The Capitol Hill and U District extension of the light rail is a much-appreciated addition, as ridership shows since they opened. Based on my personal conversations with residents, more corridors like this are badly wanted. For instance, I'm not sure why the Ballard-U District line is ignored as much as it is in official plans.
The other big missing piece is a cross-town rail line. Currently there are three main corridors for going east-west in Seattle: Denny Way (home to the 8 bus line), Mercer St (a glorified entrance/exit thoroughfare for I-5 and the bridges across Lake Washington), and 45th/50th St north of Lake Union (home to the 44 bus line).
Now that UW and Capitol Hill have a station, it makes sense to at least study the feasibility of an east-west line that could provide an alternative to at-grade transit and connect to the Link.
Another advantage of a crosstown route north of Lake Union is it could continue east over the brand new 520 bridge, which was designed to support Light Rail and connect to the east side.
As a resident of Seattle, the current plan is vexxing. I love transit, and I don't mind voting for something that I'll never see (as long as there are good reasons for the long timeline) but I'd certainly prefer a different set of priorities for light rail.
Exactly, it's such a chore to go East/West. Ballard-U District along 45th/50th seems like the most obvious addition to me, along with a line to the Eastside - I know that if I worked in Bellevue, the ability to take the light rail to work would be my top priority.
Yeah, it's practically impossible to work at Microsoft and live in Ballard without driving every day, unless you want to spend (probably more than?) an hour on the bus each way. And even driving is going to be pretty slow.
Ballard -> Redmond has gotta be 45 minutes by car at the BEST of times. I'd think it'd be closer to 90min by bus at rush hour. 520 is an unmitigated traffic disaster (granted, I haven't been on it since the tolling began).
When I lived in the area I often joked I'd drive 405-90-5 if I was going from Kirkland to the U-District. Having spent 2 hours in traffic on the bridge alone in the past, it's not far from the truth.
IIRC, one of the main complaints from boeing is that the traffic situation is disastrous for their JIT parts deliveries and have threatened to pull out of Seattle b/c of that (not just the HQ, as they did a few years ago).
If you take the Ballard Connector to MSFT it is not that bad. 45-60 minutes depending on traffic. With the new 520 work on the Eastside, the carpool lanes are speeding things up dramatically and I expect it's closer to 45 most days (I'm in Phinney currently, and I'm usually at 45-50 minutes on the last stop).
If you're doing the counter commute, Kirkland->Seattle Business District in the morning, 520 is a great option. Most people have abandoned it due to the toll, but the only area where things get sticky is the merge from 405->520 where you need to merge left twice in short order and then merge left again directly after the Burgermaster exit. The merge across I5 to the Union exit is annoying since the backup for the Mercer exit (and people that never realized the needed to take Mercer) extends almost to 520, but if you wait in the third lane from left until you pass Mercer, you can usually merge gracefully right and take Union.
The return commute is only screwy when there's a big con - SakuraCon for example.
I did take Mercer for the three months I worked at Lab 126 in Fiona, but I assume it's better now that construction is over. It was much worse.
I apologize, I missed your comment earlier. In my experience (before the tolls were in place on 520 to mess with things), the morning commute was heavy from Seattle->Microsoft exit. There was a lot less traffic going from Kirkland->Seattle. Once the tolls were in place, people went to the I90 bridge and amplified this. Over the several years I was driving in every day, backups on 520 from Seattle->eastside in the morning seemed to be an every day thing; on the commute home, the worst part was the 5 north -> 520 merge. Everyone going south on 5 wants to take the university exit, so they're all stopping in the left lane trying to merge in, while everyone from 5 north wants to get on the bridge and wants to merge into the left hand lane. Once you got past that little knot, it was usually clear sailing until you got on 405. I could see everyone sitting on 520 westbound waiting for the neck down from three to two lanes before speed picked up.
I take it you haven't driven 405 through downtown Bellevue in a while? (or for that matter 405 northbound for the reverse trip...) It's gotten really nasty from my experience.
520 eastbound has mostly not been bad since ramp metering started, and even better since tolling started. Westbound is a bit of a different thing, though my impression is that it clears up much earlier now than it used to.
Well, yeah, there's that. Downtown Bellevue -> I-90 has been a parking lot for ages. Even in the late 90s when I last lived there. Even at 3pm. Always 10min to go 3mi.
Fingers crossed; that might get be about to get better when the new 520 bridge opens, since it has an HOV lane for the busses. The busses won't be stuck in traffic with everyone else and it might even cause more people to take them.
As a resident of Seattle who lives south of the ship canal, I am going to lose my mind if we don't get to, someday, vote on transit through the Central District. The CD has more riders and more density than the opening-in-2021 station in Roosevelt. Roosevelt is going to be zoned lower than the upcoming rezone at 23rd and Jackson. Yet, inexplicably, nobody ever wants to put a Metro 8 Subway to a vote.
I'm already half tempted to vote no on ST3 because running light rail to ISSAQUAH--expected to get 11,000 riders per day, or 70% of the riders that a single route (number 48) through the CD gets--before filling in the gaps in the rest of our system is just...galling. But I'll probably vote yes because it's not like voting no is going to end subarea equity.
(See the seattlesubway.org yellow line for what a Denny/23rd Ave "Metro 8 Subway" would look like.)
Now's your chance to get involved! As a soon-to-be Beacon/Mt. Baker resident, I'm right there with you on the south-end infill... Their final plan will be decided in June, so we have to speak up now!
The issue is the outsize power that suburban districts have relative to population. Intra-Seattle light rail would clearly be best for the city, but Snohomish gets as much of a say as the city proper.
The U District stop is actually a great example of this. Farther west (e.g. near The Ave), there is much more transit access and substantially more walkable areas. But the priority seems to be getting suburbanites to Huskies games.
Disclaimer: That's not to say I dislike the extension. It's the first time Link has been useful for anything other than getting to the airport.
To be fair, the stop does work for students who want to get to campus (via a bridge). It is about the same walk from the stadium or the Ave to the campus center.
I'm waiting for the next station to open at NE65th/Roosevelt, which will help further -- but there is already a building boom happening around there with new condos and such. And it's not open until something like 2021.
An east/west option that ran from Ballard, stopped in U-District, and continued to Bellevue and Redmond would be the bomb. Game-changing for recruiting -- imagine living in Ballard and working at Microsoft, or living in Redmond but working at Expedia (after they move.) And your commute not sucking the life out of you.
It's infuriating that it took this long for them to add West Seattle to a Seattle transit proposal. Every day I cringe at the thought of another accident or overturned semi on the West Seattle Bridge or 99 stopping traffic for 60-90 minutes.
The article title is misleading. The ST3 package is being put to voters in November, Seattle isn't simply ponying up $50bn. Seattle doesn't have $50bn to put into transit.
As a non-american, I am stunned - if ridership is only 20%, how on earth are all these people parking their cars in downtown Seattle? Carpark skyscrapers?
There's quite a lot of $10/hour parking in downtown Seattle -- almost every high-rise building has multiple levels of publicly available parking. Also, if you take a taxi/Uber, you don't need parking.
What are the incentives at play here? Is it mandated that buildings need carparks, or is space genuinely so plentiful that this is economic? I can't imagine a carpark-sized area of office space goes for $10/day, even after the cost of carpet and coffee.
The problem with the region is that geographic constraints spread everything out; if you look at the terrain a giant sound, a bay, and Lake Washington divide what should be one nicely sloped set of density across narrow strips of hilly land.
The region is plagued by horrid traffic steaming from several interacting issues.
* There are four large cities, each of which also has numerous suburbs and even un-incorporated areas. Urban planing across these regions sure seems like it doesn't occur.
* 'The Rent is Too darn High'; because there needs to be /far/ more supply side control of the market.
* Housing near jobs (and near quality education for workers with children) is consequently very expensive; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Jobs are no longer permanent lifetime things, with a single 'bread winner' able to easily support their family; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Moving is a PITA; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Transit isn't laid out in a mesh, thus doing anything other than suburb to downtown (a model that worked in the era of big companies and lifetime employment) takes many transfers and a lot of time; encouraging workers to /drive/ (for freedom).
The best solution that I see is making it possible for at least the major bus lines to be run as self-driving systems. A 'car pod' version of bus transit with point to point automated driving, particularly if those pods could link up and/or draft for improved efficiency on the long hauls looks like a far better solution.
I think 20% is system-wide. The percentage is probably higher specifically for people who work downtown. Also every new building in Seattle starts out as a large hole in the ground which will become underground parking once the building is completed. So kind of like carpark skyscrapers, just in the opposite direction.
The geology of downtown Seattle is interesting, essentially it starts on a tidal zone and goes up to a bluff. In between is basically fill dirt and/or glacial deposits, and so you have to go down quite a ways before you hit bedrock for your foundation.
Any place east of 1st (about 3 blocks from the water) and north of Pioneer Square has plenty of space for parking garages below grade but above sea level. At 6th and Pike you've got space for at least 6 levels of parking, and there are a few areas higher than that.
Giant parking garages for one, yes (which mostly go below ground). Also, many people who work in Seattle live in Seattle. Probably not a majority, but not a small minority either. The rate at which new housing is being constructed in the downtown area (including Capitol Hill, SLU, etc.) is staggering[0]. Much of the job growth the city is experiencing has corresponding housing growth within walking distance to work.
[0]: Which I view mostly as a good thing -- late last year they hit a saturation point that resulted in the first month-to-month decrease in rent for new leases; my hope is that this will alleviate some of the upward rent pressure on the lower end of the market and make the city livable for a broader range of incomes. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, but it's far more likely if rents for the new construction face downward pressure from inflated supply.
I for one, am extremely dissapointed with the concept of "bus rapid transit". I live in Prague, and so I experience all three froms of mass transit: metro(subway), tram, and bus. Busses are extremely uncomfortable. They rock as they drive, and they have really awful seating arangements due to the need for tall wheel wells. I don't see the point in including busses as a part of a modern system. They also have a much shorter lifespan, and have horible gas milage/electric efficiency compared to tram cars which last over 50 years. I think that busses are only included in the system due to the convenience of not having to have a line to the depo, and perhaps the corruption of the consultants involved.
As Americans, you may have this impression that mass transit is a horrible thing for poor people. That impression comes from busses, where the bus is rocking around so much that you cannot whip out your cellphone and read on the way to work(one of the big advantages of mass transit over a car). Trams, however, are very comfortable. The floor is always extremely stable, you can comfortably read or do work on your laptop. You no longer feel the stress of driving and your commute can become a "free time" part of your day, rather than a stressfull period between home and work.
>I think that busses are only included in the system due to the convenience of not having to have a line to the depo
Busses are just a lot more flexible in general. The costs with starting and stopping bus lines are much less than other forms of transit, the vehicles tend to be more interchangeable, the infrastructure is less substantial, and so on. I'm not saying I generally enjoy riding busses, but the costs to the system are very different than other forms of transit.
The bus line you are seeing on that map is literally a "bus only road". It could as easilly have rail on it. I realize that the flexibility is lower. But I thought that America is the richest bestest country ever, and why should you have something that is horribly uncomfortable just because doing it right is "kinda hard"?
