Sprawl & Transportation posts from the Daily Score blog - Sightline Daily

The Tunnel Won't Be Boring

Eric de Place — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:33:57

Seattle's planned deep-bore tunnel could get even more contentious soon. As state engineers flesh out their early cost estimates, a comparable tunneling project has hit another snag. The Seattle Times reports:

The Brightwater sewage-treatment project, which is costing local ratepayers $1.8 billion, is delayed yet again because fixing a damaged tunnel-boring machine stuck deep underground will take months longer than originally thought.

This should be eye-catching because Brightwater's sewage tunnel construction uses a smaller-scale but very similar tunneling technology to what is planned for the tunnel under downtown Seattle. And the Brightwater tunneling project has encountered numerous problems.

Earlier this year, both machines working on the two "Central Tunnels" were damaged and await repairs underground. The one that was due to be operational by November is, apparently, in worse condition than originally believed. The other is not due to be fixed until December or early 2010.

So the project will be delayed further and the costs will continue to mount:

The delay likely will push completion of the project — originally scheduled for 2010 — into 2012, project manager Gunars Sreibers said Tuesday.

It isn't yet known how much repairs will cost and how much of the cost might be paid by the county, the contractor or the manufacturer of the damaged machines, but, Sreibers said, "We're in the tens of millions of dollars of money at issue."

If Seattle's deep-bore tunnel were to encounter similar problems, it could pose a serious risk for Seattle property taxpayers, who are designated by state legislation to pick up the tab for any cost overruns. The legality of that legislation has been much disputed, but at least one influential legislator has vowed to enforce the provision. (At best, the current funding legislation does not adequately clarify who pays for cost overruns, a potentially serious problem.)

Amplifying the worrisome lessons from Brightwater, the deep-bore tunnel project’s costs were first estimated when the project’s design was considered only 1 percent complete. (Today, the project is considered to be 5 percent designed, but the state has declined to release updated cost estimates until it is 15 percent designed.) None of this is good news, but the Brightwater experience is, unfortunately, consistent with the majority of major tunneling projects undertaken in the area, a topic I covered in a recent report for Sightline, "Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunneling Projects."

But I also have at least a partial defense of the Brightwater project. In the course of writing the report, I looked into the cost estimates for Brightwater in some detail and I concluded that the media has not been entirely fair. For example:

The existing $1.8 billion tab for the project is roughly double what the Metropolitan King County Council was told when it first approved the project.

That implied 100 percent cost overrun is technically true, but it's also misleading. Here's a fuller description that I included in the report:

According to newspaper accounts, the projected cost of the total Brightwater project—including a conveyance system for transporting sewage underground, a marine outfall system, and a new wastewater treatment facility—has already exceeded its initial estimates by more than 100 percent. However, this figure is based on an early cost estimate from 1999 of approximately $880 million, which in turn was based on a conceptual design of a wastewater system, without taking into account the actual length and route of the tunnels, the actual cost, or inflation. Cost estimates released in 2004, when the project design was 30 percent complete, established a higher budget baseline that accounted for actual design and siting choices, as well as inflation for materials and labor. Using these updated figures, the total Brightwater project is, at most, 24 percent over budget. [Update 11/20/09: More precisely, I mean that the project's current projected expenditures are, at most, 24 percent higher than the budget approved as the official baseline in 2004.]

And the County Council has approved the higher expenditures for the project.

Additionally, the Brightwater project managers deserve credit for being forthright in a way that some other public agencies are not. The public gets to see annual reports and monthly project updates plus annual quarterly audits. Their community relations officers are informative, engaged, and committed to keeping the public apprised. It's only because of their diligence and accountability that the media has any realistic view of the project's difficulties.

Unfortunately, my experience to date leads me to believe that we should not expect a similar level of openness from officials working on Seattle's deep-bore tunnel.

Introducing the Bike Tree

Alan Durning — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:43:30

A couple years ago, I mentioned that secure bike parking is important to creating affordable, green transportation.

Personally, I’m well provided. Here’s the backyard bike shed I built with my father in-law.

Here’s the bike storage room in Sightline’s building in downtown Seattle. (Pretty nice!)

And here’s what bike storage looks like in one bike-happy Japanese community, courtesy of video from the Guardian in the United Kingdom. Read about it here.

Where the Carbon Emissions Sidewalk Ends

Roger Valdez — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:53:08

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

In Portland, residents have shown strong interest in cultivating “20-minute complete neighborhoods”— places where residents can safely walk a relatively short distance from home to most of the destinations and services they use every day. Fundamentally, the 20-minute neighborhood concept is another way to talk about or describe walkable, bikable environments and vibrant, human-scale neighborhoods—in essence, complete neighborhood communities.

Click here for full size image.

So while Seattle also has a climate plan, their City Council , in contrast with Portland's, has been at work actually undoing a dedicated source of funding often called the “head tax” -- a small $25, annual tax charged to businesses for each employee that drives to work -- to support neighborhood bike and pedestrian infrastructure. But Seattle isn’t putting their money where their climate plan says it should.

Since motor vehicle emissions are the single largest source of climate pollution in Seattle, the City must do even more to provide climate friendly transportation choices such as public transit, biking and walking — and to encourage greater use of those alternatives.

The repeal of the “head tax” during Seattle’s budget deliberations this month will eliminate $4.5 million in dollars to promote walking over driving, a move that seems inconsistent with the City of Seattle’s ambitions to be a global leader in reducing emissions.

So the best way to judge a climate action plan may not be just by the bench marks it sets for the next 40 years, but where the shoe soles hit the pavement: where are dollars flowing today for long term pedestrian infrastructure?

Image derived from flickr user ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser, distributed under a Creative Commons license:http://www.flickr.com/photos/clickflashphotos/ / CC BY 2.0

Walk Score Adds Transit

Clark Williams-Derry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:26:19

Walk Score, which has become the most widely-used measure of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in North America, has added a new trick: they're now incorporating transit data into their walkability ratings. So in addition to stores, restaurants, parks, and the like, Walk Score now treats nearby bus stops and rail stations as key ingredients of a walkable neighborhood.

What makes this extra nifty is that Walk Score has already partnered with a bunch of national real estate websites to incorporate walkability rankings into real estate listings. So now, all those real estate sites will have data on transit access, too.

Sadly, Walk Score's new transit ranking only works in places where transit agencies have made their "transit feeds" -- the data on transit locations and schedules -- freely available to the public. So if you live and walk in Portland, OR, you're in luck. Same goes for a handful of smaller transit agencies around the Northwest -- Island and Jefferson counties in Washington, Tillamook County in OR, and Humboldt County California. But even though King County Metro and Vancouver, BC's Translink publish their transit data for Google's use, their transit feeds are kept private--so third parties like Walk Score can't get access to them.

