We reported this morning on a report covering new light rail options for East Link’s downtown Bellevue alignment and later showed that a 405 station is less accessible than other alternatives. We’ve editorialized in the past that Sound Transit should put the downtown Bellevue light rail stations in the right place, with that place not next to a freeway. Readers should know by now that we’re no fans of a 405 station.
Neither is Dan Bertolet, the former HugeAssCity blogger who now posts at Publicola. Last Friday, he provided some data about the development potential of a station build next to 405 versus one that serves Bellevue Transit Center. Some arguing for a 405 station have incredulously claimed that a stop along the highway would have more transit-oriented development (TOD) potential, but according to Bertolet’s data, there’s much more developable land near the transit center. That land has the potential to hold many more jobs and residents:
The Bellevue Transit Center has more TOD potential than a stop near 405. (Image and data from Publicola.)
Most of us know what greenwashing is; it’s when an otherwise terrible thing for the environment is promoted as green — such as advertisements in the bus tunnel proudly proclaiming that a local car dealership is carbon neutral. We’re seeing that cynical mindset spread to a new area in the Seattle region as transit options become more politically popular. Now we have transitwashing. Promoting ideas that seriously, adversely damage public transit’s usefulness being sold as something transit-friendly.
Claiming a freeway stop has development potential because there are a bunch of low-density lots across a large interstate is transitwashing, and Bertolet proves it.
As a follow up to Ben’s post this morning, here’s a nice walkshed graphic from Sound Transit that shows the accessibility for the various light rail alignments that the report covered:
Walkshed for various East Link rail alignments through downtown Bellevue. Dark orange is five minutes of walking distance, with light orange representing ten minutes of walking distance.
That C14E alignment, Kevin Wallace’s 405 station, performs the poorest for good reason. We shouldn’t build a station right next to a freeway and we should instead put the line downtown. According to the report, the other alignments serve nearly all of the 79,000 jobs downtown expected by 2030; Wallace’s proposal leaves fully one-fifth of downtown workers unable to walk to work from a station within a reasonable time. More than half of downtown residents by 2030 will be unable to walk to a light rail station within ten minutes. The high capture walkshed, 5 or less minutes, for Wallace’s alignment is pitiful with just 27% and 7% of jobs and households, respectively.
If Wallace’s proposal to site a station on an interstate highway isn’t good for Bellevue’s downtown workers, downtown businesses, or downtown residents, then who is it good for?
Update from Ben: I just noticed one more thing about these maps, and I doubt it’s a coincidence. We know 10 minutes is pretty much the outside of what people are willing to walk from a station. The largest block in the downtown square, on the left edge in the middle, is Bellevue Square. C14E is the only option that puts Bellevue Square distinctly outside that 10 minute walk. Kemper Development spokesman Bruce Nurse called me “presumptuous” for suggesting that Kemper doesn’t want transit users to go to Bellevue Square. Apparently “presumptuous” means “absolutely correct!”
Sound Transit and the City of Bellevue have just released their joint analysis (PDF) of the East Link options for downtown Bellevue. East Link project manager Don Billen briefed me (and happily answered all of my questions) by phone on Saturday morning.
Four options were studied, and two come out as rock stars – C11A, a surface option with two stations, providing great walking distance coverage to almost all of downtown Bellevue’s jobs and homes, and C9T, a more expensive tunnel option that provides decent walking coverage of downtown, plus reduced travel times that attract more riders from the east. Both of these alternatives get the segment 8,000 weekday riders in 2030.
The two not-so-good options are losers for clear reasons. C9A, a surface version of the tunnel option, has the same downtown travel time as C11A, but doesn’t compete with C11A in walking coverage, especially as downtown grows. The City’s walkshed maps are similar to what Adam did for our First Hill Streetcar piece, using the actual walking times from the platforms to different destinations via the network of sidewalks and paths, rather than just drawing a circle at a particular distance. As a result, they give a much more accurate view of what’s accessible from a station.
C14E is the other loser – the I-405 alignment that Kevin Wallace has proposed. Analysis found that a circulator bus would offer no significant benefit. It would attract only 6,000 riders, completely failing to serve western downtown.
The real comparison here will be between the better two: what I’ll call the tunnel (C9T) and surface alignment (C11A).
Today marks the first day of Metro’s service change which, among other changes, has ended route 194. We should expect a uptick in light rail ridership going forward as airport riders switch to Link and as folks get familiar with the routes that now feed into the rail line.
The very final 194 bus departed the Westlake Center tunnel station last night at 10pm.
As per usual with service changes, services like One Bus Away will likely a few days where live bus tracking is down.
Westlake Streetcar Plaza; Concept by Seattle's Department of Transportation.
SDOT hosted an open house for the Westlake Streetcar Plaza last Wednesday. (For background, Adam covered the project in great detail last year.) The open house presented the project at the 60% design stage and took public comments. From this point SDOT will move towards finalizing the design and implementing the project. If you want to make a comment, do it as soon as possible. Construction is planned to begin this July and finish this November.
