Seattle Transit Blog

Two great resources about urban livability for HNers in Seattle: Seattle Transit Blog (http://seattletransitblog.com/) HugeAssCity (http://www.publicola.net/category/column/hugeasscity/)

This is a great piece in conjunction with "The Astounding Collapse of American Bus Ridership" (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/07/21/buses_in_new_york_and_o… which explains why bus policy is so often bad and even counterproductive. In Seattle, transit ridership is up significantly because of grade-separated light rail: http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/07/16/link-ridership-up-82-in-may.

Rough Translation from commenter at http://seattletransitblog.com: Today is Mukhtar’s birthday Hurrah Hurrah Hurrah He certainly will get the gift, that he has wished for this year and delicious chocolate cake. How he smiles, when he is happy, Hurrah Hurrah Hurrah But this day is also nice, for at home wait Mom and Dad with delicious chocolate and cakes And when he goes home from the Bus Hurrah Hurrah Hurrah So will he go home and throw a party. And those who come as guests will also get delicious chocolate and cakes. Finally we shout loudly in chorus, Hurrah Hurrah Hurrah Wish Mukhtar long life and his unfulfilled wishes few and delicious chocolate cake too.

What are your sources? From 2013: > Leading up to the construction and just afterwards NE 65th St performed very similar to both controls, however two quarters after the project was finished NE 65th St experienced a 350% increase in sales index, followed by another jump to 400% sales index the following quarter.[1] From 2020 [2]: > "Both the trend analysis and DID analysis show that the protected bike lane on Second Avenue corridor positively impacted employment, especially in the retail sector, when compared to the Fourth Avenue control corridor" > "In conclusion, the protected bike lane on Broadway triggered a significant employment increase in the food services industry after installation, indicating an improvement in business vitality as a result." The overall study finds that > - On the Second Avenue corridor, the protected two-way bike lane contributed to higher employment and improved business vitality in the retail sector. - On Broadway Avenue, we find that the protected bike lane triggered a significant positive impact on food services employment after installation, indicating an improvement in business vitality as a result." and > In terms of retail service sector, we found either mixed results or insignificant results. [...] However, the insignificant results may be significant in this context, indicating that there does not appear to be a negative causal impact of right-of-way or parking lane removal on economic outcomes. Anecdotally, many people…

I'm guessing you live in Ballard, which I do think ST3 hasn't prioritized getting done quickly enough. I would love to see Seattle kick more money into getting Ballard <> Downtown done sooner than 2035, that is a perfectly valid complaint. With that said, I also think you're not being fair to ST3 - it's a regional program, and it's paid by everyone in the ST region. Long before 2035 there will be a host of improvements[1], including more BRT and other deliverables: Link to Redmond, West Seattle, etc. Sound Transit has consistently delivered projects on-time, and outside of an increased land acquisition cost, has been relatively on-budget[2]. I don't want to debate on a fact-by-fact basis, but I'll say that you're off on the percentage of Seattle that takes transit to work: it's north of 20%[3] (from what I can see), and bucking a nationwide trend of that falling in other cities. Seattle is, IMO, doing the right thing to work through the massive influx of population it's gotten. I only wish it was started 20 years ago (or more!) and could be done faster. Personally, I am more than happy to pay the increased vehicle registration tax, sales tax and property tax. I purchased a house close to the light rail explicitly because I wanted to have convenient transit access, and I see the benefit of how these tax dollars were spent every day. Even if you don't directly ride the Link, it's taking traffic off the road and making commutes easier. I think transit _options_ are an…

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,…

Every time I read anything complaining about gentrification in San Francisco, I think about this: http://seattletransitblog.com/2012/04/01/city-looks-to-detroit-baltimo… ("On a recent fact finding mission to both cities, council members and staff met with officials from Detroit and Baltimore to learn from the nation’s leaders in combating gentrification."). Gentrification is a good thing. You can't do all of the liberal shit San Francisco's municipal government wants to do without a bunch of "2%" types whose taxes can bankroll the whole endeavor. You lose your tax base, and you turn into Detroit or Camden, NJ, and then its game over. If you're a municipal government, 90% of your energies should be spent figuring out how to get businesses and wealthier people to move into and stay in your city. Without the tax base, your great ideas for everything else are totally irrelevant.

Another case in point is OneBusAway for iOS and Android: https://seattletransitblog.com/2023/10/17/onebusaway-needs-help/ (n.b. I am the maintainer of OBA for iOS, and also a board member of its volunteer run parent organization.)

Global: - https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/ (30/mo) Local: - https://publicola.com (19/mo) - https://washingtonstatewire.com (1/mo) - https://southseattleemerald.com/category/news/ (20/mo) - https://www.seattlebikeblog.com (21/mo) - https://seattletransitblog.com (10/mo) - https://wasmoke.blogspot.com (2/mo) - https://washingtonbeerblog.com (30/mo) Tech: - https://this-week-in-rust.org (4/mo) - https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix (4/mo) - https://community.openstreetmap.org/top (150/mo) - https://discourse.nixos.org/top (150/mo) Plus about 100 personal blogs and update feeds.

