Here you have it, folks. With the small changes noted, this is what East Link will look like. Click for the big version.
Please Note: There is no money for section E. Money Bellevue might find for section C will not make section E affordable – that’s the city’s choice to fund their own tunnel, and has no bearing on Sound Transit’s budget. Also note that section D ends smack in the middle of Microsoft campus, at Overlake Transit Center.
Now we await the state’s dangerous game on I-90.
Update: Andrew Austin liveblogged the ST board meeting on the TCC blog. The state seems pretty obsessed with protecting the direct access from I-90 HOV to Bellevue Way. You’ve gotta love those “House Transportation Chair’s District” priorities.
Today’s Sound Transit board meeting should prove to be reasonably exciting. They’ll be addressing the motion to move forward with East Link alternatives, and I expect there will be amendments. I may not be able to watch most of it, so I’m relying on you to tell me if anybody throws punches. Maybe there will be yelling!
The Kinkisharyo light rail vehicles we’ve purchased for Link have a top speed of 65mph. Now, they won’t run over 55mph in actual service, but I bet some operators will edge 60 on the way down the hill from Tukwila…
Proposition 1 should also increase transit use in the region by 65%. I think that’s by 2030. We should build more than that.
From Streetfilms come another example of a working BRT implementation, this time from Curitiba in southern Brazil.
Other than the clearly indicated tube stations, the thing that struck me the most in this video is how little congestion there seems to be on the roads the buses drive down. We’ll find out here how well BRT works on super-congested roadways very soon when Community Transit’s Swift opens this year and Metro’s Rapid Ride opens next year.
Tomorrow, the Sound Transit board will make their determination of which East Link alignment options to move forward for further study.
But before we discuss that, I have a little “Overheard in Seattle” moment to share, and a response. At the Bellevue and Olive 545 stop one morning, a discussion was overheard about how this blog is too Eastside-oriented. I can see where this criticism comes from, but I think it’s misguided.
Transit in Seattle is solid. We have the political will to build more, and there’s a lot of room to grow around future stations. Link is already on its way from city limit to city limit. We have a streetcar plan. Ballard and West Seattle mass transit is just a matter of time.
The suburbs are where the problems are. Most of the region’s residents live outside the city, but a lot of our jobs are inside it. Commuting isn’t something that we can just change – you can’t just bulldoze everything low density, all you can do is stop building farther out and start filling in the gaps. Those commute trips are the ones that have no options, that we need to make reliable. As a result, that’s where a lot of the news is.
In January, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Highway Administration, Americans drove a collective 222 billion miles. That’s a lot of time spent behind the wheel — enough to make roughly eight hundred round-trips to Mars. It translates to about 727 miles traveled for every man, woman, and child in the country. But that figure was down about 4 percent from January 2008, when Americans averaged 757 miles of car travel per person. And this was no aberration: January 2009 was the fifteenth consecutive month in which the average American drove less than he had a year earlier.
It’s a good piece and there’s a good discussion at Nate Silver’s website Five Thirty Eight. This decline is caused in part by the rise of the cost of driving (and falling real incomes), and in part by increased urbanization and better access to transit. It’s a bit depressing to think that transit agencies could cut service just when America’s car and oil dependencies are starting to ebb.
I think it’s worth considering the 28% percent fewer (according to WSDOT) car trips that would be taken with a surface option to replace to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Would those vehicle miles traveled just disappear anyway? Looks like it, probably don’t need the highway then.
Tacoma Link and SLU cars are 66 feet long (Link LRT cars will be 90 feet). 1966 was also the year of an infamous New York City Transit strike.
Bellevue’s Mayor, Grant Degginger, really wants a tunnel. Everyone but Microsoft seems to agree, but there’s not enough money, the cheapest tunnel is about $500 million more than the available funding. If Bellevue plans on relying entirely on federal funding and value engineering the rest of the line, they are probably going to wind up short. It’s going to need some local funding in Bellevue.
West Coast High Speed Rail? Maybe, but at 1,500 miles and $45 million a mile, it’s little more than a pipe dream.
The federal transportation bill might be pushed back to 2010, rather than come in this year. If it includes more transit or better smart-road funding, I’d happily wait.