So the good folks behind Walk Score have set up an online petition to ask local transit agencies to release their transit service data to the public. (I've signed the petition -- and if you care about walkability and transit, you should too!)

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user kworth30: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kworth30/ / CC BY 2.0]

The Fiscal Crisis At Metro Transit

Doug MacDonald — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:21:22

Doug MacDonald is a Sightline fellow. He served as Secretary of Transportation for Washington State from 2001 to 2007 and now lives in the Greenwood neighborhood in Seattle. He mostly rides the Metro 358, 5, 48 and 70 and the Sound Transit 550, plus whatever comes along in the downtown transit tunnel.

It’s a fundamentally worthy public enterprise, facing the toughest of challenges: sustaining service to its riders while it stands awash in a rising tide of red ink. But King County Metro Transit—the largest transit agency in Washington State, providing more rides each year than the rest of the state’s transit agencies combined—needs a strong and focused board of directors to guide the system through this crisis.

Good luck finding that kind of leadership. In recent years, the political oversight structures governing Metro have demonstrated little aptitude for making smart strategic choices, achieving greater efficiencies of service, and setting sound priorities. As the gap between Metro's needs and funding has widened, it's been increasingly unclear whether anyone's truly minding that gap.

But before we dive into Metro’s governance problems, let’s talk about the agency’s biggest recent success: its remarkable tally of ridership growth. For the first half of 2009, Metro buses and electric trolleys fielded almost 380,000 boardings on its buses and electric trolleys on an average weekday. That’s 60,000 more boardings a day than in 2005—an impressive 20 percent gain.

True, ridership has slipped a bit since last year, as the economy has stumbled and gas prices have eased. Metro’s ridership gains are impressive nonetheless. For perspective, 60,000 new boardings is more than twice Sound Transit’s total projected light rail boardings (largely taken from existing bus trips) after the new tracks are finally open next year all the way to the airport. Or consider Portland, where combined bus and light rail system boardings have grown by just 4 percent since 2005.

Yet despite Metro’s ridership strengths -- and in some ways because of them -- the organization is in big trouble. Surging ridership has added to costs; the economic downturn has constricted sales tax revenues; and Metro, like any organization, is not free from a few leaks in its own roof.

Metro operates an astonishingly complex array of routes and services, a result of history and the enthusiasm with which new missions have been pressed upon it. It has an undeniably high cost structure. And burgeoning ridership comes with higher visibility, and elevated expectations from a public that cut little slack for late or over-crowded buses – of which there now are more than there used to be.

Those challenges are exacerbated by the fragility and Byzantine complexity of the agency’s finances. Metro’s proposed 2-year budget -- which is a moving target, given all the crucial deliberations still ahead in November -- stands at about $1.2 billion. Those funds come from county transit sales tax revenues. Plus fares. Plus payments from more than a dozen local cities, including Seattle to help support bus runs in the local precincts. Plus money paid Metro by Sound Transit to operate quite a few of the Sound Transit Ride the Wave Regional Express bus routes. Plus important, but limited, flows of federal transit aid.

But the recession has cut deeply into Metro’s crucial sale tax revenues. At the same time, the cities that pay for some of Metro’s services are facing their own budget crises, threatening funding cuts for transit -- a situation that will only worsen if Tim Eyman’s I-1033 wraps a bottom-of-the-economic-cycle tourniquet on future services. Sound Transit’s revenue projections have fallen 20% below the long-term estimates from last fall—meaning that it may be forced to look for potential cuts in its payments to Metro.

As those losses have hit Metro from one side, Metro riders have shouldered fare increases on the other. There has been one fare increase already, another is coming, and there will be more.

Putting it all together, the agency faces a serious budget shortfall. The exact size of the depends on whom you ask, and how many of the piecemeal fixes have been taken account of in the moving target. But $200 million over the next two years is a fair round number.

WHO MAKES THE BIG DECISIONS?

These budget woes have riveted the public’s attention on seemingly inescapable cuts to Metro services. The questions reverberate: When will they come? How deep will they be? Whose routes will feel the axe?

But first the all-important threshold question: Who actually makes the difficult decisions? Who exercises responsibility and accountability for steering Metro through this crisis? Is there a table somewhere with a sign that says “The Bus Stops Here”?

King County Metro’s management team, including General Manager Kevin Desmond and colleagues, reports to King County Executive Kurt Triplett. As the professional managers, they matter a lot. But setting Metro’s budget – the power of the purse strings over what Metro does and how it does it – is the responsibility of the King County Council. It’s to the Council that Triplett and Desmond have submitted Metro’s next $1.2 billion proposed two-year budget.

However, in 1992, when Metro was folded into county government, the County Council provided a layer of broader, but not necessarily sharper, oversight of Metro Transit through a policy and strategy review body called the Regional Transit Committee.

Think of the Regional Transit Committee, therefore, as the closest thing we have to a board of directors specifically for Metro, but not exactly. The Committee is made of three county council members (Constantine, von Reichbauer and Hague), two Seattle city council members (Drago and Clark) and local elected officials sent from suburban cities, one each from Sammamish, Federal Way, Issaquah, Maple Valley, Renton, Bellevue, Burien and Kent. This Committee, in turn, reports up to the County Council.

Unfortunately, the lingua franca of this hydra-headed governance structure is local politics, not transit management. So it’s unsurprising that for months, the discussion of the budget crisis has revolved almost wholly around the high-visibility and politically charged debate over service cuts. Much of this debate has focused on the so called “40/40/20 rule” that was adopted in 2002 by a county council vote that was divided on parochial lines. The 40/40/20 canon dictates that transit service hours added by Metro, with a few exceptions, should be bestowed in the ratio of 40 percent to the eastside, 40 percent to the south part of the county, and only 20 percent to the Seattle/North region.

Whatever defense could have been made for 40/40/20 in past, the rule is now completely out of date. And in an era of deficit budgets, using 40/40/20 to guide bus route contraction serves as well as cutting cheese with a hammer and spreading it with a screwdriver. State Senator Fred Jarrett recently declared in Crosscut that it should be laid to rest. The Municipal League of King County had offered the same view last November and recommended a new course to the Regional Transit Committee five months ago.

Service cuts will ultimately depend on how much money needs to be saved, and no proposal currently on the table offers cuts at a scale that yield more than fraction of the dollar savings and revenue gains that must be found to close the budget gap.

Which leads to a crucial question—one that demands at least as much attention from Metro’s political directors as whose route will get whacked: how much money can metro save without cutting service? How many ways are there to make Metro’s existing service more efficient?

