Tacoma Trestle
Photo by Sound Transit

This is an open thread.

84 Replies to “News Roundup: Council Hopefuls”

  1. Throwback Thursday. This is a 1969 view of low-rise Bellevue taken from about 1 block south of where the future BTC would be, at NE 4th and 108th Ave, looking toward Seattle. Today, the Expedia building would be where the Richfield sign is, and the twin Bellevue Towers high rise condos would be on the right where that yellow building is, which is the old Puget Power building. Further in the background in the middle right, is the old Safeway store, which is now a deep hole, and soon a 31 story office tower and a 42 story hotel and apt tower will sprout up from it. Does anyone know what kind of transit center Bellevue had back then, and where it was located? Didn’t the routes 226 and 235 go to Seattle back then?

    http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/imlseastside/id/264/rec/499

    1. When I started taking the bus around 1980, the 226 and 235 each ran hourly for half-hour combined service. There was no transit center: they ran on Bellevue Way, the 252 and 253 were on NE 8th, the 240 was on 108th, and the 340 on 112th, and they just crossed like spaghetti.

      The first transit center was built around 1983 on 106th between NE 4th and NE 8th. One of the art pieces is still there, a rectangular metal “air-conditioning duct” with a crank at the bottom that turns figurines at the top. It was just two long bus stops on both sides of the street.

      The current transit center is the second. I think it was built in the late 80s. They moved it further east and turned it sideways between two streets rather than on a street. It fits two or three times as many buses.

    1. More inexpensive?!?

      The 3.2 mile Oakland Airport Connector line cost $484 million… that’s $151.25 million per mile.
      Over the US as a whole, excluding Seattle, new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile.

      By comparison, most LRT systems cost on average $35 million per mile. Of course that’s if you exclude an outlier, Central Link Light Rail (the most expensive LRT line in the US). But Central Link didn’t cost much more than the Oakland Airport Connector at $179 million per mile.

      Furthermore this line will cost nearly $8 million a year to operate, necessitating a $6 one-way fare (in addition to the regular BART fare).

      Don’t get me wrong… a connector to OAK was badly needed and using the Doppelmayr Cable Car technology was cheaper than building a spur using the existing BART trains… but it was not an “inexpensive” line.

      1. Ricky, I believe your comparison is fundamentally flawed. To get 4 minute trains, the builders had to construct two complete tracks because there are four active vehicles operating in the system at any given time. The technology requires 100 percent grade separation but frankly no light rail system can run with major grade crossings at that headway (a train every two minutes in one of the two directions). I’m also not sure where you are getting $35M.

        If the distance was shorter and they were able to run just two vehicles (like the Minneapolis airport system) with lots of single track, the cost would surely be significantly cheaper. If a light rail system was to operate at those headways, it would pretty much have to have grade separation to make that happen and that would easily be three or four times more expensive per mile.

      2. No, that should most certainly be considered a lot of money for what is basically an elevated shuttle loop running atop wide-open airport access roads and car-rental lots.

        As it often does, the Canada line provides a stark comparison. 12 miles, two bored tunnels, lots of elevated and cut/cover digging, three dedicated river crossings, 16 stations, land takings and construction mitigations, and so on and so forth…

        CAD$177 million per mile.

        That’s roughly US$150 million per mile in comparable real basket-o’-goods purchasing power.

      3. Well, Canadian bacon has a lot less fat than the American kind. Who would have thought you could find the perfect metaphor for American transit construction at your grocer’s deli case?

      4. Most light rail systems are at-grade in the middle of streets. So comparing Phoenix’s line through an exurban wasteland to something in the middle of a city is definitely apples-to-oranges.

      5. I got the figure about light rail construction costs from Wikipedia… feel free to find another source that refutes it.

        I also realize that there’s a huge difference in the cost of building an at-grade LRT system with 15 minute headways and a fully grade separated cable car system running at 4 minute headways. I also happen to think that it was right to build the OAK system fully grade-separated and running at short headways.

        My point is that it is not –as you say– a “more inexpensive way to connect some of the major “last mile or two” trip destinations”.

