Category: Orphan Road

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

My fellow readers, I’m very exited to announce that Matt the Engineer and I are going to be joining the excellent blogging crew over at Seattle Transit Blog. I’ve always had great respect for the STB team. In fact, our blogs started at about the same time back in 2007 when the infamous “Roads and Transit” debate was raging. They’ve created a strong community and a solid voice for transit and land use issues in the Seattle area.

I won’t shut down OR. Too much good stuff to let it slip to link rot. But I’ll probably be doing the bulk of my writing about transit at STB from now on. You’re welcome to follow me on Twitter, but you may be disappointed as few of my tweets are specifically about transit.

Special thanks to all the contributors who have blogged here over the years, and to you all for reading. The ability for anyone in the world to self-publish and find a niche of readers is still, to me, the most magical thing about the internet.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

If I could simplify what Martin’s saying here, it would be to say, “let density be density” (with apologies to Ronald Reagan). Dense development is good on it’s own. Locally owned businesses can also be good, but one doesn’t require the other.

As an example, I’d point to the area around the Columbia Heights Metro Station in Washington DC. It’s a walkable, urban paradise compared to almost any transit station in Seattle (outside of downtown) and yet it manages to feature a Target, a Best Buy, and more.

View Larger Map

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Roger Valdez doesn’t want to debate anymore, he wants to win.  Apparently it’s Scarface, final scene, f**king bazookas under each arm, “say hello to my little friend.”

Okay then! In the interest of being solutions-oriented, let me offer something positive.

Compared to, say, most of Europe, Seattle falls short when it comes to building dense, transit-oriented development. Compared to most of America, though, I’d say we’re doing pretty darn well. But I get it, it’s not good enough. We can do better.

At the 30,000-foot level, Roger’s question is about power and influence: how does density win? How does it beat the other guys: the NIMBYs. Well, basically you either out-organize them or out-fundraise them. Liberals often think politics is a battle of ideas, when it’s usually a battle of interests. If you want your interests to beat out the other guys’ interests, you either need more money, better organization, or both. Having good ideas is important, but it’s a second-order importance. Ideas help you raise money and organize. But you still have to raise money and organize.

So, how do we get there?

Organizing in favor of change is always harder than organizing against it. People come out of the woodwork to oppose something, whether it’s to protest the Iraq War or changes to the Route 2, more often than they come out in favor of something new. But people do come out to celebrate the new, if they sense possibility and excitement around it. Witness the crazy crowds that surrounded the opening days of the Seattle Streetcar and Link. Positive, change-oriented agendas can have their own power, but they have to be specific, tangible, and actionable. Think Obama 2008: Change = Hope = Vote for This Dude. End of story.

For density advocates, raising money is in some ways the easier task. There are plenty of organizations – from developers to construction firms to trade unions – that benefit from urban development. But that money comes with strings attached. These folks are often just as happy to build sprawl. More happy, in fact, since it often requires less onerous soil remediation and environmental permitting. Also, the amount of money that can be made from infill development is proportional to the restrictions on said developments. If it became easier to build in the city, then building in the city would by definition be less profitable. I think pro-density folks often think that developers are their friends. In truth, it’s often a marriage of convenience.

I’m afraid there are no magic solutions here. “Politics is a long and slow boring of hard boards,” as Max Weber said. But I do think the broad outlines are right: a coalition needs to form — call it a political party or not — that has the power to change policy and can back it up with money and votes. It needs to be difficult for a politician to defy this coalition. From time to time, the coalition will do things that individual members disagree with, and these members need to find a way to support the coalition and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is often a very difficult task for some, who may immediately defect if the percentage of funding for their favorite pet transportation mode isn’t exactly what they wanted.

