Update 5/20/11 – Archived video now available.
In case you can’t make it but would like to watch the Seattle Channel will be streaming the presentation live starting at 6:30. If you would like to attend information is here.
Seattle’s Union Station, home to a private railway company in its heyday and now Sound Transit headquarters, opened 100 years ago tomorrow. ST, the National Park Service, and the Alliance for Pioneer Square are celebrating:
Please join us for a community open house celebrating the 100th anniversary of Union Station and the launch of “Trail to Treasure”, a historic interpretive trail through Pioneer Square. The celebration will feature walking tours, information about planning efforts affecting the neighborhood, a live brass band and model train exhibit.
We’ve just received a copy of a letter (PDF) dated today, signed by all these and several others, politely letting Bellevue City Council know that they need to get on with it. They go so far as to say East Link and 520 replacement are “equally critical,” very strong language for a transit project, especially on the eastside.
This is a strong message not only to Bellevue City Council, but also to Kemper Freeman, and the small group attacking light rail construction: Business community leaders and the largest employers on the eastside are all sick of the quixotic attacks on East Link. We need regional mass transit now.
Good show to all those who signed. I hope to see other employers add their voices to this message.
Waterfront Seattle February 17th Kickoff Event from WaterfrontSeattle on Vimeo.
Tomorrow is the second design meeting for the waterfront project. For those that didn’t make it to the first presentation check out the video above to get up to speed on what was presented at the last event.
At the last meeting the design team asked the public where they want to be on the waterfront and what they want to do on the waterfront, using a dot exercise. They also asked other more open ended questions. Their presentation was interesting, especially when they described the different waterfront segments and the specific context of each segment. I felt this was the most interesting part and in my mind really helped to define the opportunities and challengers of each segment.
Event details below the jump. Continue reading “Waterfront Design Meeting Thursday”
Goldy at Slog has done some careful reading of I-1125, Tim Eyman’s latest initiative and found this attack on East Link buried in the text:
NEW SECTION. Sec. 3. State government, the department of transportation, and other agencies may not transfer or use gas-tax- funded or toll-funded lanes on state highways for non-highway purposes.
For background, I-1125 is primarily concerned with tolls and what the state can do with tolling revenue and would mean bad things for both roads and transit. I-1125 would eliminate variable tolling, and prohibit tolls raised on a road to be used for anything but the construction of that road. However, the abpve language is particularly scary for East Link; the new provision would prohibit the state from transfering the I-90 center lanes to Sound Transit for East Link. Goldy noticed Kemper Freemans sizeable donation to the I-1125 campaign and reads between the lines:
Of course, that is a section specifically designed to block the use of I-90’s center lanes for Sound Transit’s East Link light rail crossing. It’s what Freeman’s lawyers argued and lost in court, and it no doubt helped inspire Freeman to donate $25,000 to I-1125, the campaign’s largest contribution to date (if you don’t count the indecipherable transfers from Eyman’s other committee).
It’s scary to think that the voters in the Central Puget sound can approve a transportation system and one man with a strange vendetta against transit can help give voters in the rest of the state the ability to undo that decision. Let’s hope I-1125 doesn’t pass.
by JOHN CHELMINIAK
One of the most mentioned advantages of East Link’s B7 (cross-slough/BNSF route) is that it provides the guideway for a future connection to the Eastgate Park & Ride and Issaquah. It’s a common theme at open houses, testimony to government boards, and a favorite talking point of the Build a Better Bellevue crowd, both citizens and Bellevue City Council members alike. Frankly, it’s one of the few strong arguments for the BNSF route. Build one guideway and you are ready to go east in the future.
However, the east side of the Mercer Slough is a steep ridge. It starts with 118th Ave SE, goes up to the BNSF ROW, and then climbs in a set of tiers containing the I-90 and I-405 ramps and finally I-405 itself. Standing near the BNSF right of way and looking up, it finally hit me.
You can’t get across from there.
Continue reading “Op-Ed: B7-R Couldn’t Connect to a Future Issaquah Line”
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Recently, I was chatting with a friend who works in government, and the topic of density and growth management came up. We were discussing whether or not growth management leads to increased home values, and I made a point that I think doesn’t get discussed enough: growth management and density need to go hand-in-hand. You can maybe have the latter without the former (if, say, you happen to build a city on the edge of a cliff or on a tiny island), but you really can’t have the former without the latter.
