Could the fact you are leagally blind have something to do with your meadering as a bicyclist? Are you the living example of why we should insist on licensing of bicyclists? If you are going to be using the roads shouldn't we be confident that you can see hazards that will be a danger to you and others on the road?

"They both drown out badly needed analysis about how the transportation assets of our pavements bequeathed from yesteryear can best be used for today’s transportation needs and tomorrow’s transportation technologies. "

Tomorrow's transportation technologies will mainly address how vehicles are powered, not whether or not people still want their own vehicle. As long as people have their own cars then they are going to want roads to drive them on.

I am surprised that Doug MacDonald would make two mistakes normally associated with light rail cheerleaders. MacDonald wrote: "...this road, according to SDOT, would have a capacity of 22,000 vehicles a day. That couldn’t be much closer to the 21,766 average weekday boardings that Sound Transit recently reported for Link Light Rail..."

Link reports "boardings." These are not analogous to "vehicles per day", they are analogous to "passengers per day." The average car has a capacity of about 5 passegners, so 125th actually has a capacity of about 110,000 passegners per day.

Since the average car normally carries around 1.6 passengers, 125th would likely be carrying close to 35,200 passengers per day in 22,000 cars per day -- many more than Link's 21,766 boardings per day.

Also, road capacity figures are counted in vehicles per day "past a point" on the road. Link's "boardings per day" count all boardings at every station along the route. When there are 21,766 boardings per day on Link, there are never anything close to 21,766 passengers on Link past any point on the line. Along MLK Jr Way, for example, only about 50% of total boardings are on Link trains when they travel between Columbia City Station and Rainier Beach Station. That means that, along this segment of Link, only about 11,000 passengers per day were on Link trains in the 2nd quarter of 2010. That is in both directions, combined.

So, NE 125th St at actually could carry more than three times as many passengers per day past a given point as Link carries past the midpoint on MLK Jr Way.

Funny Lincoln, comparing theoretical road capacity with actual light rail ridership. Even you must know this is an apples and oranges comparison. Are you ignorant or just trying to deceive us? Why don't you look up the theoretical capacity of light rail with four car train sets and minimal head ways?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail

I did, and it is 20,000 an hour, each way. Let's do the math: 20,000 * 2 * 24 = 960,000 riders per day. Also, the average auto occupancy is 1.2 not 1.6. Your facts are wrong also. How do you explain these errors in your comment, Lincoln?

Lincoln, I reviewed your previous comments and most of them suffer from the same problems, summed up nicely here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics

I was surprised when you even went after Ichiro using the statistical fallacy. The question remains unanswered; are you ignorant, stupid, or deceitful?

little andy. I am correct. The average occupancy of autos in the U.S. is 1.6. Look it up.

Link carried about 21,776 boardings per day in the 2nd quarter of 2010. You say this is wrong?

Only about half of Link's total boardings per day are on Link trains along MLK Jr Way. You say this is wrong?

That comes to about 11,000 passengers per day on Link along MLK Jr Way. You say this is wrong?

Can you point out any errors in my post? I thought not.

The comparison the author made between Link and 125th St was his idea. I just provided more -- and better -- numbers.

Link is carrying fewer passengers per day on MLK Jr Way than 125th St. is carrying right now. In fact, SDOT says that 125th is currently carrying 16,200 vehicles per day, which comes to 25,920 passengers per day, right now. Link is carrying only about 24,000 total boardings per day in the highest-ridership month so far, and only about 12,000 passengers per day are riding Link along MLK Jr. Way.

So, if you want to compare actual numbers of people being moved on 125th in cars, compared to on MLK Jr Way on Link trains, there are twice as many people using 125th in cars each day compared to those using Link on MLK Jr Way each day.

Your childish rants are amusing, though.

google maps has the hill at about 180ft, I am in my 50's and regularly ride a 400ft hill. So I suspect that if Mr. McDonald rode regularly, he'd find the hill steep but manageable.