Are you talking about the orange "Bus rapid transit" line? That's not a bus only road, I'm pretty sure that's I-405, where busses will soon run on the shoulder, or in traffic, wherever there's room. You can't put rail on an interstate shoulder.
The rapid ride roads are shared but have many sections where buses have dedicated lanes to bypass congestion (and often get signal priority).
And you really can't "just as easily" put rail on that road. Laying rail is expensive. To make a dedicated bus lane, you just paint it. Much much cheaper.
Frankly, I think the rapid ride buses in seattle are a huge win, and I think you really have to try them to see it. The couple of lines I'm familiar with (D and E) form a very nice (and fast) north-south backbone that meets up with east-west lines in some really strategic spots. They bypass a ton of traffic due to judicious use of bus-only lanes. I used to ride an "express" bus that practically dropped me off door-to-door with only three stops in between, and recently when I missed the last one, I used the rapid ride as a workaround, expecting it to totally suck because it involved using a regular bus and a transfer. Well, due to the speed of the rapid ride, my two-bus trip actually beats my one-bus "express" route by nine minutes. I've since tried the other rapid ride backbone combined with a short regular bus jaunt and it also compares favorably to the express route. No, they're not trains. But they're here right now, and very little infrastructure actually needed to be added to support them.
Busses are a lot more flexible in terms of routing - normal gasoline busses can be rerouted at will, and the cost of changing routes for electric busses (like the ones in Seattle) are much lower than street cars, where you basically have to lay new track. Essentially, there's a lot less buy-in with busses which can be good for expanding transit where you aren't sure about.
That said, I agree that busses are the least desirable, and I for one would much prefer a well-thought-out transit system that eliminates the need for busses.
> Busses are a lot more flexible in terms of routing - normal gasoline busses can be rerouted at will, and the cost of changing routes for electric busses (like the ones in Seattle) are much lower than street cars, where you basically have to lay new track. Essentially, there's a lot less buy-in with busses which can be good for expanding transit where you aren't sure about.
On the other hand, that difficulty in changing routes with trains, subways, and street cars means it is much less likely that a route will be shut down completely if ridership falls off. I could at least consider moving to be near a subway or train stop and then giving up my car.
With a bus no way am I giving up my car. The risk is too high that some bean counter will decide that ridership could be improved by 5% of they shut down my route and replaced it with a new one a mile away, and then I'd be screwed.
I think to really make a transit system be widely used there has to be a long term commitment to (1) keeping certain routes open, and (2) running at certain times on those routes, no matter how low ridership falls.
Busses are a lot more flexible in terms of routing - normal gasoline busses can be rerouted at will, and the cost of changing routes for electric busses (like the ones in Seattle) are much lower than street cars, where you basically have to lay new track.
That's actually a downside of buses when it comes to urban development. As a business owner, there's very little upside in opening up a new business next to a new bus stop, because I know that bus stop may move (or disappear entirely) next year. Compare that with a light rail line, which is guaranteed to be on a fairly fixed route, with fairly fixed stops. The literature I've read about urban development shows that additional bus lines do almost nothing for economic activity along their route, while light rail lines have significant, sustained increases in economic activity near their stations.
> Busses are a lot more flexible in terms of routing - normal gasoline busses can be rerouted at will, and the cost of changing routes for electric busses (like the ones in Seattle) are much lower than street cars, where you basically have to lay new track.
YAGNI.
In Boston, not only are many of the bus lines following the exact route of older trolley lines, but those trolley lines follow routes taken by horse-drawn street car lines, and the tracks laid down for those matches, block for block, the routes of older omnibus stagecoach services.
You really don't need to reroute bus lines very often.
But what about something blocking a track, you might ask? Well, streetcar cities deal with the prospect of an incident blocking a streetcar track by being very, very intolerant of things that might make that happen. And it works.
But... since a bus can reroute easily, it can also be rerouted very easily by politicians for their own ends. Which means real estate investors ignore bus lines. They don't ignore streetcar tracks.
I think it depends on the bus. If you look at buses of travel companies, or buses which takes people to casinoes - they are much more comfortable, with cushy seats, decent suspension, reasonable seat design, etc.
You are right about raised busses being more comfortable. Unfortunately, they cannot be used for mass transit, as it takes to long to get a wheelchair or stroller onto them :(.
Wheel chairs are a special case, maybe they should be handled as such ?
And as for strollers taking too much time: if 40 people can spend their time on the bus in peace an quite using their phone/resting, maybe time for strollers is a reasonable price to pay?
And we have'nt said anything about trying to solve that design problem somehow.
BRT is compatible with raised buses: the platform can be built at any height, so disabled (or otherwise-rolling) passengers will have already cleared a ramp or elevator when the vehicle arrives.
Unfortunately, they cannot be used for mass transit, as it takes to long to get a wheelchair or stroller onto them :(.
That's not true. When I lived in Minnesota, Southwest Metro Transit used coach-style buses to go to and from Downtown Minneapolis, and they were just fine. The time needed to deploy their wheelchair lifts was about the same as the time needed for a regular "kneeling bus" to deploy its wheelchair ramp.
Houston uses buses like that for its long-distance commuter service. I used to ride it every day from Katy to downtown. 30 miles, no stops along the way. During peak hours buses departed every 5-8 minutes.
you should see the ones in Argentina - the good ones have seats similar to the old business class (international) seats and on some they even give you some nice spirits
I am also very frustrated by transit advocates who don't seem to realize just how bad the bus experience is and just how strongly that shapes public attitudes about public transit. Every time a train or trolley proposal comes along you get all these people yammering on about how much money we could save with "BRT", not realizing that you save that money FOR A REASON, by settling for a crappy, uncomfortable experience.
[p.s.: there is actually a term in transit-nerd circles, "rail bias" - as though people have an unreasonable preference for trains when other transit modes would do just as well. So far as I can see, "rail bias" is a myth - the truth is merely "bus aversion".]
> I am also very frustrated by transit advocates who don't seem to realize just how bad the bus experience is and just how strongly that shapes public attitudes about public transit.
This times 1000x.
It's common in the Midwest for many people to have never once used any public transit in their entire lives. So it's very easy for our public transit groups to pretend that BRT is "like Light Rail" hoping it will improve the public response to BRT.
Instead, it just dampens enthusiasm for real transit. People ride BRT and are underwhelmed. Since they've been told BRT is "just like Light Rail", they decide that Light Rail must suck too.
Which is how you get metro areas of 600k+ people which, despite having a dozen or more bus lines, still manage to have no useful public transit of any kind.
A tram does not need a suspension system because the rails are flat. That means that the tram doesn't bounce around or sway. The flat rails are also much more efficient due to reduced friction.
The other difference is that a tram can weigh many times more than a bus, because weight doesn't cause a loss of efficiency, due to the way rails work. And this makes the tram much more stable and long lasting.
They do! A rubber wheel, when compressed, is squished against the pavement, making it stick to the pavement. However, a non-overstressed steal wheel stays the same shape, the amount of area in contact with the rail doesn't increase, and the friction involved in rolling stays low.
And because they can have multiple carriages you have more entry/exit points.
Having more entrances/exists is important if you have a lot of people who wish to travel in wheelchairs, or while pushing buggies with babies. This reduces the time it takes people to board/leave, and helps iron out delays caused by multiple busy stops on a route.
Counterpoint: I am reading this quite comfortably on one of Seattle's "rapid ride" buses out of downtown right now. I agree that the regular buses tend to suck, but the rapidride refinements are quite nice. Dedicated lanes, much more spacious buses and rail-style tolling (meaning you can enter in any door, much improving stop times) help a lot.
I rode a bus for years, it wasn't an awful experience at all.
Until massive amounts of money stop chasing American real estate, it's the only option. It would be cheaper to provide free uber than to build a train line in any moderate sized American city.
But you are investing into the future. As I said, tram cars last 50 years in a nice new state. Here in Prague, we sell 50 year old trams east (to Russia and China) and those trams are selling for a lot more than the price of scrap. Buying busses, is throwing away money, because you have to get new ones every 15-20 years, and you really can't re-sell a 20 year old bus.
Debt is cheap and nobody cares about the future. Every Mayor plans to be gone in 1-2 terms.
Also, in the US, government mushroomed in the late 60s with the "Great Society" welfare programs and war on drugs. So state and municipal governments in most states are dealing with underfunded pension programs. Transportation that isn't Federally funded is discretionary spending.
Since debt is cheep, that's all the more reason to invest in the future :) Since intrest rates are so low, it is seriously cheeper, even if rail were more expensive in the long run, just to throw money at rail and let that debt dissapear into inflation.
It would be cheaper to provide free uber than to build a train line in any moderate sized American city.
And it's unfortunate that people don't understand that this is exactly the right thing to do.
Once autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time, mass transit will be instantly forgotten. This whole article is about spending $50,000,000,000 on shiny new stables and hitching posts.
Mass transit will still make a lot of sense where there's, you know, masses of people. Frequent train service into Manhattan works much better than a fleet of Uber's.
Outside of dense areas though, Uber-like services (or even privately owned self-driving cars) win.
A fleet of synchronized autonomous vehicles is a train.
The idea of spending billions of dollars on hardwired tracks when it's so obviously the wrong thing to do in the long term is just forehead-slappingly dumb.
The two metro(subway) stations at Vaclav square in Prague have between 1 and 2 thousand people arriving AND leaving every 10 minutes at rush hour, how are you going to get that kind of capacity using cars, without having some kind if dedicated tunnel(which would be the same as a subway, just less efficient).
So we can build train stations that are guaranteed not to be where people need to end up, or we can use existing roads more intelligently. To me, that doesn't sound like such a tough choice.
Yes, but that's per HOUR not per 10 minutes. And you cannot multiply by 6 and put in 6 lanes, because Vaclav square is only 3 lanes wide and is a PEDESTRIAN area. Also, 6 lanes wouldn't work at that capacity, because people would have to cross those lanes. Also, that capacity is for driving through, not stopping and getting on/off.
Sorry, I don't agree that there's a material difference. You're comparing one highway to the single busiest train station in the city, and that just doesn't make sense.
Trains are not going to be the answer. Nobody is going to be taking the train 50 years from now, or any other form of fixed-rail urban transit.
> Once autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time, mass transit will be instantly forgotten.
In some places, perhaps -- big American cities with decent overground infrastructure capacity -- but the world will not just stop needing subways and trams. I cannot possibly imagine the chaos if the 5 million people who use the Hong Kong MTR every day suddenly started using cars.
I've heard this assertion many times, but it almost never accounts for the fact that most of the world's urban cores are simply not designed for large volumes of vehicular traffic.
There are about 550 miles of roadway in the parts of Hong Kong where the vast majority of people live and work; most of that is narrow, much of it is on steep grade, and almost all of it dates back to the days of pulled rickshaws. Self-driving cars will almost certainly replace the taxi fleet and may well kill the bus lines, but they have no hope of matching the capacity of an underground train in places like this.
I can't speak with regard to Hong Kong. This article is about Seattle. Underground tunneling here is very expensive and subject to unique engineering problems that most areas don't have, which have been covered adequately elsewhere.
The limitations we find in HK are broadly the same in every big, old city -- New York, Boston, London, Tokyo, Istanbul, and most any other place that got its start as a major population center before the early 1900s.