    2. I was talking with some of the Doppelmayr guys from Portland other day (Doppelmayr continues to operate the system they built there.) Not only does the Oakland Connector design have 2 guideways…it also requires the cars to completely switch cable loops during dwell times. Apparently the number of proximity switches and sensors required to accomplish this is astounding. I guess it’s akin to a detachable gondola versus a fixed-grip one. Detachables are vastly more complex and expensive.

      It’s also crazy that $484 million represents about half of the $1 billion Doppelmayr had in revenue worldwide last year. Granted, there were other contractors on the team, but still. Their average lift system probably less than $5 million and they don’t get an operating contract in most cases. Anyone can see why they are trying to expand their urban business.

  3. With regards to the lawsuit involving the roadway ramp, I’m with the home owners. I’m having a hard time understanding why there is a proposed road there. It seems to me that while the owners’ motivation may be selfish (loss of view, noise, potential for panhandling) they have a point. I see no reason why the city should spend money on a road for a project that is already facing budget problems. Build a smaller pedestrian-only overpass and be done with it. This would save money and eliminate many of the home owners concerns.

    My guess is the city council didn’t take a really good look at the details, and basically said “OK, looks good”. I’m sure a lot of them are thinking “Wait, there is a road there? I thought that was just a pedestrian overpass?”. Hopefully the lawsuit will get them to rethink the details of the proposal (which will probably have to be done anyway, given the cost of the project).

    1. I thought the ramp going down from Pike Place was going to be pedestrian-only so I was surprised there’s a road there. They never mentioned a car road to the waterfront in the early design meetings; cars were going to use the existing east-west streets.

      1. Right, exactly, you and me both. I’m not alone in thinking “wait, there is a road there?”, which is why it wouldn’t surprise me if at least some of the city council feels the same way.

    2. The road is required. It connects Alaskan Way to the new section of Elliot Ave (which is raised at this location to go over the rail road and up to link with the existing Elliot Ave).

      1. @Fil,

        This road is anything but required. Basically this is just more unimaginative road planning from SDOT. All they are doing is looking at the existing aerial map and saying “Gee, we are losing this connection when Hwy 99 goes into the DBT, so we need to replace it with similar connection.” That is as far as their thinking has gone, and it is very flawed.

        A better plan would be to divert Alaskan Way at the top of the railroad tunnel and instead simply place it over the tracks all the way to Broad and Elliot where it would tie into the two-directional portion of Elliot on the north side of Broad. The street grid would be connected to this new elevated Alaskan Way and all at grade railroad crossings could be closed.

        The advantages are numerous: 1) faster freight and passenger service through Seattle, 2) improved safety, 3) reduced noise (engine and horn), 4) more waterfront park space, 5) a pedestrian only connection from VS Park all the way downslope to the waterfront, 6) better separation of peds, bikes, and cars, etc.

        Cost might be an issue, but then again building on the steep slope along the existing route won’t be cheap either.

        SDOT needs to think a bit more creatively about these things.

    3. Oh, that road. That was in the designs. But I’d call it more of reconnecting an existing road than a new road. If they really want to cancel it, it would amount to severing Alaskan Way from Aurora. The heavyweights would object to that. Incidentally, it would also force everbody going to Aurora to use the tunnel, which would increase toll revenue and make the boulevard practically empty, which would be a windfall for the condo owners. But it would leave the Port with no outlet, and one state legislator said the Port and “enabling commerce” are the state’s highest transportation priorities.

      1. @Mike O

        Ya, by simply rebuilding Alaskan Way along the existing route of Hwy 99 SDOT is sort of spending scarce tax dollars to duplicate service on a route that we are already spending zillions of tax dollars to create. And in the process of doing this they are undercutting the funding plan for the DBT (tolls).

        That said, with the Battery St Tunnel closed the connection still won’t be all that good.

        I’d just put Alaskan Way over the railroad tracks along the waterfront and connect it to Elliot at Broad St. Eliminate all those crossings and you improve traffic flow for both cars and rail, and the connection to Magnolia and Interbay would actually be better than trying to recreate the 1950’s era routing of the viaduct.

      2. It’s not exactly “duplicating”. It’s replacing road capacity the tunnel won’t have because the tunnel has less capacity than the existing viaduct.

