Not necessarily wrong, but not a well thought out piece. I'm all for public transit, but this doesn't cover the issue in sufficient depth to actually be informative.
Assuming $30/hour opportunity cost? Pulling 20 minutes a day out of a hat? Ignoring the alternative forms of public transit?
Commutes are complex beasts. The article ignores the demand curve of commuting, and dynamic responses like people moving closer to their work.
If we are going to look at opportunity cost, what is the expected gain by investing $53B in existing public transit? Or rezoning density downtown?
You can't really get any more dense in Seattle's downtown core. There aren't any single-family houses left and everything between Denny and, say, Yesler is zoned much, much more dense than pretty much anywhere else in town.
I completely agree that there needs to be more dense zoning, especially around the light rail stations. (I also read somewhere that the new Roosevelt station will have less density zoned for it, because of neighborhood opposition, than already exists in areas of Seattle not getting light rail. The math seems to bear that out, at least from the zoning maps I have read.)
Seattle still has a long ways to go for densification. Lower Queen Anne is not dense at all if you walk through it.
There are also still a lot of surface lots in downtown and throughout the city that should ideally be buildings with parking garages instead. If we converted some of those garage spots to paid public parking (similar to the pearl apartments on 15th), we'd get the best of both worlds.
The article also conflates the tax increase with the cost of the plan, which are two entirely separate things. Whether the government immediately raises taxes enough to cover the whole tab or does it at some later point doesn't really matter -- the people will eventually pay (this is also the case for our massive federal debt). In this case, Seattle is covering under a third of the cost with their up-front tax increase, so for the article to suggest that the tax increase should be the number that folks consider is disingenuous at best.
One of the pluses of living in Seattle instead of the Bay Area is the significantly lower taxes (especially given that Washington has no state income tax); this could be a trend in the wrong direction. I'd really hate to see Seattle become the next Bay Area (except without the nice weather to justify the higher costs of living).
Some, like myself, argue that Puget Sound's taxes (and those in Seattle, specifically) are too low to both pay for the infrastructure we have and that which we need. Our property tax rate inside Seattle is in the bottom half of the country and our sales tax is relied upon too heavily and fluctuates too much to be used for funding things that need a long-term stable tax source. I'm perfectly willing to pay taxes on transit, schools, roads, water-and-wastewater, social services, and even a municipal fiber optic network. Voters usually agree with me since almost all of these levies have been put to a public vote and are approved in, generally, at least 2:1 margins.
Just watching the staggering change that has happened now that Capitol Hill and University Link stations have opened makes me both thrilled for the next ones (U-District, Roosevelt, and Northgate) and insanely jealous of the handful of areas inside the city that are going to get real, grade-separated mass transit over the next two or three decades. It is already far too late for me to afford to buy housing in any of the coming-very-soon areas that is walkable to the new train stations and the new stations (Ballard and West Seattle Link) are going to areas that are already priced out of most affordability.
Though I understand the political and infrastructure reasons why we have to build light rail to the suburban areas before filling in the urban core[0], that doesn't stop me from being sad that, in my lifetime, already-dense areas like Georgetown or the Central District or Lake City or even Greenwood[1] won't see real high-capacity transit. (Having a single station in the CD's Judkins Park doesn't really count, not when Interbay and Ballard are getting five stations between them, or when West Seattle has four.) I read somewhere, probably on Seattle Transit Blog[2] from someone who likes to rant about this stuff like I do, that route 48 through the CD has more daily riders now than the train to Issaquah is supposed to have five years after it opens in 2035.
But Goldy makes the most salient point: Voting against Sound Transit 3 doesn't accomplish anything except, maybe, make Sound Transit more cautious in a second vote and less willing to put out a big package to build for the next generation. Voting for it doesn't get a perfect system, but I think that it helps more than saying no.
0 - Because Sound Transit is a regionwide taxing district so the region has to pass it and selling voters in Everett on a transit package that builds only in Seattle will not fly; because we should have been building Ballard Link 30 years ago so, by that same logic, we need to build Redmond and Issaquah Links now instead of waiting 30 years...