Even if we throw out tunneled trains, something like Chicago's El will be miles more efficient in a dense urban core than trying to cram thousands more cars into streets that weren't designed for them.
Even if we throw out tunneled trains, something like Chicago's El will be miles more efficient in a dense urban core than trying to cram thousands more cars into streets that weren't designed for them.
Autonomous vehicles will help us get away from the idea that everyone has to own or lease their own car to be considered a full-fledged adult. Once cars are no longer used to travel arbitrarily from one parking lot to the next, the result will be more people getting to their actual destinations in fewer cars.
This is a perfect example of the point I've been making (and been modded down regularly for) -- people simply aren't thinking through the consequences of the technology that's coming. The coming changes in the personal transportation business will be vast and profound in both economic and social terms, and they definitely won't involve fixed rails.
It's OK for ordinary people to ignore or underestimate the progress being made in this direction. It's not OK for urban transit planners, who are paid to think 20-30 years out, to make the same mistake.
I didn't read the document at [1]. Is it based on the idea that self-driving cars won't operate under coordinated supervision, and will behave just like cars driven by humans?
Because if it is, it isn't worth the space it takes up on the Internet. Self-driving cars won't be any more vulnerable to gridlock than trains are.
And none of this stuff is going to happen "overnight," especially in Seattle.
You should. It's a simple picture that compares road throughput of mass transit vs automobiles.
I don't care if the self-driving car revolution will take two decades - if we abandon mass transit, we will either have to greatly reduce our trips, or demolish half the city to build more roads.
"As Americans, you may have this impression that mass transit is a horrible thing for poor people. That impression comes from busses"
This cannot be overstated.
There is nothing in the urban, built environment that is as terrible aesthetically and functionally as some big lumbering bus bonking its way through the city (and usually belching black smoke as it goes).
I am a huge advocate of public transit and I will do anything to not ride a bus.
Always remember the quote from Steve Jobs about tablets and the stylus:
"If you see a (bus), they blew it."
edit: Yes, yes I know all about BRT. Lipstick on a pig.
> There is nothing in the urban, built environment that is as terrible aesthetically and functionally as some big lumbering bus bonking its way through the city (and usually belching black smoke as it goes).
I'm pretty sure the NYC subway in the 80s could give it a run for its money:
For what it is worth, I ride transit a lot in Seattle and really like the electric trolleybuses we have here. The new ones are whisper quiet, have air conditioning, are generally a smooth ride, and belch no black smoke. I will modify trips to be on one of those instead of a diesel bus. My house is on a trolley route, by choice.
Metro has almost completely eliminated the older high-floor diesels that are loud and rickety. Next up is ditching the longer, old conversion electric buses.
The only reason they have trolleybuses in Seattle, however, is because of the hills. Electric provides much more torque for getting a big bus up a steep hill. If hills aren't involved, the bus is usually diesel given the flexibility and lack of infrastructure need. (They used to run electric in the bus tunnel, but went with hybrid instead)
You are incorrect. At start (speed == 0), an electric motor will put out a lot more torque than a diesel. When you're stopped at a steep hill, this is what matters the most.
At speed == 0, a combustion engine doesn't put out any torque; it doesn't work at that speed. It has quite a high minimum speed, below which it stalls (if under load: the idling speed is lower).
To get going, you need a low gear and a clutch of some kind. To get going up a steep hill, with a heavy load, you simply need an even lower gear. The problem has a solution.
The high low-end torque of electric motors is actually annoying in a transit vehicle. Particularly to those passengers who are standing up. The vehicle moves suddenly, flipping from zero acceleration to high acceleration. The time derivative of acceleration is called "jerk", for a good reason.
The jerking problem could be solved, if they wanted to. Just like modern elevators aren't jerky or HSRs aren't typically jerky and with most you are hard pressed to feel hard acceleration/deceleration (BART does have a jerking problem, but it's old and it's not HSR).
I don't own a car and cycle to work, appointments and errands (as well as for recreation, on top of running five days a week).
Things on wheels with a diesel engine in them tend to be oversized and driven by lowlife assholes who threaten cyclists and other motorists. At times (such as when accelerating or otherwise loaded) they spew noxious black smoke from their unmanaged, unoptimized engines that run fine on 25 octane garbage due to the way they are designed, and are noisy as hell.
The regulation for sulphur content in the fuel and the condition of diesel engines must be a joke in Canada. Definitely I don't see such black smoke coming out of trucks, or the pungent smell, in Japan, for instance. The trucks and buses smell similar to an indoor, household kerosene-burning heater, a bit like a paraffin candle; quite different from the acrid stench I'm used to smelling at home.
So that's where I am on the diesel yes/no question.
Are they still running buses in the bus tunnel? My impression lately, with the way Sound Transit has been moving routes out of the bus tunnel is that the bus tunnel these days is more of a light-rail tunnel.
That's as may be. My house is served by two trolley routes and I can go almost anywhere I want except northeast Seattle by trolley. Given a choice, I use the electric routes (for example, going to Ballard using the 44 instead of the 40).
Move Seattle is supposed to fund more electrification of routes so maybe we get more wires in the next handful of years.
Ya, I was living in the U district for a long time, and they had a few trolleybuses through but they were mostly local routes through the hills. If you wanted to get to downtown, the 71/72/73 were diesel even though (at the time) they were capable of running on electric in the tunnel.
Frankly, I wish they would just go with a decent tram system (like Portland and many European cities).
I wonder why the don't consider electric buses with big batteries. We have a few of those in Beijing now, and they seem to work OK. I have no idea how long they have to be down for charging, however.
Metro is running Proterra EV buses (like a Nissan Leaf writ very large) on routes 226 and 241 on the Eastside. So far the only charger is at Eastgate P&R so the routes served by the Proterras have to go through there. They are entirely run on batteries, no overhead wire or diesel engine, but their range is limited to about a ~20 mile route and they don't hold a charge well with steep hills. They take around 20 minutes to go from discharged to full and about 10 minutes to recharge from normal route usage.
The new trolleys, separate from the Proterras, operating in Seattle now have batteries and can run off-wire for a few miles, including going up the 18% grade found at James St & 7th Ave. They're a lot better on hills and come in bendy-bus (articulated) styles that the Proterras currently don't have.
We're trying to build more streetcars but there is astounding pushback against devoting street capacity to exclusive lanes for them. The First Hill Streetcar, that runs from the ID to Capitol Hill Link Station, goes up two-lane-with-bike-path Broadway...and is slower than walking during parts of the day. On the other hand, it will get monumentally more useful if the Central City Connector--a streetcar route from the ID to Westlake along 1st Ave in its own lanes--is built because the CCC will connect both streetcar routes.
Personally, I'd love to see a dedicated-lane streetcar running between Mt Baker Station (Rainier Ave near Franklin HS) to University Link Station (just north of the ship canal along Montlake) on 23rd Ave. Cheaper than tunneling, in its own right-of-way, and running from, say, 5am to 1am every day of the week. That would be incredible and could easily replace route 48 with more capacity and better reliability.
Sadly, I suspect I will be dead and gone before the Central District gets any kind of high-capacity transit.
Ironically, there have been topics in HN about the wealthy in San Francisco being privileged enough to ride busses to work, while the lower classes sweat it out in their own cars.
"Bus Rapid Transit" isn't just regular bus service. It is a specialized system that aims to provide a "Tram" like service that just uses wheels rather than a track. Unlike current bus services, BRT systems use special elevated busses, have a dedicate "track" - special roadways, and dedicated stations. Done right, you really shouldn't realize you that you aren't on light rail or a tram. The biggest advantage really is the cost. It is order of magnitudes cheaper to build BRT systems but only 2-4x more expensive than traditional bus systems.
I have seen this claim made many times and accomplished seldom or never. The BRT which is inexpensive is not the BRT which is good. Roadways are not cheap, and if you actually spent the money and political capital it would take to develop new, dedicated, grade-separated smooth concrete roadways for your BRT system, it would cost so much that you might as well just build a train - people will like it more, they'll use it more, you can expand it later by hitching cars together, and your long term maintenance costs will be far, far lower.
I believe that BRT is popular among people making transit proposals because they are thinking about it as designers, not as users; they don't care that it is a bus, so they don't understand why other people do. All they see is a politically expedient way to draw some lines on a map.
Ask people who use transit, though, and very few of them will be impressed if you try to sell them a bus when what they want is a train.
Except they aren't building dedicated roadways -- they're just dedicating existing lanes. Look at the streetview link below. That lane with the red on it used to be a regular traffic lane. This particular stretch of road becomes a nightmare during commute times, and it literally takes you four or five long traffic light cycles to get through this intersection. The bus used to sit in that, and now it whizzes past without noticing. That red lane is only a couple of blocks long, because this is the one really congested spot. You can't spot-apply rail like this. Not to mention, it's just paint -- they can study the effects of these optimizations and adjust them at relatively little cost.
Guided busways are in no way comparable to light rail. In practice they are much less comfortable that unguided buses - all the same design issues as before but with huge levels of judder. I would avoid any route which used these for more than about a mile
Sorry, I've just realised from other responses that what is being proposed is just dedicated bus lanes. These are very much a given in the UK, so I'm always surprised that they are seen as new development in the US
Simpler reason, I can't ride the bus to work without feeling sick. The uncomfortable seats, constant rocking, often too much heat, etc... all adds up to horrible motion sickness.
Compare that to the Skytrain in Vancouver, faster and never had that problem.
I also hate being jammed in with people. Just find it uncomfortable. Last time I took a public bus the guy next to me was pretty much asleep on my shoulder. I was tired too, but come on man. :/
I personally am disappointed that there's so little will to improve buses. Buses have a lot of good attributes:
1. Turn radius is pretty good: streetcars have 18-20m turn radiuses, buses are comfortable at 12m radius, doable at 9m, and can go lower. Buses are compatible with existing city forms.
2. Because of this you can change routes based on demand. This almost never happens, but it should.
3. Broken buses don't break the line.
4. Express buses can coexist with local service buses.
5. Turns out passing is a useful feature!
6. It would be possible to responsively add buses to meet demand. Never happens, but possible.
7. Variable stop frequency is a possibility. If you are on a late-night bus in New York they'll let you off at any corner you want. (Most cities lack this basic sense of decency, but I won't claim we do buses right.)
8. The vehicles are not proprietary. You don't like your buses? Buy any brand you like!
9. New manufactures could enter the market. Trains are regulated to a degree that makes it very difficult to enter the market. This is especially bad in the U.S., so maybe it's unfair: we have terrible regulation, and local manufacture requirements. This has a lot to do with the high subsidies trains require: it requires so much political will that everyone wants a piece of the pie.
10. Buses don't have to be inefficient. Intercity buses are often more fuel-efficient than intercity trains, for instance (I'm guessing this is mostly because they use variable pricing to run at capacity, but something like that is possible for transit too.)
11. Rubber wheels are pretty awesome for stopping, and stopping is pretty awesome for not killing people. Trains are incompatible with humans and even cars except at very low speeds, and require intense separation, or barriers with long lengths of times to let traffic and pedestrians clear. Surface trains substantially hurt the walkability of their immediate surroundings.
12. Buses can run lines that are more dense than trains, which is important for people with disabilities. Most disabled people I see are using buses.
