Orphan Road

Seattle's crappiest bus route

Matt the Engineer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:58:28 +0000

Vote over at the Slog.

I actually like the 3 and 4. I'm a 2, 13 (and recently 15 and 18) rider myself, and the 4 is a nice change - calm, quiet, with few stops and little traffic. But that's up QA hill - maybe the problem is on the south end of the route.

184 Years and Counting...

serial catowner — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:42:29 +0000

Students of rail history will recall that the Stockton and Darlington, opened in 1825, was originally intended to act as a sort of toll road, where the user supplied the cars and the horses to pull them. It wasn't long after that that it was decided it would be best if one company had total control of what ran on the road and when.

For years it was a matter of debate as to whether the alternate form of management could ever work. Now, according to this post at the Transport Politic, "mainland European high-speed rail competition will mean more than one company competing on the same lines, similar to the way deregulated air service works".

SNCF is probably hoping they won't have the same problems AMTRAK has dealt with in sharing rails.

Converting the Tunnel

serial catowner — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:48:40 +0000

Ben Schiendelman, in a post at Seattle Transit Blog, has argued that the proposed deep-bore tunnel under Seattle could not be converted to transit use. He tells us that any transit line through Seattle must include 5-6 stops downtown, that the tunnel, at depths of 60 to 200 feet will make the cost of building those stations as much as a billion dollars per station, and therefore, it would be simpler to build a new subway than to convert the tunnel. The only remaining question is whether any of what he says is true.

Are there any deep-tunnel type subway systems? The Wikipedia entry for the London Underground describes 7 of London's 11 lines as "deep level", with the Bakerloo line reaching depths of 200 feet. A deep-tunnel subway would not be without precedent.

How many stations would you need downtown? Certainly not "five or six"- LINK itself only has four. I would go further and argue that NO stations are needed for the deep tunnel.

Seattle's downtown, as large as it may appear to Seattle residents, is not actually that large. The distance between James and Pine is no more than 3-4 stops for a Manhattan local subway or 2 stops for an express. The area around each proposed tunnel mouth is developing rapidly, with some of the largest investors making it plain they consider these areas better investments than the exact center of the city.

When we couple these developments with surface transit and the small size of downtown, it seems very possible that it would be of value to have a transit line that did not become a local for twenty minutes traversing the city core. The tunnel, after all, is being built for people who do not want to go downtown, and presumably these people will still exist when the price of gas has driven them to transit.

Ben is adamant that people will not use transit that doesn't deliver them to their door. Fortunately, we can again touch base with reality by watching the passengers commuting by ferry. Most of these passengers used a Kitsap Transit bus to reach the ferry dock, where they transferred to the ferry. Upon reaching Seattle, where no particular transit is offered at the ferry depot, almost all of them simply walk uphill to their destination or another transfer to a bus, or possibly two, taking them to their final destinations.

By an accident of geography, any traveler from south of Seattle to north of Seattle must pass through the 'narrow waist' of the city, or travel east of Lake Washington. If density were to increase on existing transportation corridors, it seems entirely probable to me that some transit users of the future would prefer to use a line that hardly stopped downtown at all. Unlike Ben, I consider it very likely that at some time in the future the proposed tunnel will be converted, at least in part, to transit use.

That WSDOT Viaduct Video

Frank — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:33:05 +0000

The video above was released as part of a public records request. Or so they say. It's apparently all a big conspiracy.

Color me skeptical.

Certainly it's possible that the video was released intentionally to sway the election. But to sway it in whose favor? Neither candidate for Seattle mayor supports leaving the viaduct intact. I don't see how this clearly benefits either of them.

I'd be curious to know how videos are typically released as part of public records requests. It's obviously easy enough to send the filer a PDF of a text document. But what do you do with a video? Send a VHS tape or DVD? Putting it up on YouTube is an interesting, low-cost way to comply with the request in a way that benefits the public. I can't turn up any evidence on the internet on how videos are typically released.

Anyway, the video is best viewed with Metallica playing really loudly in the background.

TNR on the Viaduct

Frank — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:57:46 +0000

The New Republic's excellent new blog, The Avenue (which I would read more frequently if they offered full-length RSS feeds), uses the viaduct replacement to talk about whether we can build things anymore, building on the Jacobs-vs-Moses debate I alluded to recently.

As Glaeser notes, the only way large projects get built in the United States now is to grease the stakeholders (funny how a word that once meant neutral custodian of gambling wagers now means interested party) with amenities and other expensive mollifications.

Beyond new parks and playgrounds, this resulted in extensive testing and monitoring of zoo animals as Portland built light rail under its West Hills, and it meant the purchase of air conditioners, soundproofing, and comfier mattresses for residents of Boston’s North End during the Big Dig.

On our podcast this week, we wonder how it is that Barcelona can build a new, 29-mile underground subway for 2-3x what it's going to cost to build a mile or two of tunnel to replace the viaduct. Perhaps they just don't have to buy as many mattresses and air conditioners.

