Tag Archives: transit

Gyllenhaal’s Grassroots Puts the “Polar Bear” Back in Politics

June 22, Grassroots opens at the Harvard Exit on Capitol Hill, after having had its world premiere at SIFF. That’ll make the Harvard Exit a Gyllenhaal & Gyllenhaal establishment, since Maggie Gyllenhaal stars in Hysteria, which is running there right now, and Grassroots was directed by Gyllenhaal père, Stephen. Gyllenhaal will be at all showings of his movie from Friday, June 22 to Sunday, June 24.

As Stephen Gyllenhaal sees it, Grassroots is meant to be an inspiring film about the little guy pushing back–“even though ‘too big to fail’ wasn’t around when I started making Grassroots,” he writes at HuffPo, “the idea of a bully rationalizing his right to run a playground was.”

There’s a curious tension in Grassroots between this urge to broad-brush a heroic uprising against some suitably powerful figure, and the movie’s smaller-scale personalities, their tinpot aspirations and quixotic conflicts. As an example of tender rapprochement, there’s a late scene where one character accepts a ride in another’s car. In another director’s hands, that could be farce, or satire, but from Gyllenhaal, it feels like an implicit admonition for us all to grow up and work for the common good.

The story of Grassroots hews in reworked-for-movies fashion to the actual history of Grant Cogswell’s surprisingly unthought-out, one-issue run for Seattle City Council in 2001, against sitting Councilman Richard McIver. As the movie tells it, Monorail monomaniac Cogswell has no traction in his race, until his handler Phil Campbell hits upon the idea of getting free publicity by suing the City of Seattle. Chutzpah!

That plus Grant’s penchant for roaming around town in a polar bear suit–now part of a Twitter marketing strategy–is the sort of thing that energizes disaffected youth, who come out of the hipster woodwork to get involved in Cogswell’s campaign. Gyllenhaal gets, for what’s being called a comedy, a remarkably sober-sided performance from Jason Biggs as Campbell, the man who has to wrangle his obstreperous candidate, try to keep his relationship on life support, and ride herd on a gang on campaign volunteers.

Joel David Moore, though, never really hits his stride as Cogswell–he’s either fired up or sulky throughout much of the film, and he’s not very good at “fired up.” Cedric the Entertainer, as McIver, is far more congenial, thoughtful, and open to discussion, and you can’t shake the feeling that, yes, he’s a better politician than this crank.

Despite turning famed watering hole the Comet Tavern into a coffee house, Gyllenhaal otherwise keeps the movie’s visual sensibility fairly indie; people look suitably scruffy, the streets cold, the crisp mountains and early fall sunsets beautiful. Even Tom Arnold fits right in as a grumpy, harried bartender.

As Gyllenhaal points out, his set-in-2001 film points to much that would lie in the future: Even when he started work on it, he writes, “I couldn’t have predicted an Occupy Wall Street Movement and the issues it’s raised, nor the surreal Republican debates, Romney’s etch-a-sketch journey and the Democrats’ gentle drift towards the Tea Party.”

I’m not so sure prediction is the right word–these preoccupations, the tendency to construe events to fit a narrative, seem woven into Grassroots. Yes, Seattle and populism go together (we founded the Tea Party, after all) but when you look at what Gyllenhaal ignored from Phil Campbell’s book, Zioncheck for President, there’s a consistent up-with-youth-activism theme that came from somewhere besides burnt-out-wreck Campbell. He had penned a cautionary tale about being caught in the grip of charismatic ideologies and not dealing constructively with mental problems.

As he told Seattlest back in the day: “What did we accomplish? Nothing. We lost. Grant quit politics and I left town, end of story.” (That said, Campbell is equable when it comes to the distance between his and Gyllenhaal’s take: “Hollywood Gutted My Book, But That’s OK.”)