On Friday, May 8th, I went down to visit Oregon Iron Works division called United Streetcar. OIW has been constructing the first American built modern streetcar in decades. The vehicle is based off the Skoda 10T design and is compatible with the current Skoda/Inekon cars currently running in Seattle, Portland and Tacoma. (more…)
Vauban, Germany: but where are the cars? photo by adeupa de Brest
This New York Times article describes a place that I had thought only existed in wild fantasies: a modern suburb with few cars.
Vaubhan, Germany – Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.
As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.
Amazing, I highly recommend you read the whole thing. From the look of this photo spread by Adeupa de Brest, it does seem like Vauban is much more dense than most American cities, but from a bit high up, it seems a plenty verdant and suburban.
I want to start out here by saying that I write about and support transit because I don’t think our land use or transportation are sustainable. I didn’t start out as a subway geek – I started out buying organic and local, reducing my meat intake, replacing my lightbulbs, the basics of cutting my environmental impact. But over time, looking at statistics of what contributes to our emissions, I’ve realized that here in Puget Sound, where our buildings are mostly hydro-powered, transportation is by far the largest contributor to climate change.
Some of you know I don’t drive. I don’t even have a license, nor do I plan to get one. That doesn’t mean I don’t ever take car trips – I catch rides with people when they’re headed my way, or I’ll do a road trip. When I go to the store, a park, get groceries, catch a movie – those things I usually do on foot, or on the bus. I just try not to be absolutist – there are things cars are good for. Our urban form demands some car use sometimes. But that doesn’t make our urban form sustainable – it just means we’re in a bad situation.
None of the technologies to make cars ‘carbon neutral’ actually work at any scale. Sure, battery powered sports cars might be affordable for a few, and neighborhood electric vehicles might let us do last mile deliveries. But battery technology isn’t ‘advancing’ that much, and there’s no oil industry plot behind it, it’s just physics. When we have to generate our own power, rather than dig it out of the ground, most of us just don’t generate enough wealth to buy the energy it would take to drive us around. (more…)
Levi Pulkkinen of the P-Icrunches the numbers and finds that, since 1998, incidents on Metro have risen almost five times higher than ridership.
Route 174 is the 2008 champion with 60 incidents, a stunning upset of the usual winner, Route 7 (with 52). The 7 is both the backbone of the Rainier Valley and the highest-ridership route in the system.
To keep things in perspective, however, system-wide we’re still below 5 incidents per million rides. Furthermore, “incident” encapsulates everything from the mildly uncomfortable to the absolutely unacceptable. Pulkkinen’s pie chart indicates that about 1/3 of the incidents materially effect innocent bystanders: harassment, theft, sex offenses, threats, and some portion of “other.” I think that compares pretty favorably with the odds of something bad happening to you when you drive.
With Route 174 likely to be split into Route 124 and RapidRide A in 2010, its reign is sure to be brief. However, a whole new candidate will appear when light rail opens. Consult my post from late last year on how Link can avoid this title.
And by the way, there’s a first time for everything: the P-I comment thread is totally worth it.There’s noise, sure, but John Niles crunches the numbers to show that these statistics are nothing to fret about, while commenter Seattle_Music points out that many incidents go unreported. Of course, truly serious assaults are generally reported.
Do unpleasant people and fights between others discourage you from riding the bus?
In 1967 the Federal Transit Administration was born. At the time, it was called the Urban Mass Transit Administration. The same year, a number of mass transit studies were released, from L.A. to Hong Kong to our own plan in Seattle.
It was also 1967 when residents of Vancouver, BC got together to reject a highway through their city. Perhaps, forty two years later, we can get our act together and do the same?
The Department of Transportation at M Street and New Jersey Avenue in Washington, D.C. Photo by NCinDC
The US Department of Transportation has released its annual recommendation (12 MB pdf link) for Federal New Starts (transit capital projects over $250 million) and Small Starts (transit capital projects under $250 million) for the 2010 Federal Budget. The document recommends $1.83 billion in funding for New Starts and Small Starts, which would be about a 10% increase over the 2009 budget if Congress were to include that level of funding in the federal budget. Some highlights of the recommendation below the fold. (more…)
Have you ordered your free ORCA card yet? All the cool kids have, and instead of fumbling for change and bills they are using their e-purse to pay fares, handle transfers, and look stylish.
But did you know that you can use your e-purse to pay for multiple people?
