Cascadia Prospectus

A flurry of developments suggests passenger-only ferries are gaining momentum in Puget Sound. In recent months there have been seven routes in operation: the state's Vashon Island to downtown Seattle run; King County's West Seattle to downtown Seattle water taxi; Kitsap Transit's Port Orchard to Bremerton foot ferry; and four longer, privately operated routes to the San Juans Islands and Victoria. Now, add another local water taxi, and - it appears - another major regional passenger ferry route.

From today through late November, the Electric Boat Company will run reservation-only water taxis connecting neighborhood docks along Seattle's Lake Union, as KOMO4-TV reports. Here's the schedule. In addition, the Port of Kingston - in northeast Kitsap County across Puget Sound from Seattle's near-northern neighbors - has received a $3.5 million federal grant to fund Kingston-Seattle foot ferry service. The Kitsap Sun reports on this likely resurrection of a foot ferry run that didn't pencil out for one operator, Aqua Express, in 2005. Nels Sultan of Kingston Express will bid on the route and says he can make it work in part by starting small with just one boat.

There's more. A recent Urban Partnership grant of $138 million from the feds to the state and King County to implement tolls on the State Route 520 Floating Bridge and cut regional traffic snarls included $11 million for the state ferry system and within that pool, $1.1 million to expand service on the current Vashon Island-Seattle foot ferry.

Meanwhile, the West Seattle Herald reports that West Seattle water taxi ridership is up and a local advisory group called the Pier 1-Pier 2 Committee is suggesting the route's West Seattle dock be shifted from pinched accomodations at Seacrest Park a short distance south to the Port of Seattle's Jack Block Park, where there's far more room for park-and-ride spaces. That's a good idea. The current King County Metro water taxi shuttle bus to Seacrest Park is very small and only runs to and from Alki and the West Seattle Junction. Parking near the current Seacrest Park dock off Harbor Avenue is highly constained, as is space for larger buses. A large park-and-ride lot and room for mid-size buses with a longer range than the current shuttle routes is necessary to grow the water taxi service.

All this comes as the Puget Sound transportation planners are looking closely at how to best develop a regional passenger-only ferry system.

Last month, as part of a current study, the Puget Sound Regional Council released a white paper on on issues and trends affecting the future viability of a passenger-only ferry network. Among the key preliminary findings:

The draft white paper prepared for the PSRC by Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates notes that the Washington State Ferries (almost entirely a car ferry network at this point) is the largest ferry system in the U.S. and carries 25 million passengers annually. However, in 2003, 44 percent of all passengers were walk-ons and that percentage is projected to grow to 62 percent by 2030. By that year regional population will have grown 39 percent since 2000 and employment 42 percent.

If our much-vaunted emphasis on growth management is to mean anything at all in the face of such changes, governments will need to make high-density development a more attractive proposition by emphasizing livability through added green space, better policing (in Seattle), and fast, convenient regional transit including bus rapid transit and foot ferries.

What is the optimal arrangement for Puget Sound ferries in future decades? Given the spike in gasoline prices, current road congestion, the coming age of tolling, and the continuing push for greater urban and suburban density, a regional foot ferry network could really make sense in the end.

Recent news shows that interest is already high and the possibilities are many. When the PSRC study is done, county councils, local governments and private foot ferry operators will have a road map to developing a viable system in Puget Sound. But, no less important than financial considerations and land-use and transportation planning will be political leadership.

Related:

"A Big Step Toward Resuming Foot Ferries In Kingson, Kitsap Sun;

"Fast Ferry Will Come To Kitsap For Research," Kitsap Sun;

"Low Wake Study and Planned Ferry Are World Class," Kitsap Sun;

"A Turning Point Approaches For Fast Foot Ferries In Puget Sound," Cascadia Prospectus;

"Willamette River Ferry Transit for Portland: Pipe Dream Or Not?," Cascadia Prospectus;

Marine Transportation Article Archive, Cascadia Center For Regional Development Web Site.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PASSENGER-ONLY FERRIES, FOOT FERRIES, PUGET SOUND, LAKE UNION WATER TAXI, KINGSTON, SEATTLE, VASHON ISLAND, WEST SEATTLE, PUGET SOUND REGIONAL COUNCIL

An editorial yesterday by Vancouver, Washington's daily newspaper, The Columbian, celebrates support voiced during a Portland-region visit last week by U.S. Rep. James Oberstar, U.S. House Transportation Committee Chairman, for the I-5 Columbia Crossing bridge improvement project. It's a major regional priority due to congestion and safety problems on the current I-5 Interstate Bridge connecting Clark County, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Columbia Crossing and other projects bundled into a three-state proposal from California, Oregon and Washington last week won a $15 million federal "Corridors Of The Future" grant, the bulk of which is essentially planning money for innovative approaches to financing the up-to-$6 billion cost of Columbia Crossing. Project options include replacing the current six-lane bridge with a wider one; adding a second bridge; and building in light rail or bus lanes under either scenario. One way or another, the thinking goes, this cross-border interstate chokepoint - and the tricky, tight interchanges and lane shifts north and south of the bridge that raise the corridor's accident rate - needs fixing.