Personally, I like Campbell’s flamethrower approach, and miss the spectre of Marion Zioncheck, who hovered over Campbell’s tragicomedy to provide proof that as bad as things get, there’s usually someone out there who’s got it worse. It gave context to Cogswell’s rantings about the Monorail’s purity v. other modalities (this cannot play especially well with today’s hipster Seattleites who can’t wait for the  fatcats’ gold-plated lightrail to be extended). Besides, Campbell implicated himself in “going off the rails on the crazy train” that was the Cogswell campaign–and, by extension, the idea of being fired up too much by a charismatic or forceful leader.

For all its faults, Campbell’s book undertook to tell you the truth–about many things, including starting a campaign from scratch, the symptoms of bipolar disorder, transportation infrastructure, and the history of Northwest populism. Grassroots seems to want to dispense with the messiness in favor of a “small is beautiful” parable. It pulls this off, mostly (though, the introductions and exits for a few too many characters seem to have hit the editing room floor). With distance and time, it may even improve. It’s just hard not to imagine–knowing of the real-life Cogswell’s move to Mexico City–that that’s Gyllenhaal in the polar bear suit, shouting about things only beginning.

Seattle Subway: “We want it all, and we want it now”

Imagine all the transit, moving people around (Image: Seattle Subway)

Saturday afternoon I sat Seattle Subway‘s Ben Schiendelman down at the Hopvine and asked just what the heck was going on.

Schiendelman is an interesting character: a software engineer and transit enthusiast (he’s one of the gang at Seattle Transit Blog) who’s evolved into a transit advocate, willing to plunge into the messy and often-arcane realm of political action to get things done.

That impulse, simply to speed things along, is largely what the new non-profit Seattle Subway (over 1,600 fans on Facebook) is about, the catchy, “envisionary” full-system graphic aside. (Ballard! West Seattle! It’s like someone’s planning to reattach Seattle’s arms.) Underground, aboveground, they don’t really care, so long as the net result is speed.

Sound Transit already has big plans for light rail in the region, it’s just that because it is a regional entity, it often has to move at a slower pace, as intransigent anti-transit forces are won over and voters in less-wealthy areas agree to allocate the revenue to pay for infrastructure. As a compromise Sound Transit has been breaking out its big transit projects into “phases,” all of which require ballots marked “Yes.”

Seattle Subway wants to leverage Seattle’s bias to vote pro-anything-transit, even a Monorail. In fact, that failed Monorail project has given them an idea. I’ll let The Stranger‘s Dominic Holden summarize:

Here’s how it would work: Seattle voters would take advantage of the City Transportation Authority, created by the state legislature in 2002, which was intended to fund the monorail. That authority still allows voters to establish a motor vehicle excise tax of up to 2.5 percent for “a transportation system that utilizes train cars running on a guideway.” An initial vote as soon as this November or next year could pay for relatively inexpensive analysis and design work for the first line—probably to Ballard and West Seattle.

As Schiendelman is careful to emphasize, the idea is not to compete with Sound Transit, but to help turn a tortoise into a hare. If you map out all that Sound Transit means to accomplish, at its current rate of returning to voters for piecemeal approval, it might take a century. With Seattle giving a push, Schiendelman asks, could we bring that down to 30 years?

For a start, if the City Transportation Authority can front-load the money for studies and planning Sound Transit still needs to do, progress there could be made in 2013, instead of 2016. Slice three years off here and there, it starts to add up. So Seattle Subway’s first goal is to figure out if they can, using the CTA, get on the 2013 August primary ballot with a proposal to raise planning moneys for Sound Transit.

If you are a transit wonk, this all makes perfect sense. But if you’re looking at paying the motor vehicle excise tax, you might need a little more reason to take transit on your shoulders. As it happens, by coincidence, Amazon wants to build a very good reason to invest heavily in Seattle transit right now. Let’s take a look at Amazon’s timeline: Back in February, it was still a rumor that the internet retailer was interested in buying twelve acres of land, near Whole Foods on Denny, for a corporate headquarters.

