A Seattle Times editorial on Prop 1 includes this turd of a statement:
Rail on I-90 would leave two lanes empty most of the time, even at rush hour. And, that means light rail will reduce the capacity of the bridge, particularly to people from Sammamish and Issaquah, since the light rail wouldn’t go there.
What total bull!
Here’s a depiction of 177 cars. (Just imagine the Times ed. board in their BMWs in the front)
Now here’s the same number of people, but his time they all rode the train.
Light rail will dramatically increase the capacity of the I-90 bridge. When the East Link line opens, we’re going to see a 50 percent increase in peak-hour transit use for the corridor. In plain English, the increase in transit use will be huge between Seattle and the Eastside. A Seattle Times/Ron Sims/Kemper Freeman Jr. bus plan doesn’t come close. Not by a longshot.
The problem is that light rail on I-90 won’t serve the people that use that corridor. Without service to Factoria, Easgate, BCC, Issaquah, and Sammamish, you aren’t providing an alternative for the corridor, Instead, you are serving downtown Bellevue, Overlake, and maybe some day Redmond — places that use 520. With less capacity and the same traffic, it will be worse on I-90.
Is that really true? How often would the trains have to run across I-90 to make up for the loss of the two carpool lanes?
Genuinely interested,
Truth Teller
(PS I already voted for Prop 1.)
Ron Sims seems to have fallen off the deep end. What is he doing using right winger “facts” to bash public transportation?
Clearly Frank Bleathen is nervous, to have his henchmen write such garbage on the eve of the election.
I prefer the P-I.
I think the issue is how many train cars can you run at a time on a floating bridge. I think the technical term is “headway”, and I think I read somewhere there have to be several miles in between the trains because otherwise the bridge would be overloaded. This is one of many details needed to actually make this system work.
I agree with the post above, for people coming from Issaquah or North Bend etc to Seattle, the train across I90 would be irrelevant unless there’s a really good transfer station for buses, or a park and ride lot that is massive. The plans for where the rail line would go in Bellevue are too preliminary to say whether these could happen or not.
There are a ton of details needed to make any infrastructure work. The question is if there are differences from the rosy scenario, then who makes the call about reallocation of resources and what criteria do they use for the reallocation? This is one of the big mysteries.
Sez Commentator:
That’s a meaningless quibble. If your assertion is correct — and I have no idea whether it is — I think we can safely say that even at peak hours it’s unlikely that there would ever be more than one train in each direction on the bridge.
Why do I say that? Well, let’s assume that the bridge is five miles long. Let’s also assume that the light-rail will travel on the bridge at 40 MPH. (I’m too lazy to look up either the bridge length or the anticipated speed). This implies that it will take 7.5 minutes for the light-rail to cross the bridge. Thus, if rush-hour trains are scheduled eight minutes apart, there won’t be more than one running in each direction on the bridge.
And if the (allegedly) vulnerable portion of the bridge is shorter, or if the light-rail travels faster, the requisite interval would be even shorter.
Beautiful pictures but they don’t actually illustrate the point; even withou the headway argument or the downtown Bellevue routing issue, that 177 cars are going to move across the bridge before the next scheduled train is visible on the horizon.
We should build rail because it’s a more sustainable use of energy and resources, but we should avoid spurious arguments about capacity.
It takes aboout 7.5 minutes to cross the bridge by bicycle by the way.
I have lost all respect for Ron Sims.
You can replace his name in the Seattle Times article with Kemper Freeman’s and it reads just fine.
Ron has transit envy. He sees his stinky buses getting slower and slower every year and sees Sound Transit close to unleashing these fancy, fast, sexy trains and it just makes his little buses look bad.
Will, I’m not opposed to mass transit (I support it, when done correctly).
And while I haven’t dug into the I-90 issue in depth, I’ll say Seattle Times editorials in general often display questional judgment and grasp of facts.
I do worry about the idea of running rails across a FLOATING bridge. I’m not an engineer, but I see potential problems with that idea.
However, whether light rail should or will cross I-90 is merely a piece of a larger picture. It neither makes nor breaks the case for Prop. 1. You have to look at the whole picture, not one element of it. See my next post.
