Some Surprises in Sightline’s Commuter Analysis

Does anyone in Eugene actually work?

Seriously though I am curious about the people in Seattle not carpooling. This makes sense if they are actually referring to Seattle residents since it kind of makes little sense to carpool within your city of residence. If they aren’t already doing so, it would make more sense to measure how many people employed in Seattle from elsewhere (Bellevue, Everett, etc) are carpooling.

I’d think carpooling would be lower in Cities due to the presence or transit and also the fact that people probably live close enough to work to make carpooling impractical. Little benefit from carpool lanes, so the only real savings is going to be parking, which is only a factor if you are downtown at which point you can probably bus faster.

Ty,

The figures are “residence-based.” That means they refer to the residents of Seattle, for example, not to the people who work in Seattle. (More specifically, the figures are restricted to residents who are “workers age 16 and up”)

Eric de Place
Sightline

What a perfect illustration of the incredible stupidity of wasting billions of dollars in the Seattle area on light rail!

In 2009, the year of the study, Seattle had only one 14-mile light rail line, which did not even get to the airport. Portland had 4 light rail lines totaling 52 miles with 84 stations.

Yet, with almost nobody riding trains in Seattle, compared to Portland, Seattle had a far greater share of commute trips by transit (19.5%) than Portland (11.5%). And Portland opened their first light rail line in 1986, so they have had time to build ridership and development on their light rail lines.

What is the point of spending billions and billions of tax dollars on lite trains? As this study shows, you can move a lot more people on transit with a lot of bus routes than you can if you rely on a few extremely expensive lite rail lines.

Link light rail is currently averaging around 24,00 boardings per day on their $2.6 BILLION lite rail line, which now goes all the way to the airport, and is about one year old. If that $2.6 billion had been spent to increase bus service, instead of wasting it on little trains, there would be many times more additional boardings on buses than those 24,000 boardings per day on LINK lite rail.

Portland has been putting their transit money into light rail for decades, while Seattle has been putting it into buses (until recently). And Seattle has close to twice as high a percentage of commute trips on transit as Portland.

What is the point of building stupidly expensive light rail in our area? For the same money, you can move a lot more people on buses than you can on little trains.

Nice try, Kemper.

Seems like weather and topography might have something to do with bike commute rates.

Just what I was thinking. If you live in the middle of nowhere, your incentive finding a way around commuting to work (which is probably not in the middle of nowhere) is high.

Responding to SEN: Either if you factor in weather and topography, there is room to grow the mode-split, as you commuter analysis people like to say.

I want to point out that it’s not surprising that Puget Sound cities to our south have higher carpool rides. Several of Pierce County’s municipalities require carpooling to work if you drive, they’ll even let you borrow a company van. Tacoma Public Utilities I know for sure does this.

I am not surprised by Eugene being #1 for bike commuting. The topography for much of the downtown is flat and they have very good bike lanes on throughout the city.

Seattle would be amazing for biking if not for all the hills. Not everyone is athletic and not everyone has facilities at work to shower off a lather of sweat, being practical.

The rate of carpooling for Seattle residents has fallen steadily (from 12% in 1990 to 11% in 2000 to 9.5% in 2009). City planners had assumed it would rise from 12% in 1990 to 13% in 2009.

Can we get the % of SOV users in 2009 (it was 56% in 2000), or did that figure not fit Sightline’s agenda?

It’s great that transit use rose from 18% in 2000 to 19.5% in 2009 – even if the City Comprehensive plan did assume that it was gonna rise to 27% in 2010.

If we can’t achieve the mode shifts called for in the City ComPlan, maybe it’s time to stop handing out building permits like X-Mas candy.

…subtracting the figures provided would seem to indicate that SOV mode share is 54.3%, which is down from 56%, but nowhere near the 2010 ComPlan goal of 35%.

…subtracting the figures provided would seem to indicate that SOV mode share is 54.3%, which is down from 56%, but nowhere near the 2010 ComPlan goal of 35%.

As much as I like Portland, their light rail line is of a quite different character from what Link will be after U-Link and North Link are completed. Portland is only about 60% as dense as Seattle, and their MAX lines generally travel through sprawling areas outside of the city limits and gain ridership with lots of park and rides. Still, the operating cost advantage of rail should not be ignored. For Trimet, the operating cost per boarding is $1.89 for MAX rail and $3.21 for bus. The farebox recovery of MAX is also much higher–46% compared to 21% for the overall TriMet system.http://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/factsheet.pdfhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1215/is_11_204/ai_111269158/http://trimet.org/openhouse/budget.htmThe West Coast cities that beat Seattle in transit ridership are Vancouver, BC, and San Francisco. What do they have in common? They both have fairly extensive grade separated rail transit networks and significantly higher density.

“What is the point of spending billions and billions of tax dollars on lite trains?”

What is the point of writing paragraphs and paragraphs and saying nothing meaningful?

What about all of the Seattle residents who work in Redmond or the Kent Valley? Seems to me that it makes good sense to encourage carpooling among those folks….

As a college town, it’s perhaps valuable to compare Eugene’s cycling rate to the UW’s cycling rate. I think JDF recent noted that UW’s cycling commuter rate is around 8%, so not that much lower than the 10.7% of Eugene.

The transit and walking share of commuters must be huge, too.