(Image: Amazon's Design Review proposal)

At this precise moment, land purchased, they are seeking to fast-track permitting for Rufus 2.0, a new campus of three towers, adding up to three million square feet of office space. For New York-style contrast, that’s a little more than the amount of floorspace in the 102-story Empire State Building (2.7 million sq. ft.) and, for ironic contrast, about the same size of an old Chrysler plant. Each of Amazon’s towers would be up to 40 stories tall, with a “series of 5-6 story structures at their base.” They would like to get the Master Use Permit squared away by December 20, 2012, thanks.

“The company reported recently that it ended 2011 with 56,200 employees, a 67% increase from the prior year,” noted the Wall Street Journal recently, but that was soon out of date. Geekwire provides the new total: 65,000. Amazon won’t tell you how many of those employees work in Seattle, but however you slice it, you can’t get that many more people on Denny. Let me quote The SunBreak (full disclosure: me) on this:

Again, there is no solution envisioned, even as South Lake Union bulks up with Amazon, PATH, and Gates Foundation employees. We are simply supposed to accept as the natural way of things that public transit means taking 45 minutes to travel what could take seven minutes. Maybe it’s time to elect an engineer of some kind to the City Council?

(Sidebar to City Council: You know what makes a great public benefit package? GONDOLAS!)

The first point is, this is the kind of private development that our transit infrastructure needs to be able to keep up with, and I think you would be hard-pressed to make the case that, currently, we are managing that. The second point, is that it’s not a one-off that Schiendelman is a software engineer, and also interested in improving transit. Amazon, iconically, and in general, high tech, are reshaping Seattle’s self-image as a sleepy little burg on the Sound, a place to get away from it all. Seattle’s central core is becoming as dense as Manhattan, argues Schiendelman, if it isn’t already.

Amazon is putting down roots, and so are its employees. People who are used to optimizing systems for gains of split seconds are not going to be happy with transit that fails, each and every day, due to demand and lack of priority. (As Metro discovered when OneBusAway got flaky.) An engineer thinks that kind of thing is crazy. If it has taken Seattle a long time to realize that fast, reliable transit needs to be a priority, Seattle Subway is here to tell you that waiting even longer to implement would be crazier still.

Letter to Jeff Bezos: Let’s Talk Gondolas

Picture of GMD Mueller gondola lift in Gstaad, Switzerland, built in 1984 (Photo: Wikipedia/Acather96)

Dear Mr. Bezos,

You seem like a fairly thick-skinned gentleman, so no doubt you will keep smiling through the “Behind the Amazon.com smile” series from the Seattle Times. But Mr. Bezos–Jeff, may I?–consider your PR team. They are sensitive people. Haul one in and examine him or her for signs of stress this week, and I am sure you will see they are looking a little ragged. Sort of like a warehouse worker. Ha! No, I kid. We have fun.

Help us to help you help them, Jeff. The Times makes a big deal of your alleged anti-philanthropy stance. Philanthropy, schmilanthropy. You know what philanthropy is? Let me speak frankly: Getting something done because the other assholes aren’t doing it. You think Andrew Carnegie meant to build homeless shelters? No, he was investing in technology. It happened to be information technology shaped like a building, but there it is.

Let’s talk gondolas, Jeff. Cable-fucking-driven gondolas. You know why? Because the other assholes aren’t doing it. There you are in your new South Lake Union digs, central to everything, all wired up, and every day your employees are sardined into the #8 bus, which during commute times is traveling at less than walking speed. You can’t buy a condo in SLU anymore, so the best they can do for proximity is Belltown, Queen Anne, or Capitol Hill.

I don’t need to tell the man who runs Amazon about logistics. This situation isn’t going to improve on its own. Plus, you’re expanding from SLU to your new Denny parcel. More stress on that godawful Denny, and there’s no conventional solution. More buses would just stack up in traffic, and the city will never find the cojones to allocate a bus-only rush-hour lane.