Finally, the only way for such a coalition to survive this inevitable infighting is to have a common creed, a similar worldview. This worldview needs to be broad enough to be inclusive, but specific enough to actually mean something. Part of it is about climate change, but I’m pretty sure if we converted our entire auto fleet to zero emissions overnight, many of us would still be urbanists. Part of it is about the economic benefits of urbanization. Part of it is about limiting sprawl. And part of it’s purely romantic. It’s decidedly not about mode choice or fantasy maps (sadly!).

One last thing, as I approach the 700-word mark. I think the pieces of this coalition already exist, and great organizations like Sightline and Transportation Choices are absolutely leaders in it. It’s really a matter of finding the common thread and pulling it all together.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seattle By Plane by Dave Morrow’s Custom Creations

Is Seattle’s political process the root cause of NIMBYism?

Roger Valdez seems to think it might be.  He really likes Matt Yglesias’ post about a David Schleicher paper.  Schleicher argues that the absence of political parties in largely Democratic cities results in lower density: because city council members don’t have a party to be loyal to, they never have to take uncomfortable votes that would result in the greater good even at some personal cost to their re-election.  The result is that NIMBYism rules.

Seattle is an interesting case, since we’ve actually had two competing, but informal, movements in Greater Seattle and Lesser Seattle since at least the 1960s. You could see these two interests morphing into two distinct parties, if there was some reward for doing so.

That said, while I’m compelled by the thesis, I’m not sure Seattle is the best example of Schleicher’s argument.  He writes:

Individual legislators frequently face prisoner’s dilemmas, preferring the achievement of citywide goals like increasing the housing supply to universally restrictive policies, but preferring restrictions on new development in their districts regardless of what happens elsewhere. [Emphasis added]

Trouble is, Seattle doesn’t have districts at the city council level. If you read Schleicher’s paper, that really is the thrust of his argument: district-centered provincialism is the root cause of NIMBYism.  Here in Seattle we have a different dichotomy, one you might call “neighborhoods” vs. “downtown”  (and I use quotes because I’m using the terms quite loosely).

The “neighborhoods” are where the people live, where NIMBYism is more prevalent, and where the votes are. “Downtown” is where you get the reelection money needed to run a city-wide campaign.  Seattle’s council members aren’t torn between constituents and political party, they’re torn between constituents and their donors.

Ironically, the easiest way to reduce the influence of money in our council elections is to go back to the district system, which might actually result in more NIMBYism if Schleicher’s theory is correct.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Kevin Drum links approvingly to this idea from Ed Glaeser:

DE-FEDERALIZE TRANSPORT SPENDING: Most forms of transport infrastructure overwhelmingly serve the residents of a single state. Yet the federal government has played an outsized role in funding transportation for 50 years. Whenever the person paying isn’t the person who benefits, there will always be a push for more largesse and little check on spending efficiency. Would Detroit’s People Mover have ever been built if the people of Detroit had to pay for it? We should move toward a system in which states and localities take more responsibility for the infrastructure that serves their citizens.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but if I were ever to agree to something like it, I’d have to extract some pretty serious concessions in return.  You’d have to radically strengthen metropolitan areas to control their own destiny, such as dedicated revenue sources, even if said metro crossed one or more state lines.  Metros should also be able to extract and keep some of the value that their ports provide to more inland areas.  Oh, and there should definitely be a higher gas tax, and more tolling.  And metros should be able to opt out of excessive Federal Railroad Administration requirements and “buy American” provisions that make trains so damn expensive in the U.S.

