Sound Transit 3, the light rail initative, can bring mobility to Seattle
thatopinion.com
thatopinion.com
He is against ST-3.
I chuckle every time it comes on.
The same effect is true for mass transit, once the network is strong enough. But induced demand is usually a positive effect for mass transit.
His Republican challenger Bill Bryant does not.
However, I am worried, that the plan does not allow any kind of back out. Considering very high price and 10+ years execution time, I'd like a clear strategy for cancelling that if situation on the road changes significantly due to self-driving.
The benefit you point out is right: cars are convenient. But their convenience has serious costs.
Given a choice of two hypothetical futures:
1. I can get in a vehicle within minutes from anywhere, provided I live in a dense urban area. A third of said area is consumed by automobile infrastructure. All of that infrastructure is dirty and dangerous. I pay tremendous amounts of money out of pocket to travel anywhere more than a mile, but I get to spend that time alone.
2. I can get on a mass transit system anywhere within a mile. Two thirds of the road infrastructure is reclaimed for public usage (pedestrians, cyclists, public life); all but a tiny sliver of the rest (mostly highways which are unsuitable for public life) is either intentionally converted into parks or allowed to be reclaimed naturally. Society treats mobility as a public good, and we all pay a pittance to travel more than a mile as a result. I have to sit next to someone man-spreading.
I know which one I'd choose.
This is your opinion, not a fact.
A third of said area is consumed by automobile infrastructure.
Yep. So why build fixed rail? The infrastructure that future mass transit systems will need is already there. Let's spend the money maintaining it, upgrading it, and generally taking better care of it.
All of that infrastructure is dirty
Do you think cars will still be burning gasoline and diesel fuel by the time ST3 is complete? If so, why do you think that?
and dangerous.
Hard to respond to that. What's dangerous, in your view? Do you think pedestrians will still be hit by cars and trucks by the time ST3 is complete? If so, why do you think that?
What? It's basic math. Personal automobile space, plus stopping distance, times passengers.
> Yep. So why build fixed rail?
Because:
- Fixed rail is far more space efficient.
- That space could be used for far better things (which I enumerated in the post your responded to).
- Fixed rail is far more energy efficient.
> Do you think cars will still be burning gasoline and diesel fuel by the time ST3 is complete? If so, why do you think that?
Probably a whole lot of them, lots of old cars on the road. But that's not the only thing I meant by dirty. Automobile infrastructure is incredibly intrusive to public life. The grime is a part of that.
> Hard to respond to that. What's dangerous, in your view? Do you think pedestrians will still be hit by cars and trucks by the time ST3 is complete? If so, why do you think that?
Of course they will. The danger of automobiles to pedestrians (and cyclists!) is that they all share the same space. Light rail (and cyclists!) will likely also continue to strike pedestrians, but far less frequently (and cyclists are substantially less harmful in a collision).
Huh? That's not responsive to what I said.
You realize we're talking 30 years from now, right? How much do you know about what's already working in autonomous-vehicle pilot programs today?
Look, I get it. You don't like cars. And I don't like trains. But I genuinely think I'm right about what needs to be done to serve public transportation needs over the next several decades.
Why? Because like a lot of people I know, I'll seldom ride a public bus, streetcar or light rail system, but I'll take an Uber any day of the week.
Nothing at all that addresses their space or energy efficiency. Nothing on the horizon either. Those physical constraints are fundamental to that mode of transportation.
> Look, I get it. You don't like cars.
Actually I quite like cars. You don't seem to be responding to the points I wrote.
> Why? Because like a lot of people I know, I won't ride a public bus, streetcar or light rail system, but I'll take an Uber any day of the week.
Why is that?
Because they go where I need to go. Buses often don't, and tracks never do.
It'd be better if the transit options were actually expanded to better serve the burbs, but that's clearly not happening.
You wouldn't judge an entire rail system based on the throughput of a single track, would you? Why judge the throughput of a networked surface vehicle system by the throughput of a single highway populated by human drivers?