1 - Yes, I realize that "85th St Station" is marked as "provisional" and that 85th is the southern boundary of Crown Hill and that having a light rail stop west of IH-5 with easy bus and RapidRide access from west Greenwood and Crown Hill would be a good compromise...but nothing would beat having a station parked right at NW 100th and Holman.
I've decided recently that I'm voting against ST3. It bums me out because I've always been a big transit supporter (I know how republicans voting for Hillary must feel).
The thing is, ST3 builds a ton of crap to the outer suburbs and 50 billion dollars and 20 years later it will still be a pain to get from the University District to Ballard. But at least the taxpayers of Bothell will have an easy way to get to Totem Lake!
> ST3 builds a ton of crap to the outer suburbs and 50 billion dollars and 20 years later it will still be a pain to get from the University District to Ballard. But at least the taxpayers of Bothell will have an easy way to get to Totem Lake!
That's one of the shitballs that the Washington legislature has handed us with how Sound Transit 3 works. It's called "subarea equity" and means that taxes are spent only in the area where they are gathered--areas called things like "North King," "South King," "Snohomish," and so on--which sounds great and all but the tax rate has to be uniform across the district and the entire district must vote in a single yes/no vote. So Bothell is spending its own money to go to Totem Lake but Seattle's more expensive needs can't be fully met because it would take the tax authority of the entire district to be spent in a single subarea and neither the voters or the Sound Transit district organization would go for that.
This is what I alluded to when I wrote that I understand, politically, why ST3 is written as it is. Seattle as a city is never going to have the tax authority for us to buy the kind of in-city dense transit we really want. There's absolutely no reason for the state legislature to give it to us (especially not with that 1% hard property tax cap written into the state constitution) since leveraging Puget Sound's representatives for votes on allowing us to tax ourselves on a handful of transit packages is what the rest of the legislature uses to strongarm votes for road packages in the rest of the state (that, conveniently, never seem to have to go to the ballot).
So I'm voting yes on ST3 because, with all due respect to Mars Saxman whom I really respect and really want his ideas to come true, I don't think we'll get a better package in four years.
At first, this seemed like a politically-motivated editorial that I would consider out-of-place on HN, but then I realized this skunkworks guy has a point.
Seattle's public transit runs around the Bay Area's in circles right now. The Link light rail is clean, modern, and actually useful. Buses come EVERY TEN MINUTES, and they take you anywhere in the entire Puget Sound. There's even ferries and trains.
As tech companies hire more people, you're going to be looking at more gridlock. Think about how packed the 101 has gotten since 2011 when FB and Apple went on their hiring frenzies.
This transit packing is about to happen in Seattle (in fact, I consider in many ways the Bay Area to be a leading indicator for what is about to happen in other cities), which is already bottlenecked by two bridges, and Redmond already has the greatest daytime population shift in the US during commute hours.
It's a shame that the companies that are causing the problem (Amazon, especially) in Seattle can't help pay for solving the problems they are creating.
Buses come every 15 minutes if you're lucky and they're on time. Most of the time during commute hours one gets bogged down and they stack up (2 come every 20-30 minutes… great).
The bus that runs outside my house (route 48, in the CD) comes every 10 minutes almost like clockwork for several hours of the day and drops to 15 minutes from end of peak (6pm) until 10pm and then 30 minutes after that until after 1am. That's a vast improvement prior to Seattle's Proposition 1 vote in 2014--wherein we voted to pay for a metric ton of service hours--and the restructure around University Link. I've noticed a marked improvement in other routes I use daily, like the 3/4 pair, route 11, and even the puny 65 up to Lake City.
Your point about bus bunching stands, though, if only as an example of how polarized the use of curb space is in this city. "BAT lanes" that aren't well enforced (though I have seen a lot more towing of parked cars out of them as of late) and a dearth of bus-only lanes in favor of preserving on-street parking are just two of my complaints. But service, at least in town, has gotten better in my experience. Hopefully the additional station openings in 2021-2023 will free up even more service hours to fill in gaps and extend the span of service (dare I dream for 24-hour bus[0] service?).
