July 22, 2016

Requited Love Affair – Seattle and Light Rail

From columnist Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times:
Seattle
Nine years ago, I wrote a column predicting, unambiguously, “Light rail: We will love it.” …
Reality turned out to be more complicated. Seattle not only didn’t love light rail. At first we barely noticed it.
We finally opened a rail line seven years ago, in 2009 — after debating it off and on for half a century. But six months in, the 14-mile line, built for $2.3 billion and years late, was carrying only about 14,000 riders a day.  There are bus routes with that many passengers. …  The financials weren’t so hot, either, as fares covered only about 25 percent of the operating cost (the conservative goal had been 40 percent).
Light rail wasn’t a dud. But it hadn’t become a central feature in the city.
It sure feels like that has all suddenly changed. …
On Monday, Sound Transit announced that light-rail ridership has just surged 83 percent. That’s not a typo. The use of rail nearly doubled, from about 36,000 per day last May to more than 65,000 per day this May.
The obvious cause is that 20 years after the voters approved it, the agency finally built two stations where people really want to go — Capitol Hill and UW.
Suddenly we have vaulted into the top 10 in the country in light-rail ridership. …  Plus: In May the trains earned 51 percent of their operating costs back in fares, a doubling of the rate from last year. That’s a major rider endorsement of the system.
What is going on?
The transportation planning answer is that Capitol Hill and UW were considered the two most desirable mass-transit markets in the nation that weren’t already served by subway or rail. So putting train stops there was a no-brainer. (This makes it even more of a head-banger that it took us so long to do it!) …
A tipping point has been reached, it seems to me. The train is no longer an academic urbanist talking point, or something like broccoli that we know is supposed to be good for us. The recalcitrant city now is embracing rail with a zeal that seems to have startled even Sound Transit.
It took damn near 50 years of arguing about it. But we finally love it.

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  1. So why are we wasting all our revenues on a single subway when we could have light rail traversing the City? Seattle provides the case to support that approach.

    1. Because the Canada Line cost less than this 2 station expansion and carries twice the people as their entire system?
      Hell, the just Expo Line carries 5 times as many people as their entire system.
      The Broadway Line is also expected to carry 3.5 times as many people as their entire system.
      Then there is the fact that aside from debt costs, the Skytrain actually makes Translink money. The Seattle LRT system so far hasn’t been any cheaper and can’t even recover fares better than most bus routes in the City of Vancouver.

    2. A few more points:
      * The geometry of Broadway doesn’t support surface rail. 90+% of all intersections between Main and Arbutus are signalized, and only five of them are arterials. That’s a lot of cross traffic consisting mainly of pedestrians, cyclists and commercial vehicles.
      * A surface tram that doesn’t have signal priority will be a slow milk run (see above point), like the Number 9 bus, and any gains in ridership will be marginal at best. The vital Broadway continuation of the regional rapid transit system will not be made. Why would you spend 1.5 billion bucks to merely put the No. 9 on rails?
      * Speeding up LRT trains with signal priority or track separation and limiting their stops to stations at arterials (i.e. one km spacing) will result in severing all the signalized crossings in between stations. How on Earth then would a person safely cross the road in the kilometre between stations? How do the Broadway business people opposed to a subway reconcile the fact they will lose probably half their walk-in business because their customers cannot cross the street, unless they are located in a higher-rent space next to a station?
      * The last two points have been fleshed out well by Jarrett Walker who also illuminates the separate but important roles performed by local/slower transit and regional/faster service, and the huge issue of frequency.
      * The physical design of the surface rail stations that have been shown to ‘work’ in the narrow road allowance so far are split stations where each direction has its own platform which are separated by an arterial. Call it what you want, but it’s the last thing from efficient.
      * All the opinion pieces to date supporting streetcars on Broadway (Condon, Murphy et al) are not backed by sufficient professional analysis or evidence that founds this premise in standard transit planning practice or realistic lifespan cost-benefit study. I would suggest they are also anti-urban in scope.