TRANSIT EFFICIENCIES: FROM TALKING THE TALK TO WALKING THE WALK

Squeezing out efficiencies is hard work, but in the end it’s a better way to spend time than arguing endlessly about where to put the service cuts. The efficiencies can be hard to find—but they’re there. They won’t solve the revenue problem or allow the system to escape some cuts in service if current trends hold. But they can help. And a great place to start looking for them is this 370 page performance audit, requested, to its credit, by the County Council and released last month by the King County auditor.

Produced with the help of a hired squad of true experts, the audit so far has only seen one recommendation gain much public notice. Metro, the audit preliminarily suggested last summer, had built up an over-sized reserve fund for future bus purchases. The fund’s $105 million could be applied from the reserve fund to the crisis of the coming budget’s operating deficit. Metro basically agreed, with a few small reservations about precisely how much could prudently be taken from the reserve. It now looks as though the booty will be applied in four shares over four years of the deficit crisis.

The rest of the audit now sits on the shelf. There are signs in the County Executive race that the candidates at least know about it, though one must wonder if they have any idea what’s in it. Over at Metro itself, some of its recommendations certainly have gained traction. The Regional Transit Committee mentions it as a source of possible savings that would shrink the service cut need, but hasn’t taken up its specifics or shown evidence of the hard policy choices it will have to make if the audit is to yield real and long-term value.

Overall, it’s a good audit, balancing tough insights with respectful recording of some of Metro’s strengths: its sound preventive bus maintenance; the agency’s generally good practices in collecting and using ridership data; and recent positive trends in communicating with riders through long-overdue improvements to its website.

But the audit gives no free rides when it turns to problems. Like this one: Do Metro’s complicated daily schedules make the most efficient use of its drivers and its more than 1,400 buses and trolleys?

The audit recites the myriad factors involved in serving its riders: putting its buses and trolleys on a huge array of routes; dispatching buses from widely separated bus barns, with each bus matched to a qualified driver; scheduling each driver’s work day for expected traffic conditions, while allowing for the reasonable breaks required for safety and stipulated in the labor agreement. Grappling with the audit's implications requires the diligent reader to plow through the "round trip cycle time analysis" and the “recovery time to in service time ratio” and more. At least you will never board the bus again without marveling that every morning Metro gets this system to run at all, and even produces three schedule revisions a year to refine the product.

The “recovery time to in service time ratio,” however, is not just techno-babble, but a key to improving Metro’s efficiency. Recovery time is the cushion built into every bus run—the time when the bus and driver wait to start their next trip along the route. In-service time, the flip side of the ratio, is the time the bus and driver are actually driving the route picking up and dropping off riders. Adequate recovery time is essential to keeping the day’s schedule on-time, protecting the reliability of connections and assuring that operators get the breaks they need in a long shift of tough driving in traffic. Metro has to get the right balance for every schedule on every route. Too little recovery time to in-service time and the schedule falls apart. Too much, and bus buses and drivers—expensive assets, to be sure--spend more time than necessary parked at the beginning or end of a run.

The audit reports that Metro schedules show recovery time at troublingly high levels, at least by comparison to other systems. Metro’s buses on the daily routes spend on average 29 percent of their time in the recovery mode of the round trip cycle time and only 71 percent of the time in the in-service mode.

That’s a lot higher ration for recovery time than at counterpart systems in Phoenix (20 percent), Denver (24 percent) Portland (21 percent), San Jose (24 percent), San Diego (21 percent) or Santa Monica (18 percent). Higher, if you have been following this, is not better!

What should the ideal ratio be? There’s no easy answer, because local conditions vary so much--not just between, say, Seattle and Phoenix, but even among different routes just in the Metro system. And even if you do set a tighter target, there’s no guarantee you’ll meet it, given the enormous complexity inherent in route scheduling.

For that task of actually building the schedules, Metro employs a sophisticated software package called HASTUS to optimize its routes and schedules. HASTUS is used by more than 200 transit companies all over the world, including places like New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Singapore and Sydney.

But, according to the audit, Metro doesn’t benefit from the full power of HASTUS. It hasn’t maintained or updated necessary customizations to local conditions. Metro’s schedule builders--former rank-and-file bus drivers with deep knowledge of bus routes and traffic patterns--haven’t had all the training they deserve on the software. The agency hasn’t used HASTUS modules that would avoid cumbersome manual processing. It hasn’t properly used data fields on which HASTUS depends to generate optimal results. And it hasn’t developed or maintained widely accepted performance measures of operations efficiency that would better inform itself and its overseers and customers how it is doing.

Significant tens of millions of dollars of savings could lie in better route scheduling by making it possible to run the routes with fewer buses and drivers. The savings are no silver bullet. They’ll have to be eked out route by route and dollar by dollar. Years, not months, of patient improvement, at a cost, will be required to achieve them.

Desmond and his team already have promised that at least one dormant module in HASTUS will be running in time to help the coming annual February schedule adjustment. But money for IT support and software training is tough to come by if it has to be traded against saving even one trip from a service cut. Will the politicians be far-sighted enough to spend scarce money today for better efficiency tomorrow? Early indications here seem good that at least some money for these purposes will be approved even in the face of the deficit but the Regional Transit Committee has yet to fully consider where this course will take it.

How many dollars can be saved, and how quickly, depends on hard choices the policymakers will have to resolve. For example, savings from shrinking the scheduled recovery times can be a lot greater if the system is planned against the standard that 90 percent of the runs must run on-time rather than 95 percent. In other words, to save a lot of money, schedule performance may slip a little. Slightly more often then today, a rider may miss a counted-on transfer. Is that too high a price for a lower across-the-board recovery time ratio? These are policy choices. The public is entitled to have the policy-makers -- the County Council and the Regional Transit Committee – make the choices and be accountable for the trade-offs they select.

Indeed, the audit itself only presents the opening questions that policy-makers have to consider as route efficiency is examined. There are at least two big policy areas that the audit does not tackle directly -- and that can only be addressed by competent leadership willing to make tough choices.

The first of these areas takes us back to the complicated mechanics of any program of service cuts. County Executive Triplett’s proposed solution to the service contraction problem presents an alternative to using the 40/40/20 rule to allocate the cuts. That is just to take off nine percent of the service more or less evenly across the system. The plan Triplett has put on the table would play out in four phases from February 2010 through September 2011, altogether cutting 310,000 service hours and yielding across the two year period about $25 million in savings.

This approach sounds, at first blush, like at least a plausible alternative to the 40/40/20 canon. But it too is a dud. For technical reasons, across-the-board cuts are a hopelessly unwieldy parameter to add into the service delivery schedule for vast and interconnected transit system, and probably would result in route schedules and bus and driver utilization that would be even more inefficient than today’s practices. This is cutting and spreading cheese with a fork. There’s no obvious magic formula for allocating cuts. Sooner or later the policy-makers have to give Desmond and his management team the leeway to make cuts by hard-nosed selection of routes with the lowest productivity and benefits to riders.