0 - Sound Transit has already said that 24-hour train service is very unlikely until the second train tunnel is online.
I'm not convinced that ST3 is better than the alternative. If we vote yes, we're locked in to an incomplete transportation network for decades to come, because ST3 isn't even trying to build most of what Seattle needs; ST3 will push the rest of what we need so far into the future that there will be no hope of getting a complete transit network within my lifetime.
If we vote no, we have a chance to keep working on it. They'll have to try again in four years. The demographic shift toward reurbanization will continue. Seattle's political power will continue to grow. The ST2 bonds which are limiting us so heavily will continue to expire. We might actually be able to get a better deal if we wait - and we certainly won't get a worse one.
Amazon did help build the South Lake Union Streetcar and in my mind it's been a huge success: "The majority of property owners along the alignment supported the project, despite being asked to pay increased taxes to fund its construction. Only 12 of 750 affected property owners formally objected to the proposed "Local Improvement District" tax."
Without having to tax anyone, some private organizations just pitched in to improve the service: "In May 2011, increasing ridership led the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Group Health Cooperative, UW Medicine and Amazon.com to underwrite a third streetcar to operate during peak commuting evening hours (4pm – 6pm), reducing headways from 15 minutes to 10."
> I wish we could just build streetcars all over the whole city instead of this ST3 mess.
Amen to this but I want them only in dedicated lanes, preferably lanes separated from general purpose traffic by more than just paint. A streetcar would be great on, say, 23rd Ave between University Station and Mt Baker Station. Or replace route 7 down Rainier and connect it to the south side of the First Hill Streetcar. (As an aside: the Broadway segment of the FHSC is an example of how not to build them.) Or, if I'm wishing for ponies, start at Carkeek Park and go south on 8th Ave NW, turn right onto NW 85th St to go west until either the terminus of the most northern Ballard Link stop (and that's where you plant the maintenance and operations base for this streetcar) or continue on to the foot of the Ballard Bridge and run the M&O shop into the run down area just south of Ballard Blocks.
Streetcars in shared lanes have some downsides, especially (as a cyclist here) cycle safety. That said, if streetcars are how we're going to get on-time, effective mass transit, I'm for it. Even as a cyclist. Anything to get cars off the road.
It's still not great. The train is slow, has way too many stops between Seattle and the airport, and sits too long at each stop.
Many of the long distance busses are overcrowded during commute hours and the drivers encourage people to cram in such that people are breathing down your neck the whole way to work.
They recently put in street cars that are slow, often blocked by traffic or parked cars, and dangerous to bikers.
I have a gut feeling that the billions they're planning on spending on trains would be better spent on more and better busses. The bus experience is usually pretty bad, especially when you have to stand for 40 minutes or sit facing backwards/sideways in an overcrowded bus that's AC can't keep up with all the body heat.
That and simply reduce on street parking and ditch all free street parking.
Overall, I was pretty happy with Seattle transit until I visited Amsterdam recently. Now I'm jaded.
I'd be willing to take transit activists more seriously if rather than advocating for more money, they advocated for reforms to get costs under control. US costs are insanely out of control relative to, well, everywhere.
Construction costs are 2x-10x more than everywhere else in the world.
Yet transit activists always ignore the fact that we could get 2-10x more transit for the same money. It almost makes you wonder if their real goal is just funneling more money to the people currently taking all the money, rather than actually getting transit.
The U.S. is capable of building and running great things, but we seem to be able to mire every effort down so much that the costs spiral out of control. We also tend to delay delay delay so much that we lose on the very simple time-value of money principle.
D.C. Metro Silver line and the 2nd Ave subway line in NYC are big reminders of this. Silver line is about $300/mi almost entirely above ground on existing right of way. There are relatively few stops per mile as well so most of the line is just pure above ground or elevated track. 2nd Ave Subway is running something like $2.3billion per mile.
