Seattle is putting up $50B for transit
thetransportpolitic.com
thetransportpolitic.com
As Americans, you may have this impression that mass transit is a horrible thing for poor people. That impression comes from busses, where the bus is rocking around so much that you cannot whip out your cellphone and read on the way to work(one of the big advantages of mass transit over a car). Trams, however, are very comfortable. The floor is always extremely stable, you can comfortably read or do work on your laptop. You no longer feel the stress of driving and your commute can become a "free time" part of your day, rather than a stressfull period between home and work.
Busses are just a lot more flexible in general. The costs with starting and stopping bus lines are much less than other forms of transit, the vehicles tend to be more interchangeable, the infrastructure is less substantial, and so on. I'm not saying I generally enjoy riding busses, but the costs to the system are very different than other forms of transit.
And you really can't "just as easily" put rail on that road. Laying rail is expensive. To make a dedicated bus lane, you just paint it. Much much cheaper.
For "BRT" to rival trains, you have to set up a degree of dedicated infrastructure that costs nearly as much as trains.
BRT sucks, and study after study after study shows that people do not want to ride a bus (even BRT).
That said, I agree that busses are the least desirable, and I for one would much prefer a well-thought-out transit system that eliminates the need for busses.
Is Ballard going to move anytime soon?
On the other hand, that difficulty in changing routes with trains, subways, and street cars means it is much less likely that a route will be shut down completely if ridership falls off. I could at least consider moving to be near a subway or train stop and then giving up my car.
With a bus no way am I giving up my car. The risk is too high that some bean counter will decide that ridership could be improved by 5% of they shut down my route and replaced it with a new one a mile away, and then I'd be screwed.
I think to really make a transit system be widely used there has to be a long term commitment to (1) keeping certain routes open, and (2) running at certain times on those routes, no matter how low ridership falls.
That's actually a downside of buses when it comes to urban development. As a business owner, there's very little upside in opening up a new business next to a new bus stop, because I know that bus stop may move (or disappear entirely) next year. Compare that with a light rail line, which is guaranteed to be on a fairly fixed route, with fairly fixed stops. The literature I've read about urban development shows that additional bus lines do almost nothing for economic activity along their route, while light rail lines have significant, sustained increases in economic activity near their stations.
YAGNI.
In Boston, not only are many of the bus lines following the exact route of older trolley lines, but those trolley lines follow routes taken by horse-drawn street car lines, and the tracks laid down for those matches, block for block, the routes of older omnibus stagecoach services.
You really don't need to reroute bus lines very often.
But what about something blocking a track, you might ask? Well, streetcar cities deal with the prospect of an incident blocking a streetcar track by being very, very intolerant of things that might make that happen. And it works.
But... since a bus can reroute easily, it can also be rerouted very easily by politicians for their own ends. Which means real estate investors ignore bus lines. They don't ignore streetcar tracks.
And it shows.
And as for strollers taking too much time: if 40 people can spend their time on the bus in peace an quite using their phone/resting, maybe time for strollers is a reasonable price to pay?
And we have'nt said anything about trying to solve that design problem somehow.
That's not true. When I lived in Minnesota, Southwest Metro Transit used coach-style buses to go to and from Downtown Minneapolis, and they were just fine. The time needed to deploy their wheelchair lifts was about the same as the time needed for a regular "kneeling bus" to deploy its wheelchair ramp.
[p.s.: there is actually a term in transit-nerd circles, "rail bias" - as though people have an unreasonable preference for trains when other transit modes would do just as well. So far as I can see, "rail bias" is a myth - the truth is merely "bus aversion".]
This times 1000x.
It's common in the Midwest for many people to have never once used any public transit in their entire lives. So it's very easy for our public transit groups to pretend that BRT is "like Light Rail" hoping it will improve the public response to BRT.
Instead, it just dampens enthusiasm for real transit. People ride BRT and are underwhelmed. Since they've been told BRT is "just like Light Rail", they decide that Light Rail must suck too.
Which is how you get metro areas of 600k+ people which, despite having a dozen or more bus lines, still manage to have no useful public transit of any kind.
Having more entrances/exists is important if you have a lot of people who wish to travel in wheelchairs, or while pushing buggies with babies. This reduces the time it takes people to board/leave, and helps iron out delays caused by multiple busy stops on a route.
