On July 28, the Issaquah Transit Center opens a new garage with 819 parking spaces — about double the previous number, as well as “improved” kiss-and-ride facilities.
More project details here.
In somewhat-less-good news for Brad, the Redmond P&R has been closed so that part of the lot can be turned into dense development and rest into a parking garage, for a net gain of 9 spaces. As the funding comes from the land sale, it seems like a win-win for TOD-heads like us, and at worst a push for those best served by extending the parking capacity at transit nodes.
Good for Metro.
In the meantime, there will be parking at a nearby Home Depot, which triggers reroutes for lots of buses in the area.
What is kiss-and-ride?
Sorry, DC Metro term, from where I grew up.
It’s what happens when you order a bottle of wine on a first date.
A strip of temporary parking, meant for carpoolers. For instance, wife drops husband off at the bus stop on her way to work in a different direction.
The Redmond park-and-ride has been full for years. This is only an issue for the people in the city core. It’s been unusable to the casual driver/rider for years. A park-and-ride surrounded by two lane roads is awesome. Not. We can all agree with that. I wish they’d just do away with it altogether. But in 40 years, where would they put the ST3 station? I get that.
I swear to god that Doug MacDonald had his hand in designing the Issaquah PnR. (It’s just the garage that is opening now. The stop opened weeks ago.) The place is designed so that every bus has to navigate a 360-turn within the small facility lot. And the stop is on an island. People will get run over. Why they didn’t just put a stop off the SR900 HOT lane about 20 feet east is beyond me. It takes a bus at least 10 mins to enter, navigate, stop, and navigate out. It’s crazy. It’s like a slightly-quicker Eastgate PnR shuffle.
Huh. Maybe I don’t like park-and-rides. Heh.
I’ve never been to either place, so I defer to you.
I agree that buses going into P&Rs and Transit centers when there’s a quality freeway stop nearby is insane.
I’m also pretty disappointed with the way buses will flow from the highway to the Tukwila light-rail stop, but now I’m hijacking the thread to my own post…
Seriously guys, I’ll give you $5 to ride the 545 and 554 from start to finish so you can do a report. The park-and-ride logistics AND routing between them is insane.
Thanks for listening, Martin. I feel better.
I used to take the 545 all the way to bear creek.
To me 9 spots seems like too few, that’s not even a short bus worth of spots.
I used to take the old 546 all the way to the Redmond TC, back when it would meander all over the Microsoft Campus. It was excruciating.
Now, I’m on the 554 as far as Eastgate, so I see the P&R madness. Really, when ST’s express buses get off the freeway they cease to be “express” at all, which is why there’s no decent ST service in West Seattle, among other places.
And I sometimes took the 522 to Bothell. Like a half mile before my destination we’d take a 7 minute detour to UW Bothell. Certainly there’s some forward-planning going on, but UW Bothell is a very, very tiny school.
Yeah, I used to work out at MS’ Millennium campus, so I rode to Bear Creek and walked past UPS every day. I know how slow it is!
John Jensen, while I agree with you that the 522 detour to UW Bothell is a problem, it’s not really true that UW Bothell is a tiny school. Right now it’s got more than 3000 students, plus faculty and staff, all of whom commute. As soon as the new south entrance is completed (it’s underway now and I think planned for completion in early 2010) enrollment will be allowed to reach 10,000. That’s a major branch campus for a large state university.
My understanding is that the 522 bus will then be rerouted to use that entrance instead of Beardslee, which should save a lot of time.
Thanks for the info. You’re right, UW Bothell isn’t “tiny.” However, my high school had about 2,500 students and we didn’t have as many buses reroute to serve us. :)
I don’t really blame ST or even UW here, it’s just a fact of life the buses detour a lot to serve vital groups like P&R-goers and UW Bothellers.
Another nice thing about rail is that it can go right to the destination without a “detour.” For example, it’ll hit Quest Field and Husky Stadium without a single detour, whereas any bus heading from Federal Way to Lynnwood would have to get off the freeway and do a circuitous detour to directly serve those stadiums.
A lot of P&R’s are pretty slow and unwieldy for routes that don’t terminate there. Even the Overlake TC should really have a direct access ramp, but it must be prohibitively expensive. I can understand the frustration with P&R’s, definitely.
At least with Link, you won’t have stations a highway exit and a circuitous route away from the rail. :)
Overlake might eventually get one. Microsoft wants a new overpass for the new development, and I don’t know if that’s going anywhere, but it could help.
Thanks for feeling my pain, guys.
Also, just rode the 554 thru Issaquah PnR. I was wrong about the routing. It circles the island one-and-a-half times, and has to stop 6 times for crosswalks in the facility alone.
And we almost creamed a car as we pulled out.
But that said, it was 9pm and the bus was full. They are doing something right.
The term ‘kiss-and-ride’ is also used in Chicago and Toronto, I think. In Philly, it’s called “punch-and-ride”. (That’s a joke.)
Kiss and Ride is being used by the ST planners as well, I was watching a presentation from them on the possible new 520 bridge lids that will include them.
yes, and st planners are using the term at the sea-tac station for the area across international boulevard, accessable by bridge.
[...] Good News for Brad [...]
[...] new Redmond Park & Ride Garage opens July 6. By consolidating the spaces from the old surface lot into a smaller footprint, a developer was able to build an adjacent [...]