This is not how we would get to the U Village Apple Store. (Image: WhichBus)
Last August, the new WhichBus online app reached private beta; this week, they’re open to the public at WhichBus.org, helping you plan your next trip on King County transit.
What distinguishes them from OneBusAway and its real-time when’s-the-next-bus info, is their trip-planning assistance. WhichBus is also built on real-time bus movement, but the interface is based on getting you from Point A to Point B.
It’s beautifully simple (and award-winning). You can write in your locations of choice (or tell it to determine your location for you), and the search function has gotten much, much better at using place names like “Space Needle” instead of requiring specific addresses.
Seattle’s internecine transit system, with its dearth of system and route maps and schedules, makes this kind of service a necessity. But I can’t advise use of WhichBus for newbies yet. For one thing, there’s no app version available — they’re waiting for Apple approval.
For another, you just can’t trust it: To the right, you see it delivering what looks like an impossibly circuitous (if not downright impossible) route from Capitol Hill to the University Village Apple Store. I’ve tested a few routes on it, and it seems overly inclined to direct you to downtown to pick up a transfer to a bus actually heading in the direction you want. Downtown plus a transfer makes almost any trip in Seattle take an hour.
If you’re starting from Seattle Center and trying to get to Capitol Hill, WhichBus quite rightly suggests the #8. But if you’re starting from Capitol Hill, it suggests you take the #10 or #12 downtown, then catch a bus to the Center, which — as slow as the #8 bus is — is usually a longer route. Presumably, all this requires is some algorithmic tweaking, but unless you know Seattle’s bus system well enough to know you’re being had, I’d wait a bit on this.
2011 “crime density” in Seattle’s downtown area (Seattle.gov)
From South Dearborn to Denny Way, Seattle’s Third Avenue marks the spine of an area that could be papered over with the police reports used to track the crime within it.
During the past year, it’s been the setting for more than 3,800 incidents, everything from shoplifting and narcotics use to car theft, robbery, and shootings. 33 times, someone threatened to kill someone else. 91 times, someone was trying to vend cocaine. In this context, the King County Courthouse on Third Avenue seems conveniently located.
While any given crime is being committed, it’s likely that a great number of other people are either getting on or getting off a bus, as Third Avenue is also a transit-priority corridor, with Rapid Ride service and 42,000 daily boardings. Some are Macy’s shoppers, since the department store sits between Third and Fourth.
Almost a year ago, that confluence provided this Seattle Times headline: “Seattle looks to clean up Third Avenue transit corridor,” which also detailed how a 69-year-old man “had just taken a photo of the Macy’s Christmas star with his iPhone and was sending it to friends in California when he was jumped, beaten, robbed and left lying in Pine Street.”
This week, King County Executive Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and Downtown Seattle Association President and CEO Kate Joncas signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA pdf), which lists a series of improvements to Third Avenue: “such as transit reliability, attractive streetscape design, pedestrian flow, criminal activity and coordinated support for individuals who struggle with extreme poverty, limited housing resources, mental illness and/or drug and alcohol dependence.”
The sprucing up will include real-time transit arrival information at all major stops; better-looking bus stops with off-board fare machines and new street “furniture” (i.e. garbage cans, vending boxes); and afternoon and evening cleaning of sidewalks. Meanwhile, the Seattle Police Department will assign foot-beat patrols to trouble hotspots, while directing low-level drug offenders to community and dependency services. Also, the SPD will seek court orders to prevent drug dealers from returning to “their” corner– a Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) program.
For its part, the Downtown Seattle Association has agreed to work with the city to help the homeless and transient people who may need housing and hygiene services. Through the Metropolitan Improvement District (MID), a mental health professional will be has already been hired to help the mentally ill find treatment.
Ex-Melbourne W2-class tram/streetcar 272 eastbound at the Occidental Park station, on Main Street, on the Waterfront Streetcar line in Seattle (Photo: Peter Van den Bossche/Wikipedia)
Streetcars are all the rage in Seattle these days; the arguments over the Eastlake line or the Ballard line have mainly to do with timelines. The astounding success of the 1.3-mile Seattle Streetcar line, which carried 700,000 riders in 2011, has illustrated what the prestige of rail can do for transit. But of course Seattle knew that. The Waterfront Streetcar line was a hit with passengers as well — 400,000 rode in 2004 — and the city even paid to have its line extended from 1.6 to a total of two miles in the 1990s.