I’m not an engineer, Jeff. But I think I share your interest in disruptive technology. And when it comes to the constraints, or guiding forces, of this particular situation, I am betting that you, like me, will come to the conclusion that the solution here is gondolas. Ask the Gondola Project. They’ll tell you. Cable-propelled aerial transit. It’s  like a super-low-orbit space elevator, without the space and orbit. But the elevator part, that’s right on–an elevator that moves transversely. Lateral thinking, Jeff.

Now I admit, just as the Seattle Transit Blog says, “most people find the idea of urban aerial trams and gondolas far fetched.” That’s why this is a letter to Jeff Bezos, Jeff. Far-fetched is up your alley. Take this gondola-ball and run with it, and all your philanthropy problems will melt away, while you stay right on brand: Amazon is the company that is futurewise. It’s not like no one else does private transit: Boeing has for years, Microsoft’s Connector keeps expanding, even the Hutch and Children’s run their own fleet.

But fleets of what, Jeff? Buses. You will have gondolas. Which is going to end up on the evening news around the world? Buses or a new gondola system? I think you know that answer to that. Fucking gondolas will, Jeff. People will line up for that.

You don’t have to be out there alone on this. I know you could, you don’t give a shit. But run it past Paul Allen at your next billionaires’ brunch. Paul gets transit. Better, he gets that the rest of us get transit much more quickly if he visits City Hall to tell them, Guess what, I’m putting my own goddamn train down Westlake, bitches.

Talk out the financing. Great thing about gondolas, they’re not as expensive as other transit options. They’re the door-desk of transit, Jeff.

Philanthropy is just a way to do something transformative politely, Jeff. “Watch as I philanthropize,” you say, and then everyone claps. What do you care? You got the shit done that needed to be done. Step into a gondola, whisk yourself away. “I’m riding on a Be-zos line,” you can hum, to Berlin. (You like Berlin, I feel it.) The SLU station can be called The Amazone. “Ama” for heart, Jeff. You feel like making history again?

UPDATE: A reader reminds me of this much more serious and less profanity-laden post about the prospect of South Lake Union-spanning gondolas, by Matt Roewe on CityTank. Good news, Jeff! Roewe estimates the cost for the project could be just $75 million.

Op-Ed: Coaxing Metro into Putting Passengers First

(Photo: MvB)

Is it fair to say that King County Metro puts its fleet first? Before passengers, I mean? Let me put this question into context.

By some estimates, King Country Metro’s public transit system is the eighth-largest in the nation. King County reports that: “From 2002 to 2008, the percentage of commuters taking public transportation increased from nine percent to 11 percent.” Depending on how you look at that, it’s a success story. Metro always compares ridership to past performance; “near record numbers” took transit in 2011, the agency says…almost a three-percent increase over 2010.

But let’s say you are John Lennon, and you like to imagine things. First, are you thrilled by a two percent increase over six years? (Secondly, and I don’t know how Lennonesque this is, when you consider Metro’s $549 million 2011 operating budget, do you wonder how well this system scales?)

Sometimes the question is phrased as, What would it take to get people out of their cars? I like to ask, What’s keeping people off the bus? That means taking up a passenger-first perspective (which doesn’t supplant Metro’s systems management, but does rejigger some of its guiding parameters).

What’s interesting isn’t that no one has ever asked these questions–they have–it’s that they are generally considered to generate a “soft” data, as opposed to the hard metrics of on-time performance, farebox intake, and so forth. They are squishy and often derided and since people have the choice, they make it, leaving transit, culturally, as a last option or as a moral statement of solidarity.

Given all the other difficulties and challenges of running a super-sized transit agency, it’s easy to understand how conveniences and “discomforts” get treated. In 2009 I had the chance, at long last, to sit down with Metro chief Kevin Desmond and talk with him about a wide range of transit matters, from One Bus Away to ORCA cards, Twitter, and transit unions.

