$50B transit proposal would boost light rail throughout Seattle region | Hacker News Reader

$50B transit proposal would boost light rail throughout Seattle region

seattletimes.com

47 pointsjseliger85 comments

To all the people dissing this plan from afar you have no idea how bad Seattle has gotten in the last three years. Over 100k people have moved into the metro area every year for three years.

My commute times changed noticeably over the course of one year. It went from consistently 30 minutes over the 90 bridge to consistently an hour (we're talking 18 miles, door to door).

This thing should have been built in the 70s.

My wife and I actually moved back to the Midwest 2 months ago after living in Seattle for 8 years, despite my comfortable Senior Engineer salary, because all of our closest friends moved away in the span of a year, because they could no longer afford to live in the city (none of them worked in tech).

I wish Seattle good things from afar, and it will always hold a special place in my heart, but I'm glad I'm not living through these infrastructure growing pains that should have been addressed years ago.

I think that economics will sort out the cost-of-living issues. Seattle doesn't seem to have the NIMBYism of the Bay Area, and Washington State actually requires that communities plan for growth under the state Growth Management Act. I'm not sure how this compares to California (witness the unencumbered sprawl of LA, or the inability to build anything in the Bay Area), but from what I've seen, local Washington governments are not pretending that population growth is a fantasy. Seattle's growth plan specifically mentions "directing growth to existing urban centers and villages", so I can see how the proposed Sound Transit line extensions would help facilitate urbanization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Growth_Manage...

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cityplanning/completeprojectslist...

I hope so.

Seattle, Vancouver, SF, etc need to upzone, to permit more development, so that supply can meet demand. As I understand it, that upzoning is not happening nearly fast enough.

Public transit initiatives trigger (begats?) upzoning. This is an end run around the regressive restrictions on property taxes and entrenched NIMBYism.

I fully support it. Whatever works. I wish my peeps working on affordability, homelessness, economic justice would put less emphasis on set asides, protecting older listings, etc, and place more emphasis on increasing inventory.

One potential monkeywrench of increasing supply is absentee landlords. I just read something like 1/3rd of Vancouver properties are owned by Chinese investors. Which I'm totally cool with so long as the units are mostly occupied.

Seattle does have plenty of stupid people like every other place. People that vote against all road building because they only want bike lanes or transit. People that vote against transit because they don't want poor people coming where they are (really this happens, search for Kemper Freeman initiatives to keep the poor people out of bellevue).

We have to do increase all modes of transportation. The problem with this proposal is that it will take 25+ years. We need a 10 year version of this plan. Charge us rich programmers more, we can afford it.

Trains are very cool, and the idea of shared public transportation is probably noble, but there is an intractable economic problem. If my wife and I both take the train, it costs twice as much to us. If we drive somewhere, it costs half as much.

Additional issues that need to be solved to make pubtrans competitive with car ownership are scheduling, the ability to bring cargo, and negative class connotation. And this completely discounts the probable arrival of ubiquitous autonomous electric vehicles before Sound Transit even gets to finish this project. As much as I enjoy the romantic nature of trains, I think the Puget Sound is gearing up for a folly of a white elephant.

If you drive, it costs the same at best. Cars don't run cheaper when you put a second person in them.

I think he means per person.

Yes, though he's using a double standard.

Per person, a train costs the same regardless of the number of people.

It's a fair comparison and one I make often. Example: My friends and I could take public transport 10 miles. It might cost $5 per person. For four people that's $20. $20 might pay for a cab for all four of us.

Same with planes. I could fly or drive from LA to Vegas. Flying is $240 per person friday to sunday. 4 people = $960. 1 car carrying 4 people will be a lot less even if I rent it.

Your comparison is valid for the scenario 'whats the difference in price for x people to make this trip by car or plane'. His comparison was 'how does the cost of the trip change if I go from one to two people for either method of travel'. Assuming he and his wife operate as a single financial unit, then the cost of the trip by car does not change when they both travel somewhere instead of one person travelling, and you have to make that assumption or his mention of 2 train tickets being more expensive makes no sense.