The other person I'm conversing with in this thread makes the valid point that vast swaths of urban land are taken up by streets. What I'm saying is that this is a feature of an effective transit system, not a bug. Nobody really wants to go from one light-rail terminal to another, but streets go everywhere.
A self-driving Uber car will pick up me in north Greenwood, then it will pick up another passenger, and we'll ride to Northgate Station. I'll take Light Rail to Downtown, and then walk the rest of the way to the office.
Rural areas will always need cars but well cities shouldn't.
It rains here. A lot. And not everybody is a twenty-something Amazonian, Googler, or Microsoftie in the best shape of their lives.
Sewer systems have pipes that get wider the further they go. Road systems have to do the same. The problem is that there are road systems that already have 20 lane highways.
Seattle is a small city currently but it's growing and will continue to grow and there comes a point where you'll have to build absolutely massive highways right in the centre to accommodate all the self driving cars and buses.
Also the last portion of light rail will be completed in 2039 with a large majority of it completed by 2031 [1]
[1] https://st32.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/Document%20...
I think there's a very real possibility that people like rayiner are correct and self-driving cars are 50 years off. Of course, I hope that's wrong and that self-driving cars get here sooner, and I think companies like Uber are doing the right thing by heavily developing the idea. But is it wise to assume that self-driving cars will arrive soon and live up to expectations instead of ensuring that we have scalable infrastructure regardless?
(For what it's worth, I rode Sound Transit last month when I was in Seattle and was very pleased with the service.)
But the Osborne Effect is a good thing for consumers (read: taxpayers.) It's only a bad thing if you're selling soon-to-be-obsolete junk.
I think there's a very real possibility that people like rayiner are correct and self-driving cars are 50 years off.
He's probably making the same mistake that I did for a long time, which is to continue to chuckle under my breath at machine learning as if it were still the 1980s or 1990s.
In my case, Alpha Go was what finally made realize that huge advances in computing were being made that I didn't know about and didn't understand. Rayiner has a similar epiphany on the way, if he really thinks it will be 50 years before human drivers are history.
Anyone could come up with a similar list of technological advances that were forecasted and either realized extremely late or not at all. Flying cars had been a decade away for the last 60 years. AGI was a decade away in the 1950's, 70's, and 90's, and it's a decade away today too.
Unfortunately it's impractical to maintain a minority viewpoint in a conversation on this subject. HN imposes aggressive rate limits after a few downmods. People on HN regularly use downvotes to express disagreement, and they reeeeeeeeallly like their trains.
So although I find the topic interesting, I probably won't be able to respond further in this thread.
"BigCorp, Inc. has been actively developing flying cars. They've logged around two million miles so far."
"Yeah, well, those flying cars don't count, because they aren't perfect."
Sounds like an excellent reason to spend thirty billion dollars on trains.
But sure, lets not invest in big things that we really need now and in the future because AGI is only 10 years away and it will solve all of our problems this time for sure.
Believe me, there is nothing in "physics" that says that fixed-rail tracks are optimal for anything except transferring people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, and for transferring large sums of tax money from one set of pockets to another.
But sure, lets not invest in big things that we really need now and in the future because AGI is only 10 years away and it will solve all of our problems this time for sure.
The best time to start building a good light-rail infrastructure was 30 years ago. Not much question about that. The worst time is now.
Now that is a goalpost shift. An incredibly bad argument with an entire planet's worth of falsifying evidence, but it was an excellent goalpost shift.
No, it was a bare assertion. Different fallacy altogether. :-P
An incredibly bad argument with an entire planet's worth of falsifying evidence
Wait, I thought you were saying that networked self-driving vehicles on surface streets not only weren't ready for prime time, but won't be able to compete with multi-decade fixed rail projects that haven't even been approved for construction yet.
Now you're saying that there's already an "entire planet's worth" of evidence that proves they can't? What planet are we talking about, exactly? Certainly no such evidence exists on this one, unless you put all kinds of constraints on the problem that aren't necessary in real life.
Obviously self-driving cars can't replace rail transit if we do what most critics in this thread seem to think we'll do, which is simply replace our existing personally-owned vehicles with them. Transit is a system-level problem that requires system-level thinking, no matter the modality.
