Orphan Road

I think I posted this a while back, but I've updated my Google maps of Link and Sounder alignments based on the proposed 15-year plan from Sound Transit.

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

I will ignore all of the other wonderful benefits of traffic-separated transit for this post, and just talk about dollars (using very rough, estimated numbers).

Let's take my morning commute: the #2, #2X, or #13, depending on which one comes first. There seems to be a total of around 12 busses serving these lines*. The end result is having a bus come 16x an hour during peak times. It takes each of these ~20 minutes to get the 2 miles downtown thanks to traffic. The full route is around 45 minutes.

How many busses (or, more realistically, trains) would it take to run this route at an average of 15 mile per hour, which would only be possible with traffic-separated transit? Well, that's more than double the speed, so that would be half the number of trains. So 6.

You'd still get the same frequency of service, but you'd now have 6 less busses and drivers, less maintenance, fewer busses to clean, etc.

Assuming a driver costs on the order of $100k a year**, this is $600,000 saved each year on this one route without even looking at maintenance of the vehicles.

What will it cost us to convert our system for such savings? The deluxe (grade-seperated, think: monorail, or elevated/tunneled light rail) route may be quite expensive, but at a savings of more than $600k per route may pay back quickly. The cheap route (paint on the road reserving a lane for busses, along with signal priority) may create traffic for drivers, but will surely pay back the day you paint the road.

An added cost benefit is that as soon as travel times are cut in half, ridership will immediately go up. Assuming we go for streetcars or light rail instead of busses (and can therefore fit in more riders per vehicle), then we get added farebox income without any additional cost.

*Correct me if I'm wrong - it's my best guess based on time tables.
**I'm sure the average driver makes much less than this, but factoring in benefits, managing this employee, etc. this may even be low.

update:
[Frank]'s comment made me realize I hadn't stated the point of this post strongly enough: One bus moving at 15mph can carry twice the number of (much happier) people the same bus can carry at 6mph. It simply drives the loop twice. Basically, we're paying a whole lot of bus drivers a whole lot of money to sit in traffic with a lot of unnecessary busses.

I didn't live in Seattle when Sound Transit planned the route of the light rail, so stop me if this has already been debated to death. Also, I know it's far too late to change anything. I'm just curious.

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 you've ever wondered why Salt Lake City is suddenly a transit renaissance, Mass Transit Magazine has an interview with the agency head that describes some nuts and bolts about how you build transit. Recommended.

No, not here, but in Kansas City. In a different corner of the state St Louis is also involved in a two-state regional planning authority for transit and hike-bike paths (but I've lost the link).

That, in a nutshell, is the genius of American federalism- that we can try, at the local level, many variations of a solution, and learn from the experience of others.

More will be coming tomorrow.

On the river of time we sometimes paddle lustily, improving the speed with which we sweep forward, but more often- alas!- we're a woodchip, bobbing now in the eddy and then sucked into the stream.

In such a wise, Seattle, having defeated mass transit in 1970, fell into a deep slumber, and now awakens, like Cinderella, or perhaps, like Rip Van Winkle, shaking aside cobwebbed dreams of Roger Rabbit and the 1956 Alweg monorail at Disneyland.

We have a new trolley, an old trolley struggling to be reborn, a light-rail system nearing an opening, and the chance to tear down the freeway the fifties laid across the Seattle waterfront. We can confidently predict fuel prices of $5 per gallon by the time Sound Transit cuts the ribbons.

In Denver and Salt Lake City, after seeing light-rail (LRT) in action, the voters approved additions of a hundred miles of system in each city. It is tempting to let time simply sweep us forward, borrowing from Denver a plan, and from Bonn (Germany) some modern technology.

This might suit the Seattle of today, but any long-time resident who saw Tex Johnson barrel-roll a 707 over a Gold Cup race totally owned by Slo-Mo-Shun IV wants more- we want to be Leaders!

And, given the state of transit in America today, that is not an impossibility. It's time to re-think transit, not in terms of what was, but in terms of what can be. After all, it's probably coming soon, to a neighborhood near you.