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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

Prop 1 Results Map

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?

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.

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 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.

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