From a transit planning perspective this station would have been better placed under Rainier Vista between Stevens Way and Pacific Place, which is where Sound Transit wanted to put it once the decision was made to cross under Montlake, but the UW put the kibosh on that plan. That location had the best bus transfer story and better served the central campus. It would have fit perfectly there. But, sadly, there were other issues.

At least we can have a good interface with the buses that run today on Pacific St., with a bit of effort. It doesn’t appear that effort has been made by anyone up to now, despite official policies at the city and state levels that prioritize a direct transit connection here. The key is figuring out how to get the buses through there with a minimum of delay for through-trips while still providing bus stops in front of the station, at least northbound. That leads to interest in a transit-only grade-separated connection from northbound Montlake to westbound Pacific Place.

When you look at the sum of all the transit-related investments we are making in the region (ST, HOV lanes on 520, etc.) and consider the importance of this transit hub at the confluence of major transit services, the amount of money it would take to fix this particular problem is miniscule by comparison. I’d like to see the various agencies, institutions and jurisdictions here work together to find a way to make it work. It’s a fairly self-contained integrated design problem.

I have not actually laid out a grade-separated transit-only lane under Montlake connecting to Pacific Place, but there’s a fair amount of room to work with west of the station box and north and east of the actual triangle parking garage underground structure, which is a lot smaller than the triangle on the surface. I think it can be spared completely even though it does not deserve to be treated as some kind of sacred site of great cultural significance — it’s a parking garage.

The elevation of the Montlake/Pacific Place intersection should not be held as sacred either. If this had to be raised a few feet in the process of building a transit lane underneath, I don’t think it would harm that area. That intersection is out of the view corridor for Rainier Vista. A slightly raised ped crosswalk at Pacific could easily be matched on the triangle side in conjunction with the rest of the Rainier Vista plan. It wouldn’t be raised more than a few feet, and then only if it helps get the buses to Pacific Place. That may or may not help; it needs to be laid out.

In the other direction (southbound), the right turn volume from southbound Montlake Blvd. to westbound Pacific St. (not Pacific Place) is very low-volume. This is fed by the existing lane on Montlake Blvd. north of Pacific St. adjacent to the triangle. Buses already use this lane (e.g. 44) to turn back west. We could simply carry this lane through the intersection and connect it to the existing transit merge lane on Montlake Blvd. just north of the bridge, which is the same place buses already go from the existing eastbound Pacific St. HOV lane. The southbound through-movement would be transit-only.

The route around the north end of the triangle is about an eighth of a mile longer than just going up Pacific Street (the current routing.) It would involve an additional stop for buses, yes, but they already stop for drawbridge openings that take six minutes. The extra dwell time and distance might add a minute or so to travel times for through trips, but would save maybe four minutes of walk time and one major street crossing in each direction of a commute for the approximately 25% of the users of this station who are transferring to or from buses.

At yesterday’s ST meeting, the facilities planning officer from the UW told me that all the buses were full in that stretch, as if that would be a reason not to make this connection efficient. If buses are full, then we need to add some more buses, not make it less convenient. If masses of people have yet to clamor for a better bus-rail transfer here, maybe it’s because ST has yet to start excavating the hole for the station. Most people aren’t following the planning process as closely as we are. Once people make this walk a few hundred times in the rain across two busy streets, I think they’ll have formed an opinion on this connection.

The straight across bridges would serve nearly all trips optimally except those to the southbound bus stop on Montlake. From the Vista PDF diagram it looks like the “ADA Accessible Path” running off the picture toward the corner of Montlake and Pacific Place should have a branch back toward the elevator. Most people would prefer to walk an extra twenty yards than wait for a hydraulic elevator. I know I would.

These are excellent thoughts; it’s a long way to the bus stops on Pacific Street across from the hospital. The Vista Plan PDF does show new bus stops across from the hospital emergency access, so they’d be closer than the existing first stop at Pacific Place. But not that much closer. So your idea will be much more convenient for arriving passengers wanting to access Link.

However, I’m wondering if you’ve really analyzed the geometry of the bus underpass idea. If you look at the station Site Plan (the first link in the headline post) you can see a faint outline of the station body superimposed on the landscaping. Notice the “Vent” just west of the end of Husky Stadium. If you look at the Wide Cross Section view in the ST Library, that vent is near the north end of the station, but not quite at it. You can see the dashed line maybe fifteen yards north of the “Vent” oval in the cluster of three trees. That’s the north end of the station body.

I think you have a space problem if you try to dive down and to the right of Montlake to make your grade-separated left turn from the right hand lane of northbound Montlake. The downsloping road will really need to “belly-out” to the east a bit under the pink square in order to make the turn at the bottom a decent radius to fit standard buses comfortably. It might fit between the road and the station body, but it will be a really close thing.

If it does miss the station footprint, there’d be no problem clearing the tubes vertically. The top of them is about sixty feet down.

Once the roadway passes under Montlake, how do you propose to connect it to Pacific Place? The roadway surface of the underpass would have to be down at least 22 feet to allow for trolley poles and enough of a roof to support Montlake, and it has to miss the parking garage body under the Triangle, so it can’t join to the east side of Pacific Place. The connection will have to be a rising merge lane in the middle of Pacific Place or on the west side of the street.

Either might work since the street will be depressed for the Triangle Vista improvement, and if the bus tunnel crossed Montlake directly underneath the Pacific Place intersection the depression for the lid and the rise of the bus subway could “meet in the middle” (vertically speaking). However it does mean that the roadway footprint would have to be a lane wider to accommodate the rising bus roadway (actually a little wider than a lane because of the retaining walls).

The current plan under the landbridge shows a somewhat wider than normal two lane road with the support posts directly west of the roadway, between it and the B-G trail. It’s wider than usual because of the bus bays on the east side for most of the distance north of the garage entrance alley. The east side also has a pedestrian path which is necessary to access the bus stops. It seems likely that the rising lane would have to extend at least part way under the lid to make the merge safe.

It’s not going to be easy to squeeze “a widened and lowered Pacific Place” in there. Perhaps if the northbound lane, the bus bays and the eastside walkway were moved east so that he walkway is directly adjacent to the parking garage body it could fit, but that’s the only way.

If it can be made to fit, it’s going to be expensive, but that’s not a reason not to pursue it. The best thing about it is that it gets the buses from the south out of the left turn mess onto Pacific Street. Buses arriving should experience more rapid and reliable access to the U District as well as the Link station through the exclusive bus tunnel.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the buses heading out, because of the fairly involved detour around the Triangle and losing access to the jump lane onto Montlake. It doesn’t look like it’s possible to replace the jump lane by adding one along Montlake because there’s already a dedicated right turn lane along the curb. The buses are going to be stopping in that lane and will have to criss-cross between the bus stops and the Pacific Street intersection with traffic wanting to turn right. The right turners will stay in the right-hand “through” lane until they’re past any bus(es) at the stop, then move into the turn lane. At the same time, buses leaving the stop will want to move left into the Montlake through lane. This is a recipe for lots of fender-benders.

So it seems to me that it might make more sense to keep the departing buses on Pacific Street and add a long stop close to the Montlake intersection, east of the hospital emergency entrance. The buses often have to stop there anyway because of the back up from the light at Montlake.

Then build a diagonal pedestrian tunnel from the southwest corner of the mezzanine level under the Pacific/Montlake intersection to the bus stop and beyond to the basement of the Med Center building if acceptable to the University. That’s not cheap either and would “compete” with the proposed bridge from the raised Triangle to the Med Center. The bridge would be a longer walk from the bus stops but would serve more needs, since it would connect to the campus through the landbridge.

A tunnel to the bus stop would be similar to one of the entrances to the Civic Center BART station which runs nearly a block under Market to the west in order to underpass Hyde and give a “no-major street crossing” access to the Civic Center Plaza.

Doing the incoming buses with the “island” stop would be operationally questionable. Assuming the placement of the cross-walk as shown in the “revised Vista” plan, there will be room for only one articulated bus at the island platform if it’s south of the cross-walk. That might cause traffic jams by a following bus waiting for the platform.

If it’s north of the cross-walk there are no size constraints and you can have a waiting queue holding an artic or a couple of standard buses south of the cross walk. But you’ll have people fidgeting on buses stopped in that holding queue, wanting to use the light cycle for which they’re stopped to get to the Link train. The “walking man” won’t come on very often with all the traffic on Montlake; you can be assured that WADOT will make sure that the cars get priority.

This really is quite an awkward location for the station considering the bus interface. There are no really “good” solutions because the buses don’t have their own access to the station.

My understanding is that while ST and the UW are open to pedestrian bridges, the City (SDOT) has a blanket policy against them, and believes people will jaywalk anyway so you might as well provide a crosswalk. I’m not sure I agree, but regardless of that, there’s something else lacking in all these plans.

We need bus stops in front of the UW rail station.