13. We really do need roads everywhere. I remember making SimCity cities with only trains, but that's not a real thing. You need roads for emergency vehicles, trash collection, utilities and utility repair, your moving truck, and so on. I'd love to see roads scaled back, but they aren't going to disappear, so let's make the best of them.
Buses do absolutely suck. But I am not convinced they have to suck. Unfortunately transit systems (buses or trains) have no incentive to meet customer demand, their real customers are the government not the riders. Riders are a liability for transit systems, and so there's painfully little innovation.
If you do find a way to fix busses, you'll end up with the same problem as the tablet had with touch. Touch interfaces existed for decades, untill modern tablets came along with glass screened capacitive touch, and all of the touch interfaces before then where downright painful to use, so every one who had used a touch interface before in their lives laughed their heads off at the likes of Jobs, with his silly keyboardless i-phone. I'm not saying, don't fix busses, I'm just saying, that they have a huge amount of stigma. Furthermore, I don't see any claims by the BRT people that they have invented busses that don't rock/sway, so they almost certainly haven't solved that problem.
You're not the only one in the comments talking about buses "rocking". I've never experienced this in my life in the 3 Canadian cities I've lived in. There must be a disparity in the quality of buses depending on who is building them, or the purchase amount a particular city is willing to spend per unit. Combine a low centre of gravity with decent shock absorbers, and there shouldn't be much to worry about.
This won't pass with the current proposal. No one is going to vote to significantly increase their taxes for something they won't even see in 20 years. Most people have no idea where they'll be in 5 years, let alone 20. Further, the entire proposal is for at-grade rail. That means that these trains will be delayed by both road and waterway traffic. Do you really want to be stuck in a train for 30 minutes while some rich guy needs to float his yacht through a major city?
The timeline sucks, and there's arguably too much at grade, but the particularly congested part (from Uptown to International District) would be in a new tunnel.
Agreed, it won't fly. I'm not going to vote to spend $50E9 on a transit system that will be finished just in time to be rendered obsolete by autonomous vehicles.
> Because it is serving areas without major jobs centers or walkable neighborhoods, the long light rail corridor is inherently oriented toward suburb-to-downtown commuters.
This is the biggest problem with transit outside NYC/Chicago. Those cities are surrounded by walkable suburbs that justify regional rail. Everywhere else, the surrounding suburbs were not designed at all, and it's questionably valuable running rail out to them.
I take the Silver Line to work in D.C. None of it runs through any sensibly designed area. There are a tiny handful of apartments within walking distance of any Silver Line station, and even the closest ones are separated by enormous dangerous parking lots. My commute is actually takes longer than it did back when I used to commute from a walkable New York suburb into midtown, even though the physical distance is about 40% less.
I'm pretty skeptical of the return on transit dollars in place like Seattle. It seems to me that it's simply too late to turn these places into real cities.
I don't know about dangerous, but walking through a sea of parking lots is generally pretty unpleasant as a pedestrian. Unlike a driver, where your immediate environment is the car, which you control, a pedestrian's immediate environment is the street and neighborhood.
Parking lots are attractive to crime: Unattended vehicles, low surveillance, relative anonymity, unused space late at night. Many kinds of deals take place entirely within parking lots. The crime wouldn't vanish if these locations were busier and less anonymous, but it would be a little more challenging to go completely unnoticed.
Parking lots aren't pedestrian friendly. You have to keep your head on a swivel and look at all parked cars (in case they're about to start moving) and all approaches (in case of cars already in motion) to ensure that you're not about to get run over. It's mentally fatiguing. Other posters have addressed the crime issue. Walking down a sidewalk is a way better and safer experience as a pedestrian than walking through a parking lot.
Transit dollars would be very well spent in a place like Seattle, and Seattle voters are so hungry for transit investment that we will vote "yes" on almost any proposal to build more of it, even when it comes saddled with a lot of pointless suburban sprawl trains we don't actually care about. The problem is that the Washington State legislature refuses to allow cities to tax themselves for transit projects, and Seattle is therefore unable to build itself the transit network it needs.
No, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the political reality we're dealing with. It has to do with a rural/urban divide in the state legislature, and a resentment of Seattle's financial and cultural dominance.
The transit project described in the article may be centered on Seattle, but it is not a Seattle transit network: it is a regional project, and the region sprawls out across the entire eastern half of the Puget Sound - it's eighty miles long, from north to south, and 10-15 miles wide. It's not a city at all - it includes at least half a dozen different cities and a dozen smaller towns, plus all the suburbs between them, and a fair amount of rural land beyond the suburbs.
Sound Transit is only building Seattle transit by accident, tunneling their way through our city as a side effect of the "regional spine" they're trying to extend all the way through the Puget Sound region. Seattle is simply trying to make the best of it by pushing them as hard as we can to build something that resembles a proper subway system while they happen to be passing through. It's costing a fortune and taking forever, but it's better than nothing, which is what we are allowed to build on our own.
There are giant apartments and condos being built right next to all the stations on the Silver Line. In 5-10 years it seems like that area is going to look like most of the Arlington stops on the Orange Line: a walkable 1/2 mile radius around the metro, with single family homes beyond that.
One thing that happens in Tokyo which I think is very successful is transit companies building train stations and commercial centers at the same time. At worst you now have a commercial center that's easy to access, at best you now jump-start a walkable suburb.
"My commute is actually takes longer than it did back when I used to commute from a walkable New York suburb into midtown, even though the physical distance is about 40% less."
I'm not sure I understand this properly. How does this happen?
A plug for a technology that amplifies the reach of transit: the folding bicycle (e.g., Bromptons).
You can't run trains to everybody's home or workplace, but you can run trains to within a couple of miles of the endpoints of the commutes of many persons. Can some of this large budget somehow be used to subsidize folding bikes?
Seattle has a problem with casual bike ridership: it's very hilly. There are a bunch of bike commuters, but they all already own their own bikes. There is also a bike share system which is failing horribly primarily for this and one other reason: the stations were spaced horribly around town and riders can not know with confidence that there will be a station near their destination to park.
Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
> There is also a bike share system which is failing horribly primarily for this
The point of bike share is for casual cyclists or people who want to pair bike share with transit for the last mile (which is annoying to do with your own bike). It's a niche that's not really intended to compete with people owning their own bikes.
> the stations were spaced horribly around town and riders can not know with confidence that there will be a station near their destination to park.
Agreed. Apparently this is supposed to get better with the city taking over the program, because then they can pair the stations with transit stops better.
> Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
Seattle isn't really that rainy. It's actually less rainy than Munich, for example, and Munich has more than 4x the bike mode share as Seattle.
Correct, the sheer quantity of rain that falls is not as great as other cities. But this past week has been the first in a long time (dare I say months) that it's not been cloudy, damp, and 45F.
Seattle might be a good candidate for electric-assist bicycles. Those are more expensive, though, so you have to be sure they'll be used before buying them.
Portland has pretty much the same weather and is at least no less hilly than Seattle. But Portland seems to have a nicer system of bicycle trails and dedicated bike lanes.
Folding bikes are already inexpensive. The main reason biking isn't more popular is that the infrastructure largely isn't there. Most bike infrastructure even in Seattle consists of sharrows or unprotected bike lanes. So building out better bike infrastructure would definitely help.
Cheap bike-sized rental lockers at transit stops might work too. I've seen those in the DC area. I'd much rather leave the bike at the station during the day than have to carry it with me into work and back.
if only the Bay Area likewise had some sort of similar industry as lucrative as that in Seattle, which similarly yields the tax revenue to fund such endeavors
How does Seattle get such a generally reasonable city government (and even better in the surrounding cities) compared to San Francisco (and the neighboring cities, too).
As far as I can tell both places are roughly the same in demographics, education, and only recently has SF surged ahead in wealth (and SF used to be even worse than it is now.)
2. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is insane. For example, it allows anyone to sue anyone building anything on environmental grounds.
3. CA has Prop 13, which is also insane, and Prop U in LA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_U which is insane. Prop U encourages some people at the margins to pick SF over LA.
4. SF has rent control, which means that many voters are encouraged to say no to everything.
6. Seattle's city government is not quite as reasonable as it looks. Google "The Seattle Process" or Kshama Sawant. It only looks better than SF because SF has uniquely terrible voters.
You can't really make the comparison being made in #1 without a lot of assumptions that just don't actually hold water in the market.
Seattle has a population of 652k, with an average density of 8k/sq mi.
San Francisco has a population of 864k, with an average density of 18.5k/sq mi.
And yet:
Seattle has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.5
SF has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.6
So what explains SF's higher costs? Density coupled with massive wealth inequality. Period.
Upzoning increases land value in a tight market. Markets remain tight in desirable locations and no amount of development has been able to keep up; population is growing, job growth in the tech sector is high, and the wealth gap coupled with high demand means that there's enormous price elasticity for some, who then push the rest out.
High density construction carries a higher barrier to entry, and is almost exclusively allocated to rental units. Additionally, high density construction allows one to combine multiple profitable uses in the same plot; commercial and residential.
This accelerates the wealth divide, putting more money into the hands of fewer and fewer land owners, with rents tracking whatever the high demand is capable of sustaining. Nobody else ever builds up equity, the city winds up being owned by fewer and fewer, and the low end of the market is priced out.
This then requires attempts at government correction, through subsidized housing; either as outright grants to developers, zoning variances granted to allow higher margins in exchange for permanently affordable (but still rental!) units, tax credits, etc.
This further accelerates the growth of the wealth divide, as development and development investment companies begin to specialize in cornering access to (and brokerage of) these economic perks that are unavailable to individual potential home owners.
Density does not fix housing. It literally never has, and I do not even begin to understand how this conception became the norm amongst housing activists. As near as I call tell, it's something that's been green/liberal-washed as a necessity by those who profit the most from the government-funded development incentives.
Ehh, Seattle and Washington's government isn't any better than other cities and states. You just don't hear about the junk going on unless you live in the state. Our state funding for education is a complete joke and the state congress refuses to give funding that was mandated by the state supreme court (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/supreme-c...). The right side of the state (towards Idaho) is much, much different than the Seattle area and is always at odds with what Seattle wants. For every awesome transit project there are many other quagmires like our Bertha big dig that's been spinning its wheels and wasting money for years now.
Seattle was founded by lumber barons selling building materials to San Francisco. You guys kept lighting your town on fire, we kept sending wood and you sent back dirt and rocks which we used to fill in the mud.
We even stole your gold rush idea. Thanks for that. Great idea.
Basically we've been sucking you guys dry for 150 years :p
I hate it. I hate it so much. I think if we spent $50,000,000,000 on infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles it would both be better and we'd see returns sooner. Light rail is expensive to build, slow to build, more expensive to maintain, and completely inflexible as needs of the city change.
I will vote no in the fall. And I'll encourage my friends to do so. This makes me a minority in Seattle but I'm ok with that.
I'm not trying to change your opinion (HN is not the place to change one you clearly hold very strongly), but as someone who lives in NYC and spent 4 years living in Seattle (I moved away in 2014), I will happily say that the article you posted has nearly no correlation to your earlier points about light rail, and that the NYC Subway is an amazing piece of (partially) publicly funded work that has shaped NYC and the surrounding region in innumerable positive ways.