Yes, he probably did, but he shouldn't have since he used per trip cost for the train comparison.

I live in Seattle, and what you're saying doesn't really ring true to me. First, many employers pay for a card that you can use for public transit. So it will be free for a large percentage of people during the all important rush hours. Second, driving is expensive in Seattle. The 520 bridge costs money, parking costs money, the carpool lane costs money.

If you opt for the free I90 bridge or don't use carpool lane, you are going to be sitting in traffic, basically no matter the time of day. And if you are driving within the city limits, you have to deal with parking. There is Uber, and for going around within the city, this is viable. But if you are going longer distances it becomes cost-prohibitive for many people.

Have you calculated how much you're actually spending per day?

I roughly calculated my expenses once.

$32k car $8k tax/license + loan interest up to point I paid it off = $50k $200 gas a month for 6 years = $14400 $4k renew service plan $1200 a year car ins $7200 2 sets of tires at $1k each = $2k

100k miles on it at 6 years

So $50k+14.4k+4k+7.2k+2k = $77.6k / 100k miles = 0.77 cents per mile.

My commute was 40miles each way or $61 PER DAY!!! That's a TON more than public transportation. That price will slowly go down the longer I keep the car but still, $61 per day is a lot of money. At 20days month that's $1220 a month. That's far more than 2 people's monthly transportation passes.

Thanks for doing this. Most people have no idea how much their car costs them, and usually just think of the gas price.

The total cost of ownership only matters if you are deciding whether to own a car at all, and that is really less a question of cost than your willingness to change your lifestyle around a commitment to non-car-ownership and stop doing the things which are only feasible when you have a car.

For decisions about any individual trip, gas price really is most of the issue, because you're already committed to paying for the option of driving whether or not you choose to exercise it in any particular instance.

Living in Seattle or the Bay Area, most people "have to" have a car, so I see it as a sunk cost, rather than amortized. I'm impressed with the political will that it must have taken to plan a line from Everett to Tacoma. With that kind of community planning, the Puget Sound may be more like NYC than the Bay Area in 25 years. The duplicitous rail options interoperating within the Bay Area fiefdoms- Muni, VTA, Caltrain, BART... are ridiculous. Seattle can't do anything to improve their weather, but for those who don't mind being damp, I think it's an easy choice over the Bay Area, and they are proving that they can think long term.

Not that anyone is going to be convinced of anything here, but...

Car: $11,600

http://bellingham.craigslist.org/cto/5494584275.html

Taxes/tags: $1,500

Gas: $150/mo (100,000 miles @ 25mi/gal @ $2.50 gal over 6 years) = $10,000

Maintenance: $250/year * 6 years = $1,500

Insurance: $600/year * 6 years = $3,600

2 sets of 65k mile tires: 2*600 = $1,200

sell the car @140k miles: -$2,000

http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/cto/5488481558.html

Total: $27,400 or $0.274/mi

That's a salvage title, not something most people are comfortable with.

You certainly can find a car for that or much less, but not a 2012 Camry.

What about the inevitable repairs on a used car? I find that I spend another 1000/yr on things that break in my car because it is off-warranty. Also, gas prices are more like 2.80 to 3.50 here in Seattle, historically.

I spend at least $2000/year on things that break in my car (and I've never owned a car new enough to know what is or isn't covered by a warranty), because it's a Range Rover and replacement parts cost more than you think they should. That's still far less than I'd be spending on monthly payments if I had a newer car, and insurance is cheap since I don't have a loan company requiring me to sign up for the expensive comp/collision package, so I feel like I'm coming out way ahead.

The bridge toll alone going from Seattle to Redmond and back is ~$8\day.

The train is only ~$3 to go all the way to the airport.

and not having to take the damn bus is worth at least $10/day to me.

