PT in Review: Towards a new kind of Transit Center

The Downtown Bellevue Transit Center: Center Platforms

"If we can't do the transit centers well, I wonder if we should have them at all."

-A participant at a Pierce Transit community forum

The placement of transit centers in Pierce County isn't the only problem with them. If we could simply snap our fingers and move all of the concrete roadways and shelters of the existing centers to denser, mixed use areas, it would be a disaster. We would have to tear down buildings or occupy lots currently used by existing customers for parking - harming efforts to economically grow those districts. The key to this incompatibility is that the transit centers as they exist today simply take up too much space. Additionally, they in-essence cede control of the adjoining urban space to the automobile in the form of ultra-wide arterials. To move beyond this, we need a 21st century vision of a what a better transit center could look like.

A useful tool in this kind of visioning process in design and planning is something called a specification. A specification is essentially a standardized set of criteria, or certain benchmarks that should be met in order to say that the design is "good enough." This specification is usually informed by the values of those who want the facility built. It doesn't always turn out the way everyone wanted, usually due to budget constraints or constraints with the selected site, but the specification at least gets everyone on the same page, while conveying the aspirations of the project were from the start.

Before moving on to what a new transit center specification might be, let's take a step back and examine some of the prominent features of existing transit centers, and play anthropologist for a minute to see what the values of Pierce Transit were back in 1979:

1. A large off-street facility proximate to large destinations
2. 10+ Bus bays for the most connections
3. Paper Bus schedules at each bay
4. A public telephone
5. Temporary seating
6. Minimal protection from the elements
7. Public restrooms mainly reserved for employees
8. Park and rides

This kind of a site speaks volumes about what the focus was when these facilities were conceived. What these parameters say to me is that Pierce Transit planners were interested in transcending all sorts of geographies to connect people to a few key destinations, they didn't want people to loiter, they weren't concerned about having people exposed to the elements for prolonged periods, and they wanted the facilities to be off public rights of way so they could be controlled and used for auxiliary functions like supervisor stationing, driver breaks, restrooms and security personnel.

One has to ask if those values really correlate with our values today. Don't we want people to be comfortable in this space? Don't we want the transit centers to be more integrated into their surrounding urban environments? Don't we want transit riders to become viable and contributing members of the local economy? Don't we want transit centers to help orient people as to where they are in the city? Don't we want the transit system to really help us create livable communities where it is viable for urban residents to not own and operate an automobile 100% of the time?

If we take this set of values, a more pro-urban, pro-pedestrian perspective to the transit center, geared to make transit more convenient, while attracting greater ridership, here's what a specification for a new kind of transit center might look like:

1. Make the transit center a part of a completed street in a mixed use center, giving more space to pedestrians and less to automobiles
2. Make it simple: Four bus bays, more frequent service, staggered transfers
3. Free Wi-Fi and real time bus information
4. A kiosk to orient people about where they are in the transit network and what destinations the district has to offer
5. Larger shelters with level boarding and comfortable street furniture
6. Installations of distinctive art and placards showing the history of the surrounding neighborhood
7. Marked sidewalks, bollards, street trees, sound muffling, street lights, and other amenities to make pedestrians feel safe and comfortable
8. Traffic signal priority and restricted lanes for buses
9. Off-coach fare collection
10. Access to daily goods and services like groceries, laundromats, day-storage, child day-care, etc.
11. More bicycle Parking
12. Slower car movement
13. A passenger drop-off area for each center
14. Vending machines for ORCA cards and other necessities
15. Easily accessible food and coffee carts

What would such a transit center look like? I have some ideas, but I'm not really talented enough to put them to paper or use Google Sketch-up just yet. It'd definitely be an improvement of the facilities we've got right now.

PT in Review: Observations on Timed Transfer Centers

I've been inspired by a blogger at HumanTransit to write about Pierce Transit's timed transfer centers (TTC's).

The TCC Transit Center, courtesy of Google Maps and MS Paint

Pierce Transit operates a number of TTC's, and really bases its entire network around them. Put it bluntly, the system has issues. There are so many problems with this network topography and operating model from the 1970's that it rivals the wrongheadedness of Tacoma's 1950's-style parking requirements that require 10 off-street parking spaces for a cafe operated out of a renovated single family home. Let's examine some of the characteristics inherent to Pierce Transit's timed transfer model.

