The 101

Transit has throughout history been directly tied; either through profits, funding, or other mechanisms to land development and the growth of cities.  Even today the more urban cities, that maintain a night life, human element, and a penchant for growth all have a distinct transit element that grows larger by the year.  There was a short segment of time during the mid 20th century where transit services saw a lag in use.  But those years are now long gone and transit is seeing a resurgence as a way to mitigate the destruction of cities and instead breath new life into cities, culture, and other positive features of cities.

With the new administration putting a little more focus on real city growth, intelligent zoning, restructuring the car centric maze of roads into or at least in addition to human oriented cities we’re seeing growth in transit discussions and opportunities.  The future, in this regard for cities and their inherent generation of wealth, increased standards of living, and cultural history looks much better than it did over the last 50+ years.

Albeit we’re giving up a lot of other things for this new life, but that is for a different discussion.

Transit Futures

With that said I’d like to look to the future.  Currently we have a lot of sprawl that continues on a daily basis to drain billions of dollars form general budgets and feed it directly into foreign growth, foreign oil purchases, and depletes our internal valuations of all sorts of things, which most notable is our currency wealth generation.  This sprawl devalues human involvement in our world, pushing us aside for the modes of transport we use – namely the personal automobile.  This  mode of transport, heavily subsidized in hundreds of ways both directly and indirectly, has been sold via dubious means as a private industry, free-market creation.  It is however, anything but.  However it has created a massive hurdle to creating interconnected, human scale, comfortable, livable, and culturally vibrant cities.

With the connection of cities, internally and externally to cities, becoming a more desired focal point in politics and slowly in private industry again some key points are being brought up time and time again.

• What is actually efficient, price competitive, and won’t significantly drag on our future generations.  In other words, what can we build that provides logistical movement of peoples without bankrupting our nation, our future, and our children’s future.  According to most sources we’re somewhere in the range of $1-16 Trillion behind in transportation infrastructure investment compared to China, Europe, and even Russia.  This includes highway, rail, and other infrastructure.  The question is, how do we fund it, how do we make the money for it?
• How can we bulk up movement and travel in corridors between close cities without excessively expensive highways, Interstates, and Airports?  This leaves the absurdly obvious answer of passenger rail.  The nit picking then starts about what kind, how much, how fast, and where is the money for this also?
• Highways, Interstates, and roadways in most cities are at their peak many hours of the day and increasingly this is becoming the standard operation of roadways.  Roadways don’t pay for themselves in the least, and many states are looking at privatization, tolling, and congestion pricing to find money to pay for these existing roads, new prospective roads, and other solutions.  Currently the other question is how to expand road capacity without destroying further neighborhoods and the ever unpopular eminent domain.

There are other points that keep coming up, but these are the main ones I keep seeing.  The recurring theme of all these points is funding.  Where can we, as a nation and peoples, come up with the money for this need & desire for better, more reliable, and more capable transportation?  I have two proposals for this, which have been mentioned many times in blogs and other places, but I’m going to tie these together since many are just suggested separately.

1. A national policy… elaborate…  or no national policy & increased focus on specific areas.

2. Private investment vehicles & interest generation.  Without this, there will NEVER be enough money in the industry to really build out like the nation desires and wants.

Finally after decades of yapping and years of construction the Seattle Sound Transit Link Light Rail is finally up and running.  With the sun gleaming in the windows of the Portland Union Station, Jo and I arrived, to take a seat and await the arrival of our fellow traveling crew.  I spoke to the red cap while waiting to reserve four seats together.  Michael finally arrived and we took point near the north east side of the station enjoying the sun beaming through the upper windows.  As the time grew close to departure, Josh texted me and was running a bit close to the wire.  He fortunately arrived in time, we boarded, and we took a walk to the Bistro.

En route we enjoyed a good round of conversation while in the Bistro.  The conversation ranged from transit, buses, to heavy rail and intercity idea.  Of course high speed rail came up too, and the faux idea that it is getting built.  The real idea is that we’re merely trying to get back up to the speeds we ran rail in the USA 50-60 years ago.  With solid running, good dispatching, and minimal freight interruptions we rolled into Seattle King Street Station on the Amtrak Cascades #500.

We all waited for the arrival of Abhijeet & Paul (our Videographer) whom arrived in short order.  With that we where all off trekking around the King Street Station fence and up the walkway over the tracks, by Union Station, and then down into the International / Chinatown Station for the Link Light Rail.  It took a while to figure out what a day ticket would be.  Instead the expectation was that users would pick their start location and destination.  This however, is not exactly what we where trying to do, we wanted a round trip with a single stop off.  After a while we figured out that a round trip ticket was equal to a day ticket.   After a purchase of a full round trip we all went back down in the station again and boarded the next LRV set that arrived heading toward Westlake Station.

  We arrived at Westlake and went up the multiple escalators into the mall.  There we grabbed some food at the mall food court.  One of the awesome transit features of this mall is the number of modes that it connects to now.  There is the Seattle Monorail, South Lake Union Streetcar (A.K.A. SLUT), Link Light Rail, Metro Buses, Sound Buses, and a few others that drive into the area.

After grub we headed back down to Westlake Station to board the south bound LRVs for Tukwila.  I have to mention that Westlake Station is really something impressive.  It is a grand station unlike the others along the downtown tunnel system.

