King County Metro 180 at Burien TC

Recently, King County Metro published the details of a minor service change that will take effect Tomorrow, June 9th. There’s nothing earth-shattering in here, but lots of small, good changes that set the stage for the major West Seattle-Ballard service change in September. Several Sound Transit routes change at the same time. Here are the highlights:

• 10-minute Sunday headways on the Downtown to U-District 71/72/73 trunk. The busiest and most important transit corridor in the city gets an upgrade from 15-minute headways. While the night-Sunday service pattern (local on Eastlake) doesn’t optimally serve the vast majority of riders, who would be much better off with an extension of the weekday (express on I-5 or Eastlake) service pattern, this is a much-needed and comparatively cheap upgrade.
• Inbound tunnel buses are reassigned to the foremost bay at each tunnel stop. This (perhaps rather obvious) operational change helps increase the capacity of each tunnel station by allowing buses that are primarily unloading to pull as far forward as possible, so as not to waste precious platform space. The increase in capacity will help offset the expected reduction in tunnel capacity due to the elimination of daytime Pay as You Leave rules when the Ride Free Area goes away in the fall.
• Extension of evening Route 180 service between Kent Station and Burien Transit Center, which currently ends at 7:15. A small but significant improvement for mobility in South King.
• Sound Transit picks up Bonney Lake-Sumner Sounder connection as Route 596. Adam noted in a post a few weeks ago that this marks ST’s first significant non-capital expenditure to improve access to their rail services.
• More details about Route 99 (Waterfront): Route 99 will be extended later in the evening during the summer, but reduced to peak only during the winter; “Summer” will be early June through the end of September.
• Deletions and restructures of a few “worst of the worst” routes, notably the 38, 79 and 219. Sadly, Metro will not put the 42 out of its misery until Fall February of 2013.
• Ballard expresses acquire a stop at Elliott & Harrison. This area is very office-oriented, and I’m told local businesses were interested in better commuter access, especially with RapidRide skipping the Uptown stops nearest Harrison. It occurs to me that, once SDOT’s delayed West Thomas St overpass finally opens, smart commuters bound to or from Pioneer Square could use this stop to trade a long, slow bus ride though the CBD for a fast, scenic, flat bike ride along the waterfront.
• Minor routing changes, schedule changes, added trips, or deleted trips to various other routes. Metro adopted a proposal I discussed on the blog previously, consolidating the 25 with the Stevens Way corridor through campus.

There are no changes to any rail services in the region.

Sound Transit

Sound Transit has an extremely short online survey about the name of the station provisionally known as Brooklyn.

Apparently “University District” “U District” now has the inside track. ST explains why:

You may be aware that the current light rail system includes the University Street Station located in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT), which serves what was the original UW campus. The extension of the Link system to Northgate creates a potential scenario in which the word “university” could be used in three different station names, which would likely create confusion to riders about landmarks and geographic locations. That is why the Sound Transit Board recently adopted updated station naming criteria that discourages using similar names or words that are in existing station names.

The proposed “U District Station” name represents the local neighborhood and reduces the use of “university” in multiple station names. We’ve also heard feedback that the existing University Street Station should be renamed to better represent its location. That decision involves King County Metro and we will talk with them about whether there might be a better name for that particular station. While we won’t have an answer to that question for some time, we propose to keep the University of Washington Station name because it makes sense being located on the UW campus.

I’ve personally always liked “Brooklyn,” ostensibly because it maximizes simplicity and diversity of station names, but probably really because of East Coast media bias.

Find out how the station, to open in 2016, is progressing. Here’s our report from the last one.