Around midnight Saturday January 23, a driver on Metro Route 124 was beaten unconscious by a passenger. She may have been too slow letting him off the back door. The driver is recovering. Several suspects have been arrested and charged. Local newspapers and TV covered the story. Accounts are online. The media knows the drill. And that’s just the problem. Situation normal.
Now, even on rough routes, passengers don’t attack drivers every shift. Any 7-11 clerk is in worse criminal danger, for lousier wages and coverage. What mostly injures transit drivers is their own work day. Knee joint damage. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Back injuries. Those “gold-plated” medical benefits are legitimate repair bills for a forty hour week driving a bus.
But on about a half dozen routes, it’s not only drivers who regularly face personal violence. Most transit assault victims are passengers, who pay fares and taxes for the system and get no compensation for abuse on board. For a transit system fighting for its political and budgetary life, its people’s safety is its own as well.
I never drove Highway 99- no trolleywire. But Route 7 in the mid 1980’s also featured regular situations needing police. So I have a few suggestions about what “we” – meaning everyone who operates, rides, or cares about transit- can do to give ourselves the civilized travel people pay for, after the jump.
FTA now looking at local financial commitment more, cost-effectiveness less. I think this once again is good news for Sound Transit, and probably not so good for crisis-ridden Metro.
As several commenters have noted, Sound Transit is starting to visibly test their next train announcements. Oran shot the video above.
Testing is only occurring in isolated instances, and should be going on for the next month or two.
I hate to nitpick, but I’m not a huge fan of the scrolling — it’s possible to legibly encode a lot of information on a small board without doing so. [UPDATE- in the comments Sherwin says that the display will generally be static, with only intermittent scrolling.]
A few months ago there was some anecdotal evidence that Central Link wasn’t very reliable with respect to its schedule and scheduled headways for various reasons. My subjective impression is that this has improved somewhat, but there’s no way you’d be able to tell from Sound Transit’s publicly available data. More after the jump. (more…)
The Beacon Hill tunnel (Photo by litlnemo's husband Jason)
UPDATE (Adam here): I did a few calculations to put the debate about whether a tunnel through Beacon Hill was necessary to rest. Beacon Hill station is very roughly ~280 ft above sea level, and SODO is ~20 ft. Using ST’s design specs of 4% this means that an elevated structure of ~6,500 ft would be needed to climb from SODO up over the hill. Another one of equal length would be needed on the other side as well. Pretty unrealistic isn’t it?
Although I’d obviously like to see Bellevue pay for a Link tunnel under Downtown Bellevue, as someone who isn’t going to pay the very large costs I’m leery of taking a really strong position on it. A common argument, however, is that Seattle is getting a very long tunnel from its downtown to Roosevelt on Sound Transit’s dime, so why not Bellevue? It’s a natural question to ask, but betrays a pretty shallow understanding of the underlying concerns. More after the jump.
'Lining up for the north bus' at the Bellevue Transit Center by Oran
In my interview last month with Bellevue councilmember Conrad Lee, hearing Lee’s emphasis on the unimportance of rail station placement struck a nerve with me because that kind of thinking is exactly why rail alignments are often fouled up. After Kevin Wallace introduced his “Vision Line” proposal, it was evident that the plan was conceived on two main premises (aside from impacts mitigation) of cost and planning. While the argument for reducing East Link’s capital costs is relatively straightforward, the one for planning treads into rather muddy grounds, which pretty much renders the cost-benefit factor questionable. The bulk of this planning argument is often grounded in the belief that the “future downtown” of Bellevue will be much closer to or centered around the east side of I-405. And to be frank, I wasn’t aware that downtown districts could jump 8-lane freeways.
We editorialized last November about the importance of siting rail stations correctly. I want to follow up on the growth of Downtown Bellevue specifically, and why a “Vision Line” station cannot serve the city center as effectively as proponents make it sound, now and in the future. Back in 2008, we had a roundtable discussion on the use of the old BNSF corridor for passenger rail, and Andrew Smith touched upon this counterargument:
The common response is that it goes very close, and that the future of downtown Bellevue will be onthat side of 405. I cannot see this happening until after ST2 gets built and a station connecting the BNSF track to Link is put in place.
There are three main points I want to break down that highlight the argument against building a station serving this theoretical “future city center.” More below the jump.
I really don’t care whether we have HOV 3+, HOV 5+, or transit only lanes on the 520 bridge replacement. Even 3+ will keep transit flowing, and if it turns out there’s a problem, we can change it to 5+ later.
I especially don’t care about putting rail on the bridge. There is no plan to connect it to anything. Whatever we build now will almost definitely turn out in the long run to be in the wrong place, or installed the wrong way. That’s a great way to kill future transit ballot measures – opponents can just point and laugh.
There are two things I care about in the 520 debate.
We will eventually add rail transit to 520. My best guess is that we’ll build from Ballard to the UW, and eventually extend it to Redmond. That’s a good idea, and I think we all agree we should make sure the bridge can handle rail later. The big problem is going to be whether the later transit investment will require buying a bunch of the bridge from WSDOT again, like Sound Transit is having to do with I-90. We can prevent that.