Until massive amounts of money stop chasing American real estate, it's the only option. It would be cheaper to provide free uber than to build a train line in any moderate sized American city.
Also, in the US, government mushroomed in the late 60s with the "Great Society" welfare programs and war on drugs. So state and municipal governments in most states are dealing with underfunded pension programs. Transportation that isn't Federally funded is discretionary spending.
And it's unfortunate that people don't understand that this is exactly the right thing to do.
Once autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time, mass transit will be instantly forgotten. This whole article is about spending $50,000,000,000 on shiny new stables and hitching posts.
yep, the economies of scale of "mass" transit will then be available to "individual" transit, and that will be very attractive to people.
Outside of dense areas though, Uber-like services (or even privately owned self-driving cars) win.
The idea of spending billions of dollars on hardwired tracks when it's so obviously the wrong thing to do in the long term is just forehead-slappingly dumb.
A busy road can move more people in an hour than a train can move in a day.
So we can build train stations that are guaranteed not to be where people need to end up, or we can use existing roads more intelligently. To me, that doesn't sound like such a tough choice.
Trains are not going to be the answer. Nobody is going to be taking the train 50 years from now, or any other form of fixed-rail urban transit.
In some places, perhaps -- big American cities with decent overground infrastructure capacity -- but the world will not just stop needing subways and trams. I cannot possibly imagine the chaos if the 5 million people who use the Hong Kong MTR every day suddenly started using cars.
That's because you haven't thought through what it's going to be like when those cars aren't driven by humans.
There are about 550 miles of roadway in the parts of Hong Kong where the vast majority of people live and work; most of that is narrow, much of it is on steep grade, and almost all of it dates back to the days of pulled rickshaws. Self-driving cars will almost certainly replace the taxi fleet and may well kill the bus lines, but they have no hope of matching the capacity of an underground train in places like this.
Even if we throw out tunneled trains, something like Chicago's El will be miles more efficient in a dense urban core than trying to cram thousands more cars into streets that weren't designed for them.
Autonomous vehicles will help us get away from the idea that everyone has to own or lease their own car to be considered a full-fledged adult. Once cars are no longer used to travel arbitrarily from one parking lot to the next, the result will be more people getting to their actual destinations in fewer cars.
This is a perfect example of the point I've been making (and been modded down regularly for) -- people simply aren't thinking through the consequences of the technology that's coming. The coming changes in the personal transportation business will be vast and profound in both economic and social terms, and they definitely won't involve fixed rails.
It's OK for ordinary people to ignore or underestimate the progress being made in this direction. It's not OK for urban transit planners, who are paid to think 20-30 years out, to make the same mistake.
No number of autonomous vehicles will get you out of the fact that automobiles are the least efficient way to transport people over roadways.
[1] http://www.core77.com/posts/8015/car-bus-bicycle-taking-up-s...
Because if it is, it isn't worth the space it takes up on the Internet. Self-driving cars won't be any more vulnerable to gridlock than trains are.
And none of this stuff is going to happen "overnight," especially in Seattle.
I don't care if the self-driving car revolution will take two decades - if we abandon mass transit, we will either have to greatly reduce our trips, or demolish half the city to build more roads.
This cannot be overstated.
There is nothing in the urban, built environment that is as terrible aesthetically and functionally as some big lumbering bus bonking its way through the city (and usually belching black smoke as it goes).
I am a huge advocate of public transit and I will do anything to not ride a bus.
Always remember the quote from Steve Jobs about tablets and the stylus:
"If you see a (bus), they blew it."
edit: Yes, yes I know all about BRT. Lipstick on a pig.
I'm pretty sure the NYC subway in the 80s could give it a run for its money:
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+subway+80s&espv=2&b...
I agree totally that buses have a negative stigma, some of which is rightly deserved.
Metro has almost completely eliminated the older high-floor diesels that are loud and rickety. Next up is ditching the longer, old conversion electric buses.
To get going, you need a low gear and a clutch of some kind. To get going up a steep hill, with a heavy load, you simply need an even lower gear. The problem has a solution.