Wow Ron has completely jumped the shark
The proposed line to the Eastside has a different problem: It takes up two center lanes on the Interstate 90 Floating Bridge. Those lanes could carry more people in buses, because buses can drive a few lengths apart, whereas trains have to have several-minute “headways.”
Rail on I-90 would leave two lanes empty most of the time, even at rush hour. And, that means light rail will reduce the capacity of the bridge, particularly to people from Sammamish and Issaquah, since the light rail wouldn’t go there.
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This is what the Times actually said. In other words, they were talking about buses providing more capacity, and not making a statement about light rail vs. autos. And in the latter case they are stating the buses will offer more “people throughput” than rail.
So, we’ll need another picture.
I believe mass transit is an essential part of Seattle’s of the answer to the problem of moving commuters and commerce in the given physical setting. But to work, it must be both functional and reasonably priced.
Requirements of this nature apply to everything in the universe, and mass transit is no more exempt from these parameters than from the law of gravity. As always, the devil is in the details. And as a lawyer, former small business owner, and long-time stock investor, I know a lot about the importance of details and financial statements. Simply looking at promised benefits is not enough — not nearly enough.
My focus in this comment is not I-90 but the SeaTac to Tacoma Dome link. Partly because it illustrates what’s wrong with Prop. 1, and how deeply flawed Prop. 1 is, and partly because it’s a problem in itself at least as serious as the potential problems in crossing Lake Washington with rails on a floating span that moves with wind, waves, water levels, and the weight of traffic.
The Seattle Times examines the SeaTac-to-Tacoma segment in a front-page story today. Sound Transit estimates the 19-mile trip will take 70-minutes — considerably slower than today’s travel times via congested freeway. This segment will cost $3.4 billion, but of course ST states everything in 2006 dollars, and the actual cost is double so let’s call it $6.8 billion.
Here’s what the Times says you see when you match ST’s own ridership projections with its own cost projections:
“[Sound Transit] estimated that for every $1,000 spent, the SeaTac-to-Tacoma extension would carry 69 passengers. By comparison, … light rail to Bellevue would carry 106 people per $1,000, and the extension north would move 369 people per $1,000.”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ma01m.html
So why even build the SeaTac-to-Tacoma extension if it’s so cost-ineffective? The Times answers,
“Sound Transit also promised that money raised by tax increases would be spent where it’s generated. In this case, Pierce County residents said they wanted light rail, Patrick said.”
And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with Prop. 1. It spends gigantic sums of money, not in a cost-effective way, not on priority projects, but to buy votes. Its priorities are set by a political agenda, not a transportation agenda. That’s not good enough for our region. That won’t solve our transportation problems. The only thing passing Prop. 1 will due is burn up taxpayer money that, as a result, won’t be available to build transportation we actually need and that will actually deal with the problem. Once you spend it on political boondoggles, it’s gone, and you can’t spend it again when the transportation problems Prop. 1 leaves unsolved punch you in the face.
Passing Prop. 1 would be a disaster for our region. It’s the wrong answer to the wrong problems. It was drafted by politicians whose approach was to make promises they considered necessary to get enough “yes” votes. Promises that have little to do with moving people and commerce. Promises that don’t make effective use of the money this plan would spend.
We need to start over. The 5 years spent drafting Prop. 1 is a loss. Write it off, as you must do when any investment fails to meet expectations. The wrong people were on that committee, so we need to get rid of them and try again with new people. The committee approach itself is probably flawed, so we need to seriously consider trying a different decision-making structure when we start over. But the most critical thing is to accept the plain facts staring us in the face and make the decision that has to be made: This albatross can’t fly, and needs to be euthanized before we irrevocably commit ourselves to an irreversible leap off a cliff on the back of a creature whose wax wings are certain to melt in the sun.
However, whether light rail should or will cross I-90 is merely a piece of a larger picture. It neither makes nor breaks the case for Prop. 1. You have to look at the whole picture, not one element of it. See my next post.
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And this was the subject of the front page story in the Times today on Prop 1, viz, the big picture is that rail is wasteful compared to alternative solutions. In that story Sims argued that extending light rail to Tacoma doesn’t make financial sense given the number of people who would use that leg. He performed an independent analysis based on ridership/cost projections. Sound Transit claimed the results didn’t make sense. The Times left the “he said, she said” at that rather than look into the competing claims (after all, everyone has access to the same data).
However, this little nugget from Sound Transit did stand out:
“n 2006, it took an average of 69 minutes to travel by bus from the Tacoma Dome to Westlake in downtown Seattle, Sound Transit said. But by 2030, the agency projects, it will take buses 80 minutes to make the trip — 10 minutes longer on average than light rail.”
In other words, travel times will worsen by bus (and so by auto I imagine) despite light rail, meaning congestion will worsen by 2030 with Prop 1 along this stretch (that, I doubt, is what voters think they’re getting for their money).
@12
I believe, RR, we are on the same page.
The facts remain that people in this region will not ride this light rail. The only people that will, will be those who vacation in our state, and find it convenient to go from Sea-Tac to Seattle.
Sorry, Goldy, sell your East-Coast Utopian beliefs to someone who will ride your POS rail.
And this is worth a read:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sier.....erview.asp
I mean this question honestly and not as some sort of strawman; that said I’m sure it will come off as naive.
Why can’t we re-stripe I-5 between Marysville and Fort Lewis with a dedicated bus only lane. If the criticism of bus only solutions is that they get stuck in traffic too, let’s spend a million dollars on paint and get them out of the traffic. Same goes for I-90 out to Boehm’s chocolate or the A&W.
I know that lessens capacity for single occupant SUVs, but why can’t we view that as a good thing?
4 I don’t believe that–it sounds like a valid assumption for commuter rail, but light rail rolling stock is another matter. In fact, I’ll betcha that a two-car light rail combine weighs considerably less than one of those old Breda “tunnel turkey” buses.
In fact, when one considers that all three floating bridges deal with mixed-mode bumper-to-bumper traffic every day, with no restriction on how many buses or 18-wheelers or Escalades might be lined up end-to-end, if this were an issue, the damned things would have sunk long ago.
Small Point ..
The numbers of people carried by either mode is an integral, that is a sum over time. The instantaneous value, as shown here, is not very meaningful unless you correct for frwquency of entry/’exit into the space shown.
In effect Will is OVER estimating the difference. This is esp. true if, you add in the effects of some busses in the car lanes.
However. the implication of Wills cartoon is that the only time any of this is relevant is at peak traffic. I do not think this is true and the difference is in support of LR.
LR should have a dramatic effect on where folks live ..as Goldy, our resident adviser on real estate has said. If combined with suburban zoning for high density housing near LR, the effect could be a dramatic decrease in the cost of living and working in Seattle because LR is simply a lot more affordable as transit than any car.
This is also true for the potential effects on business locations. I have bet that the mystery client for the huge SLU building is MS. Why? Because a downtown presence linked by LR to Redmond is synergistic for both campuses, assuming I am right. Some things are more efficient in the city … esp. those things that involve MS interactions with other entities NOT in Redmond.
Finally, anyone oposed to LR should try living a few weeks in
Hellthe LA basin. I call LA, NY after its is squished. Suburban sprawl conencted by high density highways results in something really, reAally bad … even when you have more room than we do to expand.Where does that light rail car go? To each of the 177 destinations? Will it serve to transport the occupants of each car in the performance of 177 different sets of errands? How many stops will there be on light rail? Versus possible bus and car destinations?
How many supporters of light rail aren’t in this for any possible transportation benefits, but, rather, social engineering? How many light rail supporters want to force others to live a life style that meets their definition of good and moral versus according others the freedom to live and commute as they see fit?
50 measly miles…
The Piper
But, Dear Roger, we live in a political world. So naturally decisions like where to invest in transportation facilities have to be made in a political manner. If Seattle area folks want to spread the tax burden for regional transportation to Tacoma and Piece County, then projects that Tacoma and Pierce County officials want have to be included even if they don’t make sense to the King County Executive. I probably would have picked different projects, but I, alas, am just a lowly citizen and not an elected official. Yet I am still voting for Prop 1.
James @ 16
A quote from the BRT guy:
“In my city, 25 percent of the people who use the BRT have cars, but they use the system because it’s more pleasant and beautifully designed.”
Well, 70 percent of the people who ride PDX’s light rail have cars. If I had a choice between bus or car, I would choose car. Between car and rail, it’s rail every time.