Project Open House

JOIN US!
Thursday, June 7
5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Madrona Elementary School – Music Room
20301 32nd Ave. S., SeaTac 98198

DWHonan/Flickr

• Shoreline politicians show up to comment on Link Stations.
• Everett Herald senses a threat to Swift and comes out swinging.
• State house candidate wants Metro to be free system-wide. Good intentions, but this simply doesn’t work for large transit systems.
• Capitol Hill exploring an “Eco District” anchored around Link station.
• Bremerton foot ferry slides to later this month. Kingston-Seattle foot ferry now on Saturday.
• New transit center going up in East Bremerton.
• Near Surrey Downs, ST may elevate the road instead of the tracks.
• Procedural maneuvering over Clark County Light Rail.
• Link crashes get more attention when they’re photogenic.
• June 14th Sound Transit hearing on selling off some property in Seatac.
• West Seattle getting faster buses, only had to give up a few parking spaces.
• Linden Ave N roadway reconstruction complete cycle track starts soon.
• Ray Lahood getting on the low-street bikeway bandwagon. How far we have come in just a few years.
• Pedal power, Big Picture Blog takes up bicycling around the globe. Seattle brings the sperm.
• All hail Metro’s newest operator of the year, Bruce Kennedy.
• What does Jane Jacobs style density look like?
• Vancouver BC debating if its Le Corbusier inspried, Garden City form is still desirable.
• Columbia River Crossing debate taking center stage in Portland’s mayors race. Parallels being drawn to the freeway revolt that brought us MAX.
• EnviroIssues looking for intern.

This is an open thread.

zargoman/Flickr

The Federal Transit Administration last week formally awarded Metro $37.5m for the RapidRide E and F lines. Transit buffs will no doubt appreciate the cash, but might snicker at FTA director Peter Rogoff’s description of the line:

“King County’s RapidRide bus lines are a great example of bus rapid transit done right,” said FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff. “The RapidRide system is essentially rail on wheels and will help people keep more money in their wallets instead of paying it at the pump.”

Metro spokesperson Rochelle Ogershok told me that the federal contribution was already assumed in Metro’s budget, so this is more a lack of bad news than good new information. The Times reports that this money will cover more than half of the startup costs of the two lines, in line with earlier installments of RapidRide.

OneBusAway is doing another round of user research to update their work done in 2009 and they would like your input. Info below:

Three years and many changes later, the UW team that runs OneBusAway is again looking for feedback about the service. Please respond if you are a current OneBusAway user or if you ever have used the service in the past three years. The web survey can be accessed here and will typically take around 10-15 minutes to complete. Those who take the survey will also be eligible to win a $25 dollar iTunes gift card. The survey is anonymous and will provide information related to transit use, real-time information and current OneBusAway issues. Your participation is appreciated.

You can take the survey here.

Northgate meeting attendees (with a lot of familiar faces)

Last night at Sound Transit’s public meeting about their proposed parking garage at Northgate, it looks like more than 92% of the people who showed up (that’s the percentage that won’t use cars to get to the station in 2030, on stickers many attendees wore) had a pretty clear message – they don’t want Sound Transit to build a parking garage at Northgate. Instead, they want to allow Northgate the opportunity to become, as Craig Benjamin says toward the end of the KIRO clip, a “walkable, bikeable, transit-rich community.” (more…)

I’ve recently finished reading Darrin Nordahl’s ebook Making Transit FUN!, and it’s inspired a few ideas.  I’ll write up a review soon, but for now I present my latest idea: the Brooklyn Slide.  Imagine if instead of walking down two long sets of stairs or escalators in the future Brooklyn Station, you could shoot down a slide from the surface right to the platform.  This would save countless hours of passenger commute time, and would be fun.

Considering Sound Transit is only halfway done with design, there’s still plenty of time to add this little, cheap design enhancement.  Though I show a straight slide in my illustration, this could be helical after a straight section.  This could also likely work at the Roosevelt Station, Capitol Hill Station, or Bellevue Station, as they have similar designs.  If there’s any concern about safety, cleaning, liability, or maintenance, I refer you to previous designs implemented in parks throughout Seattle on city land, built safe enough for children to use.

Transit slides are not unprecedented, there are several that have been built as retrofit installations.  The difference here is that we have the opportunity to build one right into the station from the start.

