August 2008

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20:40:40 Must End

By Matt the Engineer on August 31, 2008

20:40:40 is a rule built into funding legislation for King County Metro that allocates funds for new service hours by area. 40% goes to the east side, 40% goes south, and 20% goes to Seattle and north (more complete explanation in this PDF). This sounded strange to me the first time I heard it, and now it seems unbelievable. Seattle has 35% of the population of King County. We must have 5x the ridership of either other area (anyone have #’s for this?). So we pay more in taxes, much more in fares, and get 20% of the benefit?

The justification for 20/40/40 was that Seattle has more buses than the rest of the county, and it was a way for them to catch up. But I’ve yet to hear of a full eastside bus (especially off-peak, which is what improves with more service hours), yet the #2 leaves people behind because it can’t cram any more people on the bus.

20:40:40 was actually an ingenious plan, from the non-Seattle perspective. There is no way, with 35% of the vote, Seattle could have stopped it. I suppose it was nice of the county to give us anything at all.

But maybe all this is beside the point. Although we could certainly use more service hours in Seattle, what we really need is more infrastructure. With our same number of drivers, we could double frequency and quadruple capacity by adding traffic-separated streetcars.

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A Different Kind Of Transit

By serial catowner on August 27, 2008

Americans have been commuting so long, and so far, that we have come to view transit solutions as moving tens of thousands of people at speeds of 50-60 miles per hour over distances of ten to twenty miles.

It doesn’t need to be that way. For over twenty years, 95% of my trips were under two miles, and this included higher education and professional employment. This wasn’t just a happy accident. The gas crisis of the early 70s reinforced my natural reluctance to enter the commuting relationship. What others spent on cars I spent on the higher costs of inner-city housing, and when I chose a career I chose one with multiple employers in the city core.

Transit for the person in town is not just about covering distances- it’s about being warm and dry and being able to read or, in our modern times, twitter. It’s also about building a lively streetscape.

When Jane Jacobs wrote her great tomes, old buildings were abundant and cheap. Seattle in the 70s and 80s was like that- cheap rents allowed the community to reinvent itself. Now our cities need to reinvent themselves again, radically reducing car usage in the urban core and going beyond liveable streets to highly desirable streets. But now there’s no free lunch!

The solution is capital investment in streetcars. In this setting, low speeds and short distances are a feature, not a bug.

Glorious Freedom of Driving Revolution

By serial catowner on August 22, 2008

Reading Commager and Morison’s Growth of the American Republic (highly recommended) I am reminded of how the automobile and the truck struck the shackles from the American people. A simple blog post can hardly describe how the railroads, by 1910, had enslaved and impoverished the American people.

The Southern Pacific, for example, literally owned the political process of California. SP employees were told by the railroad to run for county and state offices, knowing their faithful service to the railroad in those offices was a step up the corporate ladder.

The details can be fascinating and horrifying to read. A Chapter in the Erie, by Charles Francis Adams, for example, includes details of how the Fisk-Gould interests owned and used courts and judges, and is, additionally, a wonderful romp through some high-flying financial antics of the time. Any story of how the widespread adoption of the Janney safety coupler was delayed for thirty years, and the maiming and killing of tens of thousands of railroaders every year, will be less fun to read.

By 1910 the American people had had enough. No less a Republican than Theodore Roosevelt “hinted that unless the railroads behaved themselves the government might eventually be forced into a policy of public ownership”.

My grandfather loved the car, and the department stores he worked for loved the truck- for the freedom it gave them. My father and mother loved the car- they didn’t want to raise their children in the race-hatred of the cities, and my dad worked for Boeing. I love the car, probably not enough to own one if I didn’t have to, but certainly enough to love the one I need today.

That’s a pretty big installed base of love for the car, and a cautionary tale of bad behavior by railroads and trolley lines when they had the power. It’s a collective memory, and one that any policy of future transportation must take into account.

Good Idea

By Frank on August 19, 2008

Is there anything like this in Seattle?

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Driving Less

By Frank on August 18, 2008

WSDOT is fretting over the drop in traffic this year compared to last year. No kidding!

Fortunately for WSDOT, their own estimates show vehicle miles traveled inexplicably and mysteriously rising next year and going forward to 2040.

(via STB)

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Wilburton Tunnel Comes Down

By Frank on August 17, 2008

WSDOT crews knocked down the Wilburton Tunnel this weekend. The tunnel is coming down as part of the I-405 South Bellevue Widening Project. With the tunnel gone, the 42-mile Eastside Rail corridor will be officially severed in two. Nevertheless, the PSRC is still moving forward with a second study on using the corridor for commuter rail.

Photo from WSDOT used under a Creative Commons license.

