By Matt the Engineer on July 30, 2009
Seattlest beat me to this, but in summary: you can’t order children ORCA cards online, you have to bring their birth certificate to one of two locations downtown during business hours on the weekday. Score one for bureaucracy.
Posted in En Transit
By Frank on July 26, 2009
I think Kurt Triplett’s on the right track here with his plan to take money from the proposed King County ferry district and apply it to Metro’s funding gap. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
I was bullish on the King County ferry district back in 2007, and skeptical back in February of this year, due to the same budget constraints that seem to be driving Triplett’s thinking.
By Matt the Engineer on July 24, 2009
Today I took my first ride on Link. I’m currently a stay-at-home dad, and I took my baby son for a day trip. Since this was around noon, I asked my wife to meet us at Pioneer Station near her work. We were going to ride to King Station, get $1.75 sandwiches, and she’d ride back to work while we rode onward.
Her cost to ride Link one stop and back? $3.50. To get a $1.75 sandwich. It turns out that unlike bus transfers that are good for 90 minutes, Link requires a payment in each direction. There’s even a special section on the ticket vending machine for 2-way downtown only rides – $3.50.
How on earth is this a fair fare? Yes, she can wait for a bus – and actually decided to only ride Link one way to experience it and take the bus back. But since we’re running trains anyway, can’t we just charge some small fee that people would be willing to pay? Say, $0.25 a way. It’s not like it costs ST anything to have these extra riders, and this represents lost income for ST since people will just wait and ride the bus for free.
Posted in roads, ST, Uncategorized
By Matt the Engineer on July 23, 2009
This week’s Speaker’s Forum* speaker was Jeff Rubin, a Canadian Economist and expert on peak oil. Despite his prediction that peak oil will hit us next year, he seems much more relaxed than most who speak about peak oil. He claims several factors will actually help our economy. Although we won’t be able to afford to drive anywhere, we also won’t be able to ship goods from China – meaning that we have to produce these goods here, creating jobs. Of course our dollar will be worth much less, but we’ll probably survive.
When asked about how to get leaders to start caring about rail and mass transit he’s again very calm – he just doesn’t expect them to do anything until gas is $7 a gallon, but either now or later they’ll come around to mass transit. Rough quote: “Once people start giving up their cars and stand around waiting for a bus but no bus comes, it isn’t long before representatives will start getting phone calls.” Of course it’ll be much less painful if we start preparing now…
* I highly recommend subscribing to the free podcast. They have an in-depth hour long topic each week which is generally recorded at Town Hall.
Posted in funding
By Frank on July 21, 2009
I’ve been slammed with out of town guests this weekend, so I didn’t have a chance to write about the big day until today (though I made sure to drag them all to ride the train with me down to Tukwila and back on Saturday). I don’t have any grand thoughts beyond what Ben @ STB said here and here.
As I stood in the parking lot at Tukwila station, staring up at the giant station structure of steel, glass and concrete, all I could say was, “damn, that’s some infrastructure.” And it’s only the beginning. Link will stitch this city region together in ways we haven’t yet imagined. Think Southcenter regrets not being on the route now? Wait until Bellevue Square gets a station nearby.
Finally, what really strikes me is the parts of this city that Link will make visible. Soon we’ll all know the names of the restaurants and stores along the line. We’ll recognize houses in South Park down below. We’ll show our out-of-town guests the view of downtown Seattle as the train emerges from Beacon Hill.
Oh, and one more thing: props to Sound Transit and the scores of staff and volunteers who worked opening weekend. It was incredibly smooth. The portable toilets and water were welcome. Everyone was friendly. There’s been some talk that ST over-did it, spending $1 million on opening weekend, but it was clearly worth it. The agency had to establish trust with a whole lot more people, and they did that with flying colors. They planned for 100,000 people, and they got 92,000. Spot-on.
Speaking of people, to put that number in perspective, about 54,000 people rode ST buses & trains combined on the average weekday in 2008. It’s likely that a large chunk of people got their first real exposure to Sound Transit this past weekend, and my guess is that they came away impressed. The haters will still be there (read the comment threads at the big papers). Unfortunately for them, this train has already left the station.
By joshuadf on July 19, 2009
I suppose this problem isn’t specific to SoundTransit or KC Metro, but why are the posted station area maps so worthless? We rode the light rail to Columbia City (some friends recently moved there). This was our first visit and you would think they’d want to advertise major points of interest nearby. If we had not come armed with a map, we’d not have known we were within a couple blocks of a public library branch, two parks, a cultural center, and National Historic District, not to mention all the nearby businesses.