Glaeser’s bit about PPPs, on the other hand, needs more work:

This system has three big advantages. The private sector may be most cost-effective at construction and maintenance. The project only goes forward if private investors anticipate significant toll revenue. The private operator has every incentive to keep up maintenance, because it can only recoup costs if people keep driving the roads. There are also challenges involved in managing private concessions, as California’s experience with State Road 91illustrates, but these hurdles should be surmountable, especially if we have enough regulation to keep private roads and bridges safe. [Emphasis added]

Umm… no.  People will keep driving the road because it’s the only way to get from point A to point B.  That’s the whole point of a monopoly, and that’s why roads are typically public goods.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Evergreen Line on track for summer 2016 by BC Gov Photos

In my post on Baumol’s Cost Disease and transit, I laid out four options for how transit will have to adapt over time:

• Buses need to get bigger and carry more people per driver (i.e. turn into trains)
• Fares have to continue to go up faster than the rate of inflation
• Public subsidy has to rise, also faster than the rate of inflation
• Buses need to get faster – do the same route in less time (while not losing any passengers)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

A related thought I had while attending last night’s meeting is that Baumol’s cost disease is a killer for bus service in the long run.

If you’re not familiar, Baumol basically says that the cost of wages in unproductive sectors of the economy go up because those works are living in the same world as workers in other sectors whose productivity has increased.  The famous example is orchestras.  An orchestra takes the same amount of time to perform Beethoven’s Ninth that it did 100 years ago.  Meanwhile, an auto worker can make the same car in half the time it took in 1970.  So the auto worker’s wages go up.  But the auto worker and the violinist rent from the same landlords and shop in the same grocery stores.  So the violinist’s wages need to go up, too, even though he/she is no more “productive” than 100 years ago.

Most sectors of the economy that are afflicted by Baumol — performing arts, education, health care, transit — tend to end up with government subsidies for precisely this reason.

(Recorded music, has, of course, made the violinist more productive in the sense that the same performance can now reach millions of people.  This is exactly the increase in productivity necessitated by Baumol.  Baumol doesn’t predict the increasing costs of music in general, but specifically live performances of music.)

Similarly, Seattle’s buses likely take the same amount of time and carry roughly the same number of passengers that they did 50 years go.  But the cost of living has gone up dramatically.  So drivers need to be paid more.  They have to live and raise families in the same city with software developers whose productivity has gone through the roof in the last 20 years.  Which means one ore more of the following:

• Buses need to get bigger and carry more people per driver (i.e. turn into trains)
• Fares have to continue to go up faster than the rate of inflation
• Public subsidy has to rise, also faster than the rate of inflation
• Buses need to get faster – do the same route in less time (while not losing any passengers)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Since it’s a bus I ride regularly, I headed over to the Madrona Community Council on Tuesday to listen to Metro come talk about the proposed changes to the Route 2.

It was an impressive turnout of residents, overwhelmingly in opposition.  Hats off to the folks opposed to the changes who organized en masse.  Over 50 people crowded into the Madrona field house to give Metro’s planners an earful about why they thought the proposed change was the worst idea since New Coke.

A couple of thoughts, as someone who designs systems for a living and has listened to my share of irate user feedback:

• Change is hard. People come to expect the bus to be there, and they work those assumptions into their daily lives.  When someone tells you they’ve been riding the #2 since 1965, it’s hard to just say “well, sorry, it’s going away.”
• Explaining why a change is better than the status quo is surprisingly difficult.  Metro’s planners, I think, struggled to articulate the benefits of the proposed change.  Telling people that their route will get shortened to benefit the overall system doesn’t really get you very far.
• User feedback is important, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. People make contradictory demands.  They want the bus to be more reliable, but they don’t seem willing to make the trade-offs to make it so.
• People don’t understand the difference between SDOT and Metro.  This is obvious and long-running, but it’s especially problematic when Metro moves a bus to Madison Street under the assumption that Seattle’s Transit Master Plan calls for improving bus service on Madison, but people don’t make the connection because the changes aren’t made in sync.  You have to be paying very close attention.
• The suburban-ness of Seattle exacerbates the issue.  Seattleites expect frequent bus service in relatively low-density neighborhoods, and older riders need to get on the bus just to get groceries. The QFC on Broadway seemed to be the go-to.  Shockingly, no one in the meeting shops at the nearby Grocery Outlet on MLK and Union.  One obvious solution would be to put a grocery store in Madrona proper, maybe with some apartments above it.  Apartments would mean more people, and thus justify more transit service.  But I’m pretty sure you’d get ridden out of that meeting on a rail (pun intended) if you proposed anything like that.
• The residents of Madrona are quite scared of downtown, despite living just 2 miles from it. The idea of transferring to get to Queen Anne was a terrifying prospect, especially at night.  I wonder how much of that is based on downtown today, versus how they might remember it from 10-20 years ago.
• For many riders, speed is not an issue.  The slow “milk run” routes are not really a problem for riders who aren’t in a rush to get anywhere.  How do you balance the needs of a transit-dependent person who needs to go to the grocery store once or twice a week with a downtown worker who rides 10 times a week?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Eric de Place writes about the Governor’s proposed “barrel fee” on oil to pay for transportation projects:

Now, let’s imagine a hypothetical barrel of oil under the proposed barrel fee. Perhaps 70 percent of it would be refined into transportation fuel, half of which would be sold to Washington’s consumers and half of which would be sold out-of-state. Another 20 percent or so would be refined into things like aviation fuel and lubricants, where prices can’t easily pass on to consumers. (The remaining 10 percent of refined products would not be touched by the fee.) At the end of the day, Washington consumers would be touched by fees on about 35 percent of a typical barrel of oil, yet the state would reap revenue on 90 percent of the barrel.

That’s a pretty sweet deal for Washington’s residents. It’s not such a sweet deal for oil companies because they will end up eating a sizeable portion of the cost of the fee. And it’s not such a sweet deal for drivers in places like Oregon—where much of Washington’s refined fuel is sold—because they will, in effect, be paying more for fuel in order to fund road projects in Washington.

I really don’t like these fees that pass the buck to other states.  The King County lodging tax is another one.  Rental car taxes, too.  It’s a cowardly way raise revenue, and it ends up being zero sum as other states ratchet up their taxes on out-of-staters to match.  I can’t help but think of this classic scene from The Wire:

The next guy’s pocket, indeed.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew and Art Thiel‘s general theses: snow is rare in Seattle, and due to our geography and other factors, a couple inches of white stuff can really mess us up.  It’s a total waste of resources to go out and buy hundreds of plows that would just sit idle most years.

That said, I think we all can agree that the city’s response to the 2008 snowstorm was a total clusterfuck, plows aside.  When the head of SDOT drives around her neighborhood and says “meh, I can get around in my Subaru” and goes back to bed, that’s a problem.  In retrospect, it’s clear that the whole leadership crew at SDOT was in over their heads.

The response to this year’s storm was excellent, IMO.  I don’t think it had to do with more plows, just having a smarter plan.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I was having a drink with a friend and co-worker who’s a heavy business traveller, and I mentioned that I often take Link when I’m going to SeaTac.  He expressed disbelief, and then asked me, “where is the airport station? It’s a ridiculous distance from the terminal, isn’t it?”

I told him no, it’s on the other side of the parking garage, and not too much further of a walk than if you park your car at the airport.  He wasn’t buying it.  To him, the distance between the airport link station and the terminal made it a non-starter (for the record, it’s about 1,000 feet).  I was quite surprised.

This conversation came back to me yesterday as I read Yonah Freemark discussing a potential new route for the train connecting Dulles airport to the DC Metro.  Instead of having the Metro take a detour to Dulles, the plan would have a people mover connect airport passengers, getting them closer to the airport, but requiring a transfer:

What would Tukwila have looked like if Sound Transit had decided to route Link to Southcenter, and provide (or get the Port of Seattle to provide) a connecting tram directly to the SeaTac terminal, let’s say via an above-ground AirTrain-like station that would have dropped you off directly on top of the check-in desks.  The overall ride would surely have been longer.  But the perception might have been very different.

As a bonus, you’d have light rail service directly to Southcenter, which, as Sherwin Lee at STB noted recently, is where Tukwila wants to concentrate urban development.