When you compare to other developed economies, and their costs of line construction, these costs are basically indefensible.
How do you propose we cut construction costs? Should we cap labor rates on the workers? Looking at your lists (and from my own personal experience with people who have been on the various jobs listed), it seems obvious to me that the major differentiator between jobs is the labor costs. It just flat out costs more to hire skilled labor in the US and UK versus Singapore or Japan. This is largely related to union rates and municipal regulations on wages.
How do we get 2-10x more transit for the same money? Where in your mind can we actually cut costs?
One way is, as you note, to cut wages to British or Spanish levels. Another is to eliminate "buy American" provisions and just buy Japanese trains. A third way is to cut labor usage down to international levels.
A fourth would just be to hire foreigners to build/manage us trains as per their own standards.
This is only semi-related, but if anyone here has an interest in making a meaningful difference in improving their fellow Seattleites' mass transit experiences, I'm always looking for more people to pitch in on OneBusAway for iOS: https://github.com/onebusaway/onebusaway-iphone
Well thought out PRs for any bug or feature you care about are always welcome.
Also feel free to email me at aaron@brethorsting.com if you'd like to discuss more details.
Oh wow I didn't realize this was an entirely volunteer project - I thought it was from the various transit authorities for the Puget Sound.
This was an incredible app when I lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area, and I wish more places had it or at least a similar app.
I lack the skill to contribute code-wise, but are finacial donations beneficial? Is the best means of donation through the UoW website as listed or do you have alternate donation channels? (i.e., does the UoW donation page slice off some of the donation for the University or is it earmarked in whole for the project?)
If ST would include the Renton-Bothell train tracks, which are already there, it would form the right half of a circle all the way around Lake Washington. This would greatly increase the effectiveness of the system, at minimal cost.
There are still tracks from Tukwilla to the southern edge of Kirkland. Adding the tracks to that point would cause a lot of pressure on Kirkland that I doubt they'd be able to withstand.
I instantly have problem with anyone touting the opportunity costs related to an entirely made up number. 10 minutes off a fictional commute is not a convincing metric. How about instead we have say, line X needs $Y for modernizations after which line X will be Z minutes faster along its route. Or, which arterials will have new transit solutions.
I'm not arguing this is a bad spend of money (quite the opposite) but this article badly needs some real numbers to make its point.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadAssuming $30/hour opportunity cost? Pulling 20 minutes a day out of a hat? Ignoring the alternative forms of public transit?
Commutes are complex beasts. The article ignores the demand curve of commuting, and dynamic responses like people moving closer to their work.
If we are going to look at opportunity cost, what is the expected gain by investing $53B in existing public transit? Or rezoning density downtown?
You can't really get any more dense in Seattle's downtown core. There aren't any single-family houses left and everything between Denny and, say, Yesler is zoned much, much more dense than pretty much anywhere else in town.
I completely agree that there needs to be more dense zoning, especially around the light rail stations. (I also read somewhere that the new Roosevelt station will have less density zoned for it, because of neighborhood opposition, than already exists in areas of Seattle not getting light rail. The math seems to bear that out, at least from the zoning maps I have read.)
There are also still a lot of surface lots in downtown and throughout the city that should ideally be buildings with parking garages instead. If we converted some of those garage spots to paid public parking (similar to the pearl apartments on 15th), we'd get the best of both worlds.
Some, like myself, argue that Puget Sound's taxes (and those in Seattle, specifically) are too low to both pay for the infrastructure we have and that which we need. Our property tax rate inside Seattle is in the bottom half of the country and our sales tax is relied upon too heavily and fluctuates too much to be used for funding things that need a long-term stable tax source. I'm perfectly willing to pay taxes on transit, schools, roads, water-and-wastewater, social services, and even a municipal fiber optic network. Voters usually agree with me since almost all of these levies have been put to a public vote and are approved in, generally, at least 2:1 margins.