Brooklyn Slide, Matt Gangemi

A few months ago, I lived in the 43rd legislative district. I’d been there for quite some time – in Roosevelt, on Capitol Hill, and then downtown, right on the edge of the district. This year, now that redistricting is complete, I live in the 36th!

This is much more exciting. You see, now that Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson is retiring, she leaves behind an open seat. Running are a bunch of amazing folks. Of those who I already know kick ass on transit are: Sahar Fathi, social justice champion and legislative aide to Councilmember O’Brien. Noel Frame, boardmember of the Washington Bus and state director of Progressive Majority. Brett Phillips, director of sustainability for Unico. Gael Tarleton, Port Commissioner. For me, this sucks, because on a lot of issues I care about, they’re all good.

Seattle Transit Blog is cosponsoring a debate between them – specifically because we need some help, from YOU, our lovely readers and commenters (yes, Norman, even you) to figure out who’s awesomest.

On Wednesday the 13th from 7pm to 8:30, at the (clearly communist) “Queen Anne Community Center“, these transit, land use, infrastructure, and social justice champions will debate how we build a healthy urban environment – a place that promotes health, is affordable, can handle growth, accessible young and old, with cars and without.

Shall we RSVP at this here link? If I see five or six comments from folks who definitely will be there, perhaps we can turn it into a mini-meetup!

I wouldn’t say their development pattern has no defects, but this Virginia suburb puts progressive Seattle to shame:

On Monday, from 6 PM to 8 PM at Olympic View Elementary School, Sound Transit is hosting an open house to discuss Northgate station construction plans, “including a potential shared use, replacement parking garage and an integrated station access plan”. Parking, specifically the possibility of constructing a 600-900 stall shared-use, shared-cost garage on the Northgate Mall property close to the station, has dominated coverage of North Link for the last few weeks, and I expect it to dominate Monday’s discussion.

The open house is a part of a welcome effort by Sound Transit to engage the community, present facts, and state its goals with respect to replacement parking at Northgate. On Friday, ST released a fact sheet and a press release which previews the arguments that will be made on Monday; the fact sheet in particular is required reading. From the presser:

Construction of the Northgate Station is expected to displace 428 park-and-ride stalls managed by King County Metro over a period of about seven years. In addition, station construction is also expected to displace 451 parking stalls at Northgate Mall for which Sound Transit must compensate the mall’s owner, Simon Property Group (SPG). In order to comply with federal ROD requirements for mitigating the lost park-and-ride capacity and to provide a way for SPG to replace its lost parking, a shared use parking garage is proposed with a total of 600 – 900 spaces split between transit riders and patrons of Northgate Mall. The preferred site for the proposed garage is on Northgate Mall property near the future station site. The garage would be built before station construction begins to minimize impacts to current transit users and Mall customers.

This engagement, unfortunately, comes a little late. The mythical “$40 million parking garage” (yesterday debunked again on Crosscut) has gone viral, with Cascade Bike Club and Feet First making it the centerpiece of efforts to rally opposition to parking structures at Northgate, illustrating the dangers of an information vacuum. I’m told these groups feel ST is stampeding towards building more parking, and want more consideration and study of alternate modes, with a possible bike-pedestrian bridge over I-5 the big prize, although I’m unclear how broadcasting such dubious information advances their cause.