City Beautiful

Frank — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:32:25 +0000

In today's New York Times, Nicolai Ourussoff writes about the end of the 20th-century visions for urban spaces:

The more influential of these was the City Beautiful Movement in the late 19th century. Modeled after the Beaux-Arts grandiosity of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the movement was an expression of a newly confident, ascendant America — a country of national monopolies and sprawling rail networks. The homogeneity of the architecture, with its classical facades typically arranged around formal parks, reflected the desire to create a symbolic language of national unity after the Civil War. Emulated in cities like Washington, Cleveland, Denver and Detroit, the movement gave the country its first uniform vision of city planning.

The urge returned during the cold war in New York’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Los Angeles Music Center. These sprawling cultural complexes, cut off from their surrounding neighborhoods, not only reflected tabula rasa planning orthodoxies of their time, but all of them used a mix of modern and imperial styles and themes to portray a progressive vision of America rooted in classical ideals.

Seattle never got its City Beautiful (the Bogue plan was defeated in 1912), but we did get the "sprawling cultural complex" in the form of Seattle Center. Like Lincoln Center, Seattle Center is still trying to adapt itself to a changing urban environment.

It seems unlikely that we'll see any more of these grand urban development projects for a while. Many are being cancelled or scaled back (see Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn or CityCenter in Las Vegas) due to financing or local opposition.

So what will the 21st Century bring? If we are to adapt to a post-carbon economy in time to avert the worst effects of climate change, we're going to need to think big again. What that will look like, though, is anybody's guess.

What Kind of Metro Should We Have?

Frank — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:25:15 +0000

As a young-ish, healthy bus rider, I've long ago accepted the fact that the Metro bus system isn't primarily designed for me. If it was, the buses wouldn't stop every two blocks, for example, nor would it travel through the city more slowly than I can walk.

The bus system is designed to serve a plurality of people with different needs, and it takes a lot of empathy to come to terms with that. It also takes policymakers -- who ought to have that empathy -- to create a broad vision for the agency that reflects those diverse needs and make the tradeoffs necessary to implement them.

Doug MacDonald -- with whom I've disagreed in the past -- has a long, thoughtful piece up on Sightline on King County Metro and the policy choices it faces going forward.

MacDonald doesn't offer many discreet recommendations, except to say that the bus service we have is the result of broad policy decisions that we've made (or not made) over the years. It's not just about increasing service hours or decreasing them, but rather articulating what the agency's priorities should be. Should we focus so much on on-time performance? What is our obligation to the disabled? Should service to new areas take priority over existing areas? Should we invest in IT infrastructure in the short term to have better efficiency in the long term?

The case made in the article is that these policy tradeoffs are not being discussed by the elected officials who should be addressing them. the Regional Transit Committee. It's worth reading.

Maybe some day Link could get a bike car

Matt the Engineer — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:43:01 +0000

Completely stolen from the Slog.

Smarter Highways

Frank — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:11:21 +0000

Allow the fine folks at WSDOT to tell you about Active Traffic Management, which will keep you from being "exposed to the dangers of traffic":

Pretty cool. I can't wait to tell my grandkids that even in the early 21st century, the best way to find out which route to take in our car was to wait 10 minutes for the traffic report on the radio and pray that (a) they covered the highway you were on, and (b) the report came on while you still had the opportunity to turn.

More here.

The Creation of the General Staff

serial catowner — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:24:34 +0000

In consideration of Frank's post below about regional planning, we might liken the creation of regional governance to the development by the military of the General Staff.

Before Clausewitz, and the creation of the Prussian General Staff, military line officers and staff officers were interchangeable. In fact, it might justly be said that, before the Prussian development of the staff, a strong-willed general could perform better than his staff at predicting and managing events.

What changed all this, of course, was the industrialization of war. With huge numbers of troops and supplies to be moved, the work of the General Staff became wide-ranging and critically important to mobilizing the power of the nation to war- and in knowing when not to do that. A trained General Staff became a powerful and complicated organization that could not be created in less than a decade, or quite possibly two.

And this is the evolution we've seen in Puget Sound. Fifty years ago we looked to leaders to get things done, but the complexity of the problems has far outgrown the ability of an individual to meaningfully manage. Huge amounts of staff work are needed to gather information and, more importantly, determine where and how the information is to be used. Just as the military staff coordinates many divisions and regiments, the regional planning organization must coordinate many jurisdictions.

The regional planning organization does not supersede local jurisdictions because those local jurisdictions never had the power to act at the higher level of the regional planning organization. To the extent that local jurisdictions implement regional planning, the role of the regional planning organization is to present the planning in forms the local jurisdictions can implement, just as the military General Staff issues orders to divisions and regiments that those organizations can do.

A lot of the controversy about regional planning is not about the form of regional planning, it is about what needs to be done. When Kemper Freeman or the contractors association pay the Discovery Institute to raise complicated questions about the nature of regional planning, it simply means they want more roads and more suburban sprawl.

Regional planning efforts can go sadly awry, as witnessed by the Port of Seattle, a major regional player and boondoggle, heavily financed by taxpayers who effectively have no say whatsoever in how the Port is managed. This fiasco should serve as a constant cruel reminder of the dangers of allowing amorphous governing bodies to grow without democratic supervision.

Regional governance is not an "option"- it is a major fact on the ground that we must deal with as best we can.