Though I understand the political and infrastructure reasons why we have to build light rail to the suburban areas before filling in the urban core[0], that doesn't stop me from being sad that, in my lifetime, already-dense areas like Georgetown or the Central District or Lake City or even Greenwood[1] won't see real high-capacity transit. (Having a single station in the CD's Judkins Park doesn't really count, not when Interbay and Ballard are getting five stations between them, or when West Seattle has four.) I read somewhere, probably on Seattle Transit Blog[2] from someone who likes to rant about this stuff like I do, that route 48 through the CD has more daily riders now than the train to Issaquah is supposed to have five years after it opens in 2035.
But Goldy makes the most salient point: Voting against Sound Transit 3 doesn't accomplish anything except, maybe, make Sound Transit more cautious in a second vote and less willing to put out a big package to build for the next generation. Voting for it doesn't get a perfect system, but I think that it helps more than saying no.
0 - Because Sound Transit is a regionwide taxing district so the region has to pass it and selling voters in Everett on a transit package that builds only in Seattle will not fly; because we should have been building Ballard Link 30 years ago so, by that same logic, we need to build Redmond and Issaquah Links now instead of waiting 30 years...
1 - Yes, I realize that "85th St Station" is marked as "provisional" and that 85th is the southern boundary of Crown Hill and that having a light rail stop west of IH-5 with easy bus and RapidRide access from west Greenwood and Crown Hill would be a good compromise...but nothing would beat having a station parked right at NW 100th and Holman.
2 - It's a good blog, you should read it: http://seattletransitblog.com
The thing is, ST3 builds a ton of crap to the outer suburbs and 50 billion dollars and 20 years later it will still be a pain to get from the University District to Ballard. But at least the taxpayers of Bothell will have an easy way to get to Totem Lake!
That's one of the shitballs that the Washington legislature has handed us with how Sound Transit 3 works. It's called "subarea equity" and means that taxes are spent only in the area where they are gathered--areas called things like "North King," "South King," "Snohomish," and so on--which sounds great and all but the tax rate has to be uniform across the district and the entire district must vote in a single yes/no vote. So Bothell is spending its own money to go to Totem Lake but Seattle's more expensive needs can't be fully met because it would take the tax authority of the entire district to be spent in a single subarea and neither the voters or the Sound Transit district organization would go for that.
This is what I alluded to when I wrote that I understand, politically, why ST3 is written as it is. Seattle as a city is never going to have the tax authority for us to buy the kind of in-city dense transit we really want. There's absolutely no reason for the state legislature to give it to us (especially not with that 1% hard property tax cap written into the state constitution) since leveraging Puget Sound's representatives for votes on allowing us to tax ourselves on a handful of transit packages is what the rest of the legislature uses to strongarm votes for road packages in the rest of the state (that, conveniently, never seem to have to go to the ballot).
So I'm voting yes on ST3 because, with all due respect to Mars Saxman whom I really respect and really want his ideas to come true, I don't think we'll get a better package in four years.
Seattle's public transit runs around the Bay Area's in circles right now. The Link light rail is clean, modern, and actually useful. Buses come EVERY TEN MINUTES, and they take you anywhere in the entire Puget Sound. There's even ferries and trains.
As tech companies hire more people, you're going to be looking at more gridlock. Think about how packed the 101 has gotten since 2011 when FB and Apple went on their hiring frenzies.
This transit packing is about to happen in Seattle (in fact, I consider in many ways the Bay Area to be a leading indicator for what is about to happen in other cities), which is already bottlenecked by two bridges, and Redmond already has the greatest daytime population shift in the US during commute hours.
It's a shame that the companies that are causing the problem (Amazon, especially) in Seattle can't help pay for solving the problems they are creating.
That said, ST3 is better than the alternative.
Your point about bus bunching stands, though, if only as an example of how polarized the use of curb space is in this city. "BAT lanes" that aren't well enforced (though I have seen a lot more towing of parked cars out of them as of late) and a dearth of bus-only lanes in favor of preserving on-street parking are just two of my complaints. But service, at least in town, has gotten better in my experience. Hopefully the additional station openings in 2021-2023 will free up even more service hours to fill in gaps and extend the span of service (dare I dream for 24-hour bus[0] service?).