Erik Griswold/Flickr

• Feds shut down discount intercity bus operators for safety reasons. You knew there was a catch, right?
• Eyman’s supermajority initiative (a.k.a. I-1053) ruled unconstitutional.  In case it’s not painfully obvious, STB was against this initiative.
• Who among us does not love a good infographic? Especially one that features mother and child dancing together on a sidewalk? I thought so.
• Some Sumner City Council members want back in on Pierce Transit.
• On a totally unrelated note, 40% of Americans who rely on public transit live in rural areas.
• Highway 522 being widened.  Your snowboarding commute to Stevens Pass will be righteously epic by… 2014. Hang tight, bro.
• Capitol Hill Housing presented a report on the “Capitol Hill EcoDistrict.”  The full report includes lots of great strategies for transportation sustainability.  Strangely, “bolagna factories” are not covered.
• John Feit links the report to TOD opportunities around the new Capitol Hill (Broadway?) Station.
• Speaking of Capitol Hill, a new Brookings report shows how walkable ‘hoods like the Hill have zoomed ahead of suburbs like Redmond in terms of property values.
• New movie about legendary Seattle activist Grant Cogswell shown at SIFF.  Here’s file footage of Cogswell presenting the Monorail concept to a skeptical Seattle City Council.
• 6 mobile apps for transit.  Criminally, OneBusAway doesn’t make the list.  Whatever, Singapore.
• Federal transpo bill still stalled in the House.  Also, Eric Cantor is still annoying.
• Seattle Times Ed Board concerned about traffic around new SoDo arena.
• Light rail now seen as an economic boon to the Phoenix-Mesa area.  What a difference a few years makes.

The Fishbone/Flickr

News from the world of heavy rail:

•  Amtrak Cascades and WSDOT debuted a revamped Bistro and Lounge car. The “Mt. Rainier” trainset is in the rotation currently featuring the new swag.
• Sound Transit’s Sounder D Street to M Street is moving along. D Street is open and C Street is now closed. Both of these crossings will be “wayside” horn crossings, meaning no loud train horns.
• Sound Transit’s M Street to Lakewood is mostly completed, with only punch-list items remaining. Testing is tentatively scheduled to begin in July.
• BNSF’s Auburn yard is getting additional capacity for coal and grain trains. These extra tracks will reduce/eliminate delays to Amtrak Cascades trains. This is a BNSF funded project, NOT part of ARRA funding…
• BNSF’s Delta yard in Everett to get 2 additional tracks as part of ARRA funding. Construction starts in shortly, providing additional relief for Amtrak Cascades trains.
• Canadian Pacific Railway is on strike, causing a delays to trains in North America. The ripple effect grows with each passing day. This does not affect commuter rail services or U.S. operations of Canadian Pacific Railway.
• The Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad will be at the LeMay Auto Museum grand opening, June 2-3, providing train rides behind a 1922 Baldwin steam locomotive and a classic diesel locomotive. No advanced reservations are required. Fare is $10.
• Oregon’s new trainsets are due to arrive in July. Certification and testing will start shortly after arrival in non-revenue service with start of service later in the Fall.
• Could new coal trains prevent new Amtrak Cascade service? Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber believes so.
• Seattle City Council also opposes coal-export ports and the coal trains that would come with it.
• Could Coal Train traffic really be bad news for Public Health?
• Rail advocates continue to push for Blaine Amtrak Cascades stop. White Rock and Surrey councils are behind the project as well.

The saga of East Link has been long. Originally voted down as part of the Forward Thrust plan in 1968 (a familiar map), the I-90 floating bridge was designed to handle rail in the future. In Sound Transit’s 2008 Proposition 1, we funded cross-lake rail, and since then, planning and dependent construction work has been chugging along, even in the face of all sorts of legal and activist opposition (that clearly doesn’t represent the voters).

Eventually, the Bellevue City Council worked with Sound Transit to demand (and partially fund) grade separation through downtown Bellevue. Unfortunately, Bellevue doesn’t really have the money to make up the full difference between surface rail and a tunnel.

Sound Transit and Bellevue are working together on cost savings options to get there. Sound Transit staff  presented (PDF) to the Sound Transit board last week, and came up with some interesting ideas – some new, and some that look like they’ve been brought back from much earlier planning now that cost is a larger factor.

Right now, Bellevue is on the hook for about $60 million in savings, and it looks like these options could cut those costs by as much as $20 million. Unfortunately for Sound Transit, the agreement they have with Bellevue gives any savings back to the city.

You should really look at the whole presentation if you’re interested in seeing all of the alternatives, but there will be another way to learn more. Sound Transit will be having an open house to answer questions on June 5th, at Bellevue City Hall, from 4-7pm.