It was never supposed to go away. The old maintenance barn was in the way of SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park, so the line was closed down “temporarily” in November 2005. Then the planned new maintenance barn got hung up first by the search for a suitable location, then by the recession. At that point, city leaders wandered away from the issue. In Seattle, everyone can be “in favor of” and “strongly support” something, and it can still languish if no one bothers to lead the charge.
This spring, it was not trumpeted in the news that a section of the track was ripped out as part of the deep-bore tunnel’s construction.
Neither did anyone in city leadership press forward with the results of a 2011 study (pdf), paid for by organizations in the stadium district, that found reactivation of the Waterfront Streetcar line could cost as little as $10 to $13 million. (For comparison, new streetcar lines in Seattle are estimated to cost some $48-to-$50-million per mile.)
As Seattle Transit Blog explained, it wasn’t just that the Waterfront Streetcar line could link up with the First Hill Streetcar line under construction currently. The maintenance barn problem could be solved by having them share space in the First Hill Streetcar barn. They even shared the same track gauge, so that with an upgrade to a common electrical system, the Waterfront Streetcars could tool right into the barn on existing tracks. (The major incompatibility between the historic Waterfront streetcars and new versions is that the Waterfront streetcars are high-boarders, rather than street-level — the whole Waterfront line has raised platforms because of this.)
If the city acted now (this was 2011), the study noted, the Waterfront Streetcar line would be operational by 2013, and help to mitigate tunnel construction impacts on traffic and businesses. It is not clear why this crushingly obvious plan was not executed.
The city and James Corner Field Operations are working together on a redesign of the central waterfront, and they trade off on who, exactly, is insisting that any waterfront streetcar line run not down the waterfront but on First Avenue instead. First Avenue is not where the Bell Street Pier is, where some 30 percent of cruise ship traffic departs. Nor is there likely to be any expensive uphill transportation, and the grade to First Avenue is significant.
The reason for proposing to spend four times as much on a new First Avenue configuration may instead be that the deep-bore tunnel construction needs the real estate the old line uses. So the temporary requirements of a construction project may be dictating long-term transit planning. It is not too late to do the reasonable and cost-effective thing. The historic streetcars are still in excellent condition. And with voters overwhelmingly approving funding for the $290-million Elliott Bay Seawall project, the future of the waterfront is still very much a live topic. To sign a petition and stay updated on progress, visit Save Our Streetcar (Again).
UPDATE: A quote from George Benson, the man who pushed from the creation of the Waterfront Streetcar line, seems apropos to a discussion of why a temporary closure has lasted seven years and counting:
Despite Mayor Uhlman’s public support for the Waterfront Streetcar concept, his planning staff decided that the line would be prohibitively expensive and irrelevant to the larger transit schemes then being developed by Metro Transit, and they set about quietly to sabotage “Benson’s Folly.”
Sounder North average weekday ridership (Data: Sound Transit)
Sound Transit has a problem that needs solving. As expressed by their Citizens Oversight Panel, it is this: “the tax-payers and transit users of Snohomish County will not be well served if the high-cost Sounder North line continues to run well below capacity while the much lower-cost ST Express bus routes run overloaded with passengers standing in the aisles.”
Far from defending Sounder North, Seattle Transit Blog applauded the panel’s report, calling it “a pretty devastating evaluation of the north line as a regional mobility project.”
The high costs derive from both the establishment of the Sounder North line between Everett and Seattle (Sound Transit paid track-owner BNSF $258 million for permanent rights to use the tracks, and for upgrades necessary for passenger rail, $57 million for stations, and $42 million for trains), and from operating costs.
In the Seattle Times, Mike Lindblom puts a $29-per-passenger dollar amount on the Sounder North service in 2010, excluding capital costs. (The COP report puts operating costs at $32 per passenger in 2011. In comparison ST’s bus service from the north has a $5-per-boarding cost.)
As if to cement its snakebit reputation, the day after the Times story, a Sounder North train then hit a semi truck trapped on the tracks when signal arms came down.
But if most everyone can agree that there’s a problem, the question of what to do about it remains. The panel’s advice to Sound Transit is to find a way to increase average daily ridership to 2,400 within eight years, roughly double the current 1,125 riding weekdays now. That’s fine advice, but one can assume that Sound Transit has been trying that already. As you can see from the graph above, ridership hasn’t budged–at least in an upward direction.
So what, given Sounder South’s popularity, is holding Sounder North back? People can reel off lists of reasons: a limited walkshed (and driveshed, thanks to limited parking spaces at stations); inconvenient, infrequent schedules; a lack of stops (only the Mukileo and Edmonds stations were built, despite initial plans for Richmond Beach and Ballard stations as well); a higher fare; a more complex overall commute; and so on.