There are about 1.7 billion rides taken on it every year with over 200 miles of track. It'd be an understatement to say that the city could not exist the way it does now without it - autonomous vehicles won't get the sheer number of people moved every morning and every night that the subway does. A full order of magnitude more people take the subway on a daily basis than there are taxi rides, all for a maximum of $2.75 regardless of how far they're traveling.
It might not be the best thing for Seattle (personally, I am a big proponent), but a blanket distaste for light rail is antithetical to what has proven fundamental for cities around the world.
As far as spending public money, there are already efficiency concerns (something that your article definitely demonstrates) - I'm curious how you think public money could help fund technology that fundamentally does not exist today? Is that not a higher risk for future technology?
I'll vote no but for the opposite reason: I think we need lots more light rail and we need it in Seattle, not in the suburbs.
Autonomous vehicles cannot possibly solve our transportation problems because the best they can do to reduce congestion is nothing; at worst, they will aggravate problems by increasing the number of trips taken.
I believe that if every car on the road was autonomous tomorrow that traffic flow rates (cars/hour) would at least double. Maybe even triple.
The amount of congestion from human bullshit is insane. Cars slow down entering tunnels for no reason. Cars slow down leaving tunnels when their eyes adjust to the brightness. I-90 gets slower on sunny days than on cloudy days. I-5 north out of Seattle backs up because of a hill. I get excited if I can go a full week with an accident on 90 causing backup. Even when it's cleared to the side humans rubber neck.
And that's just getting started. Once we start making changes to street design to enable autonomous it gets even better. Elimination of street parking alone would do wonder.
Things get really fun when riders don't need to get their car back. When it's a ride share model. Parking garages are relatively inefficient now. You need to be able to get any car out at any time. But what if you didn't? What if you just needed a car. It'd be a first-in, first-out queue. We'd be able to cram 3x to 4x as many cars in a garage.
You'd also be able to order a car that fits your needs. Most trips don't require a trunk. Most cars for most trips could be smart car sized. You'd only need a bigger car if, well, you needed it.
No. I believe that asking for more light rail is asking for a faster horse. It's ancient technology. We should be looking forwards, not backwards.
Even if the development of autonomous vehicles eventually reaches the level you're hoping it will, and none of the obstacles which might prevent the realization of your vision actually occur, induced demand means that any reduction in the level of congestion will be temporary.
Anyway, you're suggesting that we could get a 2x or 3x improvement in 20-30 years by completely overhauling all of our transportation infrastructure: but we can get a 10x improvement in the same span of time at a lower cost with less risk using proven technology.
I'm happy to see people proceed with research on autonomous cars, and can certainly see the value of an Uber/Lyft type service using robot drivers, but it would be a mistake to sit and wait for speculative technology research to maybe solve the problem when we can for sure solve the problem if we just get going with what we already have.
What's the worst that can happen, we end up with lots of good options? Robot cars might make cabbies obsolete, and it is likely that they will change the way we use other transportation technologies, assuming they work the way people are hoping they will, but they won't make light rail obsolete any more than the invention of the jet engine made the automobile obsolete.
Cars are the worst. Not individually, but collectively bad drivers cause exponential chaos and massive inefficiency. I see this a lot as a motorcyclist. I have a 6th sense for when to go around/between cars because the road will be open ahead and someone just REALLY wants to make a right turn from the far left lane -- like right now!
But I do agree with other people that we need to redesign our transportation infrastructure in ways that reduce or prohibit cars.
Autonomous vehicles are great for increased speed, improved (i.e. no) parkability issues and lower car accidents. However, like any latency improvement, they will not (can not) improve throughput. Trains on the other hand are optimized for throughput and cost.
Point: They are complementary technologise, solving fundamentally orthogonal problems, and can and should co-exist to create the best possible infra. (P.S. I already train from CapHill to UDistrict then get an Uber within the UDistrict)
That said, you're welcome to argue that Seattle does not and will never need the throughput optimization provided by trains. That cars alone are enough. But I don't believe it's in your best interest, to compare the throughput of cars to trains. Actually it may even be an active disservice to the autonomous car movement to try and compare them to trains (regarding throughput).
Meanwhile, anecdotally, living and working on Denny (20 min hilly-walk, 7min bus no traffic): It is consistently bumper to bumper (at all times that matter) and only getting worse. We seem to have a throughput problem! With similar issues on Mercer. If your data is different, I'd love to hear more about that.
I'm not sure your throughput assertion is correct.
As stated in another reply I-5 North congests every single day between the 520 and 45th st exits. Why? Because of a hill. There's a big hill there. And every meatbag driver slows down going up it. Which causes people behind to brake. Which creates a shockwave traffic jam.
That wouldn't happen with robot drivers. Nor would cars slow down when they enter a tunnel for reasons I've yet to figure out. Nor would they slow down when exiting that tunnel when their eyes adjust to the summer brightness. Traffic is actually worse on I-90 on bright, sunny days than on overcast (but not rainy) days! Again, that slow down would not happen at all with robot drivers.
So I disagree. Autonomous cars can very much improve throughput. The maximum number of cars that can cross a stretch of road at rush hour is significantly higher with autonomous cars than with meatbag drivers. In my opinion.
What I really want is Seattle to throw a few million bucks at Google to do a study. Show us a vision of an autonomous Seattle. Build a simulation and present it. If Google gives us a "best case" and we still think light rail is better then great. I'm sold. Let's pick the better option. But right now we're not truly considering all options.
1. The theoretical throughput limits of cars on highways vs trains, for transporting people, is drastically in the favor of trains.
Generally 1 car per 2 secs per lane - 1.5 people per car on average = 3 people per sec on a 4 lane highway. On the other hand a 15mpg train, moves 6m per sec, with a width of 2 meters = 12 m^2 per sec = 12 people comfortably per sec. While this is a relatively slow train, and we are comparing a train (land mass = 1 highway lane) with a 4 lane highway, the math is still drastically in favor of trains. this still holds, even if autonomous cars can achieve a 100% increase to highway throughput limits.
2. Seattle may not need the level of throughput only achievable by trains. You're probably right that currently Seattle does not and will not need more throughput than cars on highways can achieve.
However, I don't think this holds true as time continues indefinitely into the future.
I felt compelled to create an account because of this misconception (not really your comment, just within the whole thread) that mass transit isn't already automated.
Metros in most major cities already have trains that drive themselves. There may be a driver, but all they do is open and close the doors. Some systems (like Vancouver) don't have drivers at all.
The Bay Bridge one mile bypass cost about $6.4Bn. It was quite contentious too, and did nothing to make getting through the city any easier. It amazes me how unwilling most municipalities are to make this kind of investment in transit that would actually make it easier for people to get around rather than just pumping more lanes into freeways. Seattle should be lauded for putting their money where their citizens wants are.
City administrations are not good at figuring out the needs of transportation especially when they give less importance to market needs and focus more on propaganda.
Even if the cars drive themselves there's still not enough lanes to let them flow right now, much less in 20+ years. There was a study done that found Seattle's needs _22_ lanes of highway to meet the current demand. However because of how the highway system was originally built through the city we're stuck with 6-8 lanes at best. We need mass transit to get cars off the roads and reduce traffic.
Really smart autonomous vehicles that automatically do ridesharing and that intelligently pack vehicles full of 4-6 people on their way in could do it. At that point you're dealing with an experience that's not too different from a bus though (i.e. sharing a space with strangers). There's not enough capacity for everyone to commute in on their own individual autonomous vehicle, nor is there enough parking downtown, so the vehicles would have to be commuting twice daily.
(I pulled these numbers off Wikipedia, but they seem about right.)
Light rail can carry up to 13,000 passengers per direction per hour.
A highway lane carries up to 1,900 cars per lane per hour.
It takes about 6 lanes of highways to match 1 lane of light rail given current car usage (1 passenger per car).
If usage patterns change (say, an automated carpool that maximizes the capacity of the vehicle -- say 5 people per car), you still have 1900 * 5 = 9,500 passengers per lane per hour, which is good, but still worse than a single lane of light rail. Hey, worse is better right?
However, the bottleneck in many cities isn't the highway, but rather the smaller city streets the highway feeds into. Transit can sidestep this bottleneck altogether with subway tunnels, which automated vehicles can't. Even after everything else, light rail is still more economical and more environmentally friendly.* Finally, light rail converts to automated train operation quite handily (further increasing capacity), especially if all the other cars around it are automated too.
* I was about to say more comfortable, but is being crammed into a small car more or less comfortable than standing on a cramped train?
It will cost that much per resident over 30 years. The actual per-year cost is a good deal smaller. A better comparison to the annual debt would be per capita annual transit spending vs per capita annual national budget deficit (not total debt).
If I still lived in Seattle and had the choice between
a) Functional transit for a one time payment of $15 grand and then chump change for train fare for the rest of my life
and
b) Buying, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and driving a car at a vastly greater cost (probably around 10 grand per year all-in) for the rest of my life
I would pick A) every time. It's not even a contest, I would pick A) at twice the price. Hell, it would probably be economically rational to pick A) at 5x the price.
Seattle has 3.5 million people now. A good rail system will be serving the city in MANY generations to come. And yes future cost of money but it also seems these projects become ever more expensive too if delayed.
Anecdotally, I've traveled a reasonable amount. Any city I've been to with a world calls metro system (6 I've seen) are all hugely appreciated by the local and tourists alike. I've never head someone say "that underground was a waste of money". In cities without metros I've heard a bunch of complaints about the lack of the ability to move around quickly/easily.
Seattle also can run tracks across the 520 bridge for $200M and can use an existing 100 foot wide rail corridor on the Eastside from Renton to Bothell for a song. This would nearly double the trackage and communities served by light rail for well under $1B.
If the Bay Area spent serious money on good public transportation, we would not have a "housing crisis" like we have today. People prefer the vibrance of SF, and choose to live in SF because getting to/from SF is a pain in the ass. And BART shuts down before midnight.
We can build as much housing as we want, but as long as we lack a solid public transportation system, we'll be miserable: more cars on the roads, longer commutes, etc.
SF itself has to fix its MUNI; we need a 24-hr BART that is cheap and reliable; a CalTrain that runs very frequently and is 24-hr again; and feeder routes in the smaller cities.
With $50B, I'd focus on building an autonomous vehicle network. Here's how:
1. create autonomous vehicle road network by both creating new roads and retrofitting existing roads with physical barriers where desirable. This would be similar to building rail lines in places (say elevated or tunnels), except with much more flexibility.
2. put up a RFP/challenge to auto manufacturers for fleet of autonomous electric vehicles, likely of a few types for different passenger loads (2-10) and needs (disabled access, small cargo).
3. put up a RFP/challenge to build efficient routing backend for fleet.
4. put up a RFP/challenge for both card-based (for those without smartphones) and app-based pickup and destination setting, as well as car interface to handle route changes. Plan financially for frequent improvements due to rapid tech changes.
5. create infrastructure of very small depots throughout city where autonomous charging as well as manned cleaning & minor repairs could happen.
6. rope in social services to have progressive prices based on income, allowing typical subsidies for seniors, disabled, low income, etc.
Here’s why:
* Separate lanes are helpful for near term autonomous vehicles that are not as good at avoiding things. They’re also good as a backup for smaller human-driven busses in the shorter term as the autonomous vehicle development ramps up.