The point of the transfer centers was to place a transit facility adjacent to potential destinations for large numbers of transit riders, where buses could all come together at the same time, so riders would have access to as many destinations as possible as soon as their bus came into the transfer center. Blah, blah, blah. This made a lot of sense in the old days. The majority of Pierce County was still farmland and woods outside of Tacoma and Puyallup. In order to ensure that all people throughout the county could have a modicum of transit service and access to the whole system, timed transfer areas would facilitate connections. However, the transit centers applied a huge degree of "geographic equity" that would have effects, which are very apparent today in the 21st century.

Number 1: Transit Centers that don't attract riders

Transit centers tend to attract transit usage in the areas where they are placed, because usage of transit service is partially a function of distance to the stop or station. Where there is a geographic concentration of service in such an area, trips become easier to make, that is that they take less time. In nature, we call this the inverse square law, which applies to light, sound, gravity and other phenomenon. However, one of the counter-intuitive aspects of the Pierce Transit system is that our transit centers are not to be found in dense, mixed use, walkable areas where transit trips are generated more easily, on foot. Instead they're found mainly on the periphery and sometimes on the periphery of the periphery as is the case with the Tacoma Mall Transit Center. This aspect of Pierce Transit's transfer centers reduces potential ridership immensely. It also spirals this inefficiency by creating the strange circumstance where there are surface level parking lots standing in between potential transit riders and the transit centers themselves. This magnifies the bad placement of transit centers, which are already conceived to be subordinate to this car dominated domain. Transit riders have to live with this situation of having the car literally shoved down their throat as they wait for their bus - on their fumes, on their horns and engine noise, on car alarms, blaring stereo systems, and burnt rubber, with the constant reminder that people are moving faster to their destinations than you are, in a more comfortable environment, by making societal decisions that hasten global warming and environmental degradation.

Number 2: Missed Connections, Uncomfortable Waiting Conditions

Secondly, transit centers are meant to bring together all of the buses at the same time... but what if the bus you're on is a little late because of traffic lights or congestion or one too many passengers in a wheelchair that took five minutes to load and strap in, or someone took a little too long paying their fare and the driver hassled them for that dime they were short because the agency's sales tax revenue took a dive and they're worried they're going to get canned in the next round of layoffs? Ah - well then, that means that you, you lucky passenger you, have to wait another half hour for the next "pulse" of buses to arrive. And don't you worry, Pierce Transit has the finest of waiting areas available, heated to a balmy temperature of "whatever it happens to be outside." And we're sure you'll be comfortable sitting on that metal bench we've provided as they're not designed for anyone to sit on for more than five minutes, and the bus stops are also designed to give everyone a cold and infuriating shower of wind and rain in the winter.

Number 3: Transit Centers dictate Transit Schedules

Thirdly, transit centers are like dictators when it comes to transit scheduling. If one bus is at a 30-minute headway, then dammit, all of the buses must be at a 30-minute headway. Geography and local conditions be damned. We will stretch all of the bus routes and have them twist and turn until they look like lines in a Picasso so that every route will be 30 minutes and will pick up every last passenger along the way, even if it inconveniences every other passenger. The end product is a transit network that defies simple geographic description. It's so contorted by the presence of the transit centers, that the bus lines create a badly distorted geography for the pedestrian, that bears no relationship at all to a geography that describes the distance between points on a map and the time it should take to get somewhere.

Number 4: The Shortchanging of Tacoma

Fourth, there's the matter how the timed transfer system affects transit frequency in cities, and specifically Tacoma. Since the transit centers are located on the periphery and transit routes have to go from peripheral transit center to peripheral transit center, the length of routing is extended and a lot of it is outside of what is considered urban. Trips are longer and take more time and tax dollars to complete. It doesn't matter to Pierce Transit if there are no riders in that area, by golly, those buses have to get from transit center to transit center.

By having many different, twisting, long routes without high frequency of service, makes transit less useful for spontaneous or casual trips. Additionally, the areas that would benefit from transit the most, i.e. get the highest ridership, are the same areas that don't get the high frequency service that they need. Pierce Transit's emphasis on geographic equity has spread out service, producing overcrowding on high use routes in urban areas. We see this a great deal on Route 1, especially on 6th Avenue, where service is currently limited to every 15 minutes, even though many times of the day it should be every five minutes, as it was over 70 years ago! Add to that, due to exceptionally long routing, there's additional potential to be late, and Route 1 averages 7 minutes in delays from this rider's experience. The end result is to have passengers get on board crowded buses that they've been waiting too much time for already, to arrive at timed transfer centers just after their connections have left the station.