A second major policy choice that Metro’s leadership must make involves overhauling and fine-tuning its route offerings. Metro is long overdue for a basic route restructuring that would make the system more efficient. This is a step beyond tinkering with the schedules on the existing routes, as contained in the audit recommendation Basic route structures and their alteration: Are the policy-makers committed enough to improving Metro’s efficiency to lift the lid off that neighborhood-by-neighborhood can of worms? The politicians really have no choice if the future is to see a stronger, more efficient Metro. It will be interesting to see whether they are up to the challenge.

LABOR PAINS

Questions from the audit don’t get easier as they directly approach problems in Metro’s labor agreement with its operators. Like this one: Can Metro manage effectively the task of providing relief overage for all its operator shifts?

Just as a hospital must staff every nursing station on every shift, Metro has to staff every scheduled bus run with a driver. That means a relief operator to cover every planned absence (vacations or military leave) and every unplanned absence (sick leave or an injury). It’s complicated and expensive to do this right, because it’s costly to keep a big roster of relief operators. And even more expensive not to do it right, since driver shortages mean missed runs, busted schedules and angry customers.

This is no simple problem. There are 1300 regular full-time drivers, along with 900 part-time operators driving regular assignments. Covering relief shifts for that staffing requires Metro to maintain approximately 500 additional full-time operators available for temporary assignments or call-in. They line up on two separate bid lists, one generally covering for short-term and unplanned absences and another for longer term planned absence, and each list separately maintained for each of the seven terminals from which the routes originate. A smooth schedule of planned absences means savings: you need a shorter roster of relief operators. Ditto if unplanned sick leave works only reasonable, not unreasonable, disruption to operator schedules.

Over the last decade, evolving terms of the labor agreement haven’t given much support for Metro efficiency on relief staffing. Vacation schedules, for example, for all practical purposes are set by the operators for themselves. Metro management is required to accommodate the vacation schedule desires of its operators ”to the maximum extent possible.” When a lot of operators choose the same day for a vacation, a vacation peak use day occurs for which Metro needs an especially large roster of relief operators. The audit analyzed vacation use for a few months of 2009 and found huge variability. On some weekdays, 60 operators had arranged their vacations. On others, 120 operators took vacation. Weekend to weekend showed a similar range of variability. That’s expensive for managing relief coverage: in the millions of dollars.

Covering for operators’ sick leave, an unplanned absence is even harder. Under its labor agreement, Metro today has few tools to exercise reasonable control on the small number of employees in this organization, like any other, who will, if they can, take sick leave that they shouldn’t.

Prior to 2001, management could require independent medical verification of an operator’s sick leave instances after two days had been used on three occasions in twelve months. The rules were loosened in 2001: drivers could claim sick leave at least seven and sometimes as many as twelve instances before verification could be sought, and no independent verification to be asked for if an employee had more than three months of accrued sick leave on the books. The rules were loosened again in 2004. As long as the operator had any accrued sick leave on the books, only self-certification of sick leave was required, however many times it was used.

According to the performance audit, sick leave use at Metro after the change in 2001 grew at three times the rate of growth of total labor hours. This picture translates into ever higher relief operator costs, especially when, as the audit describes, 65 percent of the time when coverage is needed for an absent part-time operator, a full-time operator is called in and paid a full shift. It would be cheaper to backfill a part-time operator with a part-time relief—but that’s generally not allowed. And it would be even cheaper to use overtime with a full-time operator—but that’s also usually not practicable under the agreement.

Of course, Metro can’t now unilaterally change the rules in the labor agreement. That has to be taken up in bargaining the next agreement. That’s coming soon. But the audit found that even within the framework of the current labor agreement, if Metro’s staff were using all the tools it owns in the HASTUS software, reasonable service reliability could still be maintained with seventy fewer employees on one of the relief bid lists – suggesting a savings possibility of millions of dollars.

It will take leadership from the County Council and the Regional Transit Committee to frame expectations for the next collective bargaining so that progress can be made toward a fair, but more efficient, set of rules. It’s a tough issue. Metro, including its union, needs the support and loyalty of the people who get on the bus. Very few of them going to work in big organizations live under rules that they or their co-workers are never required to more than self-certify their sick leave. Where will the politicians come down on this kind of point when the labor agreement is next bargained?

DON’T FORGET PARATRANSIT

If getting the right mix of efficiency and service is hard when it requires spending on sophisticated technology, as with service scheduling, and even harder when labor rules hamper efficiency, it’s harder still when service level choices involve really sensitive issues of policy choice: service to the disabled. Who wants to grab that high-voltage wire?

To this topic the performance audit brings important facts. In short, Metro’s Access paratransit van services, required under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for service to citizens who can’t use the regular fixed route buses, finds itself in 2009 providing first cabin service at economy cabin fares.

Metro Access service sees about 1.1 million boardings a year--roughly one percent of Metro’s total boardings. The fare is one dollar. The average cost of a ride to Metro is about $40. Total annual operating expenses are a little more than $50 million, about nine percent of Metro’s total operating costs. In recent years costs have risen at about twice the rate of increase of the Consumer Price Index.

The audit compared Metro Access to its counterparts in Minneapolis, Portland and Denver. It found that Metro has highest costs per mile, the highest costs per hour and fell short only of Denver in having the highest costs per boarding. It is cold comfort to know that when the Access dispatchers, as they do about six percent of the time, send a private taxi rather than the Access van, the average cost at $40 per ride is virtually the same as for the van.

Metro’s own agency staff for Access is bigger than at peer programs in Minneapolis, Denver and Portland. Yet Metro also has not been enforcing productivity incentives and penalties recently entered into with its outside private contractors that provide the 440 drivers and mechanics, as well as administrative personnel and almost 100 people involved in dispatch and scheduling.

Policies set for Access at Metro try to give its patrons the best possible service. Those policies, however, go beyond the requirements of the ADA. Service extends for more hours than required. Service extends to local areas beyond the required proximity to the fixed route bus system More than half of Access patrons are beneficiaries of door-to-door service that may be fundamentally required by their needs (and which counterpart agencies in other cities also provide), yet go beyond curb-to-curb service minimally required by the regulations.

Meanwhile, federal regulations limit the fare for paratransit service to double the cost of a regular bus fare. For Metro, that would be a fare for Access of $3.50, or double today’s $1.75 base fare. That’s a ceiling, not a benchmark, and few other systems charge the highest fare level. But few discount the fare as steeply as Metro.