      1. * But surface rail could go from Main and Terminal to Broadway and Arbutus following the False Creek ROW (ducking under the Granville Bridge to the Arbutus Corridor along 6th) and on to UBC via a less crowded and obstructed West Broadway – possibly using 8th along the Jericho Lands.
        * A surface tram could run along Broadway from Arbutus to Brentwood offering a slower parallel service.
        * People can cross the road between trains – your point 3 us a bit of a red herring.
        * Trams may be able to share parts of the LRT rail system – ie from Arbutus to Alma without unduly disrupting the LRT schedule.
        * If stations are serving travellers in opposite directions (which they are) there may even be greater efficiencies in split stations. Most westbound travellers would transfer southbound and vice versa. Split stations allow consistently fewer street crossings to make transfers.
        *Subway to Arbutus only. LRT/streetcars providing a broader network at lower cost. I’d hardly call Condon’s work anti-urban. Just the opposite.

        1. You could call both of those “who cares” options.
          Point 3 makes sense if the headways are small. Since the streetcars wouldn’t have much capacity per train, the headways would be small to meet the estimated ridership.
          You have to remember if the trains are running at a 120 second headway, then a train goes either way every 60 seconds. The train will take a bit under 10 seconds to clear most crossings; some more, some less.

        2. Condon’s biggest problem is his assumption of the city as a uniform blob of medium density.
          Cities have a very hard to quantify benefit of specialization. He assumes everyone and their spouse and their kids will want to work within a very small radius if a big system. That’s just not something that works with a specialized society.
          If everyone was a generalist, then sure it’s great. What if a film worker marries a banker? Do you always have a financial centre near to a film studio for this couple? It’s an interesting ideal especially with telecommuting, but it’s not very pragmatic.
          Vancouver currently is building towards a well connected nodal city. This allows specialization, and efficient travel patterns over longer distances. The disadvatage is that there is either higher infrastructure costs or lots of dead zones.
          I’d bet that the infrastructure costs are way less than the societal costs of attempted despecialization.

        3. At 50 km/h a tram would have to be more than half a block long to take 10 seconds to clear an intersection. That’s a long train with high capacity so the headways could be larger. But even with crossings every 60 seconds there would be lots of time to cross – far better than the current car-dominated street. Strategic islands mean you only need to cross half the roadway at once. I still call point 3 a red herring.
          Most European cities are much more like Condon’s vision and much more urban than North American cities. They work really well for urban residents and still better than here for suburban people.
          But the point isn’t to have a one-size-fits-all approach. A great nodal system overlaid with a more homogenous interconnected network would be ideal.

        4. A tram along the False Creek ROW would be blocks away from some major destinations, notably VGH, but also major commercial. And it’s on the north side of 6th, which can only be crossed by pedestrians at certain places between Heather and Granville.
          And then there’s that hill there.

        5. VGH would be served by the Broadway subway and other transit services on Broadway. The False Creek ROW brings the UBC LRT to the Canada Line and the Expo/Millennium lines. (Millennium Line should have a branch to Waterfront via Main Street Station for even better connectivity.)
          It would serve Burrard (which will be poorly served by a Broadway subway), Granville Island and the commercial portions of Fourth Ave (two blocks away without a significant hill) as well as the Olympic Village and all the mixed use developments growing around it.
          False Creek South is sure to have a new push for increased density and mixed use as the leases expire over the coming decade or two.

      2. Just look at the ABSOLUTE disaster of the new surface LRT in Edmonton from downtown to NAIT. Long traffic line ups. Very slow trains.
        See here: http://www.630ched.com/2015/10/08/nait-lrt-cars-to-stay-slow-for-the-rest-of-the-year/
        or here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-council-eyes-costly-solution-to-metro-line-traffic-problems-1.3525689
        An LRT makes no sense whatsoever in a dense area like Broadway. It may make sense in Surrey to Langley, or from Alma to UBC as the Broadway extension nears the Jericho lands that will be built over the next 1-2 decades, along 4th or 10th.
        Where is the Marine Drive subway discussion on this blog from W-Van’s Dundarave to Lonsdale Quay via Park Royal, then onto Deep Cove via Mount Seymour Parkway or Dollarton Highway as an LRT ?