When traveling on the bus, you can let the driver know BEFORE you tap as to the number of persons you will be paying for and the driver can adjust the reader to the correct fare. THEN, you tap only once and the correct fare for all of you and your family members will be deducted from your E-purse.
When traveling on the train or Link (if after July 18), you can use your E-purse to purchase individual tickets for each family member. You will present the tickets and ORCA card when the fares are being verified.
So says ORCA support, whose message we were forwarded by reader justin.
Do you get a monthly PugetPass or a Flexpass from your work and waiting for an employer provided ORCA card? Expect one with the same functionality sometime within the next year as contracts get renegotiated on a company-by-company basis.
in 1968, the first Forward Thrust transit vote got 50.8% of the vote, but failed to get the 60% needed to pass. It was voted on again in 1970, but it got only 46% of the vote that year. The vote came at the height of the Boeing bust, and voters were worried about the local economy and didn’t want to approve new taxes, even though the Federal Government was going to pay $880 million of the rapid transit system’s $1.3 billion price tag. The one that got away…
Oran has great video (above) of Orca being used usable in Washington State Ferry fare turnstiles.
Is the Seattle Times actually in favor of something, anything around light rail? It’s hard to tell but I think so.
Fred Jarrett, who is running for King County Exec against Larry Phillips, Ross Hunter, Dow Constantine and Susan Hutchison, is apparently is in favor of removing 40/40/20, the rule that dictates that new Metro bus service is split 40% for the Eastside, 40% for South King County and 20% for Seattle and Shoreline. Metro is in such a budget bind today that won’t have much effect in the short term, but getting rid of that rule could provide buses in need-based formula in the long term. Along with Phillips and Constantine, three of the candidates I know support some alteration to 40/40/20.
In 1969, Colorado created a regional transportation district around Denver, Minnesota created a transit authority in Duluth, and the Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) was created in Philadelphia.
PATCO’s Speedline opened that year, with 14.2 miles of track and ridership of just over 21,000. Link will do a bit better than that in 69 days!
Last night, a 24 year old MBTA trolley operator rear-ended another trolley, apparently while texting his girlfriend. There were 49 injuries, including a broken wrist on the part of the operator.
This isn’t the first time there’s been a rear-ending on the Green Line. Last May the same thing happened, albeit without the texting part. The operator died in that crash.
Link, I believe, won’t have the rear-ending problem. If I’m not mistaken, our signaling system keeps the trains separated in blocks, and trains going through a red signal or going too fast will be automatically limited or stopped. Granted, it’s possible for an operator to enter an intersection in the Rainier Valley, and someday I hope we can grade separate that portion of Link, but Sound Transit seems to have taken every precaution to prevent problems like the Green Line has.
Feel free to consider this an open thread. Is there any other interesting transit news? H/T to Sam for this one.
Link Light Rail vehicles are 70% low floor. All four of the doors on each side are at the same level as the platform, only a short portion at each end is raised. This means there will be no waiting for wheelchairs to board, as they can roll right on, and no trouble for those who have difficulty climbing steps.
Ten weeks left!
I also want to make a comment about SB 5433 – the bill that modifies local option taxes this year. Just to recap, it allows for two new things: Cities and counties can now ask the public to vote for a congestion charge on car tabs to fund transit, although unlike the MVET this would be flat, rather than based on the value of the car. The bill also changes property tax rules.
Right now, without this bill, the King County Council can vote, without the public, to increase property taxes for ferries from today’s $0.075/$1000 to a total of $0.75/$1000. 5433 makes two changes – it reduces the total allowance to $0.15/$1000, and it reserves the currently uncollected $0.075/$1000 for transit.
The Governor hasn’t signed this bill yet, and openly anti-Sound Transit Joe Turner has some incorrect reporting on the matter. He claims this is a new tax. Taxes are clearly not his motivation – this reduces the amount of tax the County Council can impose. This would be a good time to call or email the Governor’s office in support of SB 5433, as it will take a big bite out of King County Metro’s shortfall – and save routes we use.
I will be touring OIW‘s United Streetcar today with Portland Transport’s Chris Smith. Does anyone have any questions regarding the new streetcar? I will be meeting up around 1pm and will have my laptop with me. Be sure to wave, I’ll be on Amtrak Train #501 to PDX and 508 to SEA.
