You should ride a bike sometime to understand the complaints. It’s quite scary when you are staring at the side of a car who decided to run a red light to save 30 seconds. It’s really risking killing someone or causing major bodily injury. And yes, that goes for bicyclists too who ignore peds. Please don’t put us all in the same category – I was just making a point that it was interesting to hear that the trains were having some of the same problem with autos as bicyclists commonly do, and peds commonly do. I think the point is that everyone has issues, but the fact is that autos are so much more common on the streets and since they have the potential to cause so much damage people behind the wheel should really pay attention and be aware of their potential to cause harm.

Good luck getting where you are going safely.

I thought hte switcheroo was funny, because any time you talk to bike/car/ped/train folks they all ahve the same litany of complaints as you, and it just switched over so nicely!

The problem is that everyone accepts car-on-car wrecks as normal and acceptable but sees car-on-train wrecks as problems. (A non-injury car-on-car accident never makes the news.) The problem is not the trains — they’re predictable in both their speed and their path. The problem is cars.

Incidentally, there have been hardly any train-pedestrian collisions in Houston, despite a lot of jaywalking around the tracks. People see the trains and judge their speeds very well. The systems that have a lot of pedestrian collisions tend to be those that run 65, not 35 — I assume it’s just much harder to judge how long a train will take to get to you at that speed.

That many accidents showed something was wrong with the train somehow

Or wrong with the road?

On the other side of the coin, if there was a stop near the high school it could have been used by the students riding to the high school.

And yes Tukwilla is a huge sprawl. The city council is trying to change that and they did it by designating the Southcenter area as open for office/retail/appartment development. If you were around here 30 years ago, you can see what happened in Bellevue once they had a development plan. It takes time to do this sort of shift.

The trains still roll. Why? Because for every dumbass that gets hit by them, a few hundred thousand non-dumbasses rely on them.

In Houston’s case, they had 75 accidents in a year, and 74 of them were the driver’s fault. But you wouldn’t say that all 75 were caused by the drivers, would you? That many accidents showed something was wrong with the train somehow, even if the law made the train in the right more than 98% of the time.

Even the safest communities have some crime…

Some communities are targeted for that very reason–everyone feels safe and they’ve let their guard down.

Given how difficult North Beacon Hill is to serve with transit due to limited and congested access it would have been silly to dig a tunnel under the hill and not put a station in. Dearborn turned out not to be a viable alignment which is why Link goes under Beacon Hill in the first place.

Sodo station is within walking distance of SoDo center among other things. While there may not be much residential in the area there are a number of office and industrial jobs nearby.

Rainier Station for East Link is roughly as far from Mt. Baker station as the Columbia City Station is.

The first complete End to End test should be Tomorrow! (4/17/09 after the tunnel closes.) Permits permitting. :)

On the accidents: A view from inside.
They will happen, we will have a fatality, we will have something BIG.
Our job is to make them as few and far between as possible. We are training the fire departments in big accident response (one exercise is scheduled for 4/17 in Tukwila).
Last night we were out of service for about 40 minutes for the investigation but were able to continue service at that time for the remainder of our test time (until 9pm.) The operator is o.k. and the LRV is out of service only because we can run one less LRV for the test. It was cleared for service at the scene with minor damage. It appears that the driver of the car either did not “see” the LRV traveling in the same direction or they were trying to race it. either way it was a left turn in a location clearly marked “No Left Turn.” As Niven would say “Think of it as evolution in action.” One reason that we are running the trains in this corridor at service frequency levels is to acclimate drivers to the fact that “Der be trains on dem der rails!”
It wouldn’t matter if we placed 8 foot tall fences with razor wire at the top, backed with iron rails. Somebody would manage to get into the right of way and hit a train. It’s a fact of rail. I have actually seen a case of suicide by Sounder. not a pretty sight.

On Crime and Vandalism:
I have been surprised that we have not had more vandalism on the LRVs. This last week we have been storing them at Rainier Beach siding and they have been safe. There are bullet holes in the office there, the police refuse to use it as an office. All of the stations will have active video monitoring and “Passenger Emergency Telephones” (PETs) and trained personnel that can find an event and transfer the video to police for evidence.

CLLR stations:
We needed at least one station in the busway corridor. I was rather surprized that they made two. Stadium station is required for when the DSTT is closed, trains can still operate the rest of the line and cross over at the Royal Brougham interlock maintaining service. It is nice that the bus drivers can get to work. I still do not understand the need for SODO, but I can accept that.

Relief Points:
There is a “relief shack” on the elevated portion over Forrest st. but the dynamics of an operator change may require something different in the future. One thing that may be happening in the schedule is to have a rolling relief, so that an operator will get more than a 8 minute break. This is what the “Pre-Revenue” period is for sorting out.

The steepness of the hill between those two stations makes the distance much less walkable than you would think just looking at how far it is. It’s not terribly far at all, but that is a very steep hill.

It’s not far from the top of the Counterbalance to the base either, but if I were putting a streetcar back in there (oh, I wish) I’d put a stop at the top and bottom, too. The steepness makes it difficult for people, particularly older folks or the disabled.