      3. What he said. With the Battery tunnel closed, the new Elliott does no such “reconnecting” to 99.

        This ramp, which appears to be a curved and convoluted south-to-north flyover (classic SDOT) rather than an intuitive grid connection, would merely provide a redundant route from mid-Belltown to the waterfront. There are already three of those for cars.

      4. @Mike Orr,

        The DBT doesn’t need the same capacity because it doesn’t serve downtown directly.

        The fancy hill climb and connection that SDOT is planning for Alaskan Way is actually very useless except for toll avoidance. Travelers arriving from the south and heading downtown will exit AW before they even get to the climb up to Battery St. And travelers from the north will exit Hwy 99 at the north portal and enter the general street grid. It makes no sense for most travelers arriving from the north to travel all the way to the waterfront on a parallel street, only to then turn left and head back up the hill to downtown on a fairly limited number of available streets (which are mainly on the south end of DT anyhow).

        Travelers needing to head from the waterfront up to the north portal will still have Broad and a few other options, so I don’t’ really think there is a need for SDOT to build a parallel, untolled road on top of the DBT.

      6. Yeah, that’s the thing — driving will forever change because of the tunnel — just get used to it. This ramp seems silly. If you are going to build ramps and elevated structures, then you might as well rebuild the viaduct (it’s not too late!). Seriously though, the viaduct is going away, and many of the really convenient connections are going away with it, and this thing is no substitute. You can’t get on 99 from downtown. You can’t get on 99 from Western/Alaskan/Elliot. That’s right, this big highway that used to connect downtown Seattle to Ballard/Interbay/Magnolia is gone. Gone, gone, gone. I pity the driver who ignorantly thinks that his world has just gone underground. No, your world is about to be destroyed forever. Sorry.

        But wait, the city will build you a nice connection from Elliot to Western. Awesome right? Now if you missed your turn, you can still get there. Fantastic!

        Seriously though, this is a stupid ramp. It does nothing. It doesn’t make up for the loss of connectivity in the least, nor does it really do anything for drivers. It’s simply a shortcut for those that don’t want to use similar streets (Wall to the north — Union to the south). I really don’t get it. As a driver, I think this is stupid. No one with any sense wants to drive through there (anymore than they want to drive through the Pike Place Market). The tunnel is terrible for drivers, and this won’t help things much at all. I think the city needs to take a good look at this ramp and rework it. Build a pedestrian ramp instead. Save some money and placate the local residents.

      7. How will the port freight get to south 99 and eventually to I-5 without this connector? it’s going to take narrow West Mercer Place and bring the D to a standstill? It will take Western Avenue right next to the lower market shops?

      9. Mike,

        How will the port freight get to south 99?”

        By turning right at Broad and left at Alaskan Way? Is everyone saying that Alaskan Way will no longer be there at all?

      10. @Anan

        Yes, a small mini elevated street. Call it a viaduct if you want, but single deck, carrying a street instead of a highway, with sidewalks and bike access, and hidden behind the condos for about a third of Its length. The best part is it would eliminate all the at grade railroad crossings, speeding freight and passenger rail traffic while reducing noise and improving traffic. And it would provide a better connection to Interbay and Magnolia

      11. The part of Alaskan Way north of Broad has not been designed yet but it’s envisioned as a small quiet two-lane street, because the bulk of traffic will have turned off onto this controversial ramp. So north Alaskan Way may be too small for trucks, or at least too small for a lot of trucks.

      12. It’s “envisioned”? By who? The same fantasists who “envision” El Dorado springing up in Federal Way.

        We all know how this design process has worked so far, and we all know they’re going to push a major thoroughfare up the waterfront, past all the cruise terminals and conference centers, as far as it can go.

        This ramp isn’t even about traffic from the port areas to the south — that traffic looks poised to divert onto Elliott somewhere around Union. This ramp seems to be a SOVs headed from southbound on one avenue to northbound on the parallel one. It’s the very definition of LOS-planning overkill that will probably backfire and make Elliott traffic worse anyway.

      13. By the waterfront design plans. The big roads people may say they want north Alaskan Way larger, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be pushback to make at least part of it a quiet street. That’s partly why the connector road exists.

        The port traffic that can’t get to 99 or I-5 is from Interbay, not from the south waterfront.

