Tacoma's New Commerce St. Station (Sound Transit)
- I don’t agree with many of the conclusions, but I learned a lot from this history of the viaduct replacement.
- S. 200th St. now officially scheduled for late 2016.
- Capitol Hill census data.
- Let cities lower their speed limits.
- Dow Constantine backs off from the Bellevue Square bashing.
- Metro bans another ad; ST decides image is too hot for Capitol Hill.
- Stadium Way becoming a “complete street“, will be able to support streetcars.
- Locals fear pedestrians will trip on First Hill Streetcar tracks.
- “Diverging diamond” intersections eliminate left turns.
- Snohomish County leaders tell Olympia to fix transportation.
- Federal infrastructure spending might not yet be done collapsing.
- Our queen, ST CEO Joni Earl.
This is an open thread.
Re: diverging diamonds. The road geeks surely love this, but man does that thing take up a lot of real estate. I’d rather rip it out and put in a 4-way stop sign (or better! a traffic circle). The DBT portals would look a lot different if I’d designed them.
I’m a fan of the single-point urban interchange myself. Everett’s got one now at 41st Street, and it looks like Kirkland is getting half of one at NE 116th St.
Thanks for the WSDOT link. I ride through there every day and didn’t know what all was happening with the destruction. I’m not seeing the advantage of a half single point. A full single point allows exiting traffic from both directions to turn left but there is no traffic exiting from the opposite direction with a half diamond or half single point. What I hope it doesn’t eliminate is the ability to turn left from the right hand lane of the exit since that allows easy access to a right onto 120th. The problem now is the lights on either side of 405 are very poorly synchronized and there is a large amount of truck traffic turning right/north onto 120th that blocks all lanes because of the sharp corner.
Bike lanes would be nice although it’s not bad now since the lanes are very wide and traffic is light in the outside lane due to them leading to right turn only at 120th and 124th. What I really hope they improve is the left turn onto 116th from 120th. That sucks big time on a bike and depending on the timing of the light cycle I sometimes go straight through and do a U turn on the opposite side of the intersection. The ultimate would be the conversion of the BNSF ROW to trail ;-)
Tacoma’s 509 @ 705 has one of these interchanges, BEST DESIGN EVER. Low space requirements, low wait time, perfect interchange.
There are some interesting hourglass shaped roundabouts that also deal with the left turn movements well.
US Hwy 12 in Walla Walla has a new (last year) hourglass roundabout next to a regular roundabout at the junction with SR 125. The hourglass roundabout extends underneath the overpass. Even though I knew about the configuration before I drove it, I still got confused and missed my turnoff. I had to loop the hourglass an extra time. My wife took photos all the while…
Cork has a lot of confusing roundabouts. Not only that but you’re driving on the wrong side of the street! In general I think roundabouts sort of suck for cycling since you end up crossing right turn lanes or end up the victim of a right hook.
[Bernie] That just means they’ve made the radius too wide. Roundabouts control speed using their radius, and (in my opinion) should never be large enough that a bike can’t comfortably ride with car traffic. It’s an intersection, not a freeway, and road designers should stop trying to make everything they design about how quickly they can get vehicles through.
To take an extreme example, check out the turning circles on Queen Anne. They’ve fit them in regular single lane city grid intersections, so you’re limited to maybe 8 mph before your tires start squeeling. That’s maybe a bit tight for major roads, but again – it’s an intersection. Intersections are inherently dangerous and the few seconds you shave off a trip by making them faster isn’t worth it.
Yes it does have to do with turning radius and speed. For example the ones out on 203 between Fall City and Duvall. Even the ones on 202 in Woodinville. But if you restrict the turning circle you can’t get enough cars through to match the volume of the traffic signals they replaced so ain’t going to happen. I can’t even imagin what trying to get across one of the monsters in Ireland would be like on a bike; think three lanes of traffic going 50-80 klicks. I’m thinking they also sort of suck for pedestrians since it seems nearly impossible to signalize crosswalks?
I never found any of Cork’s roundabouts confusing. But then, I lived there…
I actually saw this on the BBC website when it came out and was going to forward on an open thread:
Is the British roundabout conquering the US?