Desmond turned out to be an affable, if intensely focused, man who had already considered literally everything I could possibly ask him about transit. I had thought that attending a Seattle Transit Blog happy hour had helped to prepare me for such wonky heights, but I admit to walking away chastened. It turned out that Metro was not staffed by crazy people who are crazy–one of my previous hypotheses when confronted with the near impossibility of discovering, on the street, where a Metro bus goes without getting on it and finding out.

In almost every case–it may have been, in fact, every case–when I asked Desmond about ease-of-use issues and barriers to entry, it came down to money, to need-to-haves and want-to-haves. He was terribly enthusiastic about improving signage at stops, but with Metro being strapped for gas money at the time, it just was not high on the list.

Having misspent my youth working at nonprofits, I’m all too familiar with budgetary triage. But it is also true that being chronically underfunded is a relative term–if you have had terrible bus stop signage for twenty years, for example, it may suggest an inability to adapt to reality.

That leads me to Salon’s Will Doig, via NPR’s “Get Onboard: It’s Time To Stop Hating The Bus” story:

People don’t like to talk about the aesthetics of the bus because, you know, transit agencies are strapped for cash. Who wants to make the argument that buses should just be prettier? But actually, if you think about it, the average bus costs about half a million dollars. They’re very expensive. … I talked to one design expert who’s worked in bus design; he says for just $5,000 more, you could really make the bus a nicer bus itself. And if that gets more people to the fare box, then maybe the expense is worth it.

As Metro considers its new fleet of trolley buses, there has been a good deal of “hard data” discussion: the distance that the buses can run under their own power, for instance, down to the foot. Headway times. When I brought up  the question of amenities, the perspicacious Mike Lindblom replied (via Twitter): “I’d disagree with loading lots of amenities on short range trolleybuses. Floor space, EZ loading!”

Admittedly, I was just throwing a grab-bag of notions out there–my point was that as Metro was preparing to buy the new buses, they couldn’t seem to articulate what the insides of them might be like, or discuss the ways they could be improved at all. Floor space is an amenity (as are seats). Personal space is. Safety and security is–how fun is to be sitting in the rear of an articulated bus as it tries to overtake the driver on a rain-slick Seattle hill?

Any retail store with the square footage of Metro would likely employ Paco Underhill to ensure maximum passenger satisfaction. It’s likely Underhill would be interested in the “case study” that emerged in 2007, when passenger complaints about limited visibility made Metro abandon (temporarily) its lucrative bus-wrap advertising. In the recent discussion of amenities, Seattle Transit Blog chimed in with a request for “larger windows.” In these climes, people are light-starved nine months of the year. They also really, really hate standing in the rain waiting for a bus that isn’t coming.

If it’s a little strange that the home of Nordstrom has made the individual bus rider a sort of second-class passenger for so long (behind Metro’s own needs), it doesn’t need to remain that way. In part, we need keep talking about how riders really experience Metro.

New SR 520 Toll Boosts Microsoft Connector Ridership

(Image: Microsoft)

You know who doesn’t care about the new SR 520 tolls? Microsoft Connector passengers. Or, rather, they no longer have to care. When I asked Microsoft’s Lou Gellos if the Redmond-based company anticipated a boost in ridership of their private transit system, now that the 520 bridge is being tolled, he chuckled and said they’d already seen an increase: back in April, when the tolls were originally planned to go into effect.

Actually, I was displaying my own ignorance by asking the question. I was wondering if Microsoft Connector was prepared for a big ridership bump, but after consulting the Connector’s latest fact sheet, I found that the private transit system is nothing but ridership bumps. The number of routes provided has grown almost 500 percent in its three years of existence.