Indeed, there’s a pattern here, because the audit also commented on the 50 cent discount fare for senior and disabled riders even on the regular buses. Federal requirements and the policy adopted for Metro itself in 1999 stipulate that there should be at least a fifty percent discount from the peak fare. (Disclosure: the writer uses the discount card.) That would be a dollar, not today’s 50 cents, against today’s peak fare of $2.00. In February the discount fare will go to 75 cents against the new peak fare of $2.25. “Almost universally,” according to the audit, “Metro’s regional and national peers do not offer fares discounted as much.”

Eight months ago, well in advance of the audit, Metro management asked the King County Council to review the fare policies for senior and disabled fares on the regular buses. The Regional Transit Committee apparently has put the matter on hold. For the Access program fare, tucked into County Executive Triplet’s proposed budget is a fare increase from $1.00 to $1.25 to take effect in 2011. Its fate is not yet known. Nor can one predict whether the Regional Transit Committee or the county council will be prepared to look further at fare, service or cost issues at Access while the rest of Metro’s portfolio should also be under a magnifying glass for service and cost efficiencies. Given the observations made in the audit, however, it seems hard to see how politicians who say they are committed to policy leadership and accountability can avoid taking up the hard questions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The bottom line is that Metro needs help from just about everyone. Help from experts who can offer the kinds of insights contained in the performance audit, as we have seen here. Help from citizens who must be deeply concerned about the future of public transit. And help especially from transit riders, who have to balance their critical voices for protecting and improving service with their loyalty and support for the system they so badly need. Help from Metro’s management and union, who can bring fresh thinking to the crisis now at hand. Help from business leaders, who recognize that a strong transit system is fundamental to a sensible overall transportation program, and that the workforce needs the bus to get to work, at almost all hours of the day!

But most of all, Metro needs help in the form of leadership choices on policy issues – and that’s not the same as micro-management --from the elected officials who need to make the hard choices that will improve the efficiency with which Metro spends precious taxpayer and farebox dollars.

The Regional Transit Committee held a regular monthly meeting on Wednesday, October 21. The meeting had just two agenda items. First, predictably, another go-round on service cut allocation and the 40/40/20 canon. Discussion was entirely inconclusive except to hear a formal position from the Suburban Cities Association that there should be no change in the formula. From that flowed consensus that there needed to be more discussion and another meeting. And on it goes, as it has for months. This has to be an enormous frustration for those calling for a fresh approach and asking for some actual decision-making by those whose job is to make decisions.

The other item on the agenda was a briefing on how Metro is preparing to handle snow and floods.

Nothing on the performance audit or any other efficiency topic. That will be in next year’s work plan, we are told.

Bus photo courtesy of Flickr user Oran Viriyinc, distributed under a Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/viriyincy/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

A Sustainable Night's Sleep

Jennifer Langston — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:11:31

Editor’s Note: This post is part of Sightline’s Getaway to Seattle Sweepstakes. Sign up for one of our emails and be entered to win a two-day trip to Seattle.

Seattle always ranks high on lists of US cities with green buildings, with more than 80 large buildings and nearly 50 homes now certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Since the city began mandating green construction practices in its own buildings a decade ago, the techniques have spread to offices, condos, single family homes, educational centers, even clean-and-sober low-income housing.

Take the Hyatt at Olive 8, which will be hosting our lucky sweepstakes winner for two luxurious nights. It’s the first LEED-certified hotel in the city, with everything from low-flow showerheads to preferred parking spaces for fuel-efficient cars to spa treatments that feature locally-grown ingredients. It’s expected to use 23 percent less energy than a comparable conventional building, and 36 percent less water. Plus, it walked the anti-sprawl walk: by purchasing development rights that allowed it to build higher in the city, the project also helped preserve open space on Sugarloaf Mountain in rural King County.

Here are some other green building projects to check out while you're in town:

Northgate Civic Center

Several years ago, the city faced a daunting task: create a liveable civic center for a neighborhood whose identity was defined primarily by a shopping mall and parking lots. A new Northgate library, community center and park helped provide a collective anchor for the community, incorporating green building features and amenities for residents of high-density projects planned nearby.

Seattle Central Library

Okay, so we already gushed about the city's architecturally arresting downtown library in another post on what’s great about Seattle. But it also achieved LEED silver status with an abundance of energy-saving measures and attention to giving the building a long and fruitful life. In particular, its window glazing system and abundant natural light decreases energy use and the need for artificial lighting, even in cloudy Seattle.

Mosler Lofts

Across from Seattle Center, the 12-story Mosler Lofts residential condo building also features 10-foot-tall windows to maximize daylight. Forty-three percent of the street level has been transformed from concrete into green landscaping, and 18 percent of the roof is covered in gardens. Many of the building materials – from brick to concrete to glass – were made within 500 miles of the site.

Kenyon House

This project proves that green building can be done on a tight budget. These affordable studio units in Southeast Seattle use radiant heat, passive cooling systems and finishes that resist mold to improve indoor air quality for residents living with HIV/AIDS. Its other sustainable features made it the first multi-family affordable housing project in Washington to receive LEED platinum status for homes.

Seattle University Admissions and Alumni Building

This interactive tour shows off the features of the newest addition to Seattle University’s campus on Capitol Hill, which is expected to achieve LEED gold certification. The structure itself is a recycled warehouse, with 90 percent of the new building’s materials coming from the older building.

Interested in green building, urban design and energy efficiency? Sign up to receive Sightline Daily, a daily rundown of news on Northwest sustainability, before Oct. 28 and win a two-night stay at Olive 8.

Olive 8 photo courtesy of flickr user fristle, Northgate photo courtesy of flickr user djwudi, and Seattle Central Library photo courtesy of flickr user brewbooks, under the Creative Commons license. Kenyon House photo courtesy of Housing Resources Group and Seattle University photo courtesy of Braden Van Dragt.

Hoof It, Or Hop the Bus?

Lisa Stiffler — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:40:17

You look at your watch. You look at the bus schedule. You look down the street. The bus that will take you half way across downtown should arrive in another 15 minutes. So do you wait for it, or start walking?

The answer might depend on the weather and what shoes you wore, or maybe you're looking for a mathematically-defensible solution. If the latter's the case, we at Sightline can help! Operating under the premise that there's no query too small to calculate and then graph, we bring you "Walk or Bus?" from Visualmotive.

This cool little chart requires that you know or guess at how far you're traveling, then lets you figure out which mode of transportation will be faster depending on when the bus is coming.

Say you're taking a 1 mile trip. If the bus is within 15 minutes away, wait for it -- unless you're a super speedy walker (the analysis assumes you walk a 20 minute mile, and that the bus is traveling 15 mph). Beyond that, walking will get you to your destination faster.