It seems one feature of serious roundabouts is they take up a heck of a lot of space. Other than a view for the drivers is a park in the middle of a traffic circle really an amenity? @Stephen, so you could probably even understand the old people that live out on the farms :=
@Bernie: You should check out University Circle Park. It’s always struck me as a bit silly to have a park in the middle of a roundabout, but I suspect most in the neighborhood would call it an amenity. Were it a busier intersection, I don’t imagine it would be very pleasant (or safe), but as it is it’s quite nice, especially with the views.
That is good news on accelerating the S 200th extension, but my understanding is that ST is committed to getting to Highline CC in the ST2 phase. What is the schedule for getting to HCC?
I think having HCC, SCCC and the UW all (roughly) connected with one Link line will be awesome.
There’s nothing forbidding ST from opening segments in phases. It’s just ST’s desire to open North Link, the North Corridor, and East Link in three chunks rather than gradually. Highline station is unknown because of south King’s revenue shortage. It may be built by 2023 or later, or ST may terminate Link at 200th and add BRT south of that. In either case, ST2 ends whenever the line is finished or ST officially truncates it.
I don’t think ST has formally started the environmental process for the extension south of 200th, so don’t hold your breath waiting for construction to start.
Zef, on the off chance that you see this: I rode a 60′ bus on route #11 the other day during evening peak. The other 4 coaches I saw on the route at that time were all 40-footers, though.
I missed the original discussion, but it is indeed the case that Metro runs 60′ trippers on the 11 in the peak. Before the last shakeup it was almost always D40LFs at all other times, but now it’s a mix of Gilligs, too.
The 60 footers seem more common in the PM peaks; seldom have seen one in the AM.
Thanks! I guess I wasn’t catching it in the peak time. I would say the route needs more 60-footers, given how packed the 40-foots are a lot of the time.
I’ve seen some Metro buses recently with a sticker on the farebox saying that dollar coins are accepted. Do all Metro buses accept dollar coins, or is it only the ones with the stickers?
Awesome. Have you heard about our country’s $1 coin issues? If the US really wants people to use $1 coins, having government agencies accept them isn’t a bad start. The real challange will be vending machines.
The US Mint even has a coin sale: Buy $250 worth of $1 coins for only $250, with free shipping! Normally they charge kind of a lot for coins, which seems strange to me. There was recently a Planet Money story about a strange scam – people would buy coins using their credit cards to get frequent flyer miles, then deposit their coins.
The only time I’ve gotten my hands on dollar coins recently was in change from a stamp vending machine at a post office. So at least one (pseudo-)government agency is already promoting them.
Try paying a $2.00 fare on Link with a $20 bill. It will sound like a slot machine at a casino.
I tried to get Sacajawea coins a few times after they were introduced. It requires fifteen minutes at the bank while the tellers scrounge through each other’s cubicles to gather twenty of them. They say the main people asking for dollar coins are those celebrating a child’s birthday. Dollar coins will succeed only when you can get them in your change at the checkout counter, either routinely or by asking. But ask a cashier for a dollar coin now and you’ll be lucky if she has even one of them. I used to take my dollar coins and spend them, but it was such a hassle to obtain them that I became reluctant to spend them, so they just stay in my drawer out of circulation.
The mint shutting down that caused caused an uproar on the fatwallet and flyertalk forums. Many people had bough $50,000+ worth of coins, earned miles or points on the transactions, then turned the still-wrapped coins at their local bank. The bank then typically sent the coins right back to the mint, so the goal of getting the coins into circulation never happened. Gigantic waste of money and energy.
When npr ran a story on this, they were denounced as being “big government” by all the people who couldn’t scam the government anymore.
[Mike] I’m considering taking the Mint up on their $250 coin deal. I wanted Polk (he can be credited with getting us OR and WA), but he’s not listed in the deal. I can’t imagine them selling many boxes of WH Harrison – he was only president for 32 days, and was strongly pro-slave. Maybe they should be selling those for $240 a box.
J. Reddoch is right. Use the Link TVMs if you want some dollar coins. I learned that the hard way just before getting on an airplane. I had to walk around with a pocket full of dollar coins for change.
