Category / Transit Thoughts & Curiosities

by Adron

Reviewing Seattle’s Neighborhoods, Madison Park Area

This is my first entry in what will be a series.  I’ve been searching throughout a number of neighborhoods to check out the ideal combinations of livability features.  The lease is coming up in about 5 months and I want to be prepared to get into a more ideal location.
Here are my measurements and data that I’ll provide with each of these reviews.
  • Walk Score: from at least 2 residential locations in the neighborhood:  Via http://www.walkscore.com/
  • Transit Options:  What buses traverse the area and what other town centers/areas are easily navigable via transit.
  • Night Life:  What time does the neighborhood generally “shut down”, or at least appear to.
  • Sleep Quality:  This is simply a combination of noise, crime, feeling safe, and other measures and feeling rolled into one.  Ranking will be Good or Bad.
  • Arterial Mapping:  This will be a map of the primary transit & road arterials in and out of the neighborhood.
  • The Unique Bits:  This is a list of things that make a particular neighborhood unique.  Think of it like a list that makes this neighborhood not like the ticky tacky, cookie cutter, suburban sprawl neighborhoods.
  • Architecture Mix:  See this chart for examples:  http://www.theplancollection.com/house-plan-styles/

Seattle’s Madison Park Area Review

Google Images with the search Madison Park, Seattle, WA.

Bing Images with the search Madison Park, Seattle, WA.

The first neighborhood that I’m covering here is Madison Park Area Neighborhood.  This is a rather upscale, somewhat rich neighborhood that has great views of Lake Washington along the north and eastern edges and meshes up against the Madrona Park and Montlake Neighborhoods to the west and south.  The neighborhood has hundreds of beautiful homes, condos of many architectural styles such as Cape Cod, Coastal, Colonial, Contemporary, Modernistic, European, Feng Shui, California, Row Houses, and other architectural styles.  Barely a bad home among the lot, which is really impressive for any neighborhood of this size.

Architectural Mix:  Cape Cod, Coastal, Colonial, Contemporary, Modernistic, European, Feng Shui, California, Row Houses, and other architectural styles.

There are two primary arterials coming into and out of the area.  This can be a huge negative or positive.

The Unique Bits:  This neighborhood has some great unique elements.  At the end of Madison Avenue is a strip of little shops, bars, and other things right across from a gorgeous park.  In addition to this the views of Lake Washington are absolutely tranquil.  Nothing in this neighborhood is outrageously unique, but a calm, conservative, collected uniqueness about the neighborhood does exist.

Arterial Mapping:  2 Streets, East Madison Street & McGilvra Boulevard.  The area is surrounded on the western, northern, and eastern edges by a park, a waterway, and a beautiful lake limiting the arterial route options.

First there is East Madison Street that leads into and out of the area to downtown Seattle.  This route is mixed traffic, primarily cars and small delivery type trucks.  It is also the primary transit route in and out of the area.

The second primary route south, along the lake is McGilvra Boulevard East that then merges onto Lake Washington Boulevard East.  This route is absolutely beautiful riding along Lake Washington.

Neither of these roads however connect to any major infrastructure, highways, Interstates, or other arterials.  They’re also both slow moving routes, with maximum speeds around 20-30 mph.  For residential lifestyles this is perfect, if you have a commute to outlying areas of the city this is going to add 15-35 minutes to whatever commute one already has.  If you’re going downtown though the bus provides a direct and easy route down Madison Street.  If one works at Boeing, Microsoft, or an outlying area though they should do themselves and the neighborhood a service and not move here.  Otherwise you’ll be driving all the time, cluttering up the roads & causing congestion, etc.  If you absolutely love it though, I suppose those are just the trade offs.
Sleep Quality:  Crime is low (almost non-existent), the area is very quiet, and sleep is easily to attain.  The architectures of most buildings are solid, enabling quiet buildings even in stormy or wind whipping weather.
Night Life:  Night life in the area doesn’t exist.  There are no theaters, late night bars, or music venues nearby.  If you like quiet neighborhoods with minimal activity after 6-7pm this is a good area.  If you want to enjoy art, music, movies, or anything of that sort one would have to leave the area regularly.
Transit Options:  For commuting to downtown areas, this is not a bad place.  For getting to anywhere else in the city, or for after work hours transit usage this area doesn’t have except one option.  Which for those car-free lifestyles really limits one.
Walk Score:  This neighborhood received an 83 – Very Walkable.  Check out walk score for Madison Park for more information on the walk score, check out various commute measurements, and other information.  Overall Madison Park Area ranks 28th in walkable areas in Seattle.
Just for travelling context, the way I traveled into and out of this neighborhood was on these routes, via a zipcar.
Inbound Route:
Outbound Route:
by Adron

