Mike at Carless in Seattle talked about a tunnel for cars through downtown. Sounds interesting. Oh and yes, there’s just one of me writing all of this, but I would happily invite other people here to blog if they are interested.
Then over at Orphan Road, Frank wrote about Cascadia Prospectus’s idea for a “University Street Transit Hub” that would connect Sounder and Link Rail underneath downtown Seattle which I completely agree, would be awesome, and would increase Sounder ridership quite. The problem is that all freight from Seattle going north, or from Everett/Canada going south, goes through that tunnel, so it would be a logistical nightmare to try to get any part of it closed for any stretch of time, and the platforms would need to be separated from the freight lines otherwise boardings would interfere with freight, and freight would interfere with the lives of passengers.
Well, the whole tunnel conversation got me thinking back to the time when I talked to some transit heads about a City only expansion to rail paid based on the two studies that Sound Transit is going to include in ST2 one that would connect Downtown, Ballad and the UW and a second that would connect Downtown, West Seattle and Burien/SeaTac. Well, the city would only pay for part of those two, especially not all the way to Burien, and I doubt Seattlites could afford both lines in their entirety, but I think the interest would be there once the Central Link passes. The most difficult part would be running a second set of trains through downtown. The current “bus” tunnel through downtown will barely be able to handle the Tacoma-Seattle-Everett Light Rail traffic added to the Seattle-Eastside traffic, running a West Seattle-Ballard line cause a traffic jam. In order to build the rail line of my dreams, it would take a second downtown subway on 2nd or 4th, and that might be an uphill battle.
Don’t be surprised if that ballot initiative shows up in 2011.
Let’s make sure ST2 passes first.
Definitely ST2 NEEDS to pass first or all this is mute. However, I thought that they were going to put a Sounder stop in Belltown? I did notice it wasn’t on ST2. There was talk of that however. I think it would be more logistical to have a Sounder stop where the trains exit the tunnel? Perhaps there could be a circulator bus that would be timed with arrivals and departures. That may be more logically sound. I do agree in a perfect world University Street would be nice! However the freight trains may pose the problem. If we had to hollow it out further than it is now, I wonder if that would be a bad idea to support the bus tunnel above it and Benaroya Hall? I admit I don’t know much about tunnel structure. Daijamin are you looking for co-bloggers?
Yes I am.
I would do it, but I work M-F 9-5. How much time does it take? Is it easy?
It’s pretty easy to write posts, and it doesn’t take too much time. I spend about 4 hours per week doing it.
If you wanted, you could even just write one post a week, that would take about 20~30 minutes.
I think I could handle that.
Well send me an email. Tokodaisumisu@hotmail.com