      14. This ramp does none of those things for none of those people.

        It doesn’t really do anything. It cuts 30 seconds off the regular grid connection, by creating a gigantic highway-esque structure for no discernible purpose.

      15. So tell the city. I haven’t heard anyone outside this thread doubting the need for this road, which makes me wonder whether your reasoning is really sound. Somebody wanted this road, or thought it was necessary for traffic or access or continuity from the past, so who was it and why, and are they really wrong? If this really is as unnecessary as the Deeply Boring Tunnel, it needs a wider opposition. Or maybe you can hope the condo owners win their lawsuit and the road is dropped. I never thought I’d see transit fans on the same side as waterfront condo owners.

      16. I don’t know that anyone really understands what this flyover is going to look like, or how it is supposed to function.

        I finally found the schematic in the presentation, but with the elevation of the proposed Elliott Ave existing at a currently-unoccupied horizontal plane, it’s hard to envision how steep the ramp would be, whether it would look more like a regular, steep street or like another Lakeview overpass.

        Are you sure that the intention is to close all the railroad crossings from Wall to Broad? Because none of that is mentioned or drawn in the document, which ends at Bell.

        That would render this ramp the only vehicle connection to northern Alaska, and make it a literal dead-end street. A dead-end street containing the massive cruise terminal, the Clipper dock, maintenance/emergency-services access to Myrtle Edwards, and whatever ends up on Piers 62-63.

        Closing four other streets is a much bigger can of worms than proposing this one, though it would certainly turn this one into the access bottleneck that the suing property owners likely fear.

  4. I have an honest question. Why does it take 5 years to build the South Bellevue Station, but only 410 days to build the Empire State Building?

    1. I have a dishonest answer. Because SoundTransit is deliberately slowing construction of all its transit projects so that self-driving cars will render them obsolete in the middle of construction instead of shortly after they finish; this way it will have more money left to return to the taxpayers when it happens.

    2. Thousands of immigrant workers getting paid next to nothing, with little to no safety oversight resulting in several deaths and countless injuries? Just a hunch…

    3. There are a lot more rules and regulations today (safety, planning, environmental) that the ESB didn’t have to deal with.

      The ESB was also a private project, which reduces the amount of process and regulation. The builders were also racing to build the tallest skyscraper in the world and had a strong incentive to complete it quickly, something that ST lacks. Look at the I-5 Skagit bridge replacement project – huge incentive to finish it quickly and it was.

      And, office buildings are just easier to build. Even today high-rise office buildings are still ~2.5 years to complete.

      1. One world trade center took nearly 8 years to build. But obviously, that’s a massively more complex project than the south bellevue station.

    4. It took about a year to dig the train tunnel under Seattle. I hear Bertha will be done by 2012, so that Gregoire can meet her promise of tearing down the viaduct.

    5. I mean, really, the reason it’s going to take 5 years to build South Bellevue Station is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s finished earlier than that, because the rest of the system will still be under construction. The rest of the system involves things like building tracks on an existing highway bridge, and doing that without lengthy highway closures does take some time. It could probably be done faster, but a single urban building isn’t really a good project comparison.

    6. There’s a more fundamental question, which I’ve asked a similar question to Paula Hammond and Joni Earl and they basically shrugged their shoulders.

      In 2009 we opened central link in Seattle. It has 13 stations, is 25.1 km long and connects the city to the airport. It cost $2.9 billion to build in year of expenditure USD.

      In 2009 Vancouver also opened the Canada line. It has 16 stations and is 19.1 km long. It cost approximately $2.15 billion to build in year of expenditure Canadian dollars.

      Now consider that the Canada line is entirely subway from Downtown to Marine Drive, where it’s elevated all the way on both spurs. It also crosses water four times.

      Now consider that Central link is at-grade through out the entire rainier valley and sodo. Further consider that the most expensive portion of it, the downtown tunnel, was already built in the 1980s at the price of $600m 1980s dollars (worth more than a billion in 2009 dollars).

      So why did Canada, all told, pay basically half as much for something nearly anyone would consider objectively better*?

      And why did the secretary of transportation and the head of sound transit not seem to know or care why that is the case? You would think a $200K study might shave billions of future project costs.