@ 16
BRT is whatever somebody wants it to be. Real BRT, with closed stations and separate right-of-way works well, but all that infrastructure is expensive. Cheap-o BRT, which is what Ron Sims sold up a shitbox full of last year with Transit Now, is just some painted buses and a bus only lane. Brazilian BRT is expensive, whereas Ron’s BRT it cheap. You get what you pay for.
BRT is whatever somebody wants it to be. Real BRT, with closed stations and separate right-of-way works well, but all that infrastructure is expensive. Cheap-o BRT, which is what Ron Sims sold up a shitbox full of last year with Transit Now, is just some painted buses and a bus only lane. Brazilian BRT is expensive, whereas Ron’s BRT it cheap. You get what you pay for.
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And he goes on to say,
“Light rail is sometimes 10 to 20 times more expensive than a BRT, and it takes more time to implement. But it’s much better than a subway. When you have time and money and are able to subsidize the system, light rail is OK. But when you have to subsidize every ticket, you’re taking money from other social investments. That’s the main issue. You can have a BRT system that’s as good as an underground or light rail, and it pays for itself.”
We can’t make BRT vs. light rail comparisons in this area because we haven’t been provided with any meaningful cost-benefit analysis other than the snippets like the one that appeared on the Times’ front page this morning, or in their editorial page where the peak commute time “people moving” capacity of light rail vs. buses over the I-90 bridge was discussed.
What we do know, though, is in 20 years congestion will be worse, not better, with light rail, and that says something about the choices most people will be making individually.
Incidentally, I’m all for light rail in some capacity; but like some of the others on this blog I think a much more careful, thoughtful process that addresses a broader set of issues is required.
The most effective “social engineering”, which is actually what’s been happening and by all appearances is likely to continue to happen is simply to do nothing. In this scenario, it becomes inevitable that living 10 or 15 or 20 miles from one’s place of employment and driving to and from will become increasingly distasteful. Those of us who aren’t total masochists will eventually adapt by choosing a different job or moving to another residence so that the two are closer together.
Alternatively, some might simply choose to migrate out of the Puget Sound area entirely. If so, fine…that’ll help as well.
@ 24
Look, you can have a BRT system that costs nothing, but how rapid will it be?
That’s easy to answer:
As rapid as the traffic around the buses will allow it to be. IOW, no different from what we have now.
BRT only works when you have dedicated busways, where buses don’t have to deal with the vagaries of regular-street traffic tie-ups. I’m familar with Pittsburgh’s, for example.
24/26 Does it necessarily have to be one or the other? We’ve set up the downtown tunnel (admittedly on the second try) so that it can accommodate light rail and busses. Could that be extended so that buses and LR (AKA “streetcars”) used the same right-of-way, separated from the flow of regular traffic?
Prop 1 is done.
it fails maybe by 5%.
Facts don’t always matter in politics.
It is losing in the polls, and the undecideds almost never break more yes than no.
Looks like a Bus pickup.
What about those people’s 177 cars as they drive from the exurbs to the light rail park-and-ride lot in the suburbs? People currently often drive 30+ miles to use bus-only park-and-ride lots, enabling them to live further and further into sprawl. ST2 (the largest parking lot construction project in state history) mandates the construction of well over 10,000 free parking spots so that people can easily buy cheap houses in new sprawling bedroom developments and get to work in Bellevue or Seattle. That’s the real social engineering at work with ST2.
Urban light rail: good.
Sprawling commuter rail: bad.
Roger Rabit said [in post #9]
–I do worry about the idea of running rails across a FLOATING bridge. I’m not an engineer, but I see potential problems with that idea.–
I AM an engineer, or was, now that I am retired. Light transit trains are much lighter per rider than the equivalent number of cars – even assuming that each car is at less than half capacity. So that will be LESS of a burden on the bridge than what currently exists.
The second part of the question has to do with the average momentum of the traffic vs. that of the train. The train, weighing less, will probably have less momentum than the equivelent auto traffic UNLESS there is a huge disparity in velocity. So if auto traffic on the bridge is stop-and-go, the light train travelling at 40 MPH will have more momentum.