But as Lindblom mentions, where there’s a will, there’s a way: On Seahawks Sundays special Sounder North trains carry up to 3,000 passengers. So the potential is there, if people are determined to get to Seattle. Two trains leave at 10:15 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., and return beginning 15 and 35 minutes after the game is over.
What can be changed? Due to subarea equity agreements, the service can’t simply be cut off. It would have to be made up in some way.
Sound Transit wants to add station parking spaces (“in Edmonds 156 stalls are at 97% utilization and in Mukilteo 63 stalls are at 89%,” says the COP report). They can’t add trains (the agreement with BNSF is for four roundtrips per day), and it would be difficult to improve the schedule by and large (BNSF wants “prime time” for its freight trains, including those extra coal trains you’ve been hearing so much about).
ST does hope to tweak the schedules by a few minutes to tie in better with ferry schedules at Mukilteo and Edmonds, but the four Sounder trains will still leave Everett in that general 5:45-to-7:15 a.m. window, and return between 4:05 and 5:35 p.m. (Yes, it does seem unreasonable to have three out of four commuter trains leave before 5 p.m.)
It’s $4.50 to ride the whole way from Everett to Seattle and vice-versa, but ST believes that its ridership isn’t particularly price sensitive, because they are using ORCA cards paid for by their employers. Since they are only getting 11-percent farebox recovery, it isn’t likely they can budge on price.
With Sounder North trains running at 30 percent of capacity, ST also plans to transfer two to four coach cars to a new Sounder South trip late next year.
What is not in Sound Transit’s control, however, is mudslides. The track, and its condition, is in BNSF’s hands, per the lease. It’s difficult to sell daily commuters on the reliability of rail when 70 Sounder North trains were canceled during 2010-11, and 33 in 2011-12. During that especially rainy 2010-11 winter, the 48-hour rule came into effect five times.
(BNSF says the primary concern is safety, to make sure more mud isn’t on the way, but as a Seattle Transit Blog commenter notes, mudslides create freight backups that need extra time to clear without passenger trains in the way. Other commenters ask whether there isn’t demand enough to run a single Sounder line from Everett to south Seattle.)
ST has arranged “bus bridges” so that rail passengers aren’t stranded, but it’s pretty much a given that on some cold, rainy, dark morning or evening, Sounder passengers will find themselves taking the long way to their destination, instead of relaxing in comfort. The buses pressed into service are often over-crowded, forcing passengers to stand the whole way. If this happened 70 times one winter, wouldn’t you consider just taking the bus–or driving–to begin with?
Looking at the top chart, you see that ridership takes a full year to recover ground from the disastrous 2010-11 winter. After seven train trips were canceled in November 2011, daily average ridership fell by 300 in December. I can’t show causation, but nothing like that happened the same period in 2009, which had no train-canceling mudslides. In 2010, ridership fell by 175 daily boardings in December, but then there were eight canceled train trips in December.
I would argue that the most significant factor in maintaining ridership, and building it through good word-of-mouth, is the elimination of canceled trains due to mudslides. When I look at Sound Transit’s ridership history (see Impacts to North Line Ridership), it seems miraculous that there are 1,000 people so dogged they won’t let 30 canceled trains in January 2006 (and 44 in March 2011!) keep them from showing up at the station at 5:45 a.m. on a winter morning. (That last is for effect; obviously not everyone shows up for the 5:45 a.m. train.)
I harp on this because while in retrospect these still seem large numbers, that still doesn’t compare to the sense of uncertainty passengers must endure, day after day, during these peak-mudslide seasons. The good news is that WSDOT applied for and won a $16.1-million Federal Railroad Administration grant for engineering and mitigation of mudslides: “Approximately $6 million for engineering and $10 million for mitigation projects/construction,” says ST’s Kimberly Reason. We’ll have to see if that’s commensurate with the scope of the problem, or if Sound Transit can pressure BNSF into taking more action. This winter, so far, augurs to be what’s known as a “neutral” year, which can be particularly stormy.
If you take the bus in Seattle with any frequency, there’s a good chance you use OneBusAway, the app that tells you when the next few buses are coming to your stop, using real-time data. More than 100,000 people have downloaded the app to their mobile devices, and have come to rely on it unreservedly.