So I'll keep driving.

Well, you can always use unromantic buses. At some point automobiles and population growth cause too much traffic and people waste their lives in traffic.

Here's a classic to drive the point home:

http://www.bikehub.co.uk/news/sustainability/iconic-waste-of...

SkyTran solves all the problems that come with trains and light rail, which are 19th-century technology. Too bad everyone is happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a crappy public transit system that is so slow and inconvenient that no one wants to use it, when it's entirely possible to build a system which is cheaper and much faster and more convenient, but everyone thinks it's sci-fi (but somehow, automated cars aren't).

I'd still like to understand how the Seattle Monorail failed, got spiked. I'd been thinking it was for want of a champion. But now I wonder if the missing ingredient was triggering upzoning.

Ironically, the existing tracks from Renton to Bothell could have been used for half of a light rail system for a song. But the government has desperately pretended those tracks don't exist, and has gone to considerable lengths to destroy them.

A few years earlier, they destroyed the tracks from Renton to Black Diamond so thoroughly the right-of-way can never be used for rail again.

It boggles the mind.

This interests me... Do you have any articles I can read about this?

I was always under the impression that the Sounder (our commuter heavy rail line) used tracks shared with commercial traffic (BNSF, etc.) and thus couldn't be fully developed into a city-wide system...

Nothing has run on the tracks for 20 years. Some of it has been pulled up, but the right-of-way remains.

Seattle Transit just announced a $50 billion plan to blast new right-of-way, never mind the trackage could be doubled by re-using that right-of-way for a few million.

You can still see the tracks on Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6753261,-122.1882192,16z

although it has been renamed "Cross Kirkland Corridor" in their attempt to hide what it is. Sound Transit prefers a plan that costs one thousand times as much, still won't serve the eastside, and will not be in service until half the existing taxpayers are long dead.

It's not Sound Transit's fault. The cities won't let them. Kirkland wants them to build out Buses and threatens to veto any light rail project. Residents by the CKC want to "save the trail" (aka we're selfish jerks that bought a property by a railway line, but don't want noise of trains)

http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/12/kirkland-st-struggl...

The tracks still run through Renton and Bellevue and can connect to the rest of the light rail system in the Tukwila area.

I'd build the system to the border of Kirkland, and wait for the Kirkland residents to get fed up with rotting on 405.

Easy to say if the tracks don't go (almost literally) through your back yard as they do mine.

Eh, its been used as recently as 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Washington_Dinner_Tr...

There are reasons why they can't be used. The city of kirkland has lots of residents against it. But more importantly, the tracks don't really go to the city centers that we need. I think we are so desperate we should try using them, as it would cost much less.

Yes, that lost opportunity saddens me.

The Eastside (the Kemper Freeman Jr cohort) has traditionally spiked anything resembling public transit, public good, regional bon ami. Apart from their public statements about "those people", I assume their primary bare knuckled motivation is that anything that hurts Seattle helps Bellevue (landlords). Which I'm totally fine with, love and war and all that. I just hate the hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, on the east side of Lake Washington, we're busy tearing up all of the track and replacing it with bike paths.

Building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming in metropolitan areas.

Case in point: a five mile extension on an existing Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line and one new station cost $890 million and took seven years to build. [1]

The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2]

[1] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx [2] http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology

I have a strong feeling much of that is corruption and/or over charging. I have no proof but AFAICT Singapore and Tokyo have no trouble building new lines quickly and for far less money and I suspect they both do a better job.

Well, the Shibuya-Ikebukuro section of the Tokyo metro is 12 miles long and was built between 2000 and 2012.

It cost 250 billion yen, or just over 2 billion US dollars. [1]

[1] http://www.treehugger.com/cars/trainspotting-new-subway-line...

I wish someone would give PRT a chance. Something like skyTran could be built for 1/5th the cost and would be significantly faster for commuters (since most time is spent at stops before yours).

