City Hall
Council to Adopt Ambitious Transit Master Plan
The city council plans to adopt a transit master plan (TMP) today that's largely identical to the plan that went through public comment last fall, with a few minor changes aimed at assuring residents that they'll have a voice in any decisions that ultimately result from the plan.
Maps showing the correlation between transit ridership and carlessness, via SDOT.
The TMP, of course, is merely an advisory document aimed at guiding the city's transit (and, in a tangential way, bike and ped) priorities; Metro and Sound Transit are ultimately the agencies that decide where to expand transit or make transit cuts. More importantly, the plan is aspirational: Unless a lot more transportation dollars become available, and unless existing transportation dollars are reprogrammed toward transit instead of highways, the ambitions of the TMP will go unrealized.
And the TMP is ambitious. Among other things, the plan calls for a new focus on rail over other modes ("This was a strong sentiment among stakeholders as well as members of the public"); identifies a list of 15 priority bus corridors for enhanced bus access around the city (note to wonks: Check out page 3-24 for a nifty graphic that breaks down each of those corridors by ridership, new ridership, riders per hour, costs, costs per mile, travel time improvement, and greenhouse gas reductions); proposes ways to improve branding of the city's rail, streetcar, and BRT routes; and suggests a new paradigm for neighborhood planning in the city that focuses on making transit more widely accessible.
The plan also directs the city to focus on three "high-capacity transit" (in this case, rapid streetcar or bus rapid transit) corridors: The Central Area to downtown; Roosevelt to downtown via Eastlake; and Loyal Heights to downtown via Fremont, South Lake Union, and Westlake. (Notably absent: rail to West Seattle, which was a cornerstone of Mayor Mike McGinn's original transportation agenda.)
It's a far-reaching vision. It's also astronomically expensive, and largely unfunded. (This year, the city has allocated just $900,000 to implement the transit master plan.) Although the plan doesn't include a total dollar figure for every single initiative it proposes, it does note that the total capital costs for expanding high-capacity transit and priority bus routes would be just over $1 billion, and that the operating costs for the high-capacity transit routes alone would be $27.8 million a year. Next year, if it doesn't get a boost from the state, King County Metro will be forced to cut service around 17 percent.
On the other hand, the TMP is a 20-year plan---a framework for transit planning in a future when, pro-transit officials hope, the city, state, and federal government will have shifted their transportation funding priorities from highway expansion to transit.
Maps showing the correlation between transit ridership and carlessness, via SDOT.
The TMP, of course, is merely an advisory document aimed at guiding the city's transit (and, in a tangential way, bike and ped) priorities; Metro and Sound Transit are ultimately the agencies that decide where to expand transit or make transit cuts. More importantly, the plan is aspirational: Unless a lot more transportation dollars become available, and unless existing transportation dollars are reprogrammed toward transit instead of highways, the ambitions of the TMP will go unrealized.
And the TMP is ambitious. Among other things, the plan calls for a new focus on rail over other modes ("This was a strong sentiment among stakeholders as well as members of the public"); identifies a list of 15 priority bus corridors for enhanced bus access around the city (note to wonks: Check out page 3-24 for a nifty graphic that breaks down each of those corridors by ridership, new ridership, riders per hour, costs, costs per mile, travel time improvement, and greenhouse gas reductions); proposes ways to improve branding of the city's rail, streetcar, and BRT routes; and suggests a new paradigm for neighborhood planning in the city that focuses on making transit more widely accessible.
The plan also directs the city to focus on three "high-capacity transit" (in this case, rapid streetcar or bus rapid transit) corridors: The Central Area to downtown; Roosevelt to downtown via Eastlake; and Loyal Heights to downtown via Fremont, South Lake Union, and Westlake. (Notably absent: rail to West Seattle, which was a cornerstone of Mayor Mike McGinn's original transportation agenda.)
It's a far-reaching vision. It's also astronomically expensive, and largely unfunded. (This year, the city has allocated just $900,000 to implement the transit master plan.) Although the plan doesn't include a total dollar figure for every single initiative it proposes, it does note that the total capital costs for expanding high-capacity transit and priority bus routes would be just over $1 billion, and that the operating costs for the high-capacity transit routes alone would be $27.8 million a year. Next year, if it doesn't get a boost from the state, King County Metro will be forced to cut service around 17 percent.
On the other hand, the TMP is a 20-year plan---a framework for transit planning in a future when, pro-transit officials hope, the city, state, and federal government will have shifted their transportation funding priorities from highway expansion to transit.
