(This was going to be my next post, but to be honest, I got bored writing it, so I can't imagine it would be very interesting to read. However, I spent enough time on it to not want it to just sit in my drafts folder forever, so if you happen across this (it won't be posted to Facebook until and unless I finish it someday) and actually, y'know, care, you can read this partially-completed and in-need-of-a-lot-of-work post on transit and infrastructure. Sadly, it'll probably be the last post until summer (when I'm done with school for probably ever!).)
So many of you may not have known this, but BART had a pretty rough week last week: mysterious voltage spikes damaging rail cars, having to bus bridge riders 15 miles, etc. (links). It's a system that a lot of people depend on to get around the Bay Area, so whenever it has trouble (which is apparently more and more frequent), it's bound to get a lot of flak. And, of course, the Internet age has made giving other people flak a really easy thing to do.
And so, in response, BART's Twitter feed (link) has become awesome. (Vox link)
Rather than the usual simple delay announcements and cheerful statements that they'll fix the problems as soon as possible, the guy running the Twitter feed has been actually educating people on the challenges that BART (and often, transit across the nation) is facing: old equipment and infrastructure that's wearing out, demand far beyond the designed capacity, and a lack of funds to make things better.
This is particularly timely for us here in Seattle, with U-link opening tomorrow (SO EXCITED, and I'll rarely even get to ride it. My most convenient stretch of light rail won't open until 2023, although just getting to Northgate will make quite a bit of a difference), because it offers several lessons that we can (AND SHOULD) take to heart NOW to avoid some of these problems in the future.
1) Infrastructure isn't invincible.
This isn't just a transit problem; we see it with roads, too. We build the initial stretch of roads or tracks, enjoy them, and then steadfastly refuse to support their repair and maintenance until they've degraded so far that they're barely functional.
It's kind of a weird attitude, because there are so many things in life that we DON'T treat that way: a house, a car, our computers, even our health. No one ever expects the initial investment into these things to be the only money or effort you have to put into them. They get dirty, things get broken, they need to have things fixed or replaced, or just simply maintained. And all expect this, and deal with it as a part of ownership (that often doesn't stop most people from complaining about having to do it, but they at least recognize it's necessary).
What's the difference? "Ownership" is probably part of the problem, because not many of us feel like we "own" the roads or transit. We do, though, whether through fares or fees or gas taxes or sales taxes or property taxes (or most likely a combination of all of these). And when the bill comes due for upkeep, it's going to be our money to fix it.
And just as with a house, or a car, or a computer, or your health, it's a lot cheaper to keep up on the maintenance than to deal with the consequences once things really go wrong.
So yeah, U-link's going to be pretty awesome. And so will North Link and Lynnwood Link, and East Link. But the work's not done when they're built. In fact, it's just getting started.
2) Infrastructure isn't ageless.
Of course, even when you keep up on maintenance and repairs, eventually things just wear out. You can crutch them along as long as possible, but eventually you just need new stuff. And you can put it off and put it off and put it off until whatever it is you're stalling on is incredibly unreliable and practically useless, or you can stuck it up and buy the new stuff.
Unfortunately, the former scenario is far more often the frequent one, despite the inconveniences and higher long-term cost. It's the situation that BART finds itself in, where big chunks of the system are reaching the end of their design life. But as their Twitter feed noted, money's harder to come by when things are running smoothly.
Infrastructure seems so permanent that I think it can be hard to remember that it's really not. We just assume that what we build will last forever, or at least a really really long time, but it won't. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" is a great line, but it loses some of its impact (well, the intended impact, but it picks up a completely different impact) when it's on the plinth of a broken statue. (Link)
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. It's just a fact of life that things don't last, no matter how permanent they seem. Infrastructure is no exception.
3) Infrastructure doesn't scale infinitely (but transit scales a lot better than roads).
One of things that the BART Twitter noted is that the system was originally designed to handle 100,000 people a week, and is now handling over 400,000 people per DAY. Even assuming that weekdays are busier than weekends, that's still about 25 times the design loads. It's no wonder they're having trouble!
Every system has an inherent capacity limit. For transportation, that's throughput: how many people can get through a certain point in a certain amount of time. (link)
Despite the speeds, freeways are actually terrible at this, because cars use up an incredibly inefficient amount of space for the number of people they're usually carrying. In addition, any added capacity (additional lanes, additional roads, etc.) is typically quickly taken up by induced demand (Link), leaving everyone no better off than when they started.