Mr. X–
If you clicked over to Sightline’s site, you might find exactly the calculation you’re looking for. SOV rates are here: http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2010/10/04/who-are-the-northwests-commute-leaders.

As of 2009, Seattle’s is just a hair under 53%. It’s the lowest by far among NW cities.

Remember, too, that these figures are “residence-based,” meaning they refer to the behavior of Seattle’s residents who work, which is a different population from the workers who work in Seattle.

Eric de Place
Sightline

Most of those Bellevue transit users, to be fair, are commuting into and out of Seattle. It’s not exactly buoyed by local use the way Seattle’s high transit rate is.

Most of those Bellevue transit users, to be fair, are commuting into and out of Seattle. It’s not exactly buoyed by local use the way Seattle’s high transit rate is.

Thanks – it wasn’t included in the link provided in the story (and I’m aware that it’s residence-based – see my comment on carpooling).

Thanks – it wasn’t included in the link provided in the story (and I’m aware that it’s residence-based – see my comment on carpooling).

Eugene: a flat, small town filled with 20 year old college students with no money to buy a car if they wanted and no kids….yawn.

Buses = poor people. No thanks!

Buses = poor people. No thanks!

Buses = poor people. No thanks!

Buses = poor people. No thanks!

Buses = poor people. No thanks!

Plus it’s a great way for lesbians to stay under 200lbs.

Plus it’s a great way for lesbians to stay under 200lbs.

Plus it’s a great way for lesbians to stay under 200lbs.

Plus it’s a great way for lesbians to stay under 200lbs.

Plus it’s a great way for lesbians to stay under 200lbs.

No surprise that biking rates are highest in two small towns (Eugene and Missoula) dominated by universities.

There is a reason why the carpool rate is higher in Kennewick. A large number of people work at the same place (Hanford) making it easier to coordinate rides.

Low density. Better for bikes. Better for living.

I was there this summer while coming back from a drive down to SF.

I thought that they have done a great job on the “infrastructure” in the little town.

For example, they actually had BRT — yes! On their main outlying road, running along the University, they built a really nice bus only lane with stations.

People talk about carpooling like its just a small bus. It’s not…I used to van pool. Do you know what its like to ride with people you know each and every day. You can’t sit and read a book like on a bus, and you can’t blast the radio, like in a car. You have to talk to them. Or listen to them.

I don’t know about you, but in the morning on the way to work, I want either complete silence, or super loud rock and roll!

A carpool is like social jail, evoked from scenes in Sartre’s “No Exit”…

If you compute all the money spent on rail since it was first proposed in 1993, it’s more like $20 billion.

I went on record in that year, saying what you just said, at a Metro community meeting in Bellevue.

I said at best bus was better than rail, and ideally, we would be using some kind of computer dispatched taxi service that would serve all the multi-nodal trips in this region.

What shall we do about the hills and the rain?

I have car pooled from Seattle to Eugene a couple times, but not since Garcia died and the Dead stopped enticing me.

What is that supposed to mean? After Link light rail started operation, the bus routes that those poor people used to use were terminated, meaning that those very people who used to take the bus are now riding Link light rail.

So Link light rail = poor people?

What are you talking about?

No, what a perfect illustration of how great light rail will be! We already had one of the highest transit modeshares in the nation with just a bus system, so light rail will build on that existing good ridership and make for one of the best transit systems in the country!

Low density=much longer distance to bike to get where you’re going.

He’s probably being provocative in his simplification, but there’s a kernel of truth there. While Link does transport a fair number of lower income folks, it also has a broader mix of the socioeconomic spectrum compared to most south Seattle bus routes. All those tourists with their luggage you see heading downtown? Most of them wouldn’t ride a public bus to downtown. Remember the person named “Sigh” who post on the “Today in Sound Transit” thread who gave his little testimonial about how he used to drive downtown and never took a bus, but now he takes Link? There are many more like him. That’s what Tim’s probably talking about. I know you don’t like to acknowledge it, but trains bring riders, who, for various reasons, won’t ride a bus but will ride trains.

“Low density=much longer distance to bike to get where you’re going.”

So that means that you get more exercise, and are therefore healthier. Another plus, right?

the vast majority of new buildings are being built with 1- 1.5 per 1,000 parking. If anything, they help the non-SOV mode share

Yes, in a world where only bikes existed. In the real world, sprawl means folks learn to hop in their car for every trip.

Per 1,000? Do you mean 1-1.5 spaces per unit? Given that Seattle’s household size is shrinking over time, I’m not sure how that helps reduce SOV share (though, granted, housing in high-density neighborhoods is likely to be occupied by people for whom transit or other alternative transportation modes is more viable than it is for most other residents).

What bicycle fanat–uh, enthusiasts do is verbally attack those who for whatever reason can’t do biking with moralistic diatribes. That doesn’t get rid of the hills or the rain but it makes the bikers feel satisfyingly self-righteous.

The size of the cities looks like the main factor here, and second Seattle’s hilliness. You can transverse most of Missoula by bike in 20 or 30 minutes, and I’m sure Eugene is the same. But in Seattle people can live ten miles from work, often in another city, and with lots of hills in between. So non-atheletes have to take transit (or drive).

Could you provide a few examples?

75% transit commute share to the uw.