Hamburg's busses don't have coin boxes or sell tickets/fares? You don't have any mechanism that requires swiping a card, tapping a device, showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare? In Seattle, we tap our cards on something that looks like this: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/06/28/dont-tap-orca-here/ It's pretty quick, but on the busiest bus routes it slows things down. Edit: Reading up, it looks like they don't really have those things, and rely on a combination of very infrequent inspectors (which do slow things and cost money) and the honor system.

Seattle had pretty high public transit use prior to the 2020 pandemic, which made it much more unpleasant (both in direct Covid risk/fear and in state response to the virus). See e.g., https://seattletransitblog.com/2022/06/13/transit-ridership-is-slowly-… or https://www.seattle.gov/images/Departments/SDOT/Streetcar/2021-3-16%20… to see the crater 2020 made in Seattle transit use. Here is a nice graph from back in 2018: https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/downtown-co… (from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/transit-rider… ). Transit was the plurality of downtown commuters (and growing).

If you're a local US government, you probably have trouble keeping the lights on, let alone justifying CapEx on more buses. King County in Seattle recently costed a transition to all-electric: the conclusion was that it would cost 41% more than sticking with the current hybrids, and would be equivalent to reducing service by 237,000 hours annually. https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/11/02/metros-fleet-all-electric/

My friend Zach Shaner wrote a really interesting article called "ST3 is Slow Because It Reflects Our Values." ST3 is a transit project in Seattle. https://seattletransitblog.com/2016/04/07/st3-is-slow-because-it-refle…

This is $12.5b and 17 years for a 35 mile tunnel through solid rock. Seattle's transit plan is $50b, 25 years, and laying tracks on grade. Probably about the same number of miles. http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/24/st3-draft-plan-overview/

Aha, it was origionally proposed to be placed on the Cross Kirkland Corridor trail: http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/12/kirkland-st-struggling-to-agr…

It's not Sound Transit's fault. The cities won't let them. Kirkland wants them to build out Buses and threatens to veto any light rail project. Residents by the CKC want to "save the trail" (aka we're selfish jerks that bought a property by a railway line, but don't want noise of trains) http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/12/kirkland-st-struggling-to-agr…

The odds of Seattle having late night bus service are good, but the goods are ... well: http://seattletransitblog.com/2014/07/08/metros-night-owl-alignments-a…

Of course you still need government intervention to get transit. I'm not saying "no intervention". I'm being precise: "private companies will ask to operate it". It also doesn't matter. Which sounds weird, but it's true. If you just let people build density without transit, the market will almost always build it in convenient places (a bank won't underwrite if they don't think it'll be successful), the people who move into it will either be happy with walking or they'll organize. I've done a lot of such organization, if you're curious. I spearheaded Seattle's successful 2016 ballot measure for $50 billion in additional rail transit, much of which is now under construction. It'll take more ballot measures, but we're getting there: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/11/23/lets-build-a-seattle-subway/ And along the way, we had to save bus service, so I forced the city to do that too: https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2014/04/friends-of-trans…

I think it will be difficult to find supporting data that mandates all employees across every team are required to be in office 3 days a week. Given the related news about downtown areas where the offices are facing issues with lack of consumer foot traffic and increased issues with crime and social issues, it’s seems more likely at this time the decision is being made because of pressure from local governments. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/118ihq1/seattle_mayor_praise… https://seattletransitblog.com/2023/02/25/cities-cant-rely-on-employer… https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-mayor-breed-an… https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-27/nordstrom-closes-s… Additionally managers have typically been empowered to evaluate the effectiveness of their teams and their performance, but now an external metric is being forced on them without much visibility into the metrics themselves (e.g. badge in counts for their reports, how WFH while sick but not taking a sick day affects the metric, or various other circumstances). In my experience and prior to the pandemic, whether you were in the office or not was up to whatever discussions you’ve had with your manager, and it some cases there were employees that were allowed to work from home (or other states) based on the needs for that team. So to me this isn’t…

I lived overseas for a great while, so some of this is first hand observation. I hold the equivalent of a US green card in a foreign country and worked extensively through Asia followed then by Europe. Roads without potholes : Germany, Japan https://seattletransitblog.com/2009/04/17/japans-highways/ http://bridgemi.com/2014/04/why-are-germanys-roads-better-or-are-they/ (after a more detailed read, this article doesn't support my point, but it's still interesting. And the roads in Germany were nice when I drove on them.) Trains running on time : Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea (I heard horror stories about the UK system, but it worked well enough for me when I've gone there) http://kotaku.com/ever-wonder-why-japanese-trains-arent-late-heres-why… Countries by literacy rate : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate (You have to go down to Syria to for the equivalent US literacy rate. We don't report our figures, but a quick Google search puts it about 86%) Beloved national Health systems: Canada, France, even the UK's NHS http://www.gallup.com/poll/8056/healthcare-system-ratings-us-great-bri… http://healthcare-economist.com/2008/04/14/health-care-around-the-worl… Hope this helps~