I don’t think South headways are going to increase. The original plan was to have shorter headways on the North segment where there’s higher density. (5-10 minutes vs 7-15.)

On another note, I’m beginning to wonder about the north Seattle capacity. Will 4-car Link trains really be able to handle the combined riderships of the 71/72/73, plus the 41, plus the 400-series (Snohomish County buses) that are supposed to terminate at Northgate, plus the 76/79, plus new train riders?

The underestimating seems to be mostly with rail and with new systems so I guess they don’t have much to reference when trying to model the numbers.

As for the Hiawatha line I don’t even know if the inter-terminal ridership is counted in the totals for the line. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be though.

I doubt the inter-terminal ridership is all that high. It is unlikely someone would change planes from Southwest to say Northwest at MSP. Probably no more than 5000 trips per day or so max.

The trend of wildly beating ridership projections is relatively recent. In the 70′s and 80′s new systems (or extensions) tended to have much lower ridership than projected. For that matter look at North Sounder which has had very poor ridership.

I believe at some point the formulas were changed in order to produce more conservative ridership estimates.

What does seem to be a trend is that consistently light rail (or just rail) exceeds projections. My guess is that in most cases there’s no precedent to compare to so estimates are difficult and guessing low is better than guessing high.

Not sure how much of the ridership is the airport shuttle service either. Not too much I expect as one terminal has mostly discount airlines.

They built the Hiawatha line for $715.3 million, all 12 miles and 17 stations. It seems a bit out of whack that East Link is going to cost that much per segment and that figure doesn’t even include the trains.

Interesting also that they run 24/7 between the airport stations. I wonder if that 30,000 ridership is including the free airport shuttle service?

Ridership is 2-3 times projections.

http://www.metrotransit.org/improvingTransit/hiawathaLightRail.asp

So you’re saying there’s 50,000-60,000 daily riding it now?

Vancouver SkyTrain is not a metro, at most it is comparable to Docklands Light Railway with the smaller trains and driverless operation or Kuala Lumpur’s Putra which uses the same technology.

Forgive me for my limited knowledge of other systems beyond the big ones.

But it’s a regional express Link, not a Seattle metro system.

I would put SkyTrain as a light metro because they have light rail size trains but with grade-separation and automated train operation. Their platform lengths are also shorter than Link’s but that is made up through very frequent service.

For reference, I made a to-scale linear map of Central Link. You can use it to see roughly the station spacing and types of track placement.

The only way to get from one side of Beacon Hill to the other is via tunneling.

Or follow I-90 like East Link will. The tunnel from downtown to UW probably makes sense but Beacon Hill I just don’t see as so much more valuable than the Rainier Valley stations that it can justify the cost. Yes, it gets you SODO as well but that’s just a pin prick in the South Seattle Duwamish industrial area that all has to be served by buses anyway. I don’t see it as the important transfer point that say Husky Stadium will be. It still seems Beacon Hill could have been better served and for less money with buses or a streetcar loop akin to First Hill.

(Besides those 10 people, I mean.)