Orphan Road

WSDOT just uploaded images that show how each of the 8 alternatives will look in real life. First off I want to say how amazing these images are. WSDOT is trying very hard to make sure that the public understands how these alternatives will look.

Second look at alternatives A through C. Just imagine it! These alternatives will completely change downtown seattle. This street will be lined by cafes and restaurants that spill out into the sidewalk. It will be filled with Seattlites strolling and just enjoying themselves. We will wonder why we even contemplated keeping the viaduct. And look at this disaster. I would not want to be one of those people. They make alternative E look okay but I think the ends of the "integrated" structure will look awkward not to mention cutting off the rest of the city from the water. Lets not forget this is a freeway.

From a vehicle movement perspective alternative C is probably the best acceptable solution. I could do a calculation using the HCM to figure out the difference in vehicle throughput but I can't find my copy of the HCM right now.

From an urban planning perspective A and B are the best alternatives. A is a low capital option of B which is good to consider, but alternative B is a knock out! Read the description.

"Scenario B is similar to Scenario A, but it has more capital investments and more aggressive transit improvements.

Alaskan Way would be two-lanes in each direction north of Yesler Way, with bike lanes and parking. There would be signalized intersections along the waterfront. The east/west streets north of the Battery Street Tunnel would be reconnected with new signalized intersections on Aurora Avenue.

In this scenario the streetcar system would be extended, with lines to Fremont/Ballard, University District, central downtown, and Capitol Hill/First Hill. The bus rapid transit system would be extended with lines for Delridge and Lake City Way and from Ballard to the University District. This service would be in addition to planned new lines serving Ballard, West Seattle and Aurora Avenue.

There would also be more extensive I-5 improvements than with Scenario A. An additional northbound lane on I-5 would start near Cherry Street and go north to SR 520.

This scenario would offer open space of 76-86 feet along the waterfront."

The one down side of this alternative is that the pedestrian promenade along the water will be narrower and in alternative C. Maybe a hybrid of B and C could be used to increase the size of the promenade while maintaing the same vehicle throughput.

UPDATE
Daily transit trips to, from and within the city center will dramatically increase, from 196,000 to as many as 305,000 by 2015 if one surface option replaces the viaduct.

WOW!

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)

Clark Williams-Derry notes that total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is declining nationwide. The US DOT frets that this will be the end of the highway trust fund, but I say, fear not! After all, WSDOT thinks that fuel economy will inexplicably rise starting next year. Maybe they should loan some of their analysts to the other Washington.

(yes, yes, per-capita VMT is not the same as total VMT.)

I've been remiss in not linking to Sightline's widely-discussed report on gas consumption in the Northwest. The upshot is that gasoline consumption per capita in the Northwest declined 11% since 1999, despite the fact that it's been holding steady nationwide.

Three factors are cited for the decline: increased fuel economy, increased transit ridership and the decrease in total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). What we don't know is the relative impacts of these factors. For example, Sightline cites the fact that fuel economy increased 5% in just the last few years. And since fuel-efficient cars sell better in the Northwest than anywhere else in the country, we could chalk up a good chunk of the 11% decline to increased fuel economy. That's all well and good for global warming, but it doesn't make for a more transit-friendly region, just a more gas-friendly one.

Still, the increase in transit ridership and the decrease in per-capita VMT are great news for transit and density advocates and cannot be denied. Oddly, WSDOT's VMT forecast, also used in the study, shows per-capita VMT declining between 2003 and FY 2008, but then inexplicably trending back up in the future. Check it out in chart form. Current data is in blue, projections for the future are in red:

You'd think with a Growth Management Act in place, gas topping $4/gallon and likely to increase, and a huge increase in transit investments, per-capita VMT would continue to decline. But WSDOT thinks the past four years are an abberation, and the figure is going to go back up. This doesn't make sense to me. In fact, it reminds me of this chart (below) from Gen. Petraeus' testimony before congress last week, showing U.S. expenditures in Iraq taking a whopping 90-degree turn. It doesn't pass the straight face test, does it?

Update: only a couple of hours after publishing this, I see that Clark Williams-Derry, the author of the report, has a strikingly similar post up at Sightline's blog. His blog post is datelined Friday (in my RSS reader), but it didn't show up in my RSS reader until 20 minutes ago for some unknown reason. Anyway, read his post because he has better data and prettier charts, which comes with being a full-time researcher instead of a lowly blogger. Still, it's reassuring that even he doesn't know what's going on!

HOT Lanes on SR 167 open April 26:

If the lanes are heavily congested, the toll could cost several dollars. But it could save drivers time they'd otherwise spend in more crowded general lanes. State officials think tolls in badly congested periods could rise to $4, though an electronic tracking system is set up to assess a maximum of $9.

Unlike the Narrows, there'll be no tollbooths. Electronic scanners will note a HOT-lane user's passage by reading a car-mounted transponder containing an electronic chip, and the system will deduct the charge from a prepaid account.

You can sign up for a transponder at the Good To Go site.

Big numbers:

Amtrak Cascades ridership in 2007 increased to 676,670–a 7.4 percent increase over 2006 and the highest annual ridership total since the inception of Amtrak Cascades service.

More convenient schedules and better connections, along with rising fuel prices for motorists influenced ridership growth. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) expects ridership to continue to increase with the extension of the current Portland-Seattle-Bellingham service to Vancouver, B.C in mid-2008.

