A Decade of Public Transit Incompetence Continues

The below paragraph from Sound Transit’s July Platform heralding  “Permit parking program expanding” is just the latest example of more than 10 years of incompetence in dealing with the area’s public transit needs.

In order to provide frequent transit riders with reliable parking, the Sound Transit Board today voted to offer reserved permit parking options to solo drivers. Permits will give their holders access to priority parking areas on weekdays during the morning rush hours. Up to fifty-percent of spaces at our highest-demand lots will be reserved for train and bus riders who use parking permits.

Interested?

The July announcement was a follow-up to a Feb 14th Sound Transit news release “Sound Transit, King County Metro seek public feedback on reserved solo-driver permit parking at transit facilities”.  It justified their  “new parking management strategy” with the following:

At the most popular transit facilities, people are arriving earlier and earlier to secure a space – which can increase crowding on early buses and trains while seats remain empty on later transit trips.

Note that neither of the announcements included adding more parking as a way of ensuring commuters have access to transit.  Sound Transit hasn’t added any significant parking for at least ten years.  Thus the only result of the reserved parking will be up to 50% of the stalls commuters currently use will be reserved for later arrivals.  The only way to be assured of parking is to be one of those able to reserve a stall.   It will be particularly disruptive to I-90 corridor commuters who have already had two P&Rs shut down for East Link

Presumably filling "empty seats on later transit trips" requires they give preference to those riding later trains, ending access to many current riders.  The Sound Transit Board apparently doesn't recognize forcing more commuters to drive into Seattle during peak commute is not the way to reduce congestion.

Sound Transit could have eased “crowding on early buses” by simply adding more bus routes. Sound Transit's refusal to do so is demonstrated by the fact their annual  “Revenue Vehicle Miles Operated” in 2005, 10,254,710, only increased to 11,991,374 in 2017.  More recently Sound Transit’s quarterly bus trips only increased from 115,163 in 2012 4^th quarter to 120,400 in the 2017 4^th quarter.  That comparable total average express-bus-weekday boarding only increased from 54,345 to 61,526 during the five years; hardly a “dramatic increase”.

Clearly very little of the billions Sound Transit has spent over the last decade on “System Expansion” was for added parking or bus service.   Their Central Link route from the UW stadium through the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) to SeaTac increased transit capacity within the city.  A T/C at the UW could have provided an interface between 520 BRT and light rail enhancing commuting for those on both sides of the lake. 

Rather than adding the UW T/C or a light rail extension to West Seattle, Sound Transit convinced voters to approve Prop 1 light rail extensions to Mill Creek, Redmond, and Federal Way.  They simply ignored the fact the money spent on Prop 1 extensions did nothing to increase the capacity through the DSTT.  Instead they managed to convince 70% of Seattle voters to provide the support needed to pass ST3.  The billions spent on the “light rail spine” will do nothing to reduce congestion and their operating costs will create a financial black hole for the areas transportation funds.

All of this could have been avoided if the Seattle Times Traffic Lab had demonstrated a modicum of competence.  It's totally failed in its mission to “dig into the region’s thorny transportation issues, and spotlights promising approaches to easing gridlock”.  It doesn't take much "digging" to recognize Sound Transit's failure to increase transit capacity with added parking or bus revenue vehicle hours.  They apparently don't recognize the incoherence of Sound Transit's "Parking management strategy".  Even they recognized the DSTT capacity problem with a Seattle Times 6/19/17 edition front-page Traffic Lab article “Here’s why I-5 is such a mess!” concluded the best they could say about ST3 was:

 Sound Transit 3’s light-rail system, as it expands over the next 25 years, will do little to ease I-5 traffic, but it will give some commuters an escape hatch to avoid it”.

Again, one would think, a newspaper would question the efficacy of Sound Transit spending $54 billion on a transportation system that won’t reduce congestion, something they could easily have done by urging they be audited.

Instead their 6/19/17 Times article, ”Can’t state ease I-5 traffic? Fixes exist, but most of them are pricey”, typifies their approach.

The most obvious way to reduce traffic on I-5 is to reduce the number of cars on the road.  The most obvious way to do that is to make it more expensive for them to be there.

Rather than increasing public transit capacity, their solution, a 6/26/17 edition headline “Time to pay?  Tolling doesn’t get much love, but it eases gridlock”, urges tolls on all the major roadways.  They fail to recognize that unless commuters have an alternative way of commuting, tolls only increase the cost.  They refuse to acknowledge Sound Transit’s failure to add thousands of parking stalls and hundreds of bus routes is the reason public transit ridership is still less than 10% of total. 

Until Sound Transit and Seattle Times recognize that reality the area's decade of increasing congestion is only going to continue.