After we all boarded we made a straight run all the way to the Tukwila Station.  The run down through the wooded area north of Tukwila is amazing.  The LRVs ride along raised tracks that stand at minimum a few dozen feet above the ground.  As we rolled parallel to the highway we actually passed steady moving traffic.  We hung out in Tukwila for a few and checked out the station.  There where two li
nes of people at the ticket machines that where about 40 people long each.  I was honestly surprised to see this, but good to see solid ridership anyway.

We all made it back for our Amtrak Cascades #509 trip home to Portland.  All of us, I’m sure could say we’re now well versed and a bit impressed by Seattle’s Light Rail.  I’ll have a write up in the near future of what I believe, from what I have sleuthed, of what the ridership will be and where their pain points and positive points of the line will be.

Overall, thumbs up!  But Sound Transit – PLEASE – fix the stupid ticketing.  Offer a day ticket or at least just a straight flat rate each way or something.

Transit Sleuth TV:  Produced, edited, and created by Paul Peterson

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5869858&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Transit Sleuth TV: Seattle’s Link Light Rail from Paul Peterson on Vimeo.

Awesome.

Of course Amsterdam also has MASSIVE transit ridership, trams, buses, etc.  But above all, people there live well and bicycle all the time.  Amsterdam is not this cesspool Bill O’ Reilly speaks of, I think he’s mistaken it with Washington DC or something.

Bring out the riders.  Tonight was a mighty toasty 80+ I'd guess.  The #9, down to a frequency of every 30 minutes had a full load of about 38 people aboard.  My guess, everyone is wondering around out in the heat since we only get about 2-6 weeks of this heat at the most.  Personally I'm hoping on only a few more days of this incessant temperature.

This brought up the ongoing debate us transit nerds have been having time and time again, that bus service needs bumped up and paid attention to in Portland.  Yeah, we have a world class system, this is true.  But I am afraid I must agree, that bus service does truly need some attention.  I'm not saying a lot, but a little TLC would go a long way.

Tonight is a prime example, and I know the union isn't able to handle this type of service level, but TriMet should have been able to dynamically bump up service levels within 30 minutes to get an extra bus into the flow out here.  Sure 38 people isn't that many, but there where more, as I confirmed with a friend, standing a waiting within another 20 minutes or so.  Unfortunately for them that left another 40 minutes until the next bus.  TriMet needs to add some dynamic abilities to their services.  There are several steps that need to happen.

1. The Unions and TriMet need to come to a flexible work shift agreement to bring drivers in on short notice without getting slammed hard for the hours.  There really isn't any point in providing the service if the Union requires excessive pay, especially when they could get drivers to volunteer to be available and would probably be happy for the regular pay rates for the time.
2. This is the big one, more so than the Union agreement.  TriMet needs to be able to respond flexibly to changes in ridership movements.  When there are crowds outside that want to ride, TriMet needs to have a way to track and dynamically flex routing muscle when need be.  Currently they don't have that capability, at least not by what I could figure just by thinking through some of the issues from a technological perspective.

I'll elaborate on this second point.  With a few observable cameras, that are most likely already in place, and a single observer they could monitor flows of people all over the city at key bus stop locations.  Based on that they could call in drivers, or drivers currently ready for deployment, to key routes to get people moving.  Tonight TriMet has had an opportunity to move several thousand extra people in the course of a few hours, but service levels just remained the same as the schedule dictates.

In today's Internet age, this is kind of silly that service can't dynamically reflect increased flows of people.

I'll write up some more movement and routing ideas in the near future.  Some of the other points I've been thinking about is how to improve the bunching that happens on so many routes.  I suspect TriMet could gain a 2-5% ridership increase and decrease buses on the road by about 2-5% also just by a few fixes to bunching.  But more on that later, for now I'm off to some more code, transit, and general geekdom.

I’m sitting a few days ago reading the RailwayAge Site and WHAM!  I found this article about more Talgo Trains being purchased!  I was floored.  With all the idiocy around the FRA limitations and requirements I thought there would never be another one in the country.  I’m glad to know that I was wrong, Talgo makes a great train set.  Here’s the snippet,

"The state of Wisconsin will purchase two 14-car train sets from Las Rozas, Spain-based Patentes Talgo SA to replace current equipment used in Amtrak’s Hiawatha Service between Milwaukee and Chicago. The agreement includes an option to buy two more trains if the state gets federal stimulus money to extend rail service from Milwaukee to Madison, the state capital.

Talgo will perform final assembly of the car order at facilities yet to be determined in Wisconsin, generating up to 80 jobs, said Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle Friday. Each train set has a capacity of 420 passengers.

"Today we are embarking on a new era of passenger rail service that creates high-skilled jobs, spurs economic growth, and makes travel safe and comfortable,” Doyle said. The governor made his announcement at Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, touting the deal as the Badger State’s first step toward implementing high speed rail.

Amtrak currently operates Talgo equipment on its Cascades Service in the Pacific Northwest; Talgo subsidiary Talgo, Inc., is based in Seattle."

My questions now are;

1. How did they get this past the absurd laws and regulations of the FRA?
2. Talgo has stated in the past they’d work for an FRA compliant train if enough orders where made, two trains with options however doesn’t qualify for that, so…?
3. So they Hiawatha Service between Milwaukee and Chicago, which I don’t believe even really needs to get the tilt action going, has some good straights, and could get some speed out of these sets.  Will Amtrak be able to achieve this?

Has anyone else heard anything else about this?