The Columbian editorial suggests it would be nice if Oberstar had a $6 billion sack of cash to meet the project's estimated cost, but that for now it's good news he realizes its importance. There is no mention of supplemental funding sources. A Columbian article Friday said local members of Congress are hoping the feds can provide half to two-thirds of the up-to-$6 billion cost. That's probably wishful thinking, but even so, could leave a gap of $2 billion or more.

Enter tolling, or more specifically, congestion pricing, which helps pay for projects and regulate time-of-day use. It's something Washington and Oregon say they're interested in applying to Columbia Crossing. As Oregonian reporter Dylan Rivera last week noted in a blog post on Oberstar's visit, federal officials consider that important, and specifically say that's a key reason they awarded the "Corridors Of The Future" grant to the project. Rivera's Oregonian blog post notes:

Ian Grossman, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration, said the potential use of tolls, and the possibility of variable charges, helped make the Columbia River Crossing (grant application) stand out. Federal officials were especially interested that Oregon and Washington are willing to consider congestion pricing -- the practice of tolling a roadway and imposing higher tolls during peak traffic hours, the higher prices intended to dissuade use at certain times of day. "It's the innovative financing that we believe will have a real impact on relieving congestion," Grossman said.

A recent $138 million federal grant to Washington state for rebuilding the congested, earthquake- and storm-prone, State Route 520 Floating Bridge across Lake Washington is tied to state imposition of tolls on the bridge.

During his Oregon visit, Chairman Oberstar told public radio he's against congestion pricing. But congestion pricing, keyed to time of day and sometimes also to road traffic loads, is the fairest, most logical type of tolling. And in the end, some form of tolling will almost certainly prove necessary to fully fund the Columbia Crossing bridge replacement on I-5.

TECHNORATI TAGS: I-5, COLUMBIA RIVER CROSSING, PORTLAND, OREGON, VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON, TOLLING, CONGESTION PRICING, U.S. REP. JAMES OBERSTAR, CORRIDORS OF THE FUTURE

A report by U.S. Department of Transportations's Inspector General titled "Review of Congressional Earmarks Within Department of Transportation Programs" has determined that the Fiscal Year 2006 surface transportation appropriation contained 7,808 earmarks with a total amount of $8.08 billion or over 15 percent of highway appropriations and 28 percent of transit appropriations.

This compares with 2,094 earmarks in FY 2005 ($3.27 billion), 2,282 earmarks in FY 2004 ($3.36 billion) and 1,493 earmarks in FY 202 ($3.22 billion). During the 10-year period from FY 1996 to FY 2005, the number of earmarks within the U.S. DOT appropriations increased by more than 1,150 percent.

The common definition of earmarks is that they are Congressional pork projects directed to a specific district for political gain. The Office of Management and Budget defines earmarks this way:

...funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents Executive Branch merit-based or competitive allocation processes, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to manage critical aspects of the funds allocation process.

The Inspector General's report includes these findings (pp. 11-13):

The IG report is the first authoritative review of congressional earmarks within DOT programs. It should be required reading for any one concerned about the future of transportation financing.

TECHNORATI TAGS: TRANSPORTATION EARMARKS, U.S. DOT INSPECTOR GENERAL, U.S. CONGRESS, TRANSPORTATION SPENDING, INFRASTRUCUTURE

Our Cascadia Center held a leadership forum Weds. Sept. 19 titled "Greening The Highway from Baja to B.C.," emphasizing the need for a unified West Coast effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and congestion in the I-5 corridor through increased use of alternative fuels; diesel emission reduction programs; and on-board and in-roadway technology to save truckers and motorists time and fuel. Here's our discussion brief on the initiative, and here's a related radio story (and transcript) featuring Cascadia's director Bruce Agnew.

From the discussion brief:

An important opportunity is emerging for a concerted West Coast strategy to unify alternative fuel infrastructure and green vehicle development, diesel fuel emission reduction, and intelligent transportation system technologies. Together these could yield substantial environmental and economic benefits while providing a model for other major U.S. highway corridors. An additional consideration is that congestion pricing, though not part of the West Coast Green Highway initiative, would boost congestion relief and greenhouse gas reduction, particularly if pursued on a multi-state, I-5 corridor basis.

We expect to have a white paper published in coming months on greening the I-5 corridor. We'll keep you posted as this effort continues to unfold.

UPDATE: TVW coverage. Washington state's government and public affairs channel, TVW, taped and broadcast the entire "Greening The Highway" program of Sept. 19, 2007. Here are the three video segments as they aired on TVW. You will need to have either Windows Media or Real Player installed on your computer to view. For any additional playback tips, go to TVW's Streaming Help Page.

"Greening The Highway," Segment 1 - Bruce Agnew, Cascadia Center; Sharon Banks, Cascade Sierra Solutions; Matt Rosenberg, Cascadia Center.
LINK: Segment 1.