My point in all of this is that Pierce Transit has got it all backwards. They focus on getting people where they need to be to end their trips in as circuitous and poorly timed a manner as possible. Pierce Transit needs to understand that no amount of marketing can really change the truth about the system: it's slow, it's broken and it's dysfunctional. Pierce Transit does not focus on creating a system that cares about where passengers begin their trips, nor do they care about influencing land use patterns to shorten trips in the long run. They simply are playing the role as another great government subsidizer of suburbia, the "un" in unsustainable, where poor folk have moved to buy cheap, large single family housing on large lots, but they can't afford a second car. Those people have my sympathy, but if we restructured our transit system to better serve the needs of urban riders in Tacoma, with a simplified routing system and on-street transfers in our mixed use centers, we could grow our ridership base and expand our system using some added passenger fares alongside tax dollars.

A Conversation with Marilyn Strickland

Pierce Transit Transfer Area at 10th and Commerce

Mayor-elect Marilyn Strickland is a fierce advocate for Tacoma with a sharp and fresh understanding of where the city is and where we should be headed.

Yesterday morning, the Tacoma Streetcar Board had the profound opportunity to meet with Marilyn to discuss the future of Tacoma and the prospects of streetcar extensions beyond Tacoma's Downtown. And while I don't want to steal the Mayor-elect's thunder by giving away plans that are best left to press conferences and official Council meetings, I think that it's appropriate to share certain themes that became apparent as I reviewed my notes from the meeting.

Marilyn spoke a good deal about engaging the community in a series of community conversations to fashion a comprehensive transportation vision for the city that really integrates many different layers of mobility together - from bikes to streetcars to buses. Thanks to actions by Council in 2009, we have a new set of possibilities open to us as a city. The Complete Streets design methodology has been formally adopted by Council, the Mixed Use Centers upzoned, parking meters going in by April, and part of Downtown freed of off-street parking requirements for new development. Tacoma Streetcar conveyed that what we're missing now are the transportation alternatives that will connect Downtown to the neighborhoods and the neighborhoods to each other, and that streetcars can be a great tool for economic development as well as transportation.

About streetcars Marilyn had a number of really valid questions:

Why streetcars?
Would streetcars be different from Link?
How much is this going to cost?
How is this system able to help people with limited mobility and not just able young urbanites?

etc.

At one point Morgan and Marilyn got into a "discussion" about initial routing beyond Tacoma General Hospital, with Morgan preferring a 6th Avenue route and Marilyn preferring an Martin Luther King Jr. Way routing. I was concerned at first, but after the meeting I realized that this was a good discussion to be having, although it would be settled at a later date. I remain convinced that the matching funds we come up with, added to federal, state and ST dollars will enable us to create extensions to 6th and Pine and to St. Joseph Hospital with a comfortable margin.

The issue of parking garages came up many times in reference to the word "graveyard," which I believe plays on Mayor Baarsma's depiction of Park Plaza North as a "tombstone" in downtown. The Board encouraged this understanding of the City Manager's plan for satellite parking garages on the edge of Downtown. In our view it is a diversion of city resources from what we should be aiming for in 2010 and beyond.

There was a lot of discussion that centered around the bus system and how to improve it. I was pleased to hear that Marilyn clearly understood that simply requesting additional levels of taxes from Tacoma's voters to maintain the existing bus system with a few tweaks isn't feasible. To paraphrase what she said, "We have to hit the reset button on this antiquated system." I also recall that she said something to the effect of, "Pierce Transit should understand that transit in Tacoma can include both buses and streetcars." ... and she also said that the Commerce Transfer Center is being moved. Hip-hip hurray.

We discussed a few other topics like how to come up with the money to fix potholes and how to fill in the gaps of needed goods and services in each of the neighborhood business districts, but I'll leave those announcements to our Mayor-elect.

It was definitely a pleasure to meet with her. We wish her the best in this coming year.

In other news:

Light rail to Sea-Tac airport opened today about an hour and a half ago. A lot of people have been waiting for this for decades. Congratulations Puget Sound.

Why doesn't Tacoma have a Street Utility?

Photo: Bike Lane at St. Helens Ave at S. 9th St.

At this juncture Tacoma's transportation situation can be characterized as a number of different visions, some of them are at odds with one another, but all of them have page after page of unfunded projects. City Manager Eric Anderson has a vision for parking garages on the edge of Downtown, Tacoma Streetcar has a vision for a city-wide streetcar system, the Mobility Master Plan has a vision for an extensive bike network, Pierce Transit is planning bus rapid transit on Pacific Avenue, and the common citizen has rather humble aspirations for roads free of potholes and a completed sidewalk network in South Tacoma.