This isn’t necessarily a problem as long as the bridge is regularly maintained. The additional momentum of the train *COULD* [not will, but could] cause a slight misalignment of the floating structure. Any engineer worth his salt will have calculated this already, though, so I doubt if it will be a problem.
BTW, we are talking about tiny misalignments here, that would most likely self-correct. The danger wouldn’t be that the bridge would collapse [or move] but that the expansion joints would wear unevenly, causing the pavement to deteriorate. That would require frequent, expensive and traffic delaying repaving.
Hope that this helps!
And …..
Do we all know how to spell defeat for Prop 1?
D,I,N,O …. ROSS E,E,E … TO THE TUNE OF THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB ANTHUM.
I am NOT a Din partisan but if Prop 1 goes down, the still birth will belong in our governor’s lap. This is as bad a job of poor political leadership as I can ever remember.
In effect, Ms, G is asking us to vote for a vaguely defined pan without a clear budget and with NO politician willing to take blame or credit. If she doesn’t believe in Prop. 1 she should withdraw hewr endorsement. If she does, she should get off her duff, ask the media for some time or buy some, and get out there and tell us that as OUR leader she thinks we should vote yes because.
Otherwise,
The Dino Club will be on the air every night and ..they will be right.
BTW …
For those too young to remember .. Dino Rossi came within a chad’s breadth of Christine Gregoire last time. The Mickey Muose club dominated the youths of most of the now-boomers and has always felt like a fifth column to sixties types like myself.
SJ news has posted an image that suggests Rossi may be bringing the force of the MM Club to bear in the upcoming election.
/2007/11/return-of-mickey-mouse-club
The Seattle Times thinks it is alright for Seattle to have light rail, but no place else. That’s why it is called the Seattle, Times.
The Seattle, Times advocates a second class transit system for everybody who does not live in Seattle. Today’s front page took a shot at Tacoma. Inside, on his editorial page, Frank Blethen took a shot at Bellevue and Redmond. He wants all those people to take a bus and be stuck in the same traffic as all the cars.
For communities east of Lake Washington, there’s never been a bigger investment on the table that offers more ways to solve transportation problems there after decades of focus on Seattle. Same for Tacoma and Everett. Which is why newspapers in those places enthusiastically support Prop. 1.
The Seattle, Times is proving in this campaign that it is a dying newspaper because it can’t adequately serve high growth markets outside of Seattle.
Someone should ask the question: has the Seattle, Times, lost its mind on this topic. I’m old. And I don’t recall a newspaper using turning its news pages into editorial pages on a subject quite like this.
It is as if the newspaper’s editors have adapted the tactics of a campaign to push the views of the guy in charge, who is clearly off of his rocker.
If this newspaper dies. It will be because of its current publisher, not Hearst or the publisher’s “death tax.” And I’m not sure the paper will be missed.
Will makes the fatal ASSUMPTION that all those drivers will abandon their vehicles and hop on the train. The more likely scenario is that everyone who is riding the bus system between Bellevue/Issaquah and seattle right now will move to light rail, but most people who drive will stick to it.
It’s like the HOV lanes…everyone thought that having those lanes would give people an incentive to carpool….IT DIDN’T! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been driving down I-5 or 520 or I-90 in jam packed traffic with the HOV lane wide open. People just aren’t willing to give up the luxury of going from point A their house to point B their workplace. If you carpool you have to pick someone else up at their house and drop them off at their place of work or walk far. It just doesn’t work unless maybe you’re a city employee…all congregated in one spot, in the same building. great for them. Not great for everyone else.
Oh yeah…and by the time light rail is finished, half of you posting on this blog will be retired…but you’ll still be paying for it. and so will your kids…and if Sound transit’s track record is any indication, so will your grandkids. Remember phase one was supposed to take ten years. That deadline passed last year. Now they say it won’t be finished until 2016, and it’s SHORTER than they promised, with fewer stations. Did i mention the cost is more than DOUBLE their original estimates?
What’s a better solution? Changing how we manage transportation altogether.
The gas tax is a form of consumption tax, which should theoretically give people incentives to drive less….however, WHERE you pay a tax matters. People get much more incensed about paying tolls because that is a pure tax in itself–meaning you’re not getting another “good” along with it, like gas.