* Can use existing highways, sectioning off a separate lane and creating select off-ramps to connect to autonomous road network.
* Roads are cheaper per mile than rail.
* Rather than large highway tunneling projects (oh seattle…), can build small one-way tunnels over certain stretches where useful - say a few blocks that typically have terrible traffic.
* Smaller vehicles with fewer passengers helps the inconvenience factor and last-mile problem of busses by providing flexibility in pickup/drop-off locations
* smaller vehicles and more convenience in locations helps to improve public image - it’d be like uber/lyft but without the traffic.
* Kickstarts rapid improvement in autonomous vehicle industry by being a large customer, which can benefit city with better tech over time (vs aging train cars).
* Adds useful infrastructure for the future where private fleets and privately owned cars can participate with their own autonomous vehicles. Essentially, it allows for a phase-out of publicly owned/run autonomous vehicle fleets in the future, were that to be something that makes sense.
I could see GM/Lyft and Uber being bidders in this process, among other auto manufacturers. There may even be an opportunity to own less of the fleet and simply rent at a particular per mile rate.
In short: spend money on the future of transportation, not the past.
206 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadNow that UW and Capitol Hill have a station, it makes sense to at least study the feasibility of an east-west line that could provide an alternative to at-grade transit and connect to the Link.
Another advantage of a crosstown route north of Lake Union is it could continue east over the brand new 520 bridge, which was designed to support Light Rail and connect to the east side.
As a resident of Seattle, the current plan is vexxing. I love transit, and I don't mind voting for something that I'll never see (as long as there are good reasons for the long timeline) but I'd certainly prefer a different set of priorities for light rail.
When I lived in the area I often joked I'd drive 405-90-5 if I was going from Kirkland to the U-District. Having spent 2 hours in traffic on the bridge alone in the past, it's not far from the truth.
The return commute is only screwy when there's a big con - SakuraCon for example.
I did take Mercer for the three months I worked at Lab 126 in Fiona, but I assume it's better now that construction is over. It was much worse.
520 eastbound has mostly not been bad since ramp metering started, and even better since tolling started. Westbound is a bit of a different thing, though my impression is that it clears up much earlier now than it used to.
In Seattle, Sts are E/W, Aves are N/S.
This is an extremely common mistake in Seattle, and I have no idea why.
Streets are North/South; Streets has an S in it and so does South, they all also have a T.
Ave are East/West; Ave has an E in it and so do both East and West, also Ave and East share an A.
It's either really silly, or genius, or complete luck that my overly analytical brain turned into something real.
"Avenue" has N for North and U for South
You solved the case!
I'm already half tempted to vote no on ST3 because running light rail to ISSAQUAH--expected to get 11,000 riders per day, or 70% of the riders that a single route (number 48) through the CD gets--before filling in the gaps in the rest of our system is just...galling. But I'll probably vote yes because it's not like voting no is going to end subarea equity.
(See the seattlesubway.org yellow line for what a Denny/23rd Ave "Metro 8 Subway" would look like.)
The U District stop is actually a great example of this. Farther west (e.g. near The Ave), there is much more transit access and substantially more walkable areas. But the priority seems to be getting suburbanites to Huskies games.
Disclaimer: That's not to say I dislike the extension. It's the first time Link has been useful for anything other than getting to the airport.
An east/west option that ran from Ballard, stopped in U-District, and continued to Bellevue and Redmond would be the bomb. Game-changing for recruiting -- imagine living in Ballard and working at Microsoft, or living in Redmond but working at Expedia (after they move.) And your commute not sucking the life out of you.
Here's more information on ST3:
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/24/st3-draft-plan-over...
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/31/how-to-fix-st3-so-s...
Yes. Most towns have zoning rules that include minimum parking requirements for new construction.
The region is plagued by horrid traffic steaming from several interacting issues.
* There are four large cities, each of which also has numerous suburbs and even un-incorporated areas. Urban planing across these regions sure seems like it doesn't occur.
* 'The Rent is Too darn High'; because there needs to be /far/ more supply side control of the market.
* Housing near jobs (and near quality education for workers with children) is consequently very expensive; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Jobs are no longer permanent lifetime things, with a single 'bread winner' able to easily support their family; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Moving is a PITA; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Transit isn't laid out in a mesh, thus doing anything other than suburb to downtown (a model that worked in the era of big companies and lifetime employment) takes many transfers and a lot of time; encouraging workers to /drive/ (for freedom).
The best solution that I see is making it possible for at least the major bus lines to be run as self-driving systems. A 'car pod' version of bus transit with point to point automated driving, particularly if those pods could link up and/or draft for improved efficiency on the long hauls looks like a far better solution.
Any place east of 1st (about 3 blocks from the water) and north of Pioneer Square has plenty of space for parking garages below grade but above sea level. At 6th and Pike you've got space for at least 6 levels of parking, and there are a few areas higher than that.
[0]: Which I view mostly as a good thing -- late last year they hit a saturation point that resulted in the first month-to-month decrease in rent for new leases; my hope is that this will alleviate some of the upward rent pressure on the lower end of the market and make the city livable for a broader range of incomes. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, but it's far more likely if rents for the new construction face downward pressure from inflated supply.
As Americans, you may have this impression that mass transit is a horrible thing for poor people. That impression comes from busses, where the bus is rocking around so much that you cannot whip out your cellphone and read on the way to work(one of the big advantages of mass transit over a car). Trams, however, are very comfortable. The floor is always extremely stable, you can comfortably read or do work on your laptop. You no longer feel the stress of driving and your commute can become a "free time" part of your day, rather than a stressfull period between home and work.
Busses are just a lot more flexible in general. The costs with starting and stopping bus lines are much less than other forms of transit, the vehicles tend to be more interchangeable, the infrastructure is less substantial, and so on. I'm not saying I generally enjoy riding busses, but the costs to the system are very different than other forms of transit.
And you really can't "just as easily" put rail on that road. Laying rail is expensive. To make a dedicated bus lane, you just paint it. Much much cheaper.
For "BRT" to rival trains, you have to set up a degree of dedicated infrastructure that costs nearly as much as trains.
BRT sucks, and study after study after study shows that people do not want to ride a bus (even BRT).
That said, I agree that busses are the least desirable, and I for one would much prefer a well-thought-out transit system that eliminates the need for busses.
Is Ballard going to move anytime soon?
On the other hand, that difficulty in changing routes with trains, subways, and street cars means it is much less likely that a route will be shut down completely if ridership falls off. I could at least consider moving to be near a subway or train stop and then giving up my car.
With a bus no way am I giving up my car. The risk is too high that some bean counter will decide that ridership could be improved by 5% of they shut down my route and replaced it with a new one a mile away, and then I'd be screwed.
I think to really make a transit system be widely used there has to be a long term commitment to (1) keeping certain routes open, and (2) running at certain times on those routes, no matter how low ridership falls.
That's actually a downside of buses when it comes to urban development. As a business owner, there's very little upside in opening up a new business next to a new bus stop, because I know that bus stop may move (or disappear entirely) next year. Compare that with a light rail line, which is guaranteed to be on a fairly fixed route, with fairly fixed stops. The literature I've read about urban development shows that additional bus lines do almost nothing for economic activity along their route, while light rail lines have significant, sustained increases in economic activity near their stations.
YAGNI.
In Boston, not only are many of the bus lines following the exact route of older trolley lines, but those trolley lines follow routes taken by horse-drawn street car lines, and the tracks laid down for those matches, block for block, the routes of older omnibus stagecoach services.
You really don't need to reroute bus lines very often.
But what about something blocking a track, you might ask? Well, streetcar cities deal with the prospect of an incident blocking a streetcar track by being very, very intolerant of things that might make that happen. And it works.
But... since a bus can reroute easily, it can also be rerouted very easily by politicians for their own ends. Which means real estate investors ignore bus lines. They don't ignore streetcar tracks.
And it shows.
And as for strollers taking too much time: if 40 people can spend their time on the bus in peace an quite using their phone/resting, maybe time for strollers is a reasonable price to pay?
And we have'nt said anything about trying to solve that design problem somehow.
That's not true. When I lived in Minnesota, Southwest Metro Transit used coach-style buses to go to and from Downtown Minneapolis, and they were just fine. The time needed to deploy their wheelchair lifts was about the same as the time needed for a regular "kneeling bus" to deploy its wheelchair ramp.
[p.s.: there is actually a term in transit-nerd circles, "rail bias" - as though people have an unreasonable preference for trains when other transit modes would do just as well. So far as I can see, "rail bias" is a myth - the truth is merely "bus aversion".]
This times 1000x.
It's common in the Midwest for many people to have never once used any public transit in their entire lives. So it's very easy for our public transit groups to pretend that BRT is "like Light Rail" hoping it will improve the public response to BRT.
Instead, it just dampens enthusiasm for real transit. People ride BRT and are underwhelmed. Since they've been told BRT is "just like Light Rail", they decide that Light Rail must suck too.
Which is how you get metro areas of 600k+ people which, despite having a dozen or more bus lines, still manage to have no useful public transit of any kind.
Having more entrances/exists is important if you have a lot of people who wish to travel in wheelchairs, or while pushing buggies with babies. This reduces the time it takes people to board/leave, and helps iron out delays caused by multiple busy stops on a route.
Until massive amounts of money stop chasing American real estate, it's the only option. It would be cheaper to provide free uber than to build a train line in any moderate sized American city.
Also, in the US, government mushroomed in the late 60s with the "Great Society" welfare programs and war on drugs. So state and municipal governments in most states are dealing with underfunded pension programs. Transportation that isn't Federally funded is discretionary spending.
And it's unfortunate that people don't understand that this is exactly the right thing to do.
Once autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time, mass transit will be instantly forgotten. This whole article is about spending $50,000,000,000 on shiny new stables and hitching posts.
yep, the economies of scale of "mass" transit will then be available to "individual" transit, and that will be very attractive to people.
Outside of dense areas though, Uber-like services (or even privately owned self-driving cars) win.
The idea of spending billions of dollars on hardwired tracks when it's so obviously the wrong thing to do in the long term is just forehead-slappingly dumb.
A busy road can move more people in an hour than a train can move in a day.
So we can build train stations that are guaranteed not to be where people need to end up, or we can use existing roads more intelligently. To me, that doesn't sound like such a tough choice.
Trains are not going to be the answer. Nobody is going to be taking the train 50 years from now, or any other form of fixed-rail urban transit.
In some places, perhaps -- big American cities with decent overground infrastructure capacity -- but the world will not just stop needing subways and trams. I cannot possibly imagine the chaos if the 5 million people who use the Hong Kong MTR every day suddenly started using cars.
That's because you haven't thought through what it's going to be like when those cars aren't driven by humans.
There are about 550 miles of roadway in the parts of Hong Kong where the vast majority of people live and work; most of that is narrow, much of it is on steep grade, and almost all of it dates back to the days of pulled rickshaws. Self-driving cars will almost certainly replace the taxi fleet and may well kill the bus lines, but they have no hope of matching the capacity of an underground train in places like this.
Even if we throw out tunneled trains, something like Chicago's El will be miles more efficient in a dense urban core than trying to cram thousands more cars into streets that weren't designed for them.