0 - Sound Transit has already said that 24-hour train service is very unlikely until the second train tunnel is online.
If we vote no, we have a chance to keep working on it. They'll have to try again in four years. The demographic shift toward reurbanization will continue. Seattle's political power will continue to grow. The ST2 bonds which are limiting us so heavily will continue to expire. We might actually be able to get a better deal if we wait - and we certainly won't get a worse one.
Without having to tax anyone, some private organizations just pitched in to improve the service: "In May 2011, increasing ridership led the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Group Health Cooperative, UW Medicine and Amazon.com to underwrite a third streetcar to operate during peak commuting evening hours (4pm – 6pm), reducing headways from 15 minutes to 10."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lake_Union_Streetcar
The thing was cheap and quick to build. I wish we could just build streetcars all over the whole city instead of this ST3 mess.
Amen to this but I want them only in dedicated lanes, preferably lanes separated from general purpose traffic by more than just paint. A streetcar would be great on, say, 23rd Ave between University Station and Mt Baker Station. Or replace route 7 down Rainier and connect it to the south side of the First Hill Streetcar. (As an aside: the Broadway segment of the FHSC is an example of how not to build them.) Or, if I'm wishing for ponies, start at Carkeek Park and go south on 8th Ave NW, turn right onto NW 85th St to go west until either the terminus of the most northern Ballard Link stop (and that's where you plant the maintenance and operations base for this streetcar) or continue on to the foot of the Ballard Bridge and run the M&O shop into the run down area just south of Ballard Blocks.
Many of the long distance busses are overcrowded during commute hours and the drivers encourage people to cram in such that people are breathing down your neck the whole way to work.
They recently put in street cars that are slow, often blocked by traffic or parked cars, and dangerous to bikers.
I have a gut feeling that the billions they're planning on spending on trains would be better spent on more and better busses. The bus experience is usually pretty bad, especially when you have to stand for 40 minutes or sit facing backwards/sideways in an overcrowded bus that's AC can't keep up with all the body heat.
That and simply reduce on street parking and ditch all free street parking.
Overall, I was pretty happy with Seattle transit until I visited Amsterdam recently. Now I'm jaded.
Construction costs are 2x-10x more than everywhere else in the world.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
Labor costs per ride are 3x more than Paris, 4x more than London.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/mtas-costs-loom-large-14688...
Yet transit activists always ignore the fact that we could get 2-10x more transit for the same money. It almost makes you wonder if their real goal is just funneling more money to the people currently taking all the money, rather than actually getting transit.
D.C. Metro Silver line and the 2nd Ave subway line in NYC are big reminders of this. Silver line is about $300/mi almost entirely above ground on existing right of way. There are relatively few stops per mile as well so most of the line is just pure above ground or elevated track. 2nd Ave Subway is running something like $2.3billion per mile.
When you compare to other developed economies, and their costs of line construction, these costs are basically indefensible.
How do we get 2-10x more transit for the same money? Where in your mind can we actually cut costs?
A fourth would just be to hire foreigners to build/manage us trains as per their own standards.
Well thought out PRs for any bug or feature you care about are always welcome.
Also feel free to email me at aaron@brethorsting.com if you'd like to discuss more details.
I didn't write this, but one of my co-workers did. (And not a dev!)
This was an incredible app when I lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area, and I wish more places had it or at least a similar app.
I lack the skill to contribute code-wise, but are finacial donations beneficial? Is the best means of donation through the UoW website as listed or do you have alternate donation channels? (i.e., does the UoW donation page slice off some of the donation for the University or is it earmarked in whole for the project?)
There's a Donate table item on the Info tab of the iOS app you can tap. Thank you!
I'm not arguing this is a bad spend of money (quite the opposite) but this article badly needs some real numbers to make its point.