To me, if you want to curb congestion, it makes a lot more sense to eliminate or drastically reduce gas taxes in high-traffic areas…in this case the entire Seattle/Everett/Bellevue/Tacoma area for example….and replace it with tolls instead. Tolls are a much more effective way to deal with congestion than a gas tax.
In the meantime, all other areas of Washington state would retain a gas tax to pay for those roads. I don’t know if any other areas are doing this kind of mixed system…but it seems like a pretty good solution.
The problem is people think of roads as being “free” because they don’t actually pay out of pocket specifically to use them, they pay in other ways. It’s like federal withholding.
People know how much they’re paying theoretically because they see it every pay check, but that’s entirely different than writing a $10,000 check at the end of the year for income tax! That’s why people get so incensed about property taxes and why there is a strong push to keep those lower.
I read this earlier. I was thinking to myself, this makes me FOR prop 1. But wait, I’m not. I think it’s a ploy, like, here is the stupidest argument, anyone with 4 braincells would think no way! and vote yes on prop 1. I’m pretty sure the paper is pro prop 1. Fucktards!
36 Tell me….are my grandkids supposed to pay for transportation before or after they pay for BUSH’S FUCKING WAR???
What @36 said. I am not getting out of my car.
I’m willing to bet if you took a poll of every driver from Kent to Redmond who use the bridge, they would say the same thing.
38 That’s a red herring. You’re talking about federal spending on a war; I’m talking about state spending on transportation. It does all boil down to taxes…but if you really want to find a comparable long-term federal tax obligation with virtually no end in sight, you can use the social security and medicare taxes.
You’re right about one thing though…Bush is a douche. The federal debt limit has been raised six times since he took office, most recently in October. U.S. debt obligations are now at $30,000 per U.S. citizen. Yep, even babies are born in debt.
If you add Social security and medicare obligations, it works out to about $435,000 per household. Good times. Social slavery anyone?
If, according to http://www.soundtransit.org/x4306.xml, the capacity of a light-rail train is 200 people (only 74 of which would be able to be comfortably seated), and they run every 8 minutes, that’s a capacity of (60/8*200=) 1,500 people per hour. The capacity of one vehicle lane is about 1,500 vehicles per hour. There are two express lanes on the I-90 bridge; that’s 3,000 vehicles per hour. Carpool vehicles require at least 2 persons; that’s 6,000 people per hour (all of whom would be comfortably seated). So wouldn’t replacing the express lanes with light rail be reducing the capacity from 6,000 people per hour down to 1,500 people per hour? How does that help traffic?
By the way, if those 3,000 vehicles were buses instead of cars, the capacity of those express lanes would be 180,000 people per hour, since, according to http://www.soundtransit.org/x4645.xml, an articulated bus has seating for 60 people (we can argue over how comfortable it is).
Would you rather have capacity for 180,000 people per hour, or 1,500?
@41:
You are quoting the specifications of a single rail car. The same document you link to states that cars can be combined into trains of up to 4 cars.
In Portland, for example, most (but not all) trains are two car trains, and at rush hour the primary east-west line runs at about 6 minute headways.
I don’t know what Sound Transit’s initial plans are, but if you want to talk in terms of theoretical capacity (and assuming that the bridge can handle 4-car trains), that gives you a theoretical peak capacity of 4,800 people per hour per direction, not 1,500.
Your example of “those 3,000” vehicles being buses doesn’t work because buses are much larger than cars and require greater following distances. Even if your lane can really carry 1,500 cars at peak (difficult to achieve), you can’t fit that many buses in the same space.
With urban vehicle occupancies hovering around 1.25 passengers these days, those 1,500 (maximum) cars in a lane are, at best, carrying 1,875 people, compared to light rail’s capacity of 4,800 in the same space.
Furthermore, one full 4-car light rail train does the work of 13 of your articulated buses, meaning (at peak times) 1 light rail operator does the work of 13 bus operators. Those 13 buses will also wear out and be replaced 3 or more times during the life of the train cars.
Operating costs are a huge long-term expense of providing transit service.
When evaluating any major transit proposal, you have to look at the cost of serving your projected ridership across the life cycle of the system, not just the initial construction costs.
Disclaimer: I don’t know enough about the Sound Transit proposals to provide definitive numbers… the estimates above are intended to show what is achievable in theory.
– Bob R.