For other efficiency-boosting strategies (mostly of the technology type), check out the website lifehacker, where we found the bus/walk chart.

And if you're in the Seattle metro area and want to know if your bus is actually on schedule, you can check out this Metro site and find out.

Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunnel Projects

Eric de Place — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:19:41

Will the deep-bore tunnel -- the current choice by the city and state to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct -- go over budget?

One way to answer that question is to look at what's happened with other tunneling projects in the Seattle area. In a new report -- Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunnel Projects -- Sightline examines the cost history of four recent tunneling projects: the Mt Baker I-90 expansion tunnel; the downtown Seattle bus tunnel; Sound Transit's Beacon Hill tunnel; and the Brightwater sewage tunnels.

Opinions about the likelihood of a cost overrun for the deep-bore tunnel tend to fall in a pattern. Those in favor of the deep-bore project downplay the chance of going over-budget, and point to a 22 percent cushion in current budget that is set aside for unforeseen problems. Those opposed to the tunnel tend to less sanguine, pointing to international research suggesting that major infrastructure projects rarely stay within budget, even when they include such line items.

There’s a lot riding on the current cost estimates. If the project goes over budget, Seattle taxpayers foot the bill -- a curious result, considering that Seattle voters rejected a tunnel replacement option by a 39 point margin. A cost overrun as small as $100 million (just 2.4 percent of a $4.2 billion project) works out to about $167 per Seattle resident -- or almost $700 for a family of four. For a city struggling to avoid deep cuts to basic services, even a relatively small cost overrun could be challenging.

Of course, it is impossible to know in advance whether any project will stay on budget. And that’s especially true for a project as complex, daunting, and unknown as this one. It would be among the widest-diameter bored tunnels ever built, through a seismic fault, directly underneath some of the densest and most valuable urban real estate on the West Coast. Besides, when engineers first made the $4.2 billion cost estimate for the entire Alaska Way Viaduct replacement project -- with $1.9 billion price tag for the deep-bore tunnel -- they had finished only 1 percent of the design. So the current cost estimate is little more than a placeholder.

It goes without saying that no two tunnels are alike. The deep-bore tunnel will be unlike any other tunnel that has been constructed locally. Nonetheless, we can learn something by examining recent local projects, each of which grappled with specific geographic and historical issues. It is only reasonable to believe that the deep-bore tunnel will face its own unique problems. But, speaking personally, the fact that the deep-bore tunnel is something new and different makes me more pessimistic than optimistic.

Importantly, the cost estimates I've included here are very conservative -- that is, they tend to paint the projects in a favorable light -- because they use initial cost estimates that were relatively well thought-out, usually when the contracts were ready to be sent out for bidding. In some cases, the earlier and less-planned-out cost estimates were much lower; using those rougher estimates could have resulted in a much worse accounting for the cost overruns.

Will the deep-bore tunnel prove to be as inexpensive as the Mount Baker tunnel? Or will it look more like the downtown Seattle bus tunnel? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Sightline's report, "Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunnel Projects," can help inform public understanding about the actual costs of similar projects nearby.

I-1033: Emptying Our Wallets

Lisa Stiffler and Jennifer Langston — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:48:54

After the state approved steep tuition hikes to fill a massive budget shortfall this year, the cost of Derrick Skaug’s education at Washington State University jumped by nearly $900.

So the sophomore who juggles schoolwork with two jobs moved to an apartment off campus – a much cheaper, though significantly less convenient, alternative to the dorms.

“There are some people taking out extra loans,” said Skaug, whose tuition bill will rise 30 percent over two years. “Some of my friends have gone to community college to save money.”

All six of the state’s four-year schools approved the 30 percent tuition increases. That’s left students and their families scrambling to cover the ballooning costs. The Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that applications for financial aid are up 23 percent at community colleges and universities. Twice as many students are applying for help at some schools than in the past.

And the students are arguably getting less while paying more: many institutions are cutting teachers, staff, and course offerings. WSU, for one, is eliminating entire liberal arts departments.

Government budgets hammered by the down economy are leading to across-the-board cuts in services for cities, counties, and the state. If Initiative 1033, the new measure from Tim Eyman, is approved, those reductions become the new baseline for future budgets, locking in recessionary spending levels indefinitely.

Although the initiative would reduce taxes for property owners, it will also raise other costs. Anyone hoping to send a kid to college, public employees, small business owners, and the working poor will all take a hit to their pocketbooks.

That includes firefighters in Vancouver and Longview who have given up pay raises. Across the state this year, cities and counties have balanced their budgets through layoffs and furloughs that force employees to take unpaid leave.

In Aberdeen, for instance, city employees rolled back salaries and essentially agreed to take two weeks off without pay, among other cuts. From Franklin to Snohomish counties, families will struggle with reduced paychecks that accompany furloughs. With less money to spend on groceries or books or back-to-school clothes, less money will flow through the local economy.

In Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, residents and a collection of small businesses – restaurants, markets, electrical suppliers – depend on a rickety 78-year-old drawbridge over the Duwamish River. It’s a key link between lower-income neighborhoods and industrial job centers. But King County recently announced that if additional funding isn’t found to replace the corroded and crumbling bridge, it will be shut down next year .

Since voters in 2007 rejected a regional transportation funding package, the county is looking for an additional $99 million to replace the South Park Bridge in a year when it faces a nightmare budget shortfall.

“The loss of that bridge will kill a lot of those businesses down there,” said architect and South Park resident Geoff Belau. “But it’ll affect the entire region.”

If the bridge closes, an additional 20,000 vehicles—including 2,800 trucks—will be dumped onto I-5, State Route 99 and State Route 509. That means more traffic for Boeing commuters, people doing business in Seattle, or anyone catching a flight at the airport.

“If you choke the county back to their bare operational minimum,” said Belau, “you’re going to end up with a long laundry list of projects like this one that…have almost no hope of getting funding. Things are going to start falling apart.”

Already, the state’s health care safety net is unraveling. A shortfall in the state’s coffer led to a 43 percent budget cut this year in Washington’s health plan for the poor.

That forced a painful decision: Do you drop people from the plan – and if so, whom? Or do you raise the cost of participating, thereby squeezing some folks off? Washington State Health Care Authority, the agency running the program serving close to 100,000 low-income residents, opted for the latter. Beginning next year, enrollees’ monthly fees will nearly double to $61.60 on average. Annual deductibles will go from $150 to $250.

The goal is to reduce the number of participants to about 75,000, with some shifting to Medicaid and others simply quitting the program and losing their access to affordable health care. To qualify for the program – and there’s a long waiting list of people eager to join – a family of four must earn less than $44,000 a year.