Clearly it’s too late to re-litigate all of this, and I know the pros and cons were hashed out back in the 90s when the alignment was being decided upon. I bring it up both as a thought experiment and to echo Yonah’s general statement: sometimes it’s better for an Airport line to not go directly to the airport.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road. 

I’ve just returned from an Indonesian vacation.  My trip started and ended in Jakarta, and I had a chance to try out their transit system.  I love big cities.  I’ve visited many of them, and I had yet to find one I didn’t have some love for.  I hated Jakarta.

Jakarta is a city of 10 million people, with another 18 million in the metro area.  It’s an old city, but one that has grown very quickly in the past six decades.  Its transit system consists of buses, “bemos” (small private buses), taxis, tuk-tuks, and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

First, a word about Jakarta in general.  In Jakarta, the car is king.  As a pedestrian you will find yourself walking on narrow (~3′, sometimes less), poorly maintained sidewalks.  These sidewalks have a dual function of being mostly-closed sewers, and the sidewalk forms the cover of these sewers.  Every curb cut the sidewalk abruptly drops half a foot, and rises again at the other end of the curb cut.  Many times per block you’ll come across a concrete manhole, which is often broken or missing.  As cars are king, crossing the street is a very dangerous activity – cars will not stop for you, even if you find one of the few crosswalks.  They may slow down slightly or swerve if you’re directly in front of them, but it’s best wait for an opening and run across the street.  Of course, there are far too many cars on the roads and a trip 1/3 of the way across town to dinner took over an hour.  The trip back also took over an hour.  If you need to go anywhere, bring a good book.

Now BRT.  Unlike Seattle’s new BRT system, Jakarta has real BRT – tall buses with multiple doors and few seats that dock at pre-paid fare stations, ride in exclusive lanes (often with concrete barriers, usually in the center of the road), have signal priority, and even have two operators – one to drive the bus and one to operate the doors.  BRT is often considered a cheap way of doing mass transit.  Whenever a light or heavy rail system appears on a ballot, expect to hear a call from the tax-averse to put in BRT instead.  They will tell you it’s just as good as rail, but cheaper.  They are wrong.

Notes about Jakarta’s BRT:

1. Being a car city, every road in Jakarta that can fit more than a lane or two of cars has become a highway.  BRT added exclusive lanes in the middle of some of these highways, complete with concrete barriers to keep the cars out.  This has also had the effect of taking pedestrian crossings from difficult to impossible.

2. Since the stations are in the center of the road, it is difficult as a pedestrian to enter and leave.  Some stations have pedestrian bridges, but these add two sets of stairs to your walk.  Others just have crosswalks.  This adds time and danger to your trip.

3. In order to keep buses moving fast, the stations are never really where they need to be.  They’re limited to where the big roads are, which aren’t always close to the interesting sights.

4. They are all over capacity.  This might not be true for a city of Seattle’s size.  But a city of 10M people needs real mass transit.  The stations were completely packed when I visited – in the late morning of a weekday.  The buses came every few seconds, but the ones going anywhere interesting were like sardine cans.  At one point our bus was so full that all of the handholds were taken and people relied on the squeezing force of their neighbors to remain upright.

5. Signal priority isn’t enough.  With buses being so frequent, at some point the signals need to cycle the cars through and make the buses wait.  This means in 90 degree weather with no air conditioning and far-beyond-capacity passengers, we waited at many intersections for several minutes, queued up behind other buses.  We certainly made it through the intersections faster than the cars, but grade separation would have made our trip much faster.

Our 5 mile, one transfer trip from our hotel to the long-distance bus station took well over an hour.  It was uncomfortable, slow, and difficult.  Although our hotel was in a tourist area we needed to take a taxi to get to the bus station.

