This graph is from Clark Williams-Derry’s ongoing series Dude, Where Are My Cars?  Our state road building machine is kind of like an optimistic weatherman during a drought in Ethiopia.  Just wait – any day now the rain will come.  They’ve been building and building roads all with bad predictions about future car use.  Despite predictions, we keep driving less.

My favorite quote: “I could have included another projection from the 2006 [DEIS]… But it was getting hard to fit all the wrongness on a single chart.” 

If we didn’t have a constitutional requirement to spend all of our gas tax money on building more roads, perhaps these predictions might not have been so optimistic?

Of course the only way out of this mess is to change our constitution  – not an easy job.  But I see a great opportunity to do just this.  Our state is undergoing an extreme budget crisis.  Services have been cut to the point of really affecting lives, yet taxes can’t be increased.  I see this as a great time to use legislators’ greed to help break the gas tax / road building link.  We could build support to allow the legislature to break into the gas tax piggy bank, though only during economic emergencies.  This would require the same constitutional change, but we’d get much more political support.

Road building isn’t a necessity – it’s a luxury.  And it’s very easy to defer most construction until budgetary times are better.  And if there’s one thing politicians love to do it’s defering spending.  This balances the budget short-term and leaves problems for future politicians.  The end result will be the need to increase fuel taxes to fix what the politicians will inevitably break – which gets us to our prefered solution, removes the constitutional roadblock, and sets up a system that future legislators can use to give us a good fuel tax balance.

* Section II, Article 40

Interesting to see how much of this actually happened and how much is still ridiculous sci-fi. The giant automated road builder is particularly amazing.

Also interesting how Disney took the lead on explaining the future to us. Who fills that role today? Or is the future just too depressing to actually contemplate?

It looks like the the city of SeaTac is building TOD at Tukwilla Station (press release [pdf]). This will be less than ideal for Link users, having to walk through Link’s parking lot to get there. Remind me again why we wasted valuable pedestrian space at a station with parking?

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.

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=103428233658015669918&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=2

While attending the CITE conference in Victoria I talked to a engineer who worked for Vancouver. We got to talking about TransLink’s Gateway projects and specifically the Broadway Line and he said that basically TransLink can’t add any more buses because they are already running at 2.4 minute headways.

This in-turn got me thinking about routes here, none of which run that often. Anyways coming full circle today I become curious about how Seattle’s transit stacks up against Vancouver’s in terms of riders per mile (which I think is the best measure). Here are the results. Because I had to pull projected riderships and non Metro information this is less accurate, although you get a good idea of where things fall.

The biggest thing is that the B-Line has huge ridership, almost more than Central LINK per mile. It achieves this with a medium BRT treatment which shows that BRT can handle lots of people. With that said I think it also shows that the B-Line corridors should already have Skytrain.

Also these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt because the GVA has much higher densities than almost anywhere in the Seattle area outside Downtown/Cap Hill/UW. Then again that is an integral part of transit ridership isn’t it.

Skytrain is huge success and it shows. Also you can see that the initial Link segments has comparable ridership to the B-Lines but with any expansion plan now on the table it will grow rapidly and be comparable to Skytrain when it opens. Also notice how the old ST2 or a solo Eastside expansion don’t have amazing ridership compared to the other options. Goes to show how important the North and U LINK are for ridership.

Oh and poor Rapidride. It makes me want to laugh. Although then again Metro is spending ~2.5 million a mile for it which is a fraction of LINK. I had to make an educated guess (120% 54 and 358 ridership) because I couldn’t find any ridership projections. My guesses may be way off but we will have to wait until it opens.

Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

Atrios comments:

Obviously it makes sense to focus spare mass transit dollars on population centers, but it also makes sense to change the way we think about mass transit and not have those dollars be so sparse. Development corridors could incorporate mass transit from the beginning, at the very least with right of ways preserved and zoning around planned station locations in anticipation of what is to come.

The Seattle Streetcar, for all its faults, is the rare public transit investment that anticipates future growth by trying to do exactly that. Of course, spurring infill redevelopment is not the same as opening up new land for development out in the hinterlands. But it achieves a similar goal.

[Central Link is similar, but mostly along MLK. When you take into account the full, envisioned Link to Northgate and the Eastside, it's more about serving existing communities than trying to spur redevelopment.]

PS: I like Krugman’s column title, “Stranded in Suburbia.” People tend to associate auto-dependent lifestyles as somehow more “free” than transit-oriented ones. But that’s obviously only true as long as you can afford to keep filling the tank. Otherwise you’re… stranded.

Can someone tell me why, exactly, Link takes it’s expensive and circuitus path? Considering it will take as long (or longer) as it currently does via bus to get from downtown to the airport, this would not seem like a great idea.

One would think a straight line would be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest route. This would take us through some industrial areas, which would seem to have inexpensive land. It would also drive by Boeing Field, which could be useful if it ever runs as a commercial airport. Plus it seems like there would have been little/no boring reqired.

Yes, the route drives through a few communities, but this seems like a reason to not put light rail there – you end up stopping at stoplights. Building communities around transit seems like a much better idea.

I imagine a strong difference between city-based transit, that tries to conform to neighborhoods, and regional transit, that should be built for speed. This is clearly regional transit, but seems to be designed as city transit.

If I listen closely, I can hear the buzzing of the old Lionel Model KW: