That parking lot makes me sad. Maybe we’ll eventually have a subway station there to spur redevelopment. :)

Personally I’d vote for bringing back the cable car but I doubt that will happen.

Certainly riding link end to end this weekend didn’t feel the same as a 35 minute bus trip.

Besides Link will reliably get you to Columbia City in the same amount of time no matter what time of day or what the traffic is like. The 48 is notorious for not keeping to schedule and the 42 and 7 can be almost as bad during peak periods.

That said, I believe due to the existing heavy traffic in the corridor, a Ballard to U-District transit line should really be a mostly grade separated route built to Link standards. Given the physical and political realities along the corridor, if it is built it is likely to be in a subway through downtown Ballard, Wallingford and the U-District. Given the stop spacing elsewhere on Link there is likely to be only one stop between Wallingford and 15th NW which means it might be possible to put a stop in Freemont rather than at 45th and Aurora. On the other hand 45th/Market between Wallingford and 15th NW is also the only segment where you could likely get away with either an elevated or at-grade alignment so cost may preclude serving Fremont directly.

Furthermore I believe there needs to be a HCT corridor running roughly in the same alignment as the Green Line of the Seattle Monorail had proposed. IOW some future stage of Link or rapid streetcar needs to go from downtown to the Seattle Center and Lower Queen Anne, Ballard, and possibly Crown Hill. Similarly there needs to be some form of rail service to at least the West Seattle Junction from downtown.

Still the ROW should still be available and might be a better solution than a curb-lane streetcar along Westlake. That still leaves routing the streetcar through Fremont and Ballard though.

I would hope most of the future streetcar lines use a center lane or median routing if they can’t be put in their own ROW. The curb lane routing doesn’t play well with the cyclists and some of the proposed streetcar routes are heavily used bicycle routes as well.

This weekend was the first time in 5 years I had been on MLK South of Rainier. I was amazed at what a transformation the just the street improvements alone have made. It is much more pedestrian friendly than it ever was in the past.

A very good sign is the one neighborhood along North Link in a position to opposed increased density around their station actually supports it. Maybe not to the delusional levels pushed by Mr. Sisely, but they did ask to redo their neighborhood plan with the idea of including denser zoning.

If the voting was just in Seattle I have no doubt we could get the voters to pass a Ballard to West Seattle rail line even if the cost was around the same as Central Link+U-Link+North Link. The problem isn’t the voters it is getting the tax authority from the legislature, preferably something other than a sales tax. In an ideal world I’d call for a mix of congestion pricing/tolls, sales tax on gas, MVET, general property taxes, and LID/TIF for transit funding.

And yeah, it would be nice to have the streetcars in the center lane.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/viriyincy/3488685623/sizes/o/

What matters here is node density – and Bellevue’s got a dense downtown, and are rezoning bel-red to be high density mixed use as well.

The empty space and lawn in Bellevue isn’t in the bel-red corridor or downtown, where the train is going.

Besides, it’s not like there’s The Golden Route and a criss-crossing of conspiracies knocked it off course here and there. There are always tradeoffs for planning *anything*, and they way the various options affect different groups of people are *always* part of the discussion and the solution.

Shorter comment: Welcome to the planet Earth.