The high low-end torque of electric motors is actually annoying in a transit vehicle. Particularly to those passengers who are standing up. The vehicle moves suddenly, flipping from zero acceleration to high acceleration. The time derivative of acceleration is called "jerk", for a good reason.
Things on wheels with a diesel engine in them tend to be oversized and driven by lowlife assholes who threaten cyclists and other motorists. At times (such as when accelerating or otherwise loaded) they spew noxious black smoke from their unmanaged, unoptimized engines that run fine on 25 octane garbage due to the way they are designed, and are noisy as hell.
The regulation for sulphur content in the fuel and the condition of diesel engines must be a joke in Canada. Definitely I don't see such black smoke coming out of trucks, or the pungent smell, in Japan, for instance. The trucks and buses smell similar to an indoor, household kerosene-burning heater, a bit like a paraffin candle; quite different from the acrid stench I'm used to smelling at home.
So that's where I am on the diesel yes/no question.
Move Seattle is supposed to fund more electrification of routes so maybe we get more wires in the next handful of years.
Frankly, I wish they would just go with a decent tram system (like Portland and many European cities).
I wonder why the don't consider electric buses with big batteries. We have a few of those in Beijing now, and they seem to work OK. I have no idea how long they have to be down for charging, however.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/News...
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/02/22/metros-battery-powe...
Metro is running Proterra EV buses (like a Nissan Leaf writ very large) on routes 226 and 241 on the Eastside. So far the only charger is at Eastgate P&R so the routes served by the Proterras have to go through there. They are entirely run on batteries, no overhead wire or diesel engine, but their range is limited to about a ~20 mile route and they don't hold a charge well with steep hills. They take around 20 minutes to go from discharged to full and about 10 minutes to recharge from normal route usage.
The new trolleys, separate from the Proterras, operating in Seattle now have batteries and can run off-wire for a few miles, including going up the 18% grade found at James St & 7th Ave. They're a lot better on hills and come in bendy-bus (articulated) styles that the Proterras currently don't have.
We're trying to build more streetcars but there is astounding pushback against devoting street capacity to exclusive lanes for them. The First Hill Streetcar, that runs from the ID to Capitol Hill Link Station, goes up two-lane-with-bike-path Broadway...and is slower than walking during parts of the day. On the other hand, it will get monumentally more useful if the Central City Connector--a streetcar route from the ID to Westlake along 1st Ave in its own lanes--is built because the CCC will connect both streetcar routes.
Personally, I'd love to see a dedicated-lane streetcar running between Mt Baker Station (Rainier Ave near Franklin HS) to University Link Station (just north of the ship canal along Montlake) on 23rd Ave. Cheaper than tunneling, in its own right-of-way, and running from, say, 5am to 1am every day of the week. That would be incredible and could easily replace route 48 with more capacity and better reliability.
Sadly, I suspect I will be dead and gone before the Central District gets any kind of high-capacity transit.
Rich people Uber.
SF needs more light rail. Lots of it.
... and more subway.
As in, both in this context, and originally?
I believe that BRT is popular among people making transit proposals because they are thinking about it as designers, not as users; they don't care that it is a bus, so they don't understand why other people do. All they see is a politically expedient way to draw some lines on a map.
Ask people who use transit, though, and very few of them will be impressed if you try to sell them a bus when what they want is a train.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6621364,-122.3451918,3a,75y,...
Compare that to the Skytrain in Vancouver, faster and never had that problem.
I also hate being jammed in with people. Just find it uncomfortable. Last time I took a public bus the guy next to me was pretty much asleep on my shoulder. I was tired too, but come on man. :/
1. Turn radius is pretty good: streetcars have 18-20m turn radiuses, buses are comfortable at 12m radius, doable at 9m, and can go lower. Buses are compatible with existing city forms.
2. Because of this you can change routes based on demand. This almost never happens, but it should.
3. Broken buses don't break the line.
4. Express buses can coexist with local service buses.
5. Turns out passing is a useful feature!
6. It would be possible to responsively add buses to meet demand. Never happens, but possible.
7. Variable stop frequency is a possibility. If you are on a late-night bus in New York they'll let you off at any corner you want. (Most cities lack this basic sense of decency, but I won't claim we do buses right.)