David Ammonds, writing for the AP, ticks off some of the challenges facing David Moseley, the new Assistant Secretary for ferries at WSDOT:

He faces a mountain of problems, including an aging fleet, tight finances, cranky riders, occasional labor unrest, critical state audits and the ferry system’s reputation for being something of a rogue agency.

The question I have to ask, again, is why WSF, the "nation's largest ferry system" has been allowed to become so unmoored (pun intended) from WSDOT. It says to me that WSDOT lacks a clear vision. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to find a mission or vision statement anywhere on WSDOT's website. Compare that to Oregon DOT and CalTrans, where the mission, vision, and values are up there for all to see.

To be fair, I did finally stumble across the WSDOT vision. It was buried on page 6 of a PDF of a draft workforce assessment from 2006, which I found on page 4 of the results of a search on WSDOT's own website for the phrase "mission statement." Here it is:

Keep people and businesses moving by operating and improving the state’s transportation system which is vital to taxpayers and to communities.

It's not horrible, but it's pretty bad. Do communities not pay taxes? Why the need to call out taxpayers separately? It smacks of some last minute pander to anti-tax activists, and it's not even a well-written sentence. Compare it, again, to ODOT:

To provide a safe, efficient transportation system that supports economic opportunity and livable communities for Oregonians.

Much better: safety, efficiency, economic opportunity, livability.

Now, you might say, "Frank, who gives a crap about this stuff? It's just focus group consultant-babble b.s." But this stuff matters. It's important for an organization to have a vision, something to cohere around. Not just in the public sector, but in business as well. Ask Jack Welch.

Furthermore, down in Olympia this month we're seriously considering building a whole new regional transit agency to take over where WSDOT has failed to deliver. Wouldn't it behoove us to first consider why this happened, so the new RTC doesn't suffer the same fate? Sure, I-695 sucked, and it's clear the agency is still scrambling to replace the lost MVET funds. But maybe the fact that WSDOT has not had a clear vision for a multi-modal transportation system that truly improves the lives and opportunities of the citizens of the state is partly to blame as well.

On the bright side, the Governor seems to be (belatedly) coming around to this reality. Paula Hammond grasps the idea that WSF needs to be brought in closer to the rest of the agency. And Moseley seems to be well-respected as a manager.

In the meantime, WSDOT needs to align its mission and vision, and permeate that vision down the chain to all employees. Getting it up on the website might be a good first step.

WSDOT's Flickr page has lots of great photos of the snow-clearing efforts going on up at snoqualmie pass.

(via Seattlest, photo by WSDOT used under a Creative Commons license)

The recent problems with the WSF's Steel Electric ferries has focused some much-needed attention on the nation's largest passenger ferry system. When former WSDOT chief Doug MacDonald resigned back in April, I wrote that the lack of focus on the ferry system "suggests a fundamental myopia at WSDOT. The ferry system is essentially a very large mass transit system, and the fact that the road-centric WSDOT sees it almost as an annoyance is troubling."

As I acknolwedged at the time, there wasn't much evidence to back up that assertion, but it seems to grow more and more correct as this saga unfolds. The ferry system appears to operate in its own little black box, off the radar of both WSDOT and the legislature, who are both trying to claim ignorance and blame one another for the lack of attention, as the News-Tribune reports in a whopper of an article on the state of things. Money quote:

State lawmakers approved the Steel Electrics’ retirement in 2001 and provided money for replacements two years later. But ferry officials opted to build boats too large to work as replacements. They wanted vessels that could serve routes anywhere in the ferry system. To make that work, however, they needed to replace narrow, shallow Keystone Harbor, a place where only the Steel Electrics could operate safely.

The state spent six years and $5.5 million studying a new Keystone terminal before abandoning the idea this spring. They blamed community opposition.

The new terminal was estimated to cost $1 billion over 30 years. It would have served about 3 percent of ferry system passengers.

While the authors are trying to make the point that it's silly to spend so much money on a ferry terminal that serves so few people, surely there would be some big advantages to standardizing on a single ship design that could be used at all terminals. But, unfortunately, the cash-strapped system, still reeling from budget cuts due to I-695, can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The State clearly had to make drastic changes after the 1999 initiative decimated ferry funding, and, as one sailor in The Hunt for Red October says to his new trainee, "a boat this big doesn't exactly stop on a dime."

Read the whole piece to get a sense of just how hard it is to change direction, and give credit to new WSDOT chief Paula Hammond for trying to make it happen.

Amid all this streetcar hubub, I've been remiss in not talking about the emerging crisis with respect to the Steel Electric ferries that service the Port Townsend-Keystone route. The 80-year-old ferries have been pulled from service and are unlikely to return.

The Everett Herald has been all over this story, and it seems like a pretty big screw-up at all levels. The state legislature approved replacements in 2001, but the replacements were too large to dock at Keystone! So now we're looking at 16 months or so before a local shipbuilder can design and build new boats.

In the meantime, the 90-minute passenger-only ferry being proposed from Seattle to Pt. Townsend sounds great. I'd make a weekend of that.

In a press conference today, Gov. Gregoire announced plans to build three new ferries at a cost of $100M by borrowing money from other ferry projects. The passenger ferry from Seattle will begin service in January.

Fun Fact: These ferries were built in 1927 to move people around the San Francisco Bay. When the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were built, they were sold to the Puget Sound Navigation company and renamed (via Wikipedia).