Yep, I say this all the time, and people think it's an even crazier idea than bigfoot and alien sightings.

Somehow, it's realistic to think about us all having self-driving cars dealing with the chaos of city traffic and pedestrians, and it's realistic to propose spending billions and billions of dollars on slow light-rail systems which require years of construction where the roads are all torn up, but it's completely bonkers to think about building a system with elevated rails hanging on utility poles and small, autonomous cars riding on these rails for only $1 million per mile.

I can't wait until Israel has their SkyTran system working so all these idiots in America won't be able to say how "impossible" it is.

Why 25 years?

We should have the guys that ran the Big Dig in Boston take care of this. They can run that tab up to $100B in no time.

I don't think seattle needs any help in that department, they've got their own over-budget long-delayed tunnel project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...

There's already that underground highway being dug, that runs along the bay.

Just to point this out: sound transit's last project, which expanded the existing westlake->seatac airport light rail from Westlake to capital hill and finally to UW, finished under budget and ahead of time.

It was originally scheduled to open September 2016, and the first trains carried passengers last weekend.

is this system going to be anywhere close to the actual needs of the region in 25 years?

Seriously, 25 years out. That just seems ridiculous to me.

whatever happened to those maglev trains that I used to read about as a kid? Oh right, China...

http://youtu.be/c8SqDVUdMtY

http://gbtimes.com/china/beijing-launch-first-maglev-line-20...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR

Line S1 will be much slower than most traditional trains, the energy usage of maglev isn't that much less than traditional rail (so they don't tend to run faster, the metal rails aren't a large limiting factor for speed) and the vertical alignment restrictions on maglev technology means it's not necessarily gonna be technology you can easily put everywhere.

Can you be more specific? How fast are traditional trains? These are intercity trains we are discussing, right? The S1 is being used where you would have a subway or light rail.

Well i'm not sure about outside europe but Italy's new trains run at ~400Kph

They run that fast between cities. Clearly we aren't talking about that. Japan"s intracity maglev is going to go almost 600kph.

http://youtu.be/VuSrLvCVoVk

Of course, you don't build that to go 10 city blocks.

> Japan"s intracity maglev is going to go almost 600kph.

No it's not. 603 is the fastest they've ever gotten the train to go on a test track, which doesn't make that the speed they'd actually run for commercial service. Their current plan is 500 with a top speed of 505. Which is really good, but also a decent ways off and involves some serious earthworks to make the track flat enough.

For comparison, the speed record for wheel on steel rail trains is currently 574 km/hr.

The rail really isn't a huge impact on the speed yet. At those speeds it really start being more about aerodynamics of the vehicles and the cost per kWh. Maybe maglev technology will change that at some point, but right now we haven't really seen results that would lead us to assume that big of an advantage comes from getting rid of the rail. Arguably the biggest advantage is going to come when someone figures out how to put the trains in a tube where the aerodynamic situation changes completely. That's why the hyperloop proposal wasn't just "use a maglev".

Maglev trains are cool as shit though, you're literally floating through the air, it's awesome. I highly recommend riding the one in Shanghai. Make sure you hit a 430 km/hr run and not the slower 300 km/hr ones, the experience is very different. It's fun as hell.

That is definitely not an actual commercial operating speed, IIRC. Trains can go really fast in test and demos, operating speeds right now rarely break 300 km/hr on most systems. Many systems are headed to 320-360 though. The Shanghai maglev is the only commercial line that regularly does over that in commercial service, at 430 km/hr, but that's only for a few runs a day, most of the day it goes 300 km/hr.

The point I'm trying to make here is the speeds on Line S1 are similar to commuter trains in a similar class of operation. Maglev doesn't really provide a speed advantage on that line over traditional rail.

For reference, the Phoenix light rail timeline:

1989 - route plan

2000 - voter approved tax increase

2005 - construction started

2008 - operations started

Let's just do nothing but build more highways, then. I'm sure all the 25-year-olds will thank us for planning for their future then.