WhichBus is the newest entry, and has just announced its private “beta”–the developers are accepting sign-ups from the more venturesome who won’t mind discovering how many bugs and data gaps are in the system still. (SPOILER: Plenty.)
WhichBus approaches the Seattle bus dilemma from a different direction than OBA, which assumes that you know where you are and where you’re going. (You can search out these particulars using OBA, but it’s not as easy as it could be.) WhichBus uses King County Metro‘s real-time data to help you solve how to get from A to B.
In fact, Metro already offers online trip planning, but as you can see if you visit their site, the UI is not anything as streamlined as WhichBus. On your smart phone, pressing the WhichBus location icon maps your present GPS coordinates, so you don’t even have to figure out the nearest intersection. It looks like locations can be as specific as street addresses or as general as neighborhood name.
Helpfully, the results are mapped out to show you the route the bus will take (you can choose from among itineraries), along with the walking route to the bus stop in question, if you’re not already at one. The walking route displays in a different color than the bus route, so you can estimate whether it’s worth it to catch that bus or aim for something closer. On the arrival end, the same thing: a walking route from the bus stop to your destination.
Both of these apps are essential for navigating King County Metro, and further separate the smart-phone-enabled from the hoi polloi who must try to figure out bus information from Metro. If you’re at a computer, it’s possible to visit Metro’s site and get the information you need, but if you’re out and about, the physical footprint of Metro’s expansive system (one of the largest in North America) has long made it impossible for Metro to keep comprehensive route information available at bus stops. Add in several years of budget slashing, and the schedules at far-flung bus stops are often out-of-date or missing.
Sound Transit is kicking the tires on a plan to charge a fee of some kind–daily or monthly–to commuters using its park-and-ride lots, reports Mike Lindblom in the Seattle Times. Partly the idea is to make sure that commuters are using the lots, not people ducking in for free parking. (It’s rumored that some percentage of Tukwila International Boulevard Station’s 600 parking spaces are being used as airport parking, for instance.)
That’s an easy enough fix: “One idea is to have everyone pay, then give train riders a partial rebate when they tap the ORCA fare card in the station,” writes Lindblom. Of course, if one agency starts, then others would presumably follow. Lindblom notes that King County Metro’s park-and-ride lots at White Center, Northgate, South Bellevue, South Kirkland, Bear Creek, and Redmond are equally jam-packed.
The idea puts some Seattle Timescommenters ranters in a tight spot, where they have to portray this eminently capitalist solution to a supply-and-demand problem as “socialist” because it is being thought of by a transit agency. (The reverse is clearly true: Free parking is the socialism everyone loves.) But at first glance, it seems like this might hurt transit ridership, and wouldn’t that be a problem? Writes one commenter:
If you add a parking charge on top of the transit pass cost, it becomes cheaper to just drive downtown…and those cars go straight back to the highway.
Well, no. Right now there is excess demand for park-and-ride spaces, which means that, already, cars are being driven into town by frustrated commuters, after trawling the lot. Given the fixed amount of park-and-ride spaces available, there is a price at which they will still fill up, and the much larger pool of potential parkers will still be out of luck. If Sound Transit were to set too high a price, all that’s needed is to lower it until the lots are full again.
UPDATE: A commenter on this site responds to the “cheaper to drive downtown” hypothesis:
The lot across from my office is $19/day. Compare that with my employer-paid Orca card and $2-5/day to park… How does that cost enough to put me back in traffic?
In fact, people are paying for the spaces already: with their time, since they’re arriving earlier to get a spot. When time is money, it’s only a matter of time until money can buy you time.
What’s eye-opening is the parking subsidy involved to begin with. Lindblom quotes a low, low average cost of $30,000 per parking space. If you charged $5 per day, you could pay that off in 16 years. At $2, 41 years. That cost soars if the space is in a parking garage, rather than a lot. (Over at the Seattle Transit Blog, a commenter questions those estimates as sounding on the high side.) Sound Transit says any fee would likely only cover ongoing lot maintenance, rather than help pay for construction.
So any hard-nosed economist would be hard-pressed not to recommend charging for park-and-ride spaces. Only getting the price wrong–and keeping it wrong–would effect transit ridership negatively. (A truly hard-nosed economist might question why, given the construction-cost asymmetry, you’ve built them in the first place rather than let private enterprise sort it out.) And at least in terms of light rail park-and-rides, there’s no way to match train capacity to parking spaces: Light rail stations are where they are because enough people can walk, bike, or bus to them, and that density means land is too scarce and thus too valuable to use as free parking.