Established in September of 2007, Microsoft Connector had five routes and was expected to carry up to 1,000 passengers per day. By 2009, it was “one of the largest company-owned employee bus services in the U.S.” Fast forward to October 2011, and there are 22 routes driven by 65 buses, with capacity for just about 6,000. The express bus service is only for full-time Microsoft employees, who can ride it for free.

Microsoft says it’s had 14,000 unique riders–they know because employees make reservations for their trips, which helps Microsoft achieve a 43-percent-full rate across all its routes. (The company has some 40,000 employees in the Puget Sound region.) More importantly for congestion, 10,000 of those 14,000 took the Connector as an alternative to their single-occupancy vehicle. That’s over 2.1 million trips saved over three years, says Microsoft, understandably proudly, with fuel savings of $4.2 million.

Besides their very attractive “free” pricing, the coaches double as mobile workstations, coming with plugins and WiFi, and by all accounts conversation often takes a back seat to the tapping of laptop keys.

Microsoft employees are also offered free ORCA passes, and van pools, and car pools. (Registered van pools are also exempt from tolling.) There’s even a bike shuttle that will take bicycles across the bridge, 12 at a time, more than will fit on the front of a bus.

The only thing I can manage to be critical of, in all this, is that left out of the Connector equation, still, are contract employees. There are no contract bridges to Redmond, so they get there the same way as anyone else. As it becomes clearer that Connector is much more than a perk, but also a productivity driver and environmental low-impact statement, you hope that Microsoft will revisit the question of who rides, even if it’s not for free.

Crosstown Transit? Seattle Wins Federal Funds for Study

Hey, since we're just spitballing, here... (Photo: MvB)

Mayor McGinn got an out-of-town boost this week, when the Federal Transit Administration announced the City of Seattle won a $900,000 grant to study a high capacity transit in downtown Seattle. (Also, Sound Transit netted $5.4 million to “replace buses in its Seattle-area fleet that are beyond their useful lives with hybrid-diesel buses.”)

Explains the FTA:

The study will examine the benefits, costs, and impacts of implementing an urban circulator in the corridor between the Lower Queen Anne, Uptown, and South Lake Union neighborhoods to the north, and the King Street Station and International District Multimodal Hub on the south end of downtown. […] The current Seattle Transit Master Plan estimates that the Connector project could generate approximately 10,000 new transit riders in Seattle Center City by 2030.

The high-capacity transit corridor would better connect neighborhoods with each other, and  could also link the King Street and International District Stations, Colman Dock, and Westlake Center.

To the McGinn administration, “circulator” is synonymous with “a rapid streetcar,” which is an idea the Mayor has been trying to talk the Council into throwing money at. Notes Publicola: “The city council has long been cool to the idea of westside Seattle rail, noting that it’s far more expensive than other options such as bus rapid transit.”

Properly done, BRT is a fast way to reach high capacity, though you eventually top out in the number of passengers you can carry, compared to the ability of rail to simply add another coach. Longer term, rail’s carrying capacity might exceed BRT’s by as much as 100 percent, assuming those passengers eventually show up. But BRT has to be correctly implemented, or it amounts simply to more buses creeping down already crowded roads.

Consider the SLU streetcar a kind of pilot project: With the new Amazon campus open in South Lake Union, the streetcar “carried 2,681 people per weekday in September,” reports the Seattle Times. While early ridership was projected at 1,000 trips a day, it was thought that might triple by 2020. Now you see fewer stories about how far away 3,000 trips a day seems.

McGinn would like to see $1.5 million in the 2012 city budget for a major streetcar network study, and getting $900,000 helps prime the public opinion pump. Thus spake he: “Combined with rail planning money I have proposed in the 2012 budget and funding from other sources, this brings us closer to expanding our streetcar network and giving people better transportation choices.”

Congressman Jim McDermott stayed out of the modality wars:  “This will put Seattle in a better position to compete for transit dollars, and the family-wage construction jobs that will come with them when Congress passes the American Jobs Act.”