For instance, take half the surface streets in the city and turn them into boarding platforms. These are the only places where the self-driving cars ever stop. On the other half of the streets, they never stop moving. Cars merge seamlessly in and out of these lanes. Routes and following distances are adjusted on a centralized basis to accommodate entrance and exit schedules. There are no human drivers to hesitate or misjudge speeds and distances.
It's simply unthinkable that a system like this couldn't move as many people from their actual point of origin to their ultimate destination than fixed rail. Only by artificially constraining the problem can you make "physics"-based capacity arguments that support rail transit. Fixed rail is literally all about constraints. We need fewer of those, not more.
IMHO we should spend $30-$50 billion doing something radically different in this transit-planning cycle, instead of building more of the same old trains for the same limited population of users.
Get rid of traffic signals on the streets themselves, and a 2x multiplier in efficiency is a gross underestimate of what can be achieved.
One of the biggest challenges, of course, will be to avoid what we've done in the past, which is allowing limited-access highways to act like impassable walls.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/local/california/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...
Transportation options are becoming more personalized with Uber, Lyft, and autonomous cars around the corner, but rail is and inflexible technology.
Without new ideas on how to make light rail more flexible and personal, these investments lock people it to inflexible transportation infrastructure and that is troublesome.
In other cities maybe, but not in Seattle. Ridership on the Link Light Rail has gone way up since the UW extension opened.
> Transportation options are becoming more personalized with Uber, Lyft, and autonomous cars around the corner,
Uber and Lyft exist in Seattle today, and they clearly aren't enough to solve the problem, since commute times are still increasing (2x since 2010). Autonomous cars can't fix it either - the only way autonomous cars can actually decrease congestion is if ALL the cars on the road are networked and there can be a computer somewhere doing birds-eye planning on the whole fleet. That scenario is many decades away if it happens at all.
Also, as another commenter pointed out, Sound Transit is specifically investigating how to incorporate autonomous vehicles into their planning as part of this proposal.
Did you know the UW has a big transit lab and actually has the equipment the track cars around the city. Same with SPD.
That future is coming quikcly!
* Better carpooling options
* Automatically taking side streets (based on traffic) to reduce load
* Less swerving/lane changing/rubbernecking which causes backups
* Detecting and responding to traffic waves (a few cars can make a difference)
* Reduced urban parking needs (fewer cars endlessly circling, a huge fraction of traffic)
It goes on.
That LA Times article was true for January, but the situation has started to reverse this year as more rail has been built. Scroll down to the bottom: https://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/
Here's another more recent article: http://www.lamag.com/driver/expo-gold-line-extensions-turnin...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/nyregion/surge-in-ridershi...
You need a good system before people are going to use it. The US population is going up by another 100 million people by 2050. Think more cars is the answer?
A portion of ST3 is to pay for ST2 and ST1, which both went over budget. In those cases, union and industry donated massive amounts to work on the initiative to get even bigger contracts after.
It is projected that ST3 will carry less than 3% of the local traffic capacityou, at a huge cost.
We need VC thinking here, and more proposals with a clear eye on the ROI.
If my city dropped 5.4 billion on buses (a tenth of cost of ST3), we could have much more capacity that could be provisioned in a more dynamic way. That could be ready in a few years.
Instead we get rail in 25+ years at a massive cost now.
Having spent the last week in DC and been stuck on the Red Line for a trip that took 3x as long as normal, I am not convinced a rail line with it'so single points of failure is the best solution.
Transit is cool, but I am firmly of the opinion that this train wreck of an initiative is NOT the way forward and will vote NO.
Completely false. ST2 (which isn't even complete; I'm not sure why you're referring to it in the past tense) is $100 million under budget and 6 months ahead of schedule (source: http://www.masstransitmag.com/article/12171636/ahead-of-sche...).
> mired in corruption and inefficiency.