      3. RV, you contradict yourself when you espouse trams everywhere in one post to counter the subway, then advocate for mixed transit technology in another. This is confusing. If one is to choose, then the latter is closest to best practices.
        Blanketing cities with trams as some advocate merely because they’re “cheaper” is not wise and defeats the objective of planners and project managers to design specific systems for specific circumstances, and stems from a failure of some pretty basic site analysis. Further, a cheap system will inevitably have inadequate ridership and could cost more per capita or per trip over the 100-year life of the system than a superior but initially more capital-intensive system. Long-term operating costs and benefits cannot be ignored. If you reject the Broadway subway based only on cost, then I contend that you should then turn your back on the future and stick to upgrading the B-Line to a full BRT service and improve the Number 9 trolley to at least meet the existing demand for less than $25 million rather than waste well over a billion dollars on converting it to rail for no gain.
        Broadway, for many reasons, requires a big city solution. I cannot fathom 200 six-car surface LRT trains arriving every two-hour crush period at every station on Broadway to accommodate 300,000+ riders without causing several accidents a day(*). That’s four 6-car trains every five minutes per direction, eight in total every five minutes per station. That is the frequency I measured at Burrard Station during a typical weekday afternoon rush hour, and if you don’t think Broadway will achieve 300K per day, then you weren’t paying attention to the comments on existing RRT ridership. Moreover, those trains travel at 80 k/hr between stations and extend outward relatively seamlessly to the regional scale. Central Broadway contains the densest employment and population centres, largest volume of office space and a very high unmet existing transit demand outside of downtown. Broadway also has one of the highest signalized crossing densities of any road anywhere (35 of 39 intersections in the 6-km section from Main to Alma).
        (*) Calgary’s C-Train system has killed dozens of people since its inception in otherwise preventable accidents at crossings. This is one of the most important reasons why the budget for the recent West Leg was increased to provide grade-separation from the start. That’s some “red herring.”
        This confusion over technology also begs the question about obtaining a seamless connection to the regional rapid transit system from Broadway (to date the biggest and most obvious missing link) and accounting for the huge benefits and potentially massive induced demand of fast transfer-free trips between a regional facility like VGH and far flung Coquitlam Centre or Surrey.
        The confusion also tends to originate from an inability to define the levels of graduated service quality, from a fast regional-scale to a slow local-scale. Look closely and you’ll determine that both are needed on Broadway. Therefore, when using quality of service as a primary objective, a fast and frequent regional subway service twinned with a local and improved local Number 9 trolley on the surface (articulated vehicles, bus stop bumpouts, maintaining the two-block stop rhythm, etc.) will meet most of today’s and tomorrow’s transit demand at an exemplary level.
        In addition, the subway will allow more space for an urban design plan to evolve on Broadway that places the pedestrian at the highest level and expands their realm, gets people out of their cars, protects the vital existing crossings, makes mid-block crosswalks possible in the hospital precinct, respects commercial traffic, and affords the great potential to provide a unique human-scaled streetscape treatment.
        The European cities you refer to all have multi-modal systems. Paris, London and many more of the greatest all have first and foremost an extensive core metro system, now further improved upon by the RER and Crossrail express underground services, with an extensive bus and tram network functioning in a support role at the surface.
        Vancouver could do better.

        1. Too many words, MB!
          I support the Broadway subway as far as Arbutus where ridership has already fallen off dramatically. I do not support a subway for the much smaller ridership to UBC especially since the west side will successfully resists the density required to support a subway.
          But I also support an improved, transfer-reduced service to UBC: LRT along UBC Boulevard, West 10th, 8th along the Jericho Lands, West Broadway to Arbutus and that corridor to Main and Terminal. More transit. More resilient. More connected. And, incidentally, cheaper.
          Trams have been more successful at generating commercial activity and development investment than buses so it makes sense to use them on a growing number of our commercial arterials. Perhaps it’s because trams lend themselves to a more pedestrianized environment than buses on a road because the road is always verboten but the tram ROW can be public space between trains.
          Broadway from Stephens eastward demands that type of lift. Subways won’t do it because ridership ignores the street. It hasn’t helped Cambie Village!
          Fast, medium and slow. A well balanced system to serve everyone.