King County Metro + Sound Transit != TriMet

I haven’t done a ridership & statistics brain exercise in a long time. However Sound Transit sent out their ridership report recently and I had to check it out. I brought it up and immediately thought about a few people always harping on TriMet in Portland compared to Metro & Sound here in the Seattle area. TriMet does an amazing job, even though some of the locals still gripe to no end. Sure TriMet could be better, but they really ought to think before they hold up others that aren’t doing so well in comparison.

Let’s take a look at a few really basic examples.

Sound Transit + Metro had the following weekday ridership on various modes.

TriMet (Data Source:  http://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/performance-statistics/Nov2010.pdf)

  • All Bus Routes: 186,900 Cost Per Ride: 2.85
  • MAX (4 routes): 123,680 Cost Per Ride: 1.73
  • Commuter Rail: 1,350 Cost Per Ride: 15.76

King County Metro
All Bus Routes: 365,000 (Data Source: http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Metro_Transit_(King_County))
or
All Bus Routes: 306,074 (http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/strategy/PerformMgmt/BenchmarkProgram/Transportation/TR42_TransitRidership/TransitRidershipTable.aspx)

Note: King County Metro does such a poor job of keeping track of ridership with public access that I gave up even trying to figure out the cost per rider.  I’m honestly appalled by the poor statistics that are publicly available.  One can’t tell what the agency is doing, it really bothers me and can understand why the agency is such a blind spot of apathy for many in the Seattle Metropolitan area.  This is very unfortunate.  If anyone knows where or how to get this information from the agency, I’d love to know what the official statistics are.

Sound Transit (http://www.soundtransit.org/Documents/pdf/newsroom/Ridership_Q3_2010.pdf)
All Bus Routes: 45,305 Cost Per Ride: 7.47
Link (1 route): 23,762 Cost Per Ride: 6.53
Commuter Rail: 8,665 Cost Per Ride: 14.41
Streetcar (Tacoma Link): 2,907 Cost Per Ride: 3.83

Sound Transit does a vastly superior job with their web presence, communications, and overall organization of the agency.  Metro should be held to these standards and made responsible for providing at LEAST Sound Transit level public data and site standards.

So to those that rant on and on about how horrible TriMet is and how wonderful Metro + Sound Transit is, check your premise.  You’re way off base.  TriMet costs less to the taxpayer and carries more people for that money.  On a market share basis TriMet also carries almost 2x as many people in their service area as does Metro + Sound Transit put together.  Of course Sound + Metro have a vastly harder job being that Seattle has allowed a complete desecration and sprawl effect to take place.  Without a clear UGB and the respective funds not being blown to support suburban sprawl the transit agency has almost no hope of gaining a significant share of ridership like Portland (OR), or even more seriously Vancouver (BC) or other such city.

Either way, all the agencies shown are doing a great job at a core level, but there is vastly more that should and could be done.  I merely write this to state that there is an imbalance between what each agency accomplishes on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.  In the near future I’ll add Vancouver to this list of stats to show how much work truly needs to be done for a world class transit system and to up the scale, class, and efficiency in both Seattle and Portland.

In addition to the excellent job TriMet does coming forward with these numbers and information in general, they’ve now got a dashboard to show the ongoing trends for ridership!!  Check out http://www.trimet.org/about/dashboard.htm.

Here’s some of the charts:

Ridership

Ridership

Cost Per Rider

Cost Per Rider

by Adron

Tracked Hovercraft, More Routes

I just pulled up a quick route for going to Vivace Coffee from where I work near Pike Place.

In other news a few Portlanders I know of have a blog I stumbled upon a pretty cool blog by a group of Londoner’s called At War With the Motorist.