And yes the bike lanes vs car lanes on this route is all smoke and mirror reflecting mostly on the anger of car drivers and their new lower class as vehicles as the roads fill up and gasoline prices rise.

Still nice to read a first hand article instead of the blather from the Seattle Times.

Dear blogging bloviators!

A good friend of mine lives at 125th and Roosevelt. He rides his bike to work regularly. He drives a lot too. He's practical, not ideological, about his transportation. So I asked him what he thought about all this. Basically, he thinks that 3 lanes on 125th (with one being a turn lane) will give car traffic better flow as it will help avoid back-ups in the middle two lanes when cars are waiting to turn left. The bike lane would be icing on the cake. So he sees it as a win for drivers and for cyclists. And he LIVES there. I guess that matches the city's analysis. So why is everyone so freaked out?

Joe

Lincoln,

Well, thank you for changing your numbers!

Try rereading your first comment. There is more you need to correct in your capacity comparison. You claim that a 3 lane road has more capacity than a light rail line. Do you believe that?

Also,

http://tmip.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/clearinghouse/docs/mvrcm/ch5.htm

Two things here, the rate you need to use is the 'home to work' rate (1.1 per auto) since this is when the road is at capacity (rush hours) .

Also, this study was done in 1990 and occupancy rates are dropping by about 15% every 10 years. The total average is closer to 1.2 to 1.4 now

LOL andy. The very chart you link to shows the vehicle occupancy for all purposes in 1990 was 1.6 -- exactly what I said. 125th is used for "all purposes," not just one purpose.

And, instead of using 1990 data, how about using data from 2009? From the Transportation Energy Data Book Edition 29 -- 2010. Chapter 8, page 8-1:

http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb29/Edition29_Chapter08.pdf

average occupancy rates per vehicle type, 2009:

Pickup Truck 1.49
Car 1.59
SUV 1.92
Van 2.35

I am using 1.6, even though I suspect there are a lot of SUV's and vans which use 125th, along with some buses, which would make the average even higher than 1.6 passengers per vehicle.

I believe that 125th St is currently carrying TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE PER DAY as Link light rail is carrying along MLK Jr Way. Do you not believe this?

Capacity is meaningless, if it is not used. For example, the average car has a "capacity" of five. Yet, I am using 1.6 per vehicle as the average passengers who actually are in vehicles -- I am not using the number that COULD be in each vehicle.

Who cares how many people you THINK Link could carry? Sound Transit tells us how many people Link actually DOES carry. Ant that is about half as many people per day along MLK Jr Way as 125th is carrying.

Are you disputing this?

Actually you are both wrong. Capacity and volumes are very different things, don't mix them up. You know better. And Lincoln you have some interesting math. Do you work on wall street? Doug if you want to talk about road diets, talk about road diets, don't bring in your favorite whipping boy every time you write something. It makes everything sound the same. The region (ie voters) have funded light rail. That is done. Anyways this is a stray tangent.

It would be much more productive if you worked to improve what isn't going well. For example could you please send a letter to WSDOT, SDOT, Metro, ST telling them that their 520/Mountlake Triangle design isn't acceptable. We need bus boosters working on that because right now it is just validating rail boosters suspicions about “BRT”. A whole lot of talk, but not much beyond that.

Actually I should thank andy for spurring me to look up vehicle occupancy rates again. In the same document, the "Transportation Energy Data Book Edition 29 -- 2010", on page 8-10, figure 8.1 it gives the average vehicle occupancy rate for "All" vehicles combined for 2009, which is 1.71, not 1.6 which I have been using.

http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb29/Edition29_Chapter08.pdf

So, when you factor in all the vehicles which use roads, including motorcycles, "other trucks", vans, cars, SUV's, and pickups, you get 1.71 passengers per vehicles in 2009. In 1995, it was 1.59, so it has gone up in the past 15 years.

From now on, I will use the correct figure of 7.1 passengers per vehicle on U.S. roads in 2009.

oops. typo.

I meant 1.71 passengers per vehicle in 2009, obviously.