For example, why is housing so cheap in Texas? Well, there are two reasons. One, the Texas government puts strict restrictions on the size of your mortgage, which limits the rate at which house prices can rise. That, in turn, limits the amount of money people can afford to spend on real estate. This might be a problem, except for the other reason: land is cheap and plentiful in Texas, and there’s little or no growth management. So development in Texas tends to spread out until supply reaches an equilibrium with demand.
In Seattle, the state’s Growth Management Act prevents development from spreading out. In theory, it should just spread up instead – until supply reaches equilibrium with demand – and housing should be nearly as cheap as it is in Texas.* Obviously this hasn’t happened, for a number of reasons: (a) local regulations, such as minimum parking requirements, increase the cost of building up, (b) federal lending agencies such as the FHA are biased towards detached, single-family housing, and (c) local opposition, such as what we’re now seeing in Pioneer Square and Roosevelt, prevents housing from reaching the level of density needed to achieve the necessary supply-demand balance. If we had Texas’ strict, paternalistic mortgage laws, then something would have to give here; but we don’t, so we limp along with expensive housing and sub-optimal growth management instead.
While the GMA does theoretically encourage urban growth (“Encourage development in urban areas where adequate public facilities and services exist or can be provided in an efficient manner,” reads the law), clearly the carrots and sticks have not been tuned correctly. Perhaps cities have been given too much leeway to define modest density targets. HB 1490, the Transit-Oriented Communities bill that failed in 2009, would have done a lot to rectify this. Hopefully a similar bill will pass in the future. Ideally, this kind of legislation would have been baked into the GMA from the start, since, as I said at the top, growth management and density really do go hand-in-hand.
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* perhaps our higher housing costs are inevitable in Seattle given our higher per-capita income, but I suspect that it’s actually the reverse: employers here have to pay more for workers because housing is so expensive.
The nice(r) weather of late has definitely left me itching for hikes in the mountains. I usually go with ZipCar for daytrips or Enterprise for multi-day ventures; after all, cars are at their best when providing for the occasional personal trip to a far-flung place. But Washington also has an impressive amount of rural transit, much of it imperiled by looming cuts. So as the weather warms I’ll be starting an occasional STB series, highlighting trailheads and itineraries accessible by transit, usually Saturday dayhikes that one can do without missing any days at work.
Wallace Falls is an impressive 265-foot cascade just northeast of Gold Bar. A well-trodden trail to the Middle Falls offers dense forest, steep switchbacks, and impressive views, yet it is short enough to do a daytrip from Seattle. For the weekend warrior, Community Transit Route 271 offers hourly Saturday service from Everett to Gold Bar from 6am-8pm. With an easy transfer at Everett Station, a Seattle daytripper has plenty of time to make a day of it. A sample itinerary:
For only $6 in transit fare (with ORCA), you get a two-seat ride, perhaps a greasy spoon brunch, a moderate 7-mile walking day, and you’re back in Seattle by 9:15pm. What’s not to like?
Faced with escalating fares, the University of Washington has decided to no longer provide an opt-out for the U-PASS program. Escalating charges threatened to decrease the participation rate and trigger further rises:
The universal U-PASS program will replace the current system in which students can opt to return the $99 U-PASS each quarter. Starting in autumn quarter, students will pay a fee of $76 per quarter, and the price will be locked in for two years. Faculty and staff will remain in an optional program.
According to Transportation Services, without instituting the universal U-PASS student fee, the student U-PASS fee would rise to $134.40 in the coming academic year and to $148.16 by the 2012-13 year.
At any of these rates, and especially at $25.33 a month, U-PASS is a tremendous deal for a pass at the maximum fare value compared to the open-market alternatives.
According to UW Transportation Director Josh Kavanagh, capping the fare equivalence of the U-PASS wouldn’t help contain costs. Because not many student trips involve Sounder, the formulas don’t really credit the UW much for such a concession.
The University has accumulated $3m in rebates from transit agencies due to lower student ridership than expected. Kavanagh said this would be held in reserve in case fares kept rising, or future negotiations with agencies turned out unfavorably.
In 2008, UW increased U-PASS prices from $50 to $99 per quarter.