These cuts create lasting harm to the region’s economy and families. Deferred medical care could lead to unnecessary suffering and the need for more expensive treatments in the future. The failure to invest in infrastructure such as bridges could put the public at risk, or choke the region’s economic engine by restricting transit and commerce. Ever higher tuitions will force young people to take on large debts – or simply put education beyond reach for some students.

“We’re here to better the workforce when we get out of here,” said WSU sophomore Joshua Hart, a pre-business major.

“It won’t do us any good if we have a less educated public.”

Empty wallet photo courtesy of Flickr user NoHoDamon under the Creative Commons license.

Two Big Steps For Walkability

Clark Williams-Derry — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:38:36

It's been a big week for walkability, with two steps forward for online mapping of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods:

Walk Score -- which has become North America's most prevalent gauge of neighborhood walkability -- is going open source, so that anyone can see how their rankings work and (just as importantly) suggest improvements. This has a real potential to lead to some major breakthroughs, since it will let academics and others add their own insights and ideas to the Walk Score algorithm. The Walk Score gurus also are working to improve their measurements of walkability by adding information on transit service, and are aiming to incorporate estimates of neighborhood greenhouse gas emissions and transportation costs to make the benefits of walkability even clearer. Great stuff!
A newly launched website called Walkshed offers a slightly different take on walkability, by letting users choose the amenities that are most important to them. Want to live within walking distance of grocery stores and transit, but don't care about bars or clothing shops? Walkshed lets you find the neighborhoods that match your preferences. And it also uses a very clever method to incorporate barriers to walking -- rivers, rail lines, or impassable highways -- in calculating the walking distance between two points. The only problem for Northwesterners is that Walkshed is only available for Philadelphia...at least for now.

Ain't technology grand?

Make 'em Laugh

Roger Valdez — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:34:50

A bit of a kerfuffle has broken out over a recent car advertisement between the new Hard Drive commuting blog at the Oregonian and the Bike Portland blog. Here, for your consideration is the ad:

Very funny. The ad shows people crowded in a bus and one guy negotiating his Segway down a crowded sidewalk. The car being sold passes an old Volvo with a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker. Yes, the very fact that Sightline’s now jumping into the fray might mean we’re doing the devil’s work, spreading the advertisement further into the blogosphere. But setting that aside for a moment, let’s examine what this argument is all about. Does this advertisement hurt efforts to promote more sustainable behavior? Is it an aggressive promotion of cars as a better and more fun way to travel than more sustainable alternatives? Do ads like this contribute to a social norm that promotes driving over taking the bus? Or is it just a funny ad?

Bike Portland’s point is that commuting by alternative modes wouldn’t be so damn difficult if we put as much money and focus on them as we do making it easier to drive.

We have to say, this ad has raised our hackles — and plenty of questions. Such as: Did you ever notice that bus and bike commutes suddenly get to be a lot of fun when there is adequate planning and infrastructure to support the demand for them? To what lengths will car companies go to try to sell their product?

Essentially, they say, such ads are immoral because they provide another rationale for drivers to stay in their cars and perpetuate the idea that bikes and buses are for losers.

On the other side is the Hard Drive blog, suggesting the idea that these kinds of ads are essentially just funny or irreverent—and therefore harmless in the big picture. And complaining about them actually makes things harder by making bike and bus advocates sound like scolds.

Many of them rely on blogs such as Bike Portland to get news about safety workshops and weekend events, not to get preached at for their transportation sins. I have to wonder whether a commentary like Blue's does more harm than good when it comes to getting more people bicycling.

I understand that Bike Portland sees itself as part of a cause. I appreciate that. But does arrogance and ridicule serve the cause better than balance and education?

A recent study called “Factors Influencing Car Use for Commuting and the Intention to Reduce It: A Question of Self-Interest or Morality?” looked at actual commuters in Canada and found that self-interest is much more useful in explaining commuting behavior than morality, and people are more likely to cite self-interested commute decisions. Interestingly, however, the subjects of the study were more likely to see their unfulfilled intentions (“I really should take the bus but . . . ”) in moral terms.

Morality has to be part of any discussion of climate change and all the different strategies we employ to reduce its effects. So, I tend to think that some outrage is justified. After all, car companies are selling a product that has contributed to the problem of climate change in the first place. That is serious.

But indulging in outrage won’t help us get closer to the solutions that will transition us away from car use and toward more walking, biking, and busing. In fact, the anger fuels a perception that environmentalists are extreme and unbending. Biking, as the Hard Drive blog points out, is on the rise in Portland (and there are more bike commuters than farmers). It has become a mainstream, everyday way to get to work. And we know that a big part of this shift is the pay back from good policy decisions by leaders and voters in Portland to focus on investments that promote biking rather than driving. So it’s OK. Laugh.

Boom Towns

Alan DeLaTorre — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:56:07

[Guest blogger Alan DeLaTorre is a PhD candidate at Portland State University who studies urban planning and aging.]

In 2011, the first Boomer will turn 65, an occasion that will herald an epochal demographic shift. Just as babies boomed in the 1940s through 1960s, older adults will become North America’s – and much of the rest of the world's – fastest-growing demographic. This imminent population shift is beginning to force a long-overdue conversation about the unique housing, environmental, and health care needs of an aging population.

Unfortunately, it’s a conversation that many of us are ill-prepared to undertake. A recent AARP study, for example, found a massive disconnect between perceptions of aging and its reality. The vast majority of people surveyed expressed optimism that they would not only be in good physical health in their later years, but that they would always be able to drive.

Can you say, “denial”?

These issues came to life for me several years ago, when my father, a California school teacher, started looking for his future retirement home in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. His criteria for the move, “I want to get away from the crowded [city] and find a place that is less hectic…somewhere I can grow things.” At the time, I was co-teaching a class on housing and environments for older adults at Portland State University’s Institute on Aging. Every ounce of my professional training told me that his moving away from important services could become an issue for both of us. I also knew my father well: he had never grown anything in his life. So I suggested, as gently as I could, that he might want to reconsider moving away from services he’d need.

He didn’t buy it.

My father simply couldn’t fathom the changes that age would bring to his abilities or his faculties. Even though he has never wanted to burden anyone, it was tough for him to envision the kind of decline that would lead to needing help with driving, shopping—or growing things.

After several weeks, I shifted approaches, arguing that he needed to take his daughter (my sister) into consideration when choosing a home. She had sustained a traumatic brain injury in an automobile accident about ten years earlier. Almost immediately, his paternal instinct kicked in, and he started looking for a more accessible home that was close to important services.

My father, like many others, had trouble facing the realities that accompany normal aging, not to mention the changes that might accompany a serious illness. Yet he was fully capable of making wise decisions when it pertained to someone else.