This is a bit dated, but when I was travelling in the 1990s, it was ironic that Britian had coins up to ₤2 (worth $3) and Canada up to $2 (worth $1.30), but Russia had banknotes down to 100 rubles (worth $0.19). I didn’t even know Russia had coins because almost everything was rounded to 1000 rubles, but once when I was in a supermarket and bought some fruit in bulk, they calculated it down to the fractional weight and gave me coins from 50 rubles down to 1 ruble (worth $0.002). Needless to say, I never had occasion to spend the coins because nothing else was valued that exactly.
Yeah, but the nice thing is you end up with coins returning from a country like that. It’s painful to keep a ₤2 coin, but a pocket full of rubles make fine souvenirs.
The fare machines for the DC Metro offer dollar coins as change. I quite like it.
Go to Ecuador for dollar coins. We apparently sell all of them to Ecuador because they’re everywhere. After returning I had a hard time getting rid of them because nobody here knew what they were. I also get them from left luggage lockers in DC a lot.
[Grant] Planet Money mentioned that as well. Many countries use the dollar, but paper dollars wear out quickly and they can’t just exchange them for new ones at the treasury. But dollar coins effectively last forever, so they’re highly valued. When I travel I make sure all of my bills are crisp – I had a hard time finding a Chinese bank that would take some of the $20′s I brought with me because they were worn or torn.
Metro Customer Service told me that “all US currency is valid on Metro buses”.
Feel free to slip your Bennys in the farebox.
I guess the intent of my question wasn’t to figure out if a dollar coin is “valid” according to Metro policy, but rather whether a dollar coin will be properly accepted by the fare box (without jamming the coin slot, being miscounted as a quarter, etc.).
I’ll just have to try it and see.
FYI, Canadian currency is accepted as well. I have a jar full of coins and I throw Canadian quarters in there every now and then without hitch.
Before I got my ORCA card, I had trouble using $2 bills on Metro buses. The drivers would think I had only put $1 in the fare box and try and hassle me for more money.
Before ORCA I regularly used Sacagaweas, Susan B’s, and Kennedy half-dollars to pay my fare. (I can’t say for sure if I ever used the big ol’ Eisenhower dollars, but I want to say I did.) Once or twice the box thought I’d only put in a quarter, so I started saying “It’s a dollar coin” and flashing it to the driver before dropping it in, just in case, though drivers usually took me at my word. If you do that and use the brassy dollars instead of the quarter-look-alike Susan B’s, you shouldn’t have a problem.
The GFI fareboxes have always taken $1 coins and registered them properly whenever I had anyone use them. It was the 50cent coins that barely fit down the throat and frequently got stuck that caused the most problems.
[deleted]
Since I can’t edit my previous comment, I’d like to request that it be deleted. Thank you.
Either that…or did not like the answer SDOT gave.
The single roundabout or double roundabout at a diamond highway intersection is way more efficient and cheaper. WSDOT sort of did this in the Tri-Cities. http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/i82/valleymall_ic/
I’m fan of this WSDOT project as well:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/i5/sr11interchangejoshwilsonroad/
Seems like WSDOT is warming up to traffic circles, especially at freeway on/offramps.
That link you gave is for the Valley Mall Blvd Interchange in Yakima.
In the Tri-Cities, WSDOT constructed a double roundabout at the interchange for Highway 240/Steptoe/Columbia Park Trail (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR240/TriCitiesAddLanes/ProposedRoundabout.htm) as part of a project to widen 240 from I-182 to Columbia Center Blvd. Also, though not part of a highway interchange, there’s also a new double roundabout at the intersection of Leslie St and Clearwater Ave in southwest Kennewick, just a stones throw away from exit 109 on I-82.
I thought it looked different from what I’d read a couple years ago! Thanks for finding the one I was actually thinking of! :)
Yeah, the SR-11 roundabouts work well. Though the one in Bham off of Northwestern is a bit bad for residents. I don’t know how WSDOT f’d that up.
Open-thread query for the board/staff: Any decisions or time-frame on the site improvements discussed last month?
+1 on this!
Nobody really has any time.
Here’s a stupid question… Sorry if this has already been discussed.
In the however distant future that it’s decided LINK will get extended towards Issaquah, where will it go? Unless there’s another route I haven’t heard of, the only place it can go is across the Mercer Slough. Watching how intense things got in the debate between B2M and B7, I really do wonder how things will go down when they’ll have to build across it anyways.
Things will definitely go down. But once there’s light rail on the eastside, and it’s harder to be racist and classist about transit, it’ll be harder for anti-transit folks to fight.
It’s still hard for me to imagine that light rail to Issaquah will ever be an effective use of transit money. The defining feature of rail is capacity, and Issaquah just doesn’t need the capacity (or have the density).
Issaquah should stick with express buses. Rail should not go through empty areas to reach distant suburbs, that just encourages sprawl.
Something has to happen for the Eastside in ST3. East Link will presumably be extended to downtown Redmond. Issaquah wants Link. It remains to be seen whether Kirkland will press for a north-south line. If Issaquah remains enthusiastic, ST will have to conduct feasability studies, which could include a Link shuttle on Issaquah-Eastgate-South Bellevue?-BTC or equivalent BRT. That would likely show that 15-minute BRT (with more at peak) could effectively replace hourly ST Express (which is really inadequate), and that Link’s capacity is not warranted at this time. Then Issaquah would have to convince the Eastside that Issaquah Link is worth the money.
I don’t know the numbers on Issaquah-Seattle trips vs Issaquah-Bellevue-Eastside, but I suspect the latter is larger and growing. That would argue against an Issaquah-Seattle line, plus the fact that the DSTT will supposedly be full anyway. So a shuttle to BTC or South Bellevue is more likely. That could be extended to Kirkland and Bothell later (or sent over 520 but I doubt that).
Wish Crosscut rendering were bigger and more detailed- granted, long way from conte crayon to concrete. Wish I saw streetcar tracks, catenary and stations, for instance. I don’t even see bus lanes on the sizable street.
What I would like to vote for- after a serious fight for- the project we really need. Call it the Transit/DBT option. A well-engineered tunnel for freight. And public transit, express and local, good enough nobody will miss the viaduct.
The State Legislature’s refusal to include even bus transit bodes worse than possible cost overruns. Our freeways were cursed from the start by design under-runs- starting with failure to include two-way transit lanes into their design, giving us decades of late transit and stalled traffic. It’s that mentality we can’t afford -at any price.
So my vote right now: take down the viaduct and pretend a quake got it. Question: don’t the mayor and the county exec both have the authority to declare the structure dangerous and close it on their own authority?
Implement whatever state and local measures are already in place- which likely include some form of reserved lanes for buses and trucks. Enforced by the Guard if necessary. Result give us the exact experience we need to design the system we need.
And come back to me with a ballot proposal for the century we’re in, not the one gone by. This election, I’m writing in: “DBT/Transit”. Only way I can think of my vote won’t be meaningless.
Mark Dublin
Give that that’s decades to never going to happen we don’t even know what land use patterns will look like. It could follow the 148th corridor up to Overlake but my best guess would be to cross the Slew, cross over I-90 roughly where the existing BNSF corridor is and then go under I-450 using SE 38th to serve Factoria. It might involve some ramp restructuring but they will all have been reconfigured by then anyway.
The state (WSDOT) decides if the structure is safe or not.
Does anyone on this site even read the news? Particularly the financial news?
http://finance.yahoo.com/
The stock market today fell between 4% and 5%, (Dow down 4.31%, Nasdaq down 5.08%).
Meanwhile, oil fell about $5 in the day, and another $1 since midday today, and at 7pm our time this evening is at $85.50 per barrel. That is just about where it was when the Libya civil war started, and oil eventually peaked this year at about $115/barrel.
In other words, oil has fallen about $30/barrel in the past few weeks. That translates into a drop of about 75 cents/gallon at the pump, after a delay of a few weeks.
So, if oil stays where it is right now, we should be seeing gasoline selling at closer to $3/gallon than $4/gallon by the end of summer, or before.
At the same time, unemployment is edging back up in the U.S., the stimulus programs are over, and the economy has just about stopped growing at all. Many economists think it is just about certain that we are heading into another recession before the end of this year.
This is the big news of the day, and it will affect transit significantly, as it will affect everything else. It is quite likely that sales tax revenues will fall again, or at least not increase at anything close the the rate that ST and Metro are assuming.
But, the good news is that gasoline will probably be falling in price significantly over the next few weeks.
At the same time, do recall that Obama released oil from the SPG recently. It sounded like that staved off a lot of typical summer speculation. It’s less likely that we’ll see oil fall as much as it normally does at the end of summer.
That went right over your head.
This past May, West Texas Crude hit $115/barrel. Today, it fell to $85/barrel. That is a drop of $30 in the past 3 months. That equates to a drop in the price of gasoline at the pump of about 75 cents per barrel. That drop in the price of gas has not yet occurred because there is a lag between the price of oil falling, and the price of gasoline falling to reflect the drop in the price of oil.
The price of oil does not have to fall any more for the price of gas to get down to close to $3. If oil just stays at $85 — where it was this afternoon — the price of gas will fall over the next couple of weeks by a pretty large amount.
Funny how the price of gas jumps instantly when the price of crude goes up ;-)
The price of gas goes down so we should tax it the exact same amount so nobody notices then build a bunch of little trains. ;-)
Norman had been so quiet for so long that I was beginning to think maybe he was finally driving on that big congestion-free highway in the sky.
No, he got stuck in Gridlock on the Renton S curves :=
Nah. Just got bored with this site. Nothing interesting on here lately.
This made me chuckle audibly
oooo the price of oil falls steeply! The “see I told you cars are our future” crowd is all fired up to think that all is fine here. bla bla bla.
The price of oil like any commodity will have ups and downs. But the fact remains that world demand will continue over time to trend higher as the availability of cheaply extracted oil dwindles. The remaining reserves in the world are in increasingly more expensive places such as under oceans and shale.
The current selloff is based on a rather serious fears for the global economy both in terms of the European financial markets which is in seizure and the pessimistic forecast for the US economic market. http://goo.gl/sdNYf
So, Norman, you can go ahead and crow now but you’ll be scratching your head when crude inevitably trends above $100/bbl again. Our long term transportation policy must move away from fossil based fuels and we must invest more in public transportation. Do not be fooled by short term dips in oil prices.
The general trend, as I see it, is that the price of oil follows the economy. We’re at peak oil so prices just go up, long term, from here. But the first recession dropped demand around the world, so prices dropped. As the economy started recovering, so did oil (but more so, since it’s going up long term). The economy just faltered again – and so must oil. But don’t count on a cheap oil future.
The reason the price of oil follows the economy is that industries use more or less of it depending on how much demand there is. In 2008 the oil price fell not so much because people were driving less but because factories and shipping were idle. If demand has collapsed again, that’s not surprising. But the oil price was semi-high earlier this summer when the economy was just mediocre. So the economy doesn’t have to be great for oil prices to be semi-high, it just has to be not in shock like it is this week. As Charles said, the long-term trend is for China to use more oil, not less, so expect prices to generally rise, even if there are occasional fallbacks.
And it is not just China but several countries are contributing to demand including Brazil, Russia, India, Korea and China as well as the oil producing countries are spurring their own internal use/demand with subsidized pricing.
And yes, logically the value of commodities should fluctuate with the economy as a weaker economy contributes to demand destruction but also contributes to supply sequestration. But there is an inescapable economic conclusion that the worlds supply of oil cannot and will not meet the long term demand and thus will be priced accordingly. The question is, can we afford to burn that oil at the prices that will be demanded? Something will have to give. We cannot be duped by short term drops in the price of oil to say that “everything is fine” and that we should continue on the course we are on. We must acknowledge here and now that the path we’re on is not sustainable and we need to make the hard decisions to deal with this resource problem.
One of the best things we can do right now this week is to mark NO on the city Referendum 1 on the Deep Bore Tunnel. We do not need to put more billions of dollars into infrastructure that perpetuates the consumption of fossil based fuels.