…and for the moment that’s all I’ve got.  I hope to find out more about the Seattle Streetcar, or “First Hill Streetcar” I believe they call it and the light rail extensions soon.  It seems things move slower than a glacier here in Seattle in relation to transit.

by Adron

Checking Out Seattle Neighborhoods

A friend is moving to Seattle and in addition my lease will be up in April.  To get ahead of the curve I’ve been checking out transit friendly neighborhoods around the city.

Ballard

Capitol Hill

Fremont

Any other suggestions on awesome transit friendly areas of Seattle?

by Adron

How Many SOVs Don’t Need to be in Rush Hour?

Note:  SOV == Single Occupancy Vehicle, which is what about 98%+ of cars on the road are, one driver operating the vehicle on an inefficient trip to do X.

As I was sitting on the bus, which was actively removing over 90 people from SOV use I started thinking.  How many of these people do NOT need to be on the road?  How many people are confused and just think they need to be SOV?  How many of these people could take transit, could live in a better location or more intelligently?  How many of these people, if auto transport wasn’t so heavily subsidized, could even afford to be taking frivolous trips like this?  How much wealth redistribution through transportation dollars encourages needless trips that clog Interstates, Highways, arterials and other routes?  Not to even mention the environmental damage of the excess and unneeded trips.

Common Fallacies for People Living in Smart and Intelligent Cities

“I need a car because of X situation that I have!”

This is a nonsense argument for the vast majority of people traveling to and from work.  If X is a child, or a last minute errand to run on the way home, or other item that is an outlier situation to the normal commute.  So many people use this excuse and have not thought through their situation.

If you have a child all the more reason to encourage more intelligent, non-auto centric lifestyles.

If the child is sick or injures themselves at school, which is the often cited argument, it doesn’t hold up because if it is a big enough emergency you DO NOT and SHOULD NOT drive directly to them.  The emergency services in the United States are for that specific reason.  They’ll most likely get there before you and you’ll most likely endanger lives of those around you “hurrying” to get to your child.  If the child just needs picked up from school, in most cities there are a number of alternatives to you running to them and bringing them home.  There are taxies, zip car options, and more.  You just have to think without the absurdity of saying it is a necessity for you to maintain and keep an entire car just for the sole purpose of an emergency that may or may not happen.

If you’re excuse is even less, such as X being something like karate class or a meetup after work, then again the planning you have done is poor.  If you live in any decent city, if you’re traveling so far out of your way for a meetup that it requires a car you’ve grossly mismanaged your life.  Keep things close, keep things local to you, keep things within reasonable reach.

…and don’t just do these things because it’s more intelligent to use transit and be a more responsible member of society.  Do it because it servers YOU better.  Imagine not paying auto insurance, having a wide selection of cars at your disposal instead of JUST ONE (ZipCar, Rentals, etc), imagine no car payment, no maintenance, not paying for gas(ZipCar), not worrying about “parking” every time you go downtown, not having to step into the most dangerous mode of transport in the country.  Just imagine not having to deal with those things.  With a little thinking – in the good & smart cities in the US – you can get rid of these concerns and problems.  You can be a part of the citizenry that isn’t causing the problems associated with the sprawl.

…and I promise you, your life will be better lived for it.

Here are a few of the cities where people should and could drive less en masse.

  • Portland, OR
  • Seattle, WA
  • Chicago, IL (already a heavy transit usage city, but more could be done)
  • New York, NY (also already a heavy transit use city at over 50% of the city using transit, but again, there is more that could be done to get rid of frivolous and unneeded trips)
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Los Angeles, CA (transit is amazingly making a huge come back in LA)
  • San Diego, CA
  • Boston, MA
  • New Orleans, LA
  • Denver, CO
  • Miami, FL
  • Tacoma, WA
  • Sacramento, CA

All of these cities, and there are more too, are cities that offer enough transit, bike, and other alternatives that more people should really think through and look at options besides car ownership or leasing.  There are literally millions of trips per day, millions of gallons of fuel, millions of hours of congestion time, and millions of dollars to save if additional people just think through their lifestyle paradigms a little.

It doesn’t take much, just being smarter about your day.  I’m done with my transit rant of the day.  So help me though, if someone comes up with the above excuse again I’m gonna…

Live better, peace! – Transit Sleuth