8. The vehicles are not proprietary. You don't like your buses? Buy any brand you like!
9. New manufactures could enter the market. Trains are regulated to a degree that makes it very difficult to enter the market. This is especially bad in the U.S., so maybe it's unfair: we have terrible regulation, and local manufacture requirements. This has a lot to do with the high subsidies trains require: it requires so much political will that everyone wants a piece of the pie.
10. Buses don't have to be inefficient. Intercity buses are often more fuel-efficient than intercity trains, for instance (I'm guessing this is mostly because they use variable pricing to run at capacity, but something like that is possible for transit too.)
11. Rubber wheels are pretty awesome for stopping, and stopping is pretty awesome for not killing people. Trains are incompatible with humans and even cars except at very low speeds, and require intense separation, or barriers with long lengths of times to let traffic and pedestrians clear. Surface trains substantially hurt the walkability of their immediate surroundings.
12. Buses can run lines that are more dense than trains, which is important for people with disabilities. Most disabled people I see are using buses.
13. We really do need roads everywhere. I remember making SimCity cities with only trains, but that's not a real thing. You need roads for emergency vehicles, trash collection, utilities and utility repair, your moving truck, and so on. I'd love to see roads scaled back, but they aren't going to disappear, so let's make the best of them.
Buses do absolutely suck. But I am not convinced they have to suck. Unfortunately transit systems (buses or trains) have no incentive to meet customer demand, their real customers are the government not the riders. Riders are a liability for transit systems, and so there's painfully little innovation.
Now that UW and Capitol Hill have a station, it makes sense to at least study the feasibility of an east-west line that could provide an alternative to at-grade transit and connect to the Link.
Another advantage of a crosstown route north of Lake Union is it could continue east over the brand new 520 bridge, which was designed to support Light Rail and connect to the east side.
As a resident of Seattle, the current plan is vexxing. I love transit, and I don't mind voting for something that I'll never see (as long as there are good reasons for the long timeline) but I'd certainly prefer a different set of priorities for light rail.
When I lived in the area I often joked I'd drive 405-90-5 if I was going from Kirkland to the U-District. Having spent 2 hours in traffic on the bridge alone in the past, it's not far from the truth.
The return commute is only screwy when there's a big con - SakuraCon for example.
I did take Mercer for the three months I worked at Lab 126 in Fiona, but I assume it's better now that construction is over. It was much worse.
520 eastbound has mostly not been bad since ramp metering started, and even better since tolling started. Westbound is a bit of a different thing, though my impression is that it clears up much earlier now than it used to.
In Seattle, Sts are E/W, Aves are N/S.
This is an extremely common mistake in Seattle, and I have no idea why.
Streets are North/South; Streets has an S in it and so does South, they all also have a T.
Ave are East/West; Ave has an E in it and so do both East and West, also Ave and East share an A.
It's either really silly, or genius, or complete luck that my overly analytical brain turned into something real.
"Avenue" has N for North and U for South
You solved the case!
I'm already half tempted to vote no on ST3 because running light rail to ISSAQUAH--expected to get 11,000 riders per day, or 70% of the riders that a single route (number 48) through the CD gets--before filling in the gaps in the rest of our system is just...galling. But I'll probably vote yes because it's not like voting no is going to end subarea equity.
(See the seattlesubway.org yellow line for what a Denny/23rd Ave "Metro 8 Subway" would look like.)
The U District stop is actually a great example of this. Farther west (e.g. near The Ave), there is much more transit access and substantially more walkable areas. But the priority seems to be getting suburbanites to Huskies games.
Disclaimer: That's not to say I dislike the extension. It's the first time Link has been useful for anything other than getting to the airport.
An east/west option that ran from Ballard, stopped in U-District, and continued to Bellevue and Redmond would be the bomb. Game-changing for recruiting -- imagine living in Ballard and working at Microsoft, or living in Redmond but working at Expedia (after they move.) And your commute not sucking the life out of you.
Here's more information on ST3:
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/24/st3-draft-plan-over...
http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/31/how-to-fix-st3-so-s...
D.C.'s Metro system: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/20/dc-metro-repairs-closed-es...
This is the biggest problem with transit outside NYC/Chicago. Those cities are surrounded by walkable suburbs that justify regional rail. Everywhere else, the surrounding suburbs were not designed at all, and it's questionably valuable running rail out to them.