Simalarly sized Delhi was just as much a 3rd world city in 1998 when they built their subway system. Now it’s easy to get around there and tickets start at $0.15. Jakarta backed the wrong technology.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The map above is striking.  There’s clearly a core of Seattle — including Fremont, the University District, and Capitol Hill — that supported Prop 1, and for good reason.

I wonder: what would a Transportation Benefit District look like for one or more of the neighborhoods above.  Prop. 1 would have raised on the order of $200M over 10 years.  The South Lake Union Local Improvement District raised $25M to fund the Streetcar.  Could the residents of the Hill & the Central District come together to raise, say, $30M over 10 years for transit, pedestrian, and bicycle improvements in the neighborhood?  What would that buy us?

Financing such a thing would be tricky.  A LID would be an option, but it could be a big tax on local businesses and residents.  Without a single landowner like Vulcan to muscle it through, it might not pass.  Car tabs would seem to be unwieldy given the small geographic area and the low car ownership rate in the neighborhood.

Potluck, anyone?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Philly’s Best by &y

The intersection at 23rd & Union has a storied past, but also a troubled one.  In 2008, after Degene Barecha was killed while working at the Philly Cheese Steak restaurant on the corner, Robert Jamieson wrote a piece in the Seattle P-I recounting the corner’s history in which he referred to it as “Seattle’s intersection of woe.”  Two years ago, Seattle PD made a high-profile effort to clear the drug dealers from the corner. More recently, the corner’s neighborhood outreach center was vandalized.

Given all of that, you’d think the City of Seattle would be bending over backwards to revitalize the intersection, on the theory that more “eyes on the street” make for a safer neighborhood.

Alas, just a couple of months after the Beehive Bakery opened its doors in the old Philly Cheese Steak building, it had to close.  One reason: the owners were hoping to utilize the building’s built-in drive-through, but ran afoul of zoning codes.  As reported in the CD News:

They had hoped to use the drive-through window when they started plans for the bakery, but the old permits had lapsed and new city rules designate the corner as a pedestrian area. After a lengthy re-permitting process, which delayed the bakery’s opening, Jane and Ken found out that drive-through windows are no longer allowed. So they had to go forward without it.

It’s a shame that the Seattle PD couldn’t convince the Seattle DPD that the benefits of having a business in that space far, far outweighed the zoning laws that prevented a drive-through restaurant from operating on the corner.  I’m all for limiting car-dependent development, but when you have tiny green shoots popping up on a corner like this, you need to dump as much fertilizer on them as you can find, instead of letting them whither and die.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Back in September I wrote about the demise of First Hill’s M Street Grocery, speculating that it had been done in (indirectly) by parking requirements.  I can’t help but wonder if Belltown’s Local 360 Mercantile suffered the same fate. The Mercantile, attached to the restaurant by the same name, was a neat little shop and I liked everything we bought there.  The store was a great little European-style grocer.  All the basics, all top-quality.

Now, getting into the grocery business is hard and the margins are minimal.  But is it such a stretch to think that the massive Whole Foods just 7 blocks away, with its huge, government-mandated parking garage, made it impossible for the Mercantile to survive?

Update: Joshua in the comments points out that the garage is not, in fact, government mandated. I think the point still stands.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

This is a great point from Ben:

A more diffuse package raises negatives – which are much more powerful than positives. If a measure has roads and transit, people who hate roads will vote against it as well as people who hate transit. People who hate bike lanes voted against Prop 1, people who hate streetcars, and people who hate buses. The more complex your package, the more likely you are to trigger someone angry about another project.

The most useful initiatives are the ones that boil down to simple polls of the plebiscite.  Think of an emperor querying the people:

“Do the people want a monorail from Ballard to West Seattle? Yea or Nay?”

“Yea!!!”

“Then it shall be so.”