Eventually we found a house across the street from a hospital, a half mile from a future light rail stop, with a ramp over the three stairs leading to the front door, and with plenty of room on the property to add additional square footage or an accessory dwelling unit if my sister, our family, or his friends wanted to join him in Portland. He is still a few years from retiring and moving to the Northwest, but the experience served as an important lesson about planning for the future—and a great example for the class I was teaching.

Unfortunately, not everyone has learned those lessons—and the vital window of opportunity for planning for a rapidly aging population is closing. To help prepare, here are three things we can all start thinking about.

First, accept that you are aging. Denying the changes that occur with normal aging will make it more difficult to plan for your future needs. If you know that you may not be able to drive forever, you’ll have a reason to learn your way around your town’s transit system, and to choose housing that is close to necessary services. If you are looking for housing where you would like to remain (e.g., especially if you’re aged 50-70), why not try examining properties with a wheelchair or walker in mind?

Second, developers, planners, and homebuyers can break away from the “Peter Pan” style of development, which assumes we’ll never grow old. Housing that works for the elderly can work for other age groups too: a home that accommodates a walker or wheelchair will also serve mothers pushing strollers and able-bodied younger people. “Visitable/visit-able” housing design can and should be incorporated into as much new and redeveloped housing as possible. Simple features like wide doorways and hallways, at least one zero-step entrance, and an accessible bathroom on the bottom floor will begin to create housing that many people can age in and will also allow for hosting friends, families, and neighbors who are aged and/or disabled.

Finally, we can foster innovation in housing design and development. Concepts such as co-housing and the Green House model merit further exploration; these opportunities need to be expanded to be available to those with limited and fixed incomes. Cultivating community and facilitating environments that tap into the assets of older adults (rather than solely focusing on needs) will help create a society that supports the wisdom and worth of our older population.

Free Market Parking From Canada

Eric de Place — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:23:20

My cries have been answered.

In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, "How Free Is Your Parking?" by Stuart Donovan.

It makes three points, briefly:

1. Parking regulations suppress economic activity:

Parking regulations suppress economic activity in a number of ways. Most importantly parking regulations tie up large areas of urban land and reduce the space available for other, potentially more-productive, uses... The Toronto Parking Authority estimates the costs for constructing parking in the central city at $20,000 and $40,000 per space for surface and underground parking respectively.

2. Parking regulations undermine the transportation system:

Parking regulations also drive down urban density and further exacerbate the need for motorized travel. This manifests in higher demand for parking, which over time has been reflected in ever-higher parking regulations, which then drive down density even further and in turn stimulate even more vehicle travel.

3. Parking regulations disadvantage low-income households:

...low-income households are likely to own fewer cars, carpool more often, travel more frequently at off-peak times (reflecting their propensity to work shifts and/or part time) and use alternative transport modes more often. Low-income households consequently derive less direct benefi t from parking regulations.

Good stuff. The paper is hardly a magisterial treatment of the subject, but it does manage to limn the major reasons why existing parking regulations should be replaced with more market-oriented policies.

Unfortunately, I still haven't found anything similar from the right-leaning think tanks in the Northwest, but I can tide myself over with a good local example:

...the City of Richmond, B.C., requires that new banquet halls provide 10 parking spaces per 100m2 of gross leasable floor area. Given the average parking spot requires 20-40m2 of space (including vehicle access-ways), banquet halls in Richmond are required to provide at least 200-400m2 of parking for every 100m2 of banquet space.

This means that Richmond is effectively mandating that banquet halls dedicate a minimum of 2 to 4 times as much space for cars as for people.

You'd think parking policies like this would raise eyebrows, but they're incredibly commonplace in both the US and Canada. In fact, one thing you can learn from media coverage is that attempts to undo parking mandates like these are actually examples of "social engineering" (and here, too). Go figure.

Hat tip to Michael Lewyn.

Compact Cities, Cooler Climate

Clark Williams-Derry — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:04:43

Here's a chart that almost speaks for itself: sprawling cities require more driving -- and hence, produce more CO2 from cars and trucks -- than do compact cities.

The chart is from a new study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, comparing greenhouse gas emissions in 10 global cities. The lessons are pretty clear: compact cities in temperate climates, powered by low-carbon electricity, are the ones with the lowest carbon emissions. It seems pretty obvious -- but sometimes you need a bunch of fancy math to teach you what you already know.

Bicycle Commuters Outnumber Farmers

Eric de Place — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:51:25

Squirreled away in the new census data is this: the Northwest has more bicycle commuters than farmers. Way more.

Check it out:

The chart shows the number of people whose primary occupation is farmer compared with the number of people whose primary mode of commuting is by bicycle.

Needless to say, this snapshot doesn't include the heap of people who work in the agriculture industry more generally but who aren't actually farmers. (And it doesn't count farm laborers, in particular.) There are not nearly as many folks who work in the bicycle industry.

Yet I think there's some symbolic value to my little comparison. For whatever reason, farmers occupy a quasi-mythic space in our consciousness in a way that cyclists obviously don't. And I wonder if a clearer understanding of how widespread and popular bicycling is might help change the persistently anti-bicycling policies that plague communities across the Northwest and across North America.

Some additional context. If we were to add in all the folks who farm as a secondary occupation the number of farmers would more than double. On the other hand, we don't have comparable data for commuters whose secondary mode of commuting includes a bicyle. But it's fair to believe that the number of occasional bike commuters is probably much, much higher -- well over double, I'd be willing to bet. There are an awful lot of fair-weather cyclists out there (like me) or cyclists who ride only once or twice a week or only ride during the summer.

Interestingly, across the United States, the nation's 2.2 million farmers far outnumber the roughly 685,000 bicycle commuters. But, on the other hand, according to at least one reasonably credible estimate for 2002, some 57 million American adults are at least occasional bicycle riders. If we assume that the same relationship holds for the Northwest -- the ratio between bike commuters and total cyclists -- then there are roughly 5.3 million cyclists in the Northwest states. And that doesn't even count all the kids!

Sources and notes: All commuting data come from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2008, single year estimates, Table S0801, "Commuting Characteristics by Sex." I calculated the number of bicycle commuters by multiplying the total number of commuters covered by the survey by the percentage of commuters whose means of transportation to work is bicycle. This figure excludes bicycle commuters whose primary mode of commuting is some other mode (e.g. someone who rides a bike a short distance to a bus stop) and people who commute by bicycle sometimes but commute by some other mode on a greater number of days each week. More information on the census techniques is available here, especially on page 67. All data about farmers comes from the US Department of Agriculture's 2007 Census for Agriculture, the most recent data available. For each state I used the state profiles and took the count listed for "principle operators by primary occupation." National figures are here.