The Problem: Unreconciled Visions, Bureaucracy, and No $

All of these visions for a future transportation system are steps in the right direction. They articulate a profoundly different world than exists today, but they lack sufficient concurrence with one another. The city also lacks the staff necessary to meet the standards set by Council while coordinating actions amongst multiple funding agencies. Add to that Tacoma's transportation bureaucracy, namely the Public Works Department, has been trained and conditioned for decades to cater to the throughput and storage of automobiles. However, the system we have now fails to meet the maintenance and repair needs of that one mode, let alone improvements in other modes. Once we collectively acknowledge these facts it becomes easier to understand why there has been so much talk and yet so little progress in transportation over the past few years. The City is simply ill-equipped to oversee the development of a 21^st century multimodal transportation system. We need new institutions with new powers to take the ideas of citizens and the City Council and to aggressively pursue a diversified and well-maintained transportation system.

The Street Utility - (RCW 82.80)

One option that Tacoma has available to rectify this situation is to create a state-authorized Street Utility. The Tacoma Street Utility would function just like any other utility service presently provided by the City of Tacoma. A small monthly fee, would be imposed on every home, business and industrial facility in the city based upon how much vehicular traffic is produced (doesn't that just make sense?). The revenues generated would then be used to fund up to 50% of the cost of transportation projects. Such projects could vary from new sidewalks to road paving to streetcar tracks to the backlog of unfunded local improvement districts.

Such a utility would have the effects of actually implementing the city's complete streets policy in an incremental manner, while coordinating all new investments in transportation, while seeing to the maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure. The new Street Utility Board and staff would provide active project coordination, leadership on alternatives to car, and an actual revenue source to bring plans to fruition. It could absorb the streets portion of the Public Works Department, which would give some much needed transparency to their work. Although not solving all of Tacoma's funding needs, the funding could go a long way if it is leveraged properly with local, state, and federal dollars.

We have a utility that provides broadband internet and cable television services. I'm all for Click Network. But why do we have that kind of a utility and not a utility to pay for existing infrastructure that's vital to the continued existence of the city? Why don't we have this already?

Transportation Benefit District - (RCW 36.73)

On the topic of streetcars, another potential state authorized entity exists and has yet to be utilized – the Transportation Benefit District (TBD). Such districts, when created by the City Council, act a great deal like Local Improvement Districts, but with more funding options for specific projects. With the Transportation Benefit District, we are able to fund transportation improvements of many kinds, including high capacity transit projects identified by the Puget Sound Regional Council. The 6^th Avenue Streetcar/Light Rail extension to Tacoma Community College is one of those projects.

The area surrounding 6^th Avenue could have a district that raises capital funds for streetcars using vehicle license fees, a capital bond and a sales tax, while other parts of Tacoma only need to have a meager vehicle license fee to support local streets. This makes it easier for voters to know what they're getting, and hopefully makes it more likely that they'll approve the district. Districts only exist as long as is needed to complete their projects. The Street Utility comes into play here as well, because they will be needed to coordinate the projects and matching funds from various agencies to make streetcars and other transportation improvements work.

More info:

The Association of Washington Cities

The Transportation Benefit District

The Street Utility (pdf)

• Street Utility (RCW 82.80)
• Notable Characteristics:
• Can be created by simple majority initiative or by Council
  
• Requires a new public board
• Can fund practically ANY transportation improvement from streetcars to bikes to road repairs to traffic signal priority
• Tax Authority
  
• Commercial Parking Tax on vehicle stalls or parking fees
• Monthly $2 / employee fee, $2 / residential housing unit fee
• Various fees by type of building on monthly utility bill, administered by TPU
  
• Single family residence: $2 to $8 a month (Oregon cities are about $3-$4 a month)
• Senior housing and multifamily housing ranges from 10% to 60% of a single family residence.
• Industrial and manufacturing buildings and parks could expect $10 a month for every 10,000 square feet.
• Commercial building categories, such as restaurants, office buildings, and general commercial buildings could expect $15 to $35 a month per 10,000 square feet.
• Shopping centers, could expect $150 a month per 10,000 square feet (which would be apportioned among the many businesses within the shopping center)
  

• Transportation Benefit District (RCW 36.73)
• Notable Characteristics:
• Can be created by simple majority initiative or Council action, but bonds require 60% Yes vote.
  
• For capital "road" infrastructure only
• Can fund "HCT" determined by Puget Sound Regional Council - Light Rail / Streetcars
• Could be used for $80M matching funds
  
• Tax Authority
• $100 vehicle license fee
  
• 3.75 cents / gallon fuel tax
• 0.2% Sales Tax
• 1 year excess property tax levy or capital bond levy (Needs 60% Yes Vote)