So, point one: Specifically call out that design features and capacity for transit are paid for with non-18th Amendment funds (such as tolling), and are dedicated to transit. This should, at the very least, cover the HOV lanes, so they can, if necessary, be turned into real BRT, or even light rail.
Point two: We should keep the Montlake flyer stop. That said, if we have to lose it, the midday and nighttime service that people currently use there needs to be replaced. We need UW-Redmond, UW-Kirkland, and UW-Bellevue service to keep us from screwing UW students, faculty, and staff – not to mention patients and game-fans. That means Sound Transit’s new route 542 would need to run from 5am to 11pm seven days a week. The 540 would have to run on weekends and late at night. If the legislature is choosing to remove the flyer stop, they need to mitigate the loss with dedicated transit funding.
I think the other debates about transit on the bridge are distracting us from these two immediate issues.
Thursday will be the first meeting of the new CT Board of Directors. Unlike Metro, which is directly run by the King County Council, Community Transit is overseen by a group of Snohomish County elected officials selected by the County Council for 2 year terms.
When calculating Link ridership, Sound Transit staff record the data provided by infrared electric eyes over the doors on some cars. Reading that data is something of an art – the sensors take some tuning and the data isn’t always perfect. It’s not just a “one” or a “zero”, we’re told – children register differently, for instance. Sound Transit controls for all this when calculating ridership – and sends out manual counters to be sure they’re getting accurate numbers.
As a result, though, sometimes ridership numbers are wrong. Sound Transit found two small errors in their counting methods – one for Tukwila station in the summer and one for Airport station (affecting late December data), and in both cases were throwing out good data that looked bad in the first pass.
It turns out (Excel), in fact, that December weekdays averaged just over 14,900 (300 higher than previously reported), with a peak day on December 28th with over 19,950. Weekdays after Airport Link opened were averaging 17,350. I’ve seen anti-transit activists claim as few as 12,000 weekday riders – don’t let them.
With ridership off by 15% in Portland, this looks pretty good. We’ll have to wait to know how far off Metro ridership is, but I’m willing to bet that without a recession, Link would be beating projections.
Well none of us were able to make it to the press conference this morning but here are some news clippings. [Update from Sherwin 5:34pm: The Seattle Channel has full video coverage of the event here.]
From what I have gathered it was an interesting showing of elected officials from all level of government, something very unusual. It appears that there are divergent opinions among those advocating for something besides the A+, i.e. better transit connections for some, narrower footprint for others, less traffic for others, but the fact that House Speaker Chopp, Senator Murray, Rep. Pedersen, Mayor McGinn and City Council members Licata and O’Brien were all in attendance is interesting never-the-less. Stay tuned.
Coverage from those that actually get paid to report below the jump.
I think a lot of the Ballard-to-West Seattle light rail speculation is getting bogged down in routing arguments. It’s fun but ultimately colored by our experience of those neighborhoods, and really needs some study data to capture the tradeoffs.
One line of opposition is that some sort of grade decision (e.g., at-grade through downtown) is grounds for opposing the package. As I’ve mentioned before, despite loose talk of 2012 or 2016 ST3 votes, ST3 is not necessarily close at hand and a regional package faces much higher barriers to passage. Moreover, no matter how soon ST3 comes, the more the city gets done in the meantime the larger the system will be at any particular point in the future. Indeed, there is no concrete idea of how big the funding package for ST3 will be, so it’s unclear that it would unlock huge amounts of funding to allow more tunneling. Lastly, the political takeaway from the defeat of a measure will not be “the package was not massive enough” but instead “even Seattle isn’t willing to support more light rail in the current climate.”
All that said, I’m not really worried about the measure passing in Seattle. I’m not a magnificent political prognosticator but there’s a solid record that suggests that whether this measure goes to the ballot in 2010 or 2011 or 2015 it’s going to pass. The real danger is that this plan, due to insufficient preparation, will overpromise and under-deliver. As project engineering progresses, costs (mitigation and otherwise) go up. That sets up the traditional Puget Sound funding crisis (see: Sound Transit circa 2000, Monorail circa 2004) where the entire enterprise has a near-death experience or worse. That’s the real political risk.
It may very well be that the city can put together a reasonably high-fidelity plan for the 2010 ballot. And of course, at some point before 100% engineering you have to take the planning you’ve got and go to the voters. However, I hope the McGinn administration heavily weights the maturity of the plan. For the comments: can anyone articulate what the benefit of going to the ballot in 2010 vice 2011 is, beyond everything potentially opening a year earlier?
In light of all the news lately about East Link alignment choices, and in large part just because we haven’t had one, it’s well past time to have a meetup in Bellevue. Our planned date: Thursday, February 11th.
I’m waiting for a confirmation, but we should have space at the Rock Bottom. It’s a block from Bellevue Transit Center, in the Galleria – which I understand is neither a Kemper Freeman nor a Kevin Wallace property (although it’s probably someone with their values).
I’d imagine you should start filtering in around 6, but don’t worry if you can’t show up until a little later – I’m sure folks will be there until at least 9. Please comment if you can (or can’t) make it!