Even relatively sophisticated online tools like walkscore do quite a poor job of labeling the points they show. Other entries in this contest like Lost in Seattle have handy info like hours but use dated web technology. You can get all this from the nicer tourist walking maps of downtown.
By serial catowner on July 16, 2009
In a tumultous week Washingtonians learned that this bastion of Democratism had received a mere crumb of ferry funding, and then a day later, our Senators happily reported that they had secured $7.6 million in funding, including $2.6 million for a Bremerton-Seattle fast ferry. This last might actually not be such a bad idea, but Fred Jarrett suggested that expanding the efforts of King County to run passenger-only ferries should be suspended.
There really can’t be many forms of public transit more expensive or harder to do right than “high speed” passenger-only ferries. The whole idea has such allure that it should probably be studied forever to satisfy the popular desire, but implementation should be rare.
Commuter ferries need skilled labor to work split shifts. High speed boats, in addition to being unreliable and very expensive to run, can’t carry amenities like snack bars. Water has the virtue of being level, and the drawback of being incompressible, making it expensive to push boat hulls through it. And these are just the problems you deal with all the time, to which are added storms, collisions, and tides.
The best solution is to use a large boat with a large passenger deck, running frequently at normal speeds. This makes the loading and unloading areas for the boat more important, and enhances the ability to develop connecting bus services.
Washington has a number of larger ferries with great passenger capacity which are full to the brim for a few runs each morning and night. The problem with these ferries is that they also carry cars, and those who know me can trust that I will turn to those problems in a future post, but for now one fo the best things you can say about “fast” passenger ferries is that they may forestall the paving of larger car holding areas and the building of larger car-carrying boats. And that’s not enough.
By Matt the Engineer on July 14, 2009
I know of at least one “garage” that was built really as a residence with an obligatory garage door to satisfy the code officials that it wasn’t a backyard cottage. I’m sure there are many more in this city of high land prices and single family houses. I’d love to see the owner be able to remove the garage door and build a wall (losing much less heat), add a number and a mailbox, and stop hiding his backyard residents. Now that backyard cottages are being considered, maybe the city could allow these cottages to be brought under the new code. If nothing else, it would give us an idea of how many of these things really exist in our city.
Posted in national policy, seatac
By Frank on July 13, 2009
Aubrey Cohen at the Seattle P-I lets loose on urban NIMBYs. It’s a good piece, and while I have no doubt that the NIMBYs will come out and vilify him, they should re-read the piece first. It’s actually quite moderate and constructive. As I wrote recently, many folks that you’d normally consider left-center liberals (and who would certainly think of themselves as environmentalists) are passionate defenders of suburban, car-centric lifestyles.
The challenge is that re-shaping the built environment is exceedingly difficult. Much more difficult than starting from scratch. The much-loved car-free city of Vauban is car-free largely because it was built that way 60 years ago. Which is why Cohen writes:
It’s a lot less trouble to allow different types of development where there aren’t already neighbors, which is why it’s easier to build small-lot cottages in Issaquah than in Seattle.
Without condemning entire city blocks, it’s hard to reshape the landscape. And when large lots do become available (Northgate, Dearborn), they tend to be developed by a single developer, which often leads to a certain monotony. I don’t know how you untie this knot. Backyard cottages, which Cohen mentions, are a pretty neat trick, but probably not sufficient on their own.
Finally, I’ll also note that I enjoyed the tone of the article, which was a pseudo op-ed, presumably a new degree of stylistic latitude afforded by being a web-only paper. If the paper is still going to have straight news, though, it might be worth clearly labeling separately from “opinion.” If they want to mesh them, that’s totally fine (and very bloggy of them), but they need to be consistent about it.
By Frank on July 9, 2009
Nice piece in the NYT on BRT in Bogota and the opportunity BRT presents for the developing world. A cautionary note to BRT proponents here in the US: doing it right requires a staggering amount of right-of-way:
But with its wide streets, dense population and a tradition of bus travel, Bogotá had the ingredients for success. To create TransMilenio, the city commandeered two to four traffic lanes in the middle of major boulevards, isolating them with low walls to create the system’s so-called tracks. On the center islands that divide many of Bogotá’s two-way streets, the city built dozens of distinctive metal-and-glass stations.
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