Anything more complex than that, and initiatives break down.  Because citizens, unlike legislators, don’t horse trade.  Legislators love “Christmas Tree bills,” the kind that can be loaded up with amendments in exchange for enough votes to guarantee passage.  Legislators scratch each others’ backs.  Citizens don’t.  The backers of last year’s income tax bill, I-1098, added a provision that exempted small business owners from B&O tax.  This was good policy, and shielded the bill from some intellectual criticism, but did it earn them a single extra vote?

Prop. 1 attempted to bring together different constituencies — drivers, walkers, bikers, transit riders — into a coalition, thinking that together they would make for a majority.  But citizens don’t think like legislators, or even interest groups.  Instead, they fixate on the one part they don’t like, and then scuttle the whole thing because of it.

I’m not sure what could have been done differently.  Separating out the various pieces might have worked. A $20 car tab for faster buses? Maybe. $40 for road repairs? probably.  Focusing on one big project and not a bunch of little ones? Almost certainly.  But this is all conjecture.  Policy-wise, Prop. 1 got it exactly right.  But an initiative may not have been the best venue for such a policy.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seattle is covered in broken, dangerous sidewalks.  I always assumed our sidewalks were terrible for the same reason that our roads are terrible – because WA is too anti-tax to fund anything properly.  But today I found out that homeowners and businesses are actually required to maintain their own sidewalks.  Not just rake and shovel our sidewalks, but if there’s a sidewalk outside your house and it’s cracked or a section is raised more than 1/2″, you are required to repair that sidewalk.  There’s even language that allows the city to fix it for you, then bill you and put a lien on your home until you pay.

So with the death of the $60 car tab, how do we fix Seattle’s sidewalks?  Simply have city workers wander our sidewalks looking for any cracks, roots, or damage, and require the adjacent homeowner to fix it.  It may not be a popular move, but it would certainly be effective.  All without raising taxes.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Occupy Seattle protesters get it.  I love that in yesterday’s Bank Transfer Day protests where they blocked traffic at a downtown intersection, they let buses pass through.  Sure, almost everyone affected by the backup are in the 99%.  But likely nobody in the 1% were on those buses.

 the police (who were cool as cucumbers) and protesters figured out a way to let buses through without leaving the intersection.

Story here.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seattle by Beaster725

This Thursday, JCFO is giving a design update on the Waterfront.  With the Viaduct closing for a week, it seems like an appropriate time to think about a post-viaduct waterfront.

DESIGN UPDATE AND IDEA SHARING

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

There’s an idea going around (read the comments here) that a logical extension of Link in Seattle would be to just make a turn West at Brooklyn Station, and serve Wallingford, Phinney or Fremont, and Ballard.  This is a great idea, and a way of serving some high-demand routes with our new rail infrastructure.  However, there are some significant barriers to implementing this plan:  we’re out of planned train capacity in the downtown tunnel, it’s claimed Northgate needs all of this capacity, branching a major trunk is rarely a good idea, and there would be two deep (expensive) stations.  Conventional wisdom is to save our pennies and someday serve Ballard with its own light rail line coming up from downtown.  There are benefits and disbenefits to both strategies, and I don’t plan on settling the debate here.

But consider for a moment running a gondola spur line.  We can have high capacity, very high frequency transit without giving up train capacity in the downtown tunnel.  We provide future connectivity between the current and future light rail lines, if one is built.  We give at least 18,500 riders (the 44, 15, 18) a faster way around each day.  And we do it all for much less money than a light rail line.

Let’s run the numbers for converting this spur to a gondola line:

At 3.2 miles, if we use a single cable gondola (14mph)  that’s about a 15 minute journey.  That’s probably too slow.  So let’s pull out the big guns and go with a 3S system (two support cables, one drive cable, 24mph).  Now we’re looking at 8 minutes, plus time at stops, so about 10 minutes end to end.  That’s more like it.

Looking at capacity, a 3S system will have plenty.  We can get between 4,000 and 6,000 passengers per hour per direction (and possibly more).  That’s the equivallent to between 40 and 60 buses in each direction each hour.