I wish the train to the east side went across 520 instead of 90. Oh well.

It seems idiotic that we didn't allow for that on 520. Did we really screw it up that much?

Clicking on the map to magnify it, makes it smaller.

What was the cost for the monorail again?

50 Billion could buy a lot of self driving cars in 5 years.... why not just spend it on city owned cars that taxpayers can order on demand?

Cause that would do nothing to alleviate traffic congestion.

And neither does light rail. light rail is a bad investment. It is expensive and low capacity. It is 19th century technology.

Building bus rapid transit makes much more sense because it is felixible and less expensive. But politicians don't like photo ops with buses nearly as much as with trains.

The proposal is for bus improvements and bus rapid transit as well as light rail.

There's no drawback to buying a lot more electric buses for Seattle?

Politicians like trains because their constituents like trains. Buses are stuck in traffic. Light rail runs on dedicated lines. Light rail is attractive because it is more predictable. The buses in Seattle are less attractive because they suffer the same congestion and unpredictability as driving.

Bus rapid transit specifically refers to bus lines on dedicated right-of-way.

However, once you are going to the trouble of building dedicated right-of-way, the incremental cost of making it rail isn't too bad compared to the enormous efficiency/scalability of rail over buses.

Not exactly nothing (people won't need to drive around looking for parking, in theory self-driving cars could pack in more closely to reduce road congestion), but probably not enough to make it worth it.

All you have to do to eliminate congestion is to raise the price of congestion until it goes away. Don't want to pay the full price? Share a ride with other people.

This is only unpopular because so many people would rather have free, congested roads and expensive, slow transit than just paying for the roads. This will clearly change before most of Seattle's new plans are completed: self-driving cars will clog up our roads waiting for riders unless we charge them to be on the roads.

The problem with that solution is that it puts most of the burden on those least able to shoulder it. Most of us here probably have flexible hours, so moving our commute by even an hour isn't that big of a deal. Someone working a lower end job has set hours, so they cannot move their commute. Meaning they have to drive when congestion happens, meaning they get hit with the price.

Very true. We can subsidize those trips if we want to, but I don't think that will be necessary. Employers in high congestion areas will have to pay more to compete with other employers. It'll probably work itself out, but if it doesn't, we should fix it directly instead of forcing everyone to endure traffic.

Except they won't.

Traffic exists because human drivers form a compression wave. The car in front of you accelerates, then you accelerate, then the person behind you, etc. Every time someone taps the brakes, they create traffic behind them. Self-driving cars would presumably synchronize, allowing all of the cars to start moving at almost the same time and move in unison at high speeds.

Also, people don't feel safe driving at 60mph in a densely packed road, so they don't. This should be no problem for a computer, so you could have a densely packed highway but traffic still moving at very high speeds. Basically, flow velocity could remain constant as the highway becomes more congested.

On city streets, your car would route around traffic light timing, in coordination with other vehicles, to distribute traffic and prevent unnecessary stopping.

Edit: One caveat worth mentioning is that these optimizations would be most effective if a road is 100% automated cars, though maybe dedicated lanes are a good transition mechanism. Once the safety benefits are clear, I think adoption will be very fast. The societal cost of car accidents is absolutely massive.

"people don't feel safe driving at 60mph in a densely packed road, so they don't"

Not only do they not feel safe, they aren't safe driving bumper-to-bumper.

Computers will have better reaction times, so much of that goes away. But it's still dangerous. If two cars ahead of me slows, and the car ahead doesn't slow and collides, it will decelerate very quickly, perhaps too quickly for my brakes at 60mph.

You're right, the failure mode for self-driving cars at high speeds is catastrophic, but that's no different from many safe technologies. And the bar here is pretty low. You'd have to really screw up when designing the system for it to be even remotely as dangerous as human drivers. If everyone switched to self-driving cars, serious car accidents would probably become something you hear about in the news, not something that's happened to many of your friends.