Again, false. One of the reasons why ST2 is under budget is that Sound Transit got a lower interest rate than they expected on the bonds they issued, specifically because they're one of the best-run, most efficient mass transit agencies in the country (source: http://www.soundtransit.org/About-Sound-Transit/News-and-eve...)
> We need VC thinking here, and more proposals with a clear eye on the ROI.
Ah, the hallmark of the uninformed public transit opponent. Lots of handwaving with "we need innovation and outside-the-box thinking!" with very few concrete proposals. The ST3 planning process went on for years specifically so people could propose alternative ideas- they weren't taken up because none of them were any good.
> If my city dropped 5.4 billion on buses (a tenth of cost of ST3), we could have much more capacity that could be provisioned in a more dynamic way. That could be ready in a few years.
Buses where? The roads (both the highways and the surface streets downtown) are already jammed. Nobody is going to take buses if it doesn't offer any decrease in transit time over just taking their car.
> Instead we get rail in 25+ years
Yup, construction takes time. I will only mention that we could've had this all today if your spiritual forerunners hadn't killed Seattle's transit plans in the 70's and 80's making basically the same arguments you're making now. We can either continue to make their mistakes or try to fix it.
> at a massive cost now.
No, the cost is spread out over the same multi-decade time span as the construction. Do you know how taxes and bonds work?
Behold the usual ST3 opponent: vague proposals that reek of concern trolling, combined with empirical falsehoods. Please vote Yes; Seattle is getting choked to death in traffic and we can't repeat the mistakes of the 80's by doing nothing.
I don't know how long you have been in the area, but there are reasons they have been one of the most audited agencies in the country (and you don't get audited if people think you are doing things well).
Sound Transit has a multi-million dollar marketing budget (we know here that those slick websites don't come cheap!). They memorably somehow spent a million of those dollars to have a party to open a station.
Of course their website will only contain positive stuff about them. Of course the various blog posts and editorials from folks connected to the developer, real estate, etc groups will gush over the plan -- they are slated to make a killing on the contracts! I would say a lot of untrue things for a few million dollars.
>> Seattle is getting choked to death in traffic and we can't repeat the mistakes of the 80's by doing nothing.
Ever heard of the "invisible hand"?
If Seattle is really getting choked and inefficient, maybe business will relocate to Everett or Tacoma? Is that necessarily a bad thing? I would love to see the region develop more. That would make a strong economic signal for easy connections to those cities.
I suspect a lot of the issue here is that Seattle has explosively grown in the last few years because of Amazon. Amazon's growth has spurred other companies growth. The problem compounds and for those who don't get to walk to work there are not many solutions except for >60 min commutes.
Downtown living is ever more expensive and this type of transportation seems like it would give Seattle and surrounding an ability to get to and from work without using a car. This sounds positive to me.
I don't know enough context about this one but your concerns have made me curious to do more research.
They claim their public relations spending is on par with other agencies.
As someone who lives in Seattle, this argument against ST3 is old and hollow.
http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/06/21/24241690/sound-tr...
Do you want to own a nice car? If you buy a 100k car you are on the hook for $800 extra to Washington's already high vehicle taxes
If the true reason you don't support light rail is that you own luxury cars that the majority of the population cannot afford and you wouldn't ever take public transit that's fine, but don't lie to make a case.
- Don't forget that ST2 is still in progress and some of the projects (like the Seattle-Bellevue light rail) and their benefits are coming online within the next decade. Not all the ST3 projects will take the full forty years too - the proposed Redmond and Federal Way extensions could be completed within the decade as well.
- ST3 does include several new BRT routes which will start up more quickly and ease congestion on the 405.
- Congestion imposes hidden costs, especially once it gets to the levels of really bad cities like LA or DC, and we're moving in that direction. People have more economic opportunity when they can reach more of the surrounding area quickly, and better accommodate the population growth that's coming (new employees at, say, Amazon, won't have to all live downtown like they pretty much all do now).
- The problems exist now (I mentioned above that commute times have doubled in 5 years. That's an official statistic from somewhere or other but it pretty much tallies with my personal experience, and it's only going up from here) and the alternative proposals are not convincing.