I take the Silver Line to work in D.C. None of it runs through any sensibly designed area. There are a tiny handful of apartments within walking distance of any Silver Line station, and even the closest ones are separated by enormous dangerous parking lots. My commute is actually takes longer than it did back when I used to commute from a walkable New York suburb into midtown, even though the physical distance is about 40% less.
I'm pretty skeptical of the return on transit dollars in place like Seattle. It seems to me that it's simply too late to turn these places into real cities.
No, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the political reality we're dealing with. It has to do with a rural/urban divide in the state legislature, and a resentment of Seattle's financial and cultural dominance.
The transit project described in the article may be centered on Seattle, but it is not a Seattle transit network: it is a regional project, and the region sprawls out across the entire eastern half of the Puget Sound - it's eighty miles long, from north to south, and 10-15 miles wide. It's not a city at all - it includes at least half a dozen different cities and a dozen smaller towns, plus all the suburbs between them, and a fair amount of rural land beyond the suburbs.
Sound Transit is only building Seattle transit by accident, tunneling their way through our city as a side effect of the "regional spine" they're trying to extend all the way through the Puget Sound region. Seattle is simply trying to make the best of it by pushing them as hard as we can to build something that resembles a proper subway system while they happen to be passing through. It's costing a fortune and taking forever, but it's better than nothing, which is what we are allowed to build on our own.
I'm not sure I understand this properly. How does this happen?
As far as I can tell both places are roughly the same in demographics, education, and only recently has SF surged ahead in wealth (and SF used to be even worse than it is now.)
The longer answer is complicated.
1. Some urban planning decisions are made at the state, not local, level, which means that more housing gets built and prices are lower: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11370258/honan-zoning-reform-bil....
2. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is insane. For example, it allows anyone to sue anyone building anything on environmental grounds.
3. CA has Prop 13, which is also insane, and Prop U in LA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_U which is insane. Prop U encourages some people at the margins to pick SF over LA.
4. SF has rent control, which means that many voters are encouraged to say no to everything.
5. The cities' histories are different: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing. SF has a longer history of radical, economically illiterate politics than Seattle.
6. Seattle's city government is not quite as reasonable as it looks. Google "The Seattle Process" or Kshama Sawant. It only looks better than SF because SF has uniquely terrible voters.
Seattle has a population of 652k, with an average density of 8k/sq mi.
San Francisco has a population of 864k, with an average density of 18.5k/sq mi.
And yet:
Seattle has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.5
SF has a jobs-to-housing ratio of 1.6
So what explains SF's higher costs? Density coupled with massive wealth inequality. Period.
Upzoning increases land value in a tight market. Markets remain tight in desirable locations and no amount of development has been able to keep up; population is growing, job growth in the tech sector is high, and the wealth gap coupled with high demand means that there's enormous price elasticity for some, who then push the rest out.
High density construction carries a higher barrier to entry, and is almost exclusively allocated to rental units. Additionally, high density construction allows one to combine multiple profitable uses in the same plot; commercial and residential.
This accelerates the wealth divide, putting more money into the hands of fewer and fewer land owners, with rents tracking whatever the high demand is capable of sustaining. Nobody else ever builds up equity, the city winds up being owned by fewer and fewer, and the low end of the market is priced out.
This then requires attempts at government correction, through subsidized housing; either as outright grants to developers, zoning variances granted to allow higher margins in exchange for permanently affordable (but still rental!) units, tax credits, etc.
This further accelerates the growth of the wealth divide, as development and development investment companies begin to specialize in cornering access to (and brokerage of) these economic perks that are unavailable to individual potential home owners.
Density does not fix housing. It literally never has, and I do not even begin to understand how this conception became the norm amongst housing activists. As near as I call tell, it's something that's been green/liberal-washed as a necessity by those who profit the most from the government-funded development incentives.
We even stole your gold rush idea. Thanks for that. Great idea.
Basically we've been sucking you guys dry for 150 years :p
Yes. Most towns have zoning rules that include minimum parking requirements for new construction.
The region is plagued by horrid traffic steaming from several interacting issues.