That kind of technology won't be commonplace, available, or in a position to do anything about the problem for a long, long time. Meanwhile, the traffic problem exists today.

I'm all for self driving cars, but I'd like to see solutions for the problem today, not just letting things get worse until something magically makes it better.

Let's say that 500,000 cars (100k/car, pricing in the cost for storage and maintnance). The most Expensive subway line in the world cost 15 billion and serves something like 800k people. So you could also use that money to build two subway lines and save for maintenance. You could probably build 4 light rail lines (since you're not digging tunnels but instead buying up land).

Plus rail incentivises denser living, meaning that the more rail lines you build, the shorter you need to make them. Self driving cars let you share the cars so kind of solves the parking problem (but keeping track of people doing nasty stuff), but is really just a bunch of micro-buses.

If you can get the political will for rail, it's a pretty effective way of moving people around.

Rail isn't very efficient in the United States--except for maybe Manhattan (even then MTA loses money).

Seattle should look at what's happening in other cities. For example, according to the LA Times, "The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region's largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating. Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county's only transit option." http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ridership-slum...

Phoenix spent $1.4 billion on light rail and transit growth slowed (even though population growth did not). http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/01/phoenix-light-...

The point is that rail is not on-demand. It is not flexible. It is not serve people individually. Rail does a wonderful job of taking larges numbers of people from dense living areas to dense working areas.

The future is not light rail. The future is much closer to the individualized, on-demand, flexible nature of Uber rather than the rigid, expensive, inflexible nature of rail.

We just added two stops to our light rail line. It still doesn't sync up with nearby buses, and school is on break (one of the stops is for the university). Instantly, the line became overcrowded and we'll be lengthening trains next week.

In Seattle people ride trains if they're there. This is an observable fact.

This is debatable - Light Rail isn't always the answer, that is absolutely true, but in many places, it can alleviate traffic congestion, and in conjunction with other ride share services, can help immensely in all forms of traffic.

Seattle has a major congestion issue and I5 is a mess all through Seattle, and you can feel the impact even in Tacoma during heavy traffic.

A well placed light-rail can be extremely effective, for example the Hiawatha line in Minneapolis. It's not a panacea for infrastructure issues (I5 really is just trashed in most places around Seattle) but again, in conjunction with ride shares, it likely will serve a good number of riders.

LA holds no lessons, since it has some of the most dysfunctional public transit of any major city. Want to go from Venice to West LA? The blue buses run fairly frequently, although you'll never be able to predict their schedule, since they have to fight LA traffic. Want to go from Venice to downtown, Hollywood, or the SFV? Sorry, no single bus line serves all those areas, so you need to ride one line as far as you can, then walk a bit to pick up another.

Sadly, I agree that the future does look like sitting still in a sea of on-demand four-wheeled robots on the 405.

Losing money is fine (you don't make money off of your car right?). The important thing (at least on the economics) is looking at whether it costs more for everyone to own a car, or for everyone to pay for trains, or the right mix (with other transit options).

Cities like NYC and Boston are still enjoying the fruits of investment in rail that they made 100+ years ago. Those self driving cars wouldn't last 10.

Upvoted you.

As a huge supporter of mass transit and the public good, methinks the era of centralized big bang projects are coming to an end.

In the '80s, one of my buddy's sci-fi stories (a detective novel, mystery) featured on demand personalized transportation. I've been wanting that forever. With the cost of collaboration and coordination falling thru the floor, its inevitable. Stuff like Uber, Pronto, Car2Go, ZipCar are exciting precursors.

Services like Car2Go are great when you are staying within the city. The main traffic issue in Seattle is traveling to/from/through downtown Seattle. Adding a train that travels between Bellevue and Seattle would solve a ton of problems with the traffic on our two bridges, 520 and I-90. Currently we only have buses as our only mass transit option. I have found riding the bus to take significantly longer that simply driving (they get stuck in all the same traffic).

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