Buses are somewhat better, in that they use the space much more efficiently. Let's say that each bus, counting the increased trailing distance, takes up the same amount of room as 3 cars. The approximate number of people in a car on Seattle-area freeways is apparently 1.2, so that gives us 4.6 people in those three cars. We'll round up to 5 to be generous (awfully generous, really; there's no way two out of three cars on the freeway has more than one person in it). A bus, on the other hand, can generally carry upwards of 100 people, counting standees, which makes it 20 times more efficient in the use of that space.
Light rail can do even better, as each car can carry 150 people at once (they can actually carry 200, but Sound Transit's goal is 150 because people in Seattle aren't used to NYC or Tokyo-style crowding), with very low headways. That means that two-car trains can carry 300 people, and the three-car trains ST has been forced to start using this coming week will carry 450 people, and the trains, which currently run every 6 minutes at peak times, can get down to 3 minutes or better once the buses are out of the tunnel.
Plus, aside from MLK (which is looking more and more like a terrible design choice), the Link system is entirely grade separated, so it's immune to fishpocalypses (link), major highway closures (link) and even general rush hour congestion. (Throughput at rush hour is lousy, since everyone's moving so slowly.)
So here's what I mean about transit scaling better than roads, by which I really meant cars. Take a look at those bus numbers again. Obviously, if you replaced every car on the road with buses, there'd still be a limit to the number of buses you can fit on the road, just like there's a limit to the number of cars. But when you hit that, you're moving 20 times the number of people on a given stretch of road than you were in cars!
Similarly, while there are things that a light rail/subway system can do to increase capacity (longer trains, shorter headways), those eventually hit a limit, too. But the throughput when you do is vastly higher than a road is.
But again, this doesn't scale infinitely. There are still limits to capacity, and in the meantime, you're stretching your system to the max to achieve those capacities. You're wearing out your buses/trains by running them more frequently, you're wearing out the rails and power system by running trains more frequently, you're stressing the control systems, etc. And as long as it's working, it's great, and people are happy. But when something goes wrong, it's far more dramatic. (Think blowing a tire at 20 mph vs. 100 mph. Are you pulling over, or are you rolling over?) And then people are pissed off.
4) Building infrastructure takes time and planning.
U-Link has been under construction since 2008. Construction on Northgate Link started in 2012 (although tunneling's only been going on for a year or two), and it won't open until 2021. The recently-released draft project list for ST3 (link) has timings for those projects (more on that later). These things take time, so you can't just wait until you near or hit capacity to start on the next expansion.
And a corollary to this is that you need a really good planning department. Simply building to address current needs is fighting the last war, and that's bad enough. But building to meet poor projections of growth is even worse, because it likely means you're building in the wrong spots, and that's a waste of money.
One struggle that Sound Transit has had with planning light rail is that they have to use the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC)'s estimates for population growth (link), which are wildly off in some areas (just look at Ballard). They're also forced to plan stations and routes without integrating with Metro to consider how bus routes might feed the stations, which can depress potential ridership numbers, and also to not consider possible rezoning.
All of those can add up to sub-optimal routings and station placement (or lack thereof; 130th Station, I'm looking at you here). But sometimes an even bigger problem in this respect can be the next point:
5) Building infrastructure is utterly political.
(I'll admit, this post was supposed to be up LAST Sunday, but I got lazy and didn't finish it. It actually worked out well, though, because it means that not only do we have the data showing the smashing success of U-Link, but it also means that draft ST3 list is out, which lead me to this last point.)
Go take a look at that ST3 draft list again. Look at the places it's going. Look at how long it will take to get there. This project list is a boondoggle and a disaster, and the reasons are essentially entirely political, and have been from the start.
First, consider the fact that the state legislature has to authorize Sound Transit to ask for additional taxing authority. Why? Why on Earth can't we vote more taxes on ourselves without the state legislature giving us the go-ahead first? And, of course, that gives them a chance to extort things out of the people who want the authority. (Link)
Then, a big part of the delays in ST3 (Ballard in 2038?!? 22 years from now?) is because of the way the taxes are structured. Rather than getting the full amount up-front - or at least the ability to spend the full amount up-front - they accumulate gradually. So, the project list must be staggered to spend the money as it comes in. This is completely avoidable, though, but giving ST and other transit districts better bonding
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