DWHonan/Flickr

Another quarter, another set of double-digit gains over the same time last year. The system as whole was up 12%. ST Express boardings rose 14%, Sounder 11% (15% on weekdays), and both Link lines, 10%, 8% on weekdays.

Although routes 540 and 560 took hits after service cuts, the big winner is the 513, up 39%, and the 542, up 28%. The 511, 545, and 555/556 were all up by over 25%. Cost per boarding was up to $7.19,  a trend ST spokesman Andrew Schmid attributes to fuel costs.

Sounder had no special trains, but more than made up for it with skyrocketing ridership. North Sounder was up 34% on weekdays, partially thanks to fewer mudslides, and is about 10% of the total. Sounder’s cost per boarding dropped to $12.45.

Central Link carried 22,585 souls per weekday in its customary winter lull. Cost per boarding is below the bus at $6.98 and is falling.

Of course, comparing cost per boarding over the different modes is problematic, as they cover different distances, charge different fares, serve transit markets of varying quality, and have different spans of service. But the broad trend towards lower per-rider subsidy is a positive one.

Photo by Atomic Taco

One of the most cherished realms of contemporary planning is the allowance for public participation, a tool often embraced for fostering democratic processes at the most local level of civic engagement.  It also happens to be one of the most contentious aspects that planners and policymakers face.  Borne out of a certain necessity in reaction against the top-down planning fiascoes of urban renewal, public participation has yielded issues of its own, often wielded as a tool for obstructionism and calling into question the distribution of citizen power.

Will Doig at Salon has an excellent article on how the public participation has been misused and abused over the years, allowing a disproportionate amount of power to be consolidated into the hands of a few:

These rules, designed to check the power of city officials, now perversely consolidate immense power in the hands of a few outspoken “concerned citizens.” By dragging out the building process indefinitely, these people can make it so expensive that deep-pocketed luxury developers have a better chance of surviving it than anyone actually building affordable housing. Worst of all, these rules have created a new norm in which individual residents just assume that their personal opinions should carry great weight in routine planning decisions.

More below the jump.

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Northgate Integrated Bus-Rail

On Monday I posted about the major players who have been pushing for a 600-900 stall shared use garage. Today I’ll post specifically about why King County likes the idea, and the fundmental policy discussion we should be having.

King County TOD

Northgate is slated to become the region’s premier transit-oriented development (TOD) center, and King County’s current P&R is at the center of the plan. Northgate TOD has been in the work for several years, but as I wrote on Monday, through the Growing Transit Communities partnership, the publicly funded part of TOD is in high gear. The City is anticipating 2,500 new households and 4,200 new jobs in Northgate, and King County wants to use its current surface parking lots to catalyze other development at Northgate and finance the reconstruction of the Transit Center.

King County sees an off-site structured parking garage, which would be achieved with the 600-900 stall shared use garage, as an important first step in giving the county flexibility in moving forward with TOD. Ron Posthuma said the 600-900 garage would allow the county to move forward with its first 414 units during station construction, allowing TOD to be on the ground when North Link opens. Following this King County could continue to move forward with redeveloping its remaining surface parking lots.

Past examples of King County P&R “TOD” has historically been a mix of affordable housing and market rate housing plopped on top of ugly structured parking, killing activity around the buildings and and leading to conflicts between bus movements and P&R or resident access to parking. Ron Posthuma said that King County see a shared use parking garage as a win for King County because this removed the need to accommodate replacement parking on County owned land, and relocation of P&R access away from transit center will give Metro more flexibility in building a high quality bus-rail transit center.

Access and P&R Replacement Policy

While most of the debate around parking at Northgate is about the number of stalls, it’s really is a proxy policy debate about how to prioritize access improvements to transit, how to best manage P&R supply, and whether or not P&R supply must be maintained when TOD is built on a agency’s property. All of these questions are, in my opinion, far from settled, with the status quo essentially lining up with what Sound Transit has thus far proposed at Northgate.

