Month: November 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Via the NYT’s City Room blog, a video of the new LED route signs inside the New York City subways:

Good stuff. As I’ve often said, I think transit agencies sometimes undervalue stuff like this. A good information system makes the whole idea of riding transit more approachable to newcomers, and it costs close to nothing compared to, say, building a mile of light rail or highway.

You can read more about the FIND panels here.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m just now getting around to Mayor Nickels’ appearance on the P-I‘s Opinion Leaders podcast.

It gets interesting (for our purposes!) when he gets a question about the Viaduct. He notes that he’s been meeting with Ron Sims and Gov. Gregoire, that they’re approaching a consensus, and they have people working together on a solution. In his response, he touches on the following:

• Taking advantage of the underutilized street grid, especially 6th Avenue
• Moving the Alaskan Way Streetcar to 1st Avenue, to potentially connect it to Ballard and West Seattle
• Making I-5 more of a through-way and not a downtown street
• Not advocating for a tunnel or an elevated highway
• Some concerns about freight mobility

He also mentions the Embarcadero in San Francisco, a well-known example of an elevated freeway being replaced with a surface street, and notes approvingly the I-5 closure this summer in Seattle, which he said showed that traffic patterns are flexible.

Now, he didn’t commit to anything, but it sure sounds like hizzoner has all but embraced the so-called surface/transit alternative, that Sims is on board, too, and together they’re trying to convince the Governor to see the light. Good stuff.

I’m skeptical about a streetcar having enough capacity to serve the Ballard-Downtown-West-Seattle corridor, but at least he’s thinking along the right lines: no new elevated highway.

Anyway, he said we’ll hear more after the new year. Keep your eyes open.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

See here:

Contrary to popular opinion, since the mid 1990s, we have seen an explosion in rail demand and service, primarily focused among commuter and short to medium intercity routes. From 1995 to 2005, commuter rail usage grew over 20 percent, from 352 to 423 million passenger trips. Over the same period, 421 miles of new commuter and light rail track has been built.

And yet, here in the Northwest, many continue to view rail as some kind of exotic boondoggle, despite the fact that the rest of America is interested in building more and more of it. Buses are not an acceptable alternative.

The article goes on to argue for a dedicated national rail funding source, and the dismantling of Amtrak’s long-distance coastal routes in favor of targeted investment in high-speed 100- to 500-mile routes, something I’ve long favored.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Everything’s okay at the airports today:

Eager to avoid crushing lines and frustrating delays, many travelers did not wait until yesterday to fly to their Thanksgiving Day destinations. Instead, they left Tuesday, which has become one of the busiest travel days of the year, or even earlier.

Anyone have a bad experience? Sounds like everything’s moving along swimmingly.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

In honor of Thanksgiving weekend, a few statistics on hilday travel from the USDOT:

More here.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Austin Jenkins reports:

The bill as drafted says the Legislature would have sole authority to impose tolls, thus excluding local jurisdictions. Toll prices would be set by the Washington State Transportation Commission, an appointed body. The bill would allow tolls to continue to be collected after a project is paid off – a significant departure from current policy. Finally, the legislation permits toll prices to fluctuate between peak and off-peak travel times, which is called “variable pricing.” Other key decisions will be whether tolling can be used to manage demand and whether money raised from tolls could be applied broadly — say, to underwrite transit.

That last part is key. Our current state gas taxes can only be used for highways. Getting drivers to pay for transit projects would be a big shift, but a needed one. For example, Cascadia Prospectus, in the process of unveiling the Discovery Institute’s own plan, notes that the Port Authority of NY and NJ is going to increase the tolls on the Hudson River crossings to $8 at peak, in part to help finance a second commuter rail tunnel.

One can only imagine the kind of hysteria we’d see here in the Puget Sound, if, say, drivers crossing the 520 bridge had to pay a toll to help finance a light rail link. But that’s the direction we need to be going in. Thusfar the only such efforts (that I can recall) to have drivers subsidize transit — the Monorail and ST2 car-tab taxes — have fallen apart. And the success of I-695, which gutted the car-tab fees that were used to fund transit projects, has no doubt made lawmakers leery of taxing drivers to fund transit.

For all Prop. 1’s flaws, one upside was that it would have reinforced a holistic approach to transportation funding, and perhaps given credence to the idea that gas and car taxes could be used to fund transit projects. But maybe that’s being too optimistic.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The New York Times reports that WSDOT is selling its old foot ferries on eBay:

“The state decided to get out of the passenger-only ferry business,” said Traci Brewer-Rogstad, director of operations for Washington State Ferries.

It has been four years since budget cuts, controversy and eventually declining ridership ended service on the so-called foot-ferry route that the two 350-passenger boats served between Seattle and Bremerton. The state is focusing its ferry system on its core operations, larger boats that carry vehicles as well as people. Yet the goal of getting rid of the passenger-only boats is intended to generate cash so that King County, and possibly other local governments, can get into the foot-ferry business themselves.

This week, King County approved raising property taxes by an average of about $22 a year for a $400,000 house to help pay for the operations of what it hopes will be an expanding year-round foot-ferry service that could include routes in Puget Sound and Lake Washington, which separates Seattle from suburbs like Kirkland and Bellevue. The sale of the Chinook and Snohomish would go toward capital investments, including buying or leasing smaller passenger ferries that are more fuel efficient and require smaller crews.

Indeed, King County is estimating $8.5M in revenue from the sale of the two ferries to go toward the Ferry District.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

A Sounder rider wants to know why Sound Transit wasn’t checking tickets more agressively on a train to the Seahawks game. ST responds that this was an atypical situation, but the question serves to illustrate the different attitudes people have towards transit here in the Northwest.

Growing up in New York, I’d occasionally notice that the afternoon commute on the Long Island RR was just so packed that the conductors would give up on checking tickets. Most of the riders had monthly passes, so it didn’t really make a difference. But for a kid like me, who was sneaking into the city to go hang out in the East Village and pretend to be cool, I could sometimes get away with a free ride. Of course, they charged an extra $2 to buy the ticket from the conductor, so it wasn’t really worth the risk. Better to just buy the ticket and maybe re-use it if they didn’t punch it.

Across the pond, Matt noted that most European transit systems are similarly lackadaisical when it comes to collecting tickets. Transit is just part of the social compact there, and so many people ride it that the operating costs all come out in the wash anyway.

The costs of collecting and processing tickets are nontrivial. Skagit transit spends more collecting fares than it makes from the fares themselves. And the honor system seems to work in Houston, TX when it comes to fare collection.

Perhaps, as we build more and better transit systems in the region, and as more no-good transplants like myself move in, our collective attitude towards transit will move from “costly government pork project that I refuse to ‘subsidize’ ” to “indispensible element of urban public life.” I certainly hope so.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

PDF of proposed passenger-only ferries to West Seattle, Vashon, and more.