Autonomous vehicles will help us get away from the idea that everyone has to own or lease their own car to be considered a full-fledged adult. Once cars are no longer used to travel arbitrarily from one parking lot to the next, the result will be more people getting to their actual destinations in fewer cars.
This is a perfect example of the point I've been making (and been modded down regularly for) -- people simply aren't thinking through the consequences of the technology that's coming. The coming changes in the personal transportation business will be vast and profound in both economic and social terms, and they definitely won't involve fixed rails.
It's OK for ordinary people to ignore or underestimate the progress being made in this direction. It's not OK for urban transit planners, who are paid to think 20-30 years out, to make the same mistake.
No number of autonomous vehicles will get you out of the fact that automobiles are the least efficient way to transport people over roadways.
[1] http://www.core77.com/posts/8015/car-bus-bicycle-taking-up-s...
Because if it is, it isn't worth the space it takes up on the Internet. Self-driving cars won't be any more vulnerable to gridlock than trains are.
And none of this stuff is going to happen "overnight," especially in Seattle.
I don't care if the self-driving car revolution will take two decades - if we abandon mass transit, we will either have to greatly reduce our trips, or demolish half the city to build more roads.
This cannot be overstated.
There is nothing in the urban, built environment that is as terrible aesthetically and functionally as some big lumbering bus bonking its way through the city (and usually belching black smoke as it goes).
I am a huge advocate of public transit and I will do anything to not ride a bus.
Always remember the quote from Steve Jobs about tablets and the stylus:
"If you see a (bus), they blew it."
edit: Yes, yes I know all about BRT. Lipstick on a pig.
I'm pretty sure the NYC subway in the 80s could give it a run for its money:
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+subway+80s&espv=2&b...
I agree totally that buses have a negative stigma, some of which is rightly deserved.
Metro has almost completely eliminated the older high-floor diesels that are loud and rickety. Next up is ditching the longer, old conversion electric buses.
To get going, you need a low gear and a clutch of some kind. To get going up a steep hill, with a heavy load, you simply need an even lower gear. The problem has a solution.
The high low-end torque of electric motors is actually annoying in a transit vehicle. Particularly to those passengers who are standing up. The vehicle moves suddenly, flipping from zero acceleration to high acceleration. The time derivative of acceleration is called "jerk", for a good reason.
Things on wheels with a diesel engine in them tend to be oversized and driven by lowlife assholes who threaten cyclists and other motorists. At times (such as when accelerating or otherwise loaded) they spew noxious black smoke from their unmanaged, unoptimized engines that run fine on 25 octane garbage due to the way they are designed, and are noisy as hell.
The regulation for sulphur content in the fuel and the condition of diesel engines must be a joke in Canada. Definitely I don't see such black smoke coming out of trucks, or the pungent smell, in Japan, for instance. The trucks and buses smell similar to an indoor, household kerosene-burning heater, a bit like a paraffin candle; quite different from the acrid stench I'm used to smelling at home.
So that's where I am on the diesel yes/no question.
Move Seattle is supposed to fund more electrification of routes so maybe we get more wires in the next handful of years.
Frankly, I wish they would just go with a decent tram system (like Portland and many European cities).
I wonder why the don't consider electric buses with big batteries. We have a few of those in Beijing now, and they seem to work OK. I have no idea how long they have to be down for charging, however.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/News...
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/02/22/metros-battery-powe...
Metro is running Proterra EV buses (like a Nissan Leaf writ very large) on routes 226 and 241 on the Eastside. So far the only charger is at Eastgate P&R so the routes served by the Proterras have to go through there. They are entirely run on batteries, no overhead wire or diesel engine, but their range is limited to about a ~20 mile route and they don't hold a charge well with steep hills. They take around 20 minutes to go from discharged to full and about 10 minutes to recharge from normal route usage.
The new trolleys, separate from the Proterras, operating in Seattle now have batteries and can run off-wire for a few miles, including going up the 18% grade found at James St & 7th Ave. They're a lot better on hills and come in bendy-bus (articulated) styles that the Proterras currently don't have.
We're trying to build more streetcars but there is astounding pushback against devoting street capacity to exclusive lanes for them. The First Hill Streetcar, that runs from the ID to Capitol Hill Link Station, goes up two-lane-with-bike-path Broadway...and is slower than walking during parts of the day. On the other hand, it will get monumentally more useful if the Central City Connector--a streetcar route from the ID to Westlake along 1st Ave in its own lanes--is built because the CCC will connect both streetcar routes.
Personally, I'd love to see a dedicated-lane streetcar running between Mt Baker Station (Rainier Ave near Franklin HS) to University Link Station (just north of the ship canal along Montlake) on 23rd Ave. Cheaper than tunneling, in its own right-of-way, and running from, say, 5am to 1am every day of the week. That would be incredible and could easily replace route 48 with more capacity and better reliability.
Sadly, I suspect I will be dead and gone before the Central District gets any kind of high-capacity transit.
Rich people Uber.
SF needs more light rail. Lots of it.
... and more subway.
As in, both in this context, and originally?
I believe that BRT is popular among people making transit proposals because they are thinking about it as designers, not as users; they don't care that it is a bus, so they don't understand why other people do. All they see is a politically expedient way to draw some lines on a map.
Ask people who use transit, though, and very few of them will be impressed if you try to sell them a bus when what they want is a train.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6621364,-122.3451918,3a,75y,...
Compare that to the Skytrain in Vancouver, faster and never had that problem.
I also hate being jammed in with people. Just find it uncomfortable. Last time I took a public bus the guy next to me was pretty much asleep on my shoulder. I was tired too, but come on man. :/
1. Turn radius is pretty good: streetcars have 18-20m turn radiuses, buses are comfortable at 12m radius, doable at 9m, and can go lower. Buses are compatible with existing city forms.
2. Because of this you can change routes based on demand. This almost never happens, but it should.
3. Broken buses don't break the line.
4. Express buses can coexist with local service buses.
5. Turns out passing is a useful feature!
6. It would be possible to responsively add buses to meet demand. Never happens, but possible.
7. Variable stop frequency is a possibility. If you are on a late-night bus in New York they'll let you off at any corner you want. (Most cities lack this basic sense of decency, but I won't claim we do buses right.)
8. The vehicles are not proprietary. You don't like your buses? Buy any brand you like!
9. New manufactures could enter the market. Trains are regulated to a degree that makes it very difficult to enter the market. This is especially bad in the U.S., so maybe it's unfair: we have terrible regulation, and local manufacture requirements. This has a lot to do with the high subsidies trains require: it requires so much political will that everyone wants a piece of the pie.
10. Buses don't have to be inefficient. Intercity buses are often more fuel-efficient than intercity trains, for instance (I'm guessing this is mostly because they use variable pricing to run at capacity, but something like that is possible for transit too.)
11. Rubber wheels are pretty awesome for stopping, and stopping is pretty awesome for not killing people. Trains are incompatible with humans and even cars except at very low speeds, and require intense separation, or barriers with long lengths of times to let traffic and pedestrians clear. Surface trains substantially hurt the walkability of their immediate surroundings.
12. Buses can run lines that are more dense than trains, which is important for people with disabilities. Most disabled people I see are using buses.
13. We really do need roads everywhere. I remember making SimCity cities with only trains, but that's not a real thing. You need roads for emergency vehicles, trash collection, utilities and utility repair, your moving truck, and so on. I'd love to see roads scaled back, but they aren't going to disappear, so let's make the best of them.
Buses do absolutely suck. But I am not convinced they have to suck. Unfortunately transit systems (buses or trains) have no incentive to meet customer demand, their real customers are the government not the riders. Riders are a liability for transit systems, and so there's painfully little innovation.
This is the biggest problem with transit outside NYC/Chicago. Those cities are surrounded by walkable suburbs that justify regional rail. Everywhere else, the surrounding suburbs were not designed at all, and it's questionably valuable running rail out to them.
I take the Silver Line to work in D.C. None of it runs through any sensibly designed area. There are a tiny handful of apartments within walking distance of any Silver Line station, and even the closest ones are separated by enormous dangerous parking lots. My commute is actually takes longer than it did back when I used to commute from a walkable New York suburb into midtown, even though the physical distance is about 40% less.
I'm pretty skeptical of the return on transit dollars in place like Seattle. It seems to me that it's simply too late to turn these places into real cities.
No, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the political reality we're dealing with. It has to do with a rural/urban divide in the state legislature, and a resentment of Seattle's financial and cultural dominance.
The transit project described in the article may be centered on Seattle, but it is not a Seattle transit network: it is a regional project, and the region sprawls out across the entire eastern half of the Puget Sound - it's eighty miles long, from north to south, and 10-15 miles wide. It's not a city at all - it includes at least half a dozen different cities and a dozen smaller towns, plus all the suburbs between them, and a fair amount of rural land beyond the suburbs.
Sound Transit is only building Seattle transit by accident, tunneling their way through our city as a side effect of the "regional spine" they're trying to extend all the way through the Puget Sound region. Seattle is simply trying to make the best of it by pushing them as hard as we can to build something that resembles a proper subway system while they happen to be passing through. It's costing a fortune and taking forever, but it's better than nothing, which is what we are allowed to build on our own.
I'm not sure I understand this properly. How does this happen?
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-transit-pro...
You can't run trains to everybody's home or workplace, but you can run trains to within a couple of miles of the endpoints of the commutes of many persons. Can some of this large budget somehow be used to subsidize folding bikes?
Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
The point of bike share is for casual cyclists or people who want to pair bike share with transit for the last mile (which is annoying to do with your own bike). It's a niche that's not really intended to compete with people owning their own bikes.
> the stations were spaced horribly around town and riders can not know with confidence that there will be a station near their destination to park.
Agreed. Apparently this is supposed to get better with the city taking over the program, because then they can pair the stations with transit stops better.
> Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
Seattle isn't really that rainy. It's actually less rainy than Munich, for example, and Munich has more than 4x the bike mode share as Seattle.
Seattle doesn't get heavy rain, it's just damp for weeks at a time. How do they compare in dry days per year rather than total amount?
As far as I can tell both places are roughly the same in demographics, education, and only recently has SF surged ahead in wealth (and SF used to be even worse than it is now.)
The longer answer is complicated.
1. Some urban planning decisions are made at the state, not local, level, which means that more housing gets built and prices are lower: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11370258/honan-zoning-reform-bil....
2. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is insane. For example, it allows anyone to sue anyone building anything on environmental grounds.
3. CA has Prop 13, which is also insane, and Prop U in LA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_U which is insane. Prop U encourages some people at the margins to pick SF over LA.
4. SF has rent control, which means that many voters are encouraged to say no to everything.
5. The cities' histories are different: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing. SF has a longer history of radical, economically illiterate politics than Seattle.
6. Seattle's city government is not quite as reasonable as it looks. Google "The Seattle Process" or Kshama Sawant. It only looks better than SF because SF has uniquely terrible voters.
Seattle has a population of 652k, with an average density of 8k/sq mi.
San Francisco has a population of 864k, with an average density of 18.5k/sq mi.
And yet:
Seattle has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.5
SF has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.6
So what explains SF's higher costs? Density coupled with massive wealth inequality. Period.
Upzoning increases land value in a tight market. Markets remain tight in desirable locations and no amount of development has been able to keep up; population is growing, job growth in the tech sector is high, and the wealth gap coupled with high demand means that there's enormous price elasticity for some, who then push the rest out.
