Month: October 2011

Seattle is the winner of an FTA grant to study “downtown circulator” portions of the Seattle Streetcar network:

The Federal Transit Administration announced the City of Seattle has won a $900,000 grant to study a high capacity transit project, such as a rapid streetcar, through the heart of downtown Seattle. The project would connect existing and proposed high-density neighborhoods to one another and the regional transit system.

I asked McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus if this referred to the “CC1” (1st Avenue) or “CC2” (4th/5th) corridors. He replied that “It’s an alternatives analysis that will help identify the route as well as the mode. Everything’s still on the table.”

USDOT dished out a total of $900m in grants on Monday. Elsewhere in the $49m awarded to Washington, ST got $3m for bus and nonmotorized access to S. 200th St. Station (and $5.4m to buy buses), CT got $894,578 for the Swamp Creek P&R, and Metro got $5m for a new roof at North Base. Most of the rest is for buying buses around the state.

In a matter of days we’ll be releasing STB’s endorsements. We’ve got the major initiatives and the councils of King County, Seattle, and Bellevue all set.

However, if there’s an outstanding candidate in a smaller city, or in a neighboring county, that we should know about, please let us know in the comments.

Location details below jump. Continue reading “First of Five TMP Open Houses Tonight”

If you’d like to do your part to support the passage of Proposition 1 – a vehicle license fee that will fund a host of transit, road, bicycle, and pedestrian improvements — it’s not too late to sign up for Thursday’s fundraiser:

Event Details:
Date – October 20, 2011
Time – 5:30 – 7pm
Location – Watermark Tower, 6th Floor
1107 1st Avenue, Seattle

Suggested Donation $60

Let us know you will be joining us! RSVP to Jesseca@wcvoters.org or call 206.321.7723.

One of the more mysterious parts of the transportation budget associated with the $60 vehicle license fee is a total of $10m intended for “transit access” projects. The Transit Master Plan (about which the first open house occurs tonight, October 18th) devotes Chapter 5 to the kind of projects that this money could fund.

It’s not as meticulously engineered and costed as the bus priority corridor work in Chapter 3, but it should give readers a better understanding of what this money could accomplish.

The first part of the document is a set of policies in principles that basically read as mom-and-apple-pie to the STB set. But then, there’s a 20-year plan for some key transit facilities across the city, as indicated in the map above and spelled out below the jump:

Continue reading “Access to Transit in the TMP”

In addition to Bellevue’s open house on Tuesday evening, the Redmond City Council is holding a public hearing tomorrow, October 18, at 7:30 pm at Redmond City Hall on the Master Plan to redevelop Group Health Cooperative’s 28-acre site in the Overlake Village area. The area is planned to become a new transit oriented urban village served by the RapidRide B Line and Link light rail.

The Master Plan envisions a phased redevelopment of the property that would ultimately result in about 1,400 residences, 1.2 million square feet of office and retail uses, and a hotel and conference center.

It is going to be an interesting string of transit oriented development along East Link between downtown Bellevue and Overlake. Once the whole area redevelops, the B Line jog over to 152nd Ave NE makes a lot of sense.

The Eastgate/I-90 corridor through Bellevue is, for the most part, a land use disaster: endless surface parking lots, essentially no high-density housing, an incomplete street grid, and above all a wide interstate with expansive interchanges.

To its credit, Bellevue is hoping to remake this corridor, which is on the shortlist for light rail in Sound Transit 3,  into something a bit more environmentally responsible.

The city government and a citizen advisory committee have been at work for over a year, and now have a draft transportation and land use plan. Tomorrow is your opportunity to learn about and comment on this plan (which I don’t believe is online anywhere) before the final recommendation goes to the city council:

The open house will be at the Robinswood House Cabana, 2430 148th Ave. SE, 4 to 6 p.m., with a presentation at 4:30 p.m.

I believe this plan could contain one of my personal hobby horses, fixing the roads to improve service between Bellevue College and Eastgate.

Here’s to agency cooperation:

Puget Sound area transit agencies have reached an agreement with the University of Washington to keep the popular transit scheduling software application One Bus Away up and running now that the original developer – a UW graduate student – has moved on to the private sector.

Sound Transit, King County Metro, Pierce Transit and the UW through its Washington State Transportation Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering will fund up to $150,000 to further develop and maintain the application for 13 months.

One of the tasks in this contract will be to improve interfaces and documentation to expand the practical range of agency options next year.

It’s always nice when overlapping agencies seize responsibility, especially in a time of austerity. This is a very small expense for a very large service quality improvement.