      There’s something wrong with the way we’re doing it, that’s why it takes years and costs so much. Now, mind, we should still do it, but the real answer to your question is “it costs a lot of money, it takes a long time to get that money, and we don’t know why it costs so much”.

      *Really thing you can say in cnetral link’s defense is that some of the stations are really nice, including the bus tunnel stations.

      1. Re: the Vancouver Sun article:

        This is mostly an innocuous puff piece about the value of cross-interest consensus-building in favor of a robust transit network at both the nuts-and-bolts bus service level and the future-project level.

        Yesterday, however, KUOW got hold of the article, and they ran a segment entitled “What Vancouver can learn from Seattle about transit funding!” I nearly gagged on my coffee.

        Vancouver enjoys a transit network that is more efficient, more usable, more time-competitive, and more pleasant in almost every possible way. 15-minute or worse frequency is deemed a major usability lapse and relegated to only the most fringe of off-peak times.

        Vancouver transit is also cheaper to ride (CAD$2.10 / US$1.85 with the ticket books everyone uses), cheaper to operate by every metric, and funded at least in part from regional and provincial general funds under the recognition that really good mobility in the area’s major economic motor has value.

        But KUOW couldn’t help but pat our self-congratulatory populace on the back for resorting to more self-inflicted regressiveness to provide minimally usable basic service that may soon cost riders up to $2.75 regardless of payment method. Furthermore, the KUOW piece insisted on extolling Sound Transit’s habit of overpromising and underdelivering pet projects to regional politicians instead of focuses on unequivocally productive endeavors anywhere… a massive divergence from an article about Prop 1’s winning coalition in favor of unquestionably useful investments in immediate service.

        Even when having a rare local transit success fêted by our northerly neighbors, the local discourse is so bankrupt that it attempts to fashion counterfactual and counterproductive lessons from it.

      2. Any evaluation or comparison regarding the Sky-Train tunnel through Downtown Vancouver has to take into account that the facility was placed in a pre-existing train tunnel tall enough to allow the Sky-Train tubes to be placed inside it like an over-under shot gun.

        In addition, when riding into Vancouver on Amtrak, look out the windows and notice how many of the Sky-Train pillars are planted in the same existing railroad right of way as Amtrak.

        The main reason for high right-of-way cost in Seattle is the small legacy of existing railroad right of way going where transit needs to go. For transit-grade right of way, every pebble in an old railroad trackway or tunnel might as well be a gold nugget.

        Mark Dublin

      3. Indeed.

        And then the Canada Line was built from scratch. Completely. And well. And cheaper than our compromised crap.

      5. And again, that’s not even what the Vancouver-admires-Seattle puff pieces are even about.

        They’re about us coalition-building for the purpose of passing regressive self-taxation, in order to get basic service not even 1/5 as good as Vancouver already enjoys through various more just and sustainable funding sources.

        Any admiration is clearly based on ignorance of the transit experience down here.

      6. Just some corrections about transit in Vancouver.

        The Canada Line crosses water three times, in bored tubes under False Creek, on a bridge over the north arm of the Fraser, and on a smaller bridge from Richmond to the Airport. There is a railway ROW all through Vancouver to Richmond (the Arbutus Corridor), but it wasn’t used for the Canada Line because Cambie Street is more direct and has more on it.

        The Millennium and Expo Lines were built using railway corridors in part. The Expo Line used the train tunnel downtown and follows the old interurban line through much of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster; although, it is entirely grade separated and thus elevated over much of this route. And the Millennium Line (the one you see from the Amtrak trains) follows an existing rail corridor from Burnaby into Vancouver. That railway corridor didn’t seem like an obvious transit corridor and many were skeptical about it, but it does have 70,000 weekday boardings now, and it will increase in usefulness tremendously when the Evergreen Line is completed and the Broadway Subway is built – both of which are really just extensions on either side of the Millennium Line.

      7. On the substantive point of why Link was so much more expensive than the Canada Line (or why some of the proposed Toronto LRT lines are so expensive), I don’t know the answer, but I have some speculation.

        The Canada Line operates as an automatic, high frequency system, so the trains sets are very short. Two cars now and expandable to three. (A