The world is flush with oil and natural gas. There are huge amounts of both being produced, with more new wells on the way every day.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. cars are getting vastly more fuel-efficient. Why did this blog not cover the new fuel-efficiency standards that Obama and the car manufacturers just agreed to? New autos in the U.S. will average something like 54 mpg in 15 years. That is more than double the mpg of the current U.S. fleet.
New cars in the U.S. are already more energy-efficient than buses or light rail, and new cars are going to get far more-energy efficient in the future.
The long-term outlook for energy prices is down. Energy is going to get less expensive over time, due to huge increases in eregy-efficiency, and to increasing supplies of cheap energy.
The alarms about expensive energy in the future are nothing more than wishful thinking from the people who hate cars.
Saying that it’s wishful thinking that the price of a limited and diminishing resource going up is… a little bit short-sighted. Don’t believe peak oil is here yet? Fine. But why continue to put all of our eggs in a basket that you know will some day fall apart?
The price of oil is not going up. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the price of oil has been quite constant for decades. In the past several years, they have developed new drilling technigues that have effectively greatly increased the amount of oil reserves worldwide, because a lot more oil is now “recoverable” than in the past. In other words, the supply of oil just keeps increasing, as does the supply of natural gas.
At the same time, some of the best minds in the world are working on developing cheap alternative fuels, using algae, for example. Do you honestly believe that nothing is going to come of this research?
What is it about mpg of new cars doubling compared to the current U.S. fleet over the next 15 years that is complicated to you? You don’t understand what that means? Or, you just ignore it because you hate cars and want to continue to vilify autos, even as they become far more energy-efficient than transit?
[Norman] You know it’s easy to look up data rather than just making stuff up, right? The website is called Google. Here’s the first hit for “oil price inflation adjusted.” How is that even close to constant, unless you mean a constant rise since 1999?
Increased efficiency is nice, but can’t compete with the fact that we’ve drilled all of the easy oil. There are no new oil recovery techniques. These are just the ones they haven’t used before because they didn’t have to.
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasoline_inflation_chart.htm
I meant to write, “the price of GASOLINE has been fairly constant, on an inflation-adjusted basis for decades.” After all, it is the price of gas — not oil — which affects transportation. From the above chart, you can see that the inflation-adjust price of gasoline has been between $2 and $3 per gallon in 2011 dollars for the majority of the years between about 1925 and today.
And, of course, there are new driling techniques, such as drilling horizontally, which makes vast amounts of oil (and natural gas) recoverable now, which could not be recovered in the past.
The fact is that the world is awash in oil and natural gas. You are just in denial, because this fact does not fit your desire to demonize cars.
Those of us without cars don’t need to watch the oil prices. :) It’s enough to glance at the gas stations every few weeks as our bus goes past them.
None of your buses use diesel, eh?
Yes, but the only direct effect to riders is a 25c increase in fares every year or so.
That’s only because bus riders are freeloaders who pay only about 25% of the operating costs of the buses, and let other people pay the other 75%.
Whenever you see an empty parking space and drive into it, you can thank a bus rider for not filling it.
Whenever you find an empty seat on a bus or train, you can thank a motorist for not taking it.
Motorists provide their own transportation, so taxpayers don’t have to buy trains or buses for motorists to ride.
PacMed could house juvenile court and jail
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2015824070_juvenilecourt05m.html
A fellow Beacon Hiller mentioned this to me. I’d hate to see such a cool building get turned into a fortress with razor wire around it and bars over the windows. Maybe they wouldn’t need to do those things for a minimum security facility. I’m not going to get all NIMBY – obviously they need to rent the place out.
Of course it’s hard to take a stand without more details but this sounds like a win win. Access to the large facility is shaky at best. OK for a population that isn’t coming and going 9-5 which is like, er… hospital patients and inmates? Even courts are more of an all day coming and going process. And, remember this is a publicly owned building so… I’m pretty sure they can make it secure without razor wire; it’s juvi not Alcatraz.
The environmental process (NEPA/SEPA) for SR 520 is complete.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2011/08/04_SR520_FederalApproval.htm