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Streetcars

By Frank on August 14, 2008

This article on streetcars is somewhat inexplicably the fifth most e-mailed article on nytimes.com.

Update: It’s now the third most e-mailed. What’s up with all silly these NY Times readers? Don’t they understand that streetcars are no different from buses??

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Upzoning on MLK

By Frank on August 13, 2008

Or, at least, “revising neighborhood plans” to accommodateTOD:

With Sound Transit’s light rail line from downtown to the airport scheduled to open next year, the city is feeling pressure to increase station-area development in southeast Seattle. Thus, the draft legislation targets communities around three southeast Seattle light rail stations to update their neighborhood plans first: North Beacon Hill; North Rainier (Mount Baker at McClellan Street) and Othello (Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Holly Street).

“We’re looking at the town-center idea and asking, how do we create the kind of communities (at light rail stations) that neighborhoods have identified in their plans?” said Diane Sigamura, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development, which helped craft the measures with the Department of Neighborhoods and the Mayor’s Office.

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Amtrak’s Plans

By Frank on August 13, 2008

There’s an interview with Alex Kummant, Amtrak’s CEO, in the New York Observer. The Observer has a conservative bent, but rail transit in New York is like National Health Care in Britain — even the conservatives don’t question its existence.

Kummant seems like a sensible guy (see this 2006 profile in the NY Times), one who’s not interested in privatizing the system or even breaking off the NE Corridor.

In fact, Kummant downplays the idea of spending tens of billions on a 2-hour DC-to-NY HSR in the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak already has 60 percent of the air-rail traffic), and instead suggests spreading that out over the system:

That’s right. You cannot have commuters on [a high-speed NE Corridor line]. Again, we run 750,000 commuters a day on our line. You can’t have any freight trains–we run 50 freight trains a day. You have to have completely different curvatures. You have to have different tunnels. And, again, wonderful, great, they’re vision statements; but, at the end of the day, you have to spend tens and tens of billions of dollars to do that. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is that really where you would put that capital?’

We continue to hear about, ‘Gee, how much more could be done?’ Fine. Maybe you can capture the other 40 percent [share of intercity Northeast air-rail commuters]. But I would argue you could capture that if we had new equipment; you could expand our capacity with new equipment; you could, again, drive the connectivity of the stations; you could make much higher-quality stations that basically drive connectivity with local operations. And I have little doubt that you could pick up another 20 points in share.

On the other hand, he suggests that HSR between Phoenix and LA is inevitable in his lifetime, which seems pretty aggressive (in a good way). He also uses the inevitability of such a line as a reason why we can’t abandon long-haul routes. Why dismantle the tracks, the stations, and the infrastructure on those long-haul lines if HSR (or pseudo-HSR) is just a couple of decades away?

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Tolls, Sooner

By Frank on August 12, 2008

Seattle City Council wants tolls on 520 and 90, starting in 2010. This is even more aggressive than the fastest schedule that the tolling committee is considering:

Council President Richard Conlin, who also heads the council’s SR 520 Committee, presented a letter to the committee, saying council members hope tolls will help “improve mobility throughout the region.” The fare, around $2.30 one-way, depending on the time of travel, is “relatively modest yet still raises adequate revenue,” he said.

By signaling that he wants the tolling to help manage congestion even before a new bridge is built, this proposal would rate a solid 4 out of 6 on my home-grown congestion pricing controversy-meter. Bold, but not politically impossible.

A major sticking point is what to do about Mercer Island. Island residents might suddenly have to pay a toll to go just about anywhere if there’s a toll on I-90. On the one hand, that seems fair, certainly residents of Puget Sound’s other islands (Vashon, Orcas, etc.) pay tolls to get on or off the Island. On the other hand, it’s not something that most residents had in mind when they first moved there.

Regardless, there are a ton of ways to mitigate this, and I’m sure they will all get discussed at the next tolling open house which is, as luck would have it, on Mercer Island. You could set up the toll transponders on the other side of the island, so that Mercer Islanders could ride free to and from Bellevue, for example, but would have to pay to get into Seattle. Then they’d be in the same boat as the rest of the Eastside (‘cept for the 206 area code, natch!).

The more interesting problem is how you handle people who don’t have transponders in their cars. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge has a single toll booth for people to pay cash. The 520 committee, on the other hand, is touting a “no toll booths” strategy, according to their site:

However, we know that some vehicles will not have transponders or may be visiting from out of town. These vehicles will have their license plate photographed and can prepay or be invoiced for the toll, which will include an additional surcharge for processing the video.

This seems like it’s going to piss a lot of people off, especially the additional surcharge bit. And I see no way they can get 4 toll booths and the requisite right-of-ways built between now and 2010.

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