Orphan Road

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)

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.

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??

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.

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?

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.

Now in internet form. The web site's pretty bare-bones right now. I hope they take a page from Honolulu's playbook.

Zillow's housing sale data for Q2 2008. Darker, bluer colors represent steeper declines in home value. Notice anything? Home prices have held their value better the closer you get to the city. It's uncanny.

(via Seattle Bubble)

Andrew has the must-read rebuttal to Sims. Money graf:

For an example of how rail can more more people more cheaply, we need only look to Washington DC. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the operator of DC Metro, spends almost exactly the same amount of money as King Country Metro does, $560 million to $580 million. Except for that $560 million DC metro moves almost a million people a day on rail (three times what KC metro moves per day with its buses) and the WMATA agency provides buses that carry another 120,000! It’s only possible because of the investment put in place years ago, and residents there can reap the benefit of a reliable, traffic-separated transit system that’s relatively cheap.

And DC's population density is roughly the same as Seattle's, so it's not like they've achieved this amazing transit ridership simply by crushing everyone into Manhattan-style apartments.

Good to see that Ron Sims has taken up the mantle of go-to anti-rail crank for the local media. Thanks, Ron!

Sims is peeved that the buses stuck in traffic downtown only stack up three deep. He'd like to see them going at least five deep.