Ok Lincoln, you are correct about the avg occupancy of an auto. Turns out I was looking at the UK figures initially --oops.

My big concern with your initial comment was the comparison of the capacity of the road with the volume of light rail. Looks like you are comparing volume with volume now in your later comments, which is correct--thanks. bgtothen stated this issue better than I did.

The larger problem of using selective statistics still stands. You can't (as you did) rank Ichiro as an average player based on the first quarter of one season. This is the statistical fallacy--hand picking a set of statistics that agree with your conclusion. Similarly, you can't mark light rail as a failure based on the first year of operation. The ability of rail systems to scale beyond SOV auto travel is proven around the world. Most major cities of the world would be impossible without rail transit. The jury is still out on light rail, in my opinion.

Personally, I am not a huge light rail fan. I prefer larger, faster subway systems like many European cities the size of Seattle have. Anyway it is an interesting debate!

btw: road diets rock! Pedestrian safety is the real issue, but center turn lanes make auto travel much more efficient. This is proven in many studies.

Just for reference, Frankfurt is about the same size as Seattle. We should have a system comparable to theirs by now:

http://www.urbanrail.net/eu/ffm/frankfrt.htm

Nice bike lanes too:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/09/bike-lanes-in-saxony/

If you do travel around the world, you see that USA is being leap-frogged, mainly because of our dependence on teh auto and our health care system. Just my 2 cents.

A good article, except for the potshot against light rail at the end. OK, so it doesn't carry that many people right now. But have MacDonald and the other rail detractors ever heard of peak oil? Ever thought that maybe the five (or so,) percent of the world's population in the US might not get to burn 20 (or so) percent of the world's oil forever? Ever wondered if the rest of the world might lose its appetite for these pieces of paper (really just electronic blips,) called dollars, now created in the trillions and trillions, with which we manage to procure all that oil?

I guess if you are confident that the rest of the world will always send us their oil for the dollars we now print furiously, then there is no need for concern about the future. I wish I could be so blythe about it all. Call me a worry wart, but I'd rather plan for the day the Happy Motoring era ends and we need other ways of getting around. So what if it doesn't carry enough people to satisfy MacDonald right now. It's called planning for the future.

Thanks Lincoln the cite of Transportation Energy Data Book Edition 29 - somehow I'd never seen it. I looked it over quickly - too much data. Is there a Cliff's Notes version -;)

Sno - yes, we've all been hearing about peak oil since "Limits To Growth" in the seventies. The most efficient way to move people is in electric cars not in 100ton light rail cars. Yes, the dollar may well lose it's value sooner than later. That's why we need to exploit out NG in the short term and develop alternative sources for electricity in the long run.

"The most efficient way to move people is in electric cars"

Nope: bicycles are more efficient, and electric bicycles are second best. Think about it, a car weighs in at 2,000lbs a bicycle at 20lbs that's 100x more mass to accelerate and stop. An electric bicycle with decent Li batteries is 50lbs that's 40x less mass.

On the other hand, cars are very pleasant to sit in, being out of the weather does have it's benefits.

Gary - You're right about electric bikes, but depending on assumptions (does the bike riding replace exercise, etc.)bicycle riders, especially meat eaters, use more energy than an electric car. I was talking more about comparing to light rail, but they are even better than bikes.

Here is a site that gives some analysis that shows even ICE cars can be competitive with bikes for energy efficiency. Two people in an electric car, even better.

http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/energy/bicycle-energy.html#s2

"meat" vs "vegetables" vs "oil" on human power.

The key is that the energy consumed by the rider is not sequestered carbon energy, ie no fossil fuels. So that the carbon that bicycle rider consumes via food was only recently removed from the atmosphere. Now obviously our current food production system is full of fossil fuel burning vehicles so bicycle riding is not 100% carbon neutral. But electric power is by far coal in the USA. Yes in the PNW we have dams which are closer to carbon neutral, (except for the replacement parts etc.) And thus any electricity we consume could have been sold to the midwest to replace the coal power they use. So key to that is minimizing the power required.