(more…)

WSDOT has added a flickr set containing illustrations of the design alternatives of the Portage Bay section of the 520 bridge replacement. They’ve also put up the meeting materials from last week’s Seattle Design Meeting. WSDOT is exploring cable-stayed and typical viaduct-style replacements. The Seattle Times has a write-up on the different designs and the obvious community reaction.

What do you think?

Mike and Mike: Help O'Brien out of "the Gap"

Last week Councilmember Mike O’Brien fell into the Sustainability Gap, that wide chasm between what politicians say and what they actually do. O’Brien voted against a carefully considered and vetted proposal (read more about it here), more than a year in the making, to allow some commercial uses in multifamily zones.

Here’s what O’Brien says about his vision for Seattle:

My vision of Seattle is one of made up of the incredible and growing diversity of our communities, where amid this diversity, all communities are safe, healthy and thriving. I see a Seattle that is a model of economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and political transparency.

But O’Brien, along with Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, and Jean Godden, opposed a proposal that would have helped move Seattle’s land use code toward a more innovative way of doing things, allowing diverse uses to be closer together in denser, more populated neighborhoods. The proposal that O’Brien helped to kill (which he earlier supported) was to allow, essentially, corner store like uses in neighborhoods that are already zoned multifamily. This is the kind of mix that makes transit, biking, and walking work because as uses are closer together the car becomes less necessary. It also promotes economic vitality by allowing new businesses to form.

Why did O’Brien do it?

People who live in vibrant, walkable urban centers like Capitol Hill are the people we need on board to guide the future development of the city. We clearly don’t have them on board today.

Based on the comments of a few dozen people in Capitol Hill who claim they have all the walkability they need, thank you very much, O’Brien chose to oppose the same thing for other neighborhoods.

The gap between what O’Brien says on his campaign website and how he votes is clear. Rather than support an expansion of the kind of diverse and thriving use of land on Capitol Hill, he chose to listen to a small group of neighbors getting help from insiders working for the City Council and live on Capitol Hill who opposed the idea (two members of City Council Central staff opposed the measure, and one, Rebecca Herzfeld helped opponents craft letters to Council).

That’s not sustainable, and it’s not transparent. It’s hard enough to convince Councilmembers to make a bold move on land use, but when one of the members of Council who is supposed to be a reliable ally can be persuaded to oppose something he once supported by a small group of neighbors, we’re in trouble.

Closing the Sustainability Gap means holding our elected friends accountable when they make bad decisions. It’s not a pleasant comfortable thing to do, but it’s necessary. If you think O’Brien made the wrong choice by changing his mind on the proposal call him or e-mail him. He needs to know you’re paying attention.

You can e-mail Mike at mike.obrien@seattle.gov

The author was a member of the panel, called the Regulatory Reform Roundtable, that recommended these changes to the code.

kalantziscope/Flickr

What do you do when you’re a traffic engineer hired to come up with a plan to accommodate 2,500 additional cars entering the heart of Brooklyn on a semi-regular basis? Well, if you’re Samuel Schwartz, you don’t add fuel to the fire by building a ton of parking:

Mr. Schwartz, a traffic commissioner during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, said the strategy unveiled on Tuesday — counterintuitive as it might seem — was to provide fewer, not more parking spaces for the 2,500 cars expected, according to surveys, in a “worst case scenario.”

Earlier sketches of Atlantic Yards included 1,100 spaces on its grounds, but Mr. Schwartz recommended half that number.

Here’s the money quote:

“We will scare drivers away from the arena,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “My message to New Yorkers is, Don’t even think of driving to the Barclays arena.”

Will it work? Some Brooklyn Councilmembers were skeptical.  Despite New York City’s generally excellent transit coverage, there are some significant gaps in train coverage for riders attempting to travel between the outer boroughs. Kudos to Schwartz for coming up with a plan that tries to address parking from the demand side, not the supply side.