"Greening The Highway," Segment 2 - Peter Murchie, U.S. EPA; Allison Seton, Hydrogen + Fuel Cells Canada; Jeff Doyle, WSDOT; Allison Hamilton, ODOT.
LINK: Segment 2.

"Greening The Highway," Segment 3 - Colette Brooks, BioBling/Big Imagination Co./SoCal Biodiesel Co-op; Paul Landry, B.C. Trucking Assn.; Janet Ray, AAA Washington.
LINK: Segment 3.

TECHNORATI TAGS: GREEN HIGHWAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON, OREGON, CALIFORNIA, ALTERNATIVE FUELS, PLUG-IN HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLES, DIESEL FUEL EMISSIONS, INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

The nation and major urban regions within the West Coast Corridor of Cascadia and California - namely Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego - continue to grapple with costly road and transit projects and the threat of global warming. These stem in part from workforce and population increases. Against this backdrop, common-sense trip reduction strategies such as telecommuting deserve more attention. Adopted on a broader scale, increased telecommuting can: help control road congestion and future transportation infrastructure costs; and help limit man-made greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle-related air pollution.

A recently-released study by Tiax LLC of Cambridge, Mass. for the Consumer Electronics Association calculates that telecommuting - or to use a much better phrase, telework - saves 840 million gallons of gas in the U.S. annually and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 14 million metric tons. But media reports and the study itself may actually underestimate both the number of current U.S. teleworkers (those who work from home or remote work centers at least eight hours a week) and their cumulative environmental benefit. Reports on the TIAX study by, for instance, the San Jose Mercury News and a Washington Post blogger assert that the study finds there are 3.9 million U.S. workers who telecommute (at least once a week). But the TIAX study itself casts the numbers in a clearer light. First, (p. 39, link above), the study's actual stated estimate of U.S. workers who telecommute at least once a week is 4 to 6 million, not 3.9 million. That's because (p. 40, link above) the U.S. Energy Information Administration 2001 estimate used as the source is not of 3.9 million once-a-week telecommuters, but rather translates, as Tiax notes, to 3.9 million households where at least one member telecommutes at least once a week.

Not mentioned anywhere in the recent media reports on the Tiax study is that the EIA data cited is from a six-year-old survey, and that using the same definition of what constitutes telework, other more recent estimates size the current U.S. teleworker pool as two to three times that in the Tiax study. April 2007 information from Gartner Dataquest highlighted earlier this month in an in-depth MSNBC.com story on telework is that currently, 12 million U.S. employees work from home at least eight hours per week; up from 6 million in 2000; and growing to 14 million by 2009. Percentage-wise that's still a drop in the bucket, but some assert that the trend grow. Rita Walston of The Telework Consortium tells MSNBC we should expect to see four-fifths of larger corporate workforces working out-of-office in the future, either from home or remote work centers. The MSNBC story also notes that 56 percent of Sun Microsystems' employees use home or remote work centers, resulting in information technology and real estate savings to the company of $387 million per year.

The amount of telework per worker per week is a key variable not fully addressed in the current discussion. If one day of telework out of five is feasible, why not two or three or more? To an extent it still depends on the employee and work team, and the product or service. But face it: for all the considerable upside of working on-site, there are also downsides. Put another way, there's a reason Dilbert rules.

Obvious barriers to telecommuting are lack of trust from employers, and personal disconnectedness for teleworkers perhaps coupled in some instances with legitimate fears their career advancement will be harmed by lack of time spent on in-person alliance-building and office politicking. The reality is that even for teleworkers, there are times when there is simply no substitute for being on-site. Remote work centers can often serve this purpose in larger organizations, but for smaller or mid-sized workplaces, flexible on-site work spaces for teleworkers can be important.

Government programs including financial incentives for employers and employees to increase their use of telework and other trip reduction methods such as carpooling are one approach currently in vogue. But if telework is to reach a more critical mass in coming decades, it will be more due to corporate and political leaders who connect the dots between telework, employee retention, the daunting costs of transportation infrastructure upgrades, and man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Additional Resources:

"Tele-commuting Or Hell-ecommuting?" Reason Foundation's 'Hit and Run' blog, Aug. 30, 2007.

"Seeking Loyal, Devoted Workers? Let Them Stay At Home," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2007;

"After Pushing Telework, GSA Tries To Lead The Way," Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2007.

"The Gridlock Report - One More Case For Telecommuting," BloggingStocks, Sept. 18, 2007;

"Clear The Streets - Stay At Home," Alameda Times-Star, Sept. 19, 2007;

"More Workers Telecommuting, But Obstacles Remain ," Virginian-Pilot, Sept. 23, 2007.

TECHNORATI TAGS: TELECOMMUTING, TELEWORK, TRANSPORTATION, ENVIRONMENT, GLOBAL WARMING, EMPLOYEE RETENTION, CASCADIA, WEST COAST CORRIDOR, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON, OREGON, CALIFORNIA