        2. I don’t do TwitterThink.
          I do agree that some kind of light rail, but not as light as the skinniest Eurotrams, could work potentially quite well in wider corridors like 41st Ave, 200th Street and others not riven with the conditions that are attached to Broadway. But they need to accommodate demand as high as the francilien périphérique in Paris. A deeper urban design practice should accompany the product, which translates into full lifecycle cost accounting, acknowledging the presence of underground services, providing a human-scale land use response, and so forth.

  2. The manner in which Seattle has built light rail – largely grade-separated (except for Rainier Valley) has all the costs of SkyTrain without the benefit of automated operation (because of the at-grade section in Rainier Valley).
    i.e. The 2-station, 3-mile bored tunnel extension to the University of Washington and Capitol Hill cost US$1.8 Billion
    http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/university-link-light-rail-service-starts-march-19/
    The obvious reason why ridership has ballooned is that they hit the right demographic and a major employment and study centre at the UW (plus sporting events at Husky Stadium) and connects destinations that those people originate from or what to go to.
    The biggest head scratchers are:
    – failure to connect Southcenter Shopping Center
    – future failure to connect Bellevue Square Shopping Center (due to Kemper Freeman’s opposition to the line)
    That would be like SkyTrain bypassing Metropolis @ Metrotown, Brentwood Town Centre, Lougheed Town Centre or Oakridge Centre.

  3. Vancouver should take note of demand drivers for future light rail. We have the ROW between Downtown and Granville Island now, why is it sitting empty Vision Vancouver?

      1. Is anybody else expressly forbidden from operating transit? Even if Translink tried, that wouldn’t stand up in court.

        1. Why would taxpayers want to pay for the City of Vancouver to set up a parallel operating company to Translink, just to operate a short tram line? Would you suggest they invest in a separate fare system as well?

    1. we don’t have a right of way between downtown and Granville Island. We have a right of way between Main & Terminal and Granville Island. Given that more-connective 50 is not exactly a well ridden bus, why spend the money to make it a train?

      1. Wrong, plans are in place for it to go right to Waterfront Station, I’m sure Gordon could confirm that as he was on council at the time/

      2. Van Map shows it ending at Quebec and Terminal. Beyond that, it looks like it would compete with vehicle traffic lanes.

        1. A subway extension from downtown seabus station to E-Van and new hospital / Terminal would make total sense. As would be a Broadway subway and one on the congested north-shore.
          The mayor’s council on transportation needs a reboot.

    2. Because we aren’t going to get another chance to build a train for the next 50 years, so we should put it where it will benefit the most number of people both in terms of ridership and ability to meaningfully impact regional auto trip share. That ROW would serve a small fraction of who could be served along Broadway. If you don’t like Broadway, then do Surrey LRT or a link to the North Shore or extend Canada line instead of building a bridge. Any of those make more sense than serving single use low density (compared to Broadway) false creek neighbourhoods.
      If we had the funding & support for transit that matched it’s importance to the region, we might very well do a train where you propose, it might work well alongside all the other projects. However in the world we live in, funding & support are scarce and should be consumed wisely.

  4. Just to help clarify the discussion;
    The First Phase of the Downtown Streetcar System would operate on the False Creek / First Avenue right of way between Science World and Granville Island. The idea originated among some nostalgic rail enthusiasts in the City Engineering Department and was then taken up by the Planning Department. The idea has never been more than the development of a tourist attraction akin to the one in old town Seattle, it is not a serious people mover idea, but the first phase would obviously connect some very busy transit nodes. A willing funding agency has never been identified, although I do wonder if a Heritage and Culture Agency might not take it on as a tourist attraction.

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