* There are four large cities, each of which also has numerous suburbs and even un-incorporated areas. Urban planing across these regions sure seems like it doesn't occur.
* 'The Rent is Too darn High'; because there needs to be /far/ more supply side control of the market.
* Housing near jobs (and near quality education for workers with children) is consequently very expensive; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Jobs are no longer permanent lifetime things, with a single 'bread winner' able to easily support their family; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Moving is a PITA; contributing to workers living far from their jobs.
* Transit isn't laid out in a mesh, thus doing anything other than suburb to downtown (a model that worked in the era of big companies and lifetime employment) takes many transfers and a lot of time; encouraging workers to /drive/ (for freedom).
The best solution that I see is making it possible for at least the major bus lines to be run as self-driving systems. A 'car pod' version of bus transit with point to point automated driving, particularly if those pods could link up and/or draft for improved efficiency on the long hauls looks like a far better solution.
Any place east of 1st (about 3 blocks from the water) and north of Pioneer Square has plenty of space for parking garages below grade but above sea level. At 6th and Pike you've got space for at least 6 levels of parking, and there are a few areas higher than that.
[0]: Which I view mostly as a good thing -- late last year they hit a saturation point that resulted in the first month-to-month decrease in rent for new leases; my hope is that this will alleviate some of the upward rent pressure on the lower end of the market and make the city livable for a broader range of incomes. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, but it's far more likely if rents for the new construction face downward pressure from inflated supply.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-transit-pro...
You can't run trains to everybody's home or workplace, but you can run trains to within a couple of miles of the endpoints of the commutes of many persons. Can some of this large budget somehow be used to subsidize folding bikes?
Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
The point of bike share is for casual cyclists or people who want to pair bike share with transit for the last mile (which is annoying to do with your own bike). It's a niche that's not really intended to compete with people owning their own bikes.
> the stations were spaced horribly around town and riders can not know with confidence that there will be a station near their destination to park.
Agreed. Apparently this is supposed to get better with the city taking over the program, because then they can pair the stations with transit stops better.
> Also, 8-9 months of the year Seattle is pretty miserable to bike in without the proper gear -- even with the proper gear it's very far from what I would call "appealing."
Seattle isn't really that rainy. It's actually less rainy than Munich, for example, and Munich has more than 4x the bike mode share as Seattle.
Seattle doesn't get heavy rain, it's just damp for weeks at a time. How do they compare in dry days per year rather than total amount?
This project will cost ~$15k per resident, roughly equivalent to the per-person national debt.
a) Functional transit for a one time payment of $15 grand and then chump change for train fare for the rest of my life
and
b) Buying, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and driving a car at a vastly greater cost (probably around 10 grand per year all-in) for the rest of my life
I would pick A) every time. It's not even a contest, I would pick A) at twice the price. Hell, it would probably be economically rational to pick A) at 5x the price.
Anecdotally, I've traveled a reasonable amount. Any city I've been to with a world calls metro system (6 I've seen) are all hugely appreciated by the local and tourists alike. I've never head someone say "that underground was a waste of money". In cities without metros I've heard a bunch of complaints about the lack of the ability to move around quickly/easily.
But that's nowhere in the $50B plan.
We can build as much housing as we want, but as long as we lack a solid public transportation system, we'll be miserable: more cars on the roads, longer commutes, etc.
SF itself has to fix its MUNI; we need a 24-hr BART that is cheap and reliable; a CalTrain that runs very frequently and is 24-hr again; and feeder routes in the smaller cities.
I'd get everyone a decent, quality bicycle loaded with all the right features for commuting/road use, and improve the cycling infrastructure.
No idea what I would do with the gobs of money left over after that.
I'd definitely not waste any on some buses, though.
At the end of the day the road is only so large, cars are relatively big, and it's rush hour and everyone is travelling at the same time.
Public transit is more efficient.
Light rail can carry up to 13,000 passengers per direction per hour. A highway lane carries up to 1,900 cars per lane per hour.
It takes about 6 lanes of highways to match 1 lane of light rail given current car usage (1 passenger per car).
If usage patterns change (say, an automated carpool that maximizes the capacity of the vehicle -- say 5 people per car), you still have 1900 * 5 = 9,500 passengers per lane per hour, which is good, but still worse than a single lane of light rail. Hey, worse is better right?