High density construction carries a higher barrier to entry, and is almost exclusively allocated to rental units. Additionally, high density construction allows one to combine multiple profitable uses in the same plot; commercial and residential.
This accelerates the wealth divide, putting more money into the hands of fewer and fewer land owners, with rents tracking whatever the high demand is capable of sustaining. Nobody else ever builds up equity, the city winds up being owned by fewer and fewer, and the low end of the market is priced out.
This then requires attempts at government correction, through subsidized housing; either as outright grants to developers, zoning variances granted to allow higher margins in exchange for permanently affordable (but still rental!) units, tax credits, etc.
This further accelerates the growth of the wealth divide, as development and development investment companies begin to specialize in cornering access to (and brokerage of) these economic perks that are unavailable to individual potential home owners.
Density does not fix housing. It literally never has, and I do not even begin to understand how this conception became the norm amongst housing activists. As near as I call tell, it's something that's been green/liberal-washed as a necessity by those who profit the most from the government-funded development incentives.
We even stole your gold rush idea. Thanks for that. Great idea.
Basically we've been sucking you guys dry for 150 years :p
I will vote no in the fall. And I'll encourage my friends to do so. This makes me a minority in Seattle but I'm ok with that.
Some additional food for thought: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...
There are about 1.7 billion rides taken on it every year with over 200 miles of track. It'd be an understatement to say that the city could not exist the way it does now without it - autonomous vehicles won't get the sheer number of people moved every morning and every night that the subway does. A full order of magnitude more people take the subway on a daily basis than there are taxi rides, all for a maximum of $2.75 regardless of how far they're traveling.
It might not be the best thing for Seattle (personally, I am a big proponent), but a blanket distaste for light rail is antithetical to what has proven fundamental for cities around the world.
As far as spending public money, there are already efficiency concerns (something that your article definitely demonstrates) - I'm curious how you think public money could help fund technology that fundamentally does not exist today? Is that not a higher risk for future technology?
Autonomous vehicles cannot possibly solve our transportation problems because the best they can do to reduce congestion is nothing; at worst, they will aggravate problems by increasing the number of trips taken.
I believe that if every car on the road was autonomous tomorrow that traffic flow rates (cars/hour) would at least double. Maybe even triple.
The amount of congestion from human bullshit is insane. Cars slow down entering tunnels for no reason. Cars slow down leaving tunnels when their eyes adjust to the brightness. I-90 gets slower on sunny days than on cloudy days. I-5 north out of Seattle backs up because of a hill. I get excited if I can go a full week with an accident on 90 causing backup. Even when it's cleared to the side humans rubber neck.
And that's just getting started. Once we start making changes to street design to enable autonomous it gets even better. Elimination of street parking alone would do wonder.
Things get really fun when riders don't need to get their car back. When it's a ride share model. Parking garages are relatively inefficient now. You need to be able to get any car out at any time. But what if you didn't? What if you just needed a car. It'd be a first-in, first-out queue. We'd be able to cram 3x to 4x as many cars in a garage.
You'd also be able to order a car that fits your needs. Most trips don't require a trunk. Most cars for most trips could be smart car sized. You'd only need a bigger car if, well, you needed it.
No. I believe that asking for more light rail is asking for a faster horse. It's ancient technology. We should be looking forwards, not backwards.
Anyway, you're suggesting that we could get a 2x or 3x improvement in 20-30 years by completely overhauling all of our transportation infrastructure: but we can get a 10x improvement in the same span of time at a lower cost with less risk using proven technology.
I'm happy to see people proceed with research on autonomous cars, and can certainly see the value of an Uber/Lyft type service using robot drivers, but it would be a mistake to sit and wait for speculative technology research to maybe solve the problem when we can for sure solve the problem if we just get going with what we already have.
What's the worst that can happen, we end up with lots of good options? Robot cars might make cabbies obsolete, and it is likely that they will change the way we use other transportation technologies, assuming they work the way people are hoping they will, but they won't make light rail obsolete any more than the invention of the jet engine made the automobile obsolete.
But I do agree with other people that we need to redesign our transportation infrastructure in ways that reduce or prohibit cars.
Point: They are complementary technologise, solving fundamentally orthogonal problems, and can and should co-exist to create the best possible infra. (P.S. I already train from CapHill to UDistrict then get an Uber within the UDistrict)
That said, you're welcome to argue that Seattle does not and will never need the throughput optimization provided by trains. That cars alone are enough. But I don't believe it's in your best interest, to compare the throughput of cars to trains. Actually it may even be an active disservice to the autonomous car movement to try and compare them to trains (regarding throughput).
Meanwhile, anecdotally, living and working on Denny (20 min hilly-walk, 7min bus no traffic): It is consistently bumper to bumper (at all times that matter) and only getting worse. We seem to have a throughput problem! With similar issues on Mercer. If your data is different, I'd love to hear more about that.
As stated in another reply I-5 North congests every single day between the 520 and 45th st exits. Why? Because of a hill. There's a big hill there. And every meatbag driver slows down going up it. Which causes people behind to brake. Which creates a shockwave traffic jam.
That wouldn't happen with robot drivers. Nor would cars slow down when they enter a tunnel for reasons I've yet to figure out. Nor would they slow down when exiting that tunnel when their eyes adjust to the summer brightness. Traffic is actually worse on I-90 on bright, sunny days than on overcast (but not rainy) days! Again, that slow down would not happen at all with robot drivers.
So I disagree. Autonomous cars can very much improve throughput. The maximum number of cars that can cross a stretch of road at rush hour is significantly higher with autonomous cars than with meatbag drivers. In my opinion.
What I really want is Seattle to throw a few million bucks at Google to do a study. Show us a vision of an autonomous Seattle. Build a simulation and present it. If Google gives us a "best case" and we still think light rail is better then great. I'm sold. Let's pick the better option. But right now we're not truly considering all options.
1. The theoretical throughput limits of cars on highways vs trains, for transporting people, is drastically in the favor of trains.
Generally 1 car per 2 secs per lane - 1.5 people per car on average = 3 people per sec on a 4 lane highway. On the other hand a 15mpg train, moves 6m per sec, with a width of 2 meters = 12 m^2 per sec = 12 people comfortably per sec. While this is a relatively slow train, and we are comparing a train (land mass = 1 highway lane) with a 4 lane highway, the math is still drastically in favor of trains. this still holds, even if autonomous cars can achieve a 100% increase to highway throughput limits.
2. Seattle may not need the level of throughput only achievable by trains. You're probably right that currently Seattle does not and will not need more throughput than cars on highways can achieve.
However, I don't think this holds true as time continues indefinitely into the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
Metros in most major cities already have trains that drive themselves. There may be a driver, but all they do is open and close the doors. Some systems (like Vancouver) don't have drivers at all.
D.C.'s Metro system: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/20/dc-metro-repairs-closed-es...
At the end of the day the road is only so large, cars are relatively big, and it's rush hour and everyone is travelling at the same time.
Public transit is more efficient.
Light rail can carry up to 13,000 passengers per direction per hour. A highway lane carries up to 1,900 cars per lane per hour.
It takes about 6 lanes of highways to match 1 lane of light rail given current car usage (1 passenger per car).
If usage patterns change (say, an automated carpool that maximizes the capacity of the vehicle -- say 5 people per car), you still have 1900 * 5 = 9,500 passengers per lane per hour, which is good, but still worse than a single lane of light rail. Hey, worse is better right?
However, the bottleneck in many cities isn't the highway, but rather the smaller city streets the highway feeds into. Transit can sidestep this bottleneck altogether with subway tunnels, which automated vehicles can't. Even after everything else, light rail is still more economical and more environmentally friendly.* Finally, light rail converts to automated train operation quite handily (further increasing capacity), especially if all the other cars around it are automated too.
* I was about to say more comfortable, but is being crammed into a small car more or less comfortable than standing on a cramped train?
This project will cost ~$15k per resident, roughly equivalent to the per-person national debt.
a) Functional transit for a one time payment of $15 grand and then chump change for train fare for the rest of my life
and
b) Buying, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and driving a car at a vastly greater cost (probably around 10 grand per year all-in) for the rest of my life
I would pick A) every time. It's not even a contest, I would pick A) at twice the price. Hell, it would probably be economically rational to pick A) at 5x the price.
Anecdotally, I've traveled a reasonable amount. Any city I've been to with a world calls metro system (6 I've seen) are all hugely appreciated by the local and tourists alike. I've never head someone say "that underground was a waste of money". In cities without metros I've heard a bunch of complaints about the lack of the ability to move around quickly/easily.
But that's nowhere in the $50B plan.
We can build as much housing as we want, but as long as we lack a solid public transportation system, we'll be miserable: more cars on the roads, longer commutes, etc.
SF itself has to fix its MUNI; we need a 24-hr BART that is cheap and reliable; a CalTrain that runs very frequently and is 24-hr again; and feeder routes in the smaller cities.
I'd get everyone a decent, quality bicycle loaded with all the right features for commuting/road use, and improve the cycling infrastructure.
No idea what I would do with the gobs of money left over after that.
I'd definitely not waste any on some buses, though.
1. create autonomous vehicle road network by both creating new roads and retrofitting existing roads with physical barriers where desirable. This would be similar to building rail lines in places (say elevated or tunnels), except with much more flexibility.
2. put up a RFP/challenge to auto manufacturers for fleet of autonomous electric vehicles, likely of a few types for different passenger loads (2-10) and needs (disabled access, small cargo).
3. put up a RFP/challenge to build efficient routing backend for fleet.
4. put up a RFP/challenge for both card-based (for those without smartphones) and app-based pickup and destination setting, as well as car interface to handle route changes. Plan financially for frequent improvements due to rapid tech changes.
5. create infrastructure of very small depots throughout city where autonomous charging as well as manned cleaning & minor repairs could happen.
6. rope in social services to have progressive prices based on income, allowing typical subsidies for seniors, disabled, low income, etc.
Here’s why:
* Separate lanes are helpful for near term autonomous vehicles that are not as good at avoiding things. They’re also good as a backup for smaller human-driven busses in the shorter term as the autonomous vehicle development ramps up.
* Can use existing highways, sectioning off a separate lane and creating select off-ramps to connect to autonomous road network.
* Roads are cheaper per mile than rail.
* Rather than large highway tunneling projects (oh seattle…), can build small one-way tunnels over certain stretches where useful - say a few blocks that typically have terrible traffic.
* Smaller vehicles with fewer passengers helps the inconvenience factor and last-mile problem of busses by providing flexibility in pickup/drop-off locations
* smaller vehicles and more convenience in locations helps to improve public image - it’d be like uber/lyft but without the traffic.
* Kickstarts rapid improvement in autonomous vehicle industry by being a large customer, which can benefit city with better tech over time (vs aging train cars).
* Adds useful infrastructure for the future where private fleets and privately owned cars can participate with their own autonomous vehicles. Essentially, it allows for a phase-out of publicly owned/run autonomous vehicle fleets in the future, were that to be something that makes sense.
I could see GM/Lyft and Uber being bidders in this process, among other auto manufacturers. There may even be an opportunity to own less of the fleet and simply rent at a particular per mile rate.
In short: spend money on the future of transportation, not the past.