We need a northbound bus stop in front of the station entrance (ideally), or, as another option, bus stops on a traffic island in the center of Montlake Blvd. integrated with the proposed crosswalk. Bus transfers from the south (25, 43, 48), and the Eastside would use this stop to access light rail, a few steps from bus door to to the station. Also anyone coming out of the rail station could board a northbound or westbound bus here to get to the SW campus which is otherwise a bit of a hike from both U District stations. Future bus routes heading straight north would also stop here, providing better access to U Village, 25th Ave., and the Sand Point corridor, which includes Children’s Hospital, which proposes to double in size.

After stopping in front of the station, buses destined for the U District would then access the lowered Pacific Place, either with some kind of a transit-only turn lane, or a grade-separated ramp (which starts as a transit-only right hand lane and then curves west to pass underneath Montlake Blvd., connecting with the widened and lowered Pacific Place proposed in this plan.) This could be funded as part of the SR 520 program which has a legislative mandate to optimize the transit connection at UW for transit service on 520.

We also need a southbound bus stop across the street from the station entrance. This would allow you to exit the rail station and quickly grab a local bus headed south, or east across SR 520 to Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond.

With the proper treatment of Montlake Blvd., buses could be given a queue jump from that street just as they have a queue jump now on Pacific St. These are pretty straightforward problems to solve.

The addition of East Link across I-90 does not even slightly diminish the need for these bus stops to be close to the UW rail station. East Link targets a different transit market from all of the buses that circulate in the UW triangle area today. There is no advantage to making the walk distance longer than it needs to be. We can come in later and fix this, but it would be better to do it right from the get-go.

I suggested a tunnel a couple of days ago and most people objected because of safety (and one for “smell”…). You and Alex make good points about how to make it work but it seems like we have a minority opinion, and if they’ll build the Montlake overcrossing promptly, it will be better in any weather except a Pineapple Express. It’s not clear how to make the trip through the garage pleasant and direct. I’m sure it could be done at some cost to the parking capacity.

But the cost of the tunnel would be greater than the cost of the second story of the station. That second story is like the part of an iceberg sticking out of the water, anyway. This sucker is going to be HUGE because of its depth and will sit in an enormous hole bigger than BART’s Montgomery station.

Shaving off the second floor will save only pennies on Grants. Besides, there has to be a mechanical level for the elevators.

Anyway, it isn’t “danger” that I’m concerned about this time. Danger was the Point Defiance Bypass. It’s pure and simple the enormous hassle of waiting up to three minutes twice a day to cross Montlake for every one of the thousands of people who will be using U-Link during the time between completion of the station and completion of the Montlake overcrossing. Whenever that is. And since it’s not scheduled it could be a long time.

I think it should be scheduled as a part of the Triangle Vista improvement, even if it means ST has to pony up another three million. That should handle the cost for crossing Montlake because the straight across bridge to the Triangle is way less than half as long as the $6.7 million long arc.

I admit that my experience with the Burke-Gilman trail was three decades ago when I worked in the University Retirement and Insurance Office at Brooklyn and the crossing of the B-G. Since I lived in Wallingford I walked it every morning and evening for three years while I worked there and I honestly can’t remember having been hit once.

I’m certain that bike traffic is heavier now, and you’re right, there’s no light at the crossing of the Vista pedestrian way and the trail. But it’s a whole lot less hassle for a pedestrian to slow down or pause for a few seconds for a bicycle or two to pass than to wait for a signaled crossing of Montlake. Yes, very few pedestrians get hit by cars in cross-walks, thanks to the relatively sane drivers in Seattle. And, yes, there are some jerks on bicycles who just blast through pedestrian zones. Still, I think it’s a stretch to say we’re getting “most of the benefits” of the long arc bridge.

There’s nothing to be done about the crossings until the Vista modifications to the Triangle are done. That’s the way it is and you’re absolutely correct about that. But please argue for having the Montlake overcrossing included in the construction of the Triangle improvements so the value of the landbridge is maximized from day one.

Thank you for taking the time to make a fully detailed post. And it does make sense to wait because of the elevation changes to come.

For those of you concerned about the security in a pedestrian tunnel, you can always get up on the street and walk to the station there.

The original Montlake alignment was relocated to the current one due to concerns by the UW of vibrations interfering with research. This required moving the station from Rainier Vista to Husky Stadium. The other station was moved from the Burke Museum parking lot to Brooklyn Ave at the urging of the business community.

The original preferred alignment was at 15th Ave NE below Pacific St, which in my opinion is even worse than Husky Stadium because it’s much farther from the hospital and a steeper hill than Rainer Vista. UW owns all the land around both. UW has a poor record on urban form, but I really hope that will change in the future.

I think the alignment was also moved to Montlake Blvd partially because of difficulty tunneling under Portage Bay (near the University Bridge).