However, the bottleneck in many cities isn't the highway, but rather the smaller city streets the highway feeds into. Transit can sidestep this bottleneck altogether with subway tunnels, which automated vehicles can't. Even after everything else, light rail is still more economical and more environmentally friendly.* Finally, light rail converts to automated train operation quite handily (further increasing capacity), especially if all the other cars around it are automated too.
* I was about to say more comfortable, but is being crammed into a small car more or less comfortable than standing on a cramped train?
1. create autonomous vehicle road network by both creating new roads and retrofitting existing roads with physical barriers where desirable. This would be similar to building rail lines in places (say elevated or tunnels), except with much more flexibility.
2. put up a RFP/challenge to auto manufacturers for fleet of autonomous electric vehicles, likely of a few types for different passenger loads (2-10) and needs (disabled access, small cargo).
3. put up a RFP/challenge to build efficient routing backend for fleet.
4. put up a RFP/challenge for both card-based (for those without smartphones) and app-based pickup and destination setting, as well as car interface to handle route changes. Plan financially for frequent improvements due to rapid tech changes.
5. create infrastructure of very small depots throughout city where autonomous charging as well as manned cleaning & minor repairs could happen.
6. rope in social services to have progressive prices based on income, allowing typical subsidies for seniors, disabled, low income, etc.
Here’s why:
* Separate lanes are helpful for near term autonomous vehicles that are not as good at avoiding things. They’re also good as a backup for smaller human-driven busses in the shorter term as the autonomous vehicle development ramps up.
* Can use existing highways, sectioning off a separate lane and creating select off-ramps to connect to autonomous road network.
* Roads are cheaper per mile than rail.
* Rather than large highway tunneling projects (oh seattle…), can build small one-way tunnels over certain stretches where useful - say a few blocks that typically have terrible traffic.
* Smaller vehicles with fewer passengers helps the inconvenience factor and last-mile problem of busses by providing flexibility in pickup/drop-off locations
* smaller vehicles and more convenience in locations helps to improve public image - it’d be like uber/lyft but without the traffic.
* Kickstarts rapid improvement in autonomous vehicle industry by being a large customer, which can benefit city with better tech over time (vs aging train cars).
* Adds useful infrastructure for the future where private fleets and privately owned cars can participate with their own autonomous vehicles. Essentially, it allows for a phase-out of publicly owned/run autonomous vehicle fleets in the future, were that to be something that makes sense.
I could see GM/Lyft and Uber being bidders in this process, among other auto manufacturers. There may even be an opportunity to own less of the fleet and simply rent at a particular per mile rate.
In short: spend money on the future of transportation, not the past.
I will vote no in the fall. And I'll encourage my friends to do so. This makes me a minority in Seattle but I'm ok with that.
Some additional food for thought: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...
There are about 1.7 billion rides taken on it every year with over 200 miles of track. It'd be an understatement to say that the city could not exist the way it does now without it - autonomous vehicles won't get the sheer number of people moved every morning and every night that the subway does. A full order of magnitude more people take the subway on a daily basis than there are taxi rides, all for a maximum of $2.75 regardless of how far they're traveling.
It might not be the best thing for Seattle (personally, I am a big proponent), but a blanket distaste for light rail is antithetical to what has proven fundamental for cities around the world.
As far as spending public money, there are already efficiency concerns (something that your article definitely demonstrates) - I'm curious how you think public money could help fund technology that fundamentally does not exist today? Is that not a higher risk for future technology?
Autonomous vehicles cannot possibly solve our transportation problems because the best they can do to reduce congestion is nothing; at worst, they will aggravate problems by increasing the number of trips taken.
I believe that if every car on the road was autonomous tomorrow that traffic flow rates (cars/hour) would at least double. Maybe even triple.
The amount of congestion from human bullshit is insane. Cars slow down entering tunnels for no reason. Cars slow down leaving tunnels when their eyes adjust to the brightness. I-90 gets slower on sunny days than on cloudy days. I-5 north out of Seattle backs up because of a hill. I get excited if I can go a full week with an accident on 90 causing backup. Even when it's cleared to the side humans rubber neck.
And that's just getting started. Once we start making changes to street design to enable autonomous it gets even better. Elimination of street parking alone would do wonder.
Things get really fun when riders don't need to get their car back. When it's a ride share model. Parking garages are relatively inefficient now. You need to be able to get any car out at any time. But what if you didn't? What if you just needed a car. It'd be a first-in, first-out queue. We'd be able to cram 3x to 4x as many cars in a garage.
You'd also be able to order a car that fits your needs. Most trips don't require a trunk. Most cars for most trips could be smart car sized. You'd only need a bigger car if, well, you needed it.
No. I believe that asking for more light rail is asking for a faster horse. It's ancient technology. We should be looking forwards, not backwards.
Anyway, you're suggesting that we could get a 2x or 3x improvement in 20-30 years by completely overhauling all of our transportation infrastructure: but we can get a 10x improvement in the same span of time at a lower cost with less risk using proven technology.
I'm happy to see people proceed with research on autonomous cars, and can certainly see the value of an Uber/Lyft type service using robot drivers, but it would be a mistake to sit and wait for speculative technology research to maybe solve the problem when we can for sure solve the problem if we just get going with what we already have.
What's the worst that can happen, we end up with lots of good options? Robot cars might make cabbies obsolete, and it is likely that they will change the way we use other transportation technologies, assuming they work the way people are hoping they will, but they won't make light rail obsolete any more than the invention of the jet engine made the automobile obsolete.
But I do agree with other people that we need to redesign our transportation infrastructure in ways that reduce or prohibit cars.
Point: They are complementary technologise, solving fundamentally orthogonal problems, and can and should co-exist to create the best possible infra. (P.S. I already train from CapHill to UDistrict then get an Uber within the UDistrict)
That said, you're welcome to argue that Seattle does not and will never need the throughput optimization provided by trains. That cars alone are enough. But I don't believe it's in your best interest, to compare the throughput of cars to trains. Actually it may even be an active disservice to the autonomous car movement to try and compare them to trains (regarding throughput).
Meanwhile, anecdotally, living and working on Denny (20 min hilly-walk, 7min bus no traffic): It is consistently bumper to bumper (at all times that matter) and only getting worse. We seem to have a throughput problem! With similar issues on Mercer. If your data is different, I'd love to hear more about that.
As stated in another reply I-5 North congests every single day between the 520 and 45th st exits. Why? Because of a hill. There's a big hill there. And every meatbag driver slows down going up it. Which causes people behind to brake. Which creates a shockwave traffic jam.
That wouldn't happen with robot drivers. Nor would cars slow down when they enter a tunnel for reasons I've yet to figure out. Nor would they slow down when exiting that tunnel when their eyes adjust to the summer brightness. Traffic is actually worse on I-90 on bright, sunny days than on overcast (but not rainy) days! Again, that slow down would not happen at all with robot drivers.
So I disagree. Autonomous cars can very much improve throughput. The maximum number of cars that can cross a stretch of road at rush hour is significantly higher with autonomous cars than with meatbag drivers. In my opinion.
What I really want is Seattle to throw a few million bucks at Google to do a study. Show us a vision of an autonomous Seattle. Build a simulation and present it. If Google gives us a "best case" and we still think light rail is better then great. I'm sold. Let's pick the better option. But right now we're not truly considering all options.
1. The theoretical throughput limits of cars on highways vs trains, for transporting people, is drastically in the favor of trains.
Generally 1 car per 2 secs per lane - 1.5 people per car on average = 3 people per sec on a 4 lane highway. On the other hand a 15mpg train, moves 6m per sec, with a width of 2 meters = 12 m^2 per sec = 12 people comfortably per sec. While this is a relatively slow train, and we are comparing a train (land mass = 1 highway lane) with a 4 lane highway, the math is still drastically in favor of trains. this still holds, even if autonomous cars can achieve a 100% increase to highway throughput limits.
2. Seattle may not need the level of throughput only achievable by trains. You're probably right that currently Seattle does not and will not need more throughput than cars on highways can achieve.
However, I don't think this holds true as time continues indefinitely into the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
Metros in most major cities already have trains that drive themselves. There may be a driver, but all they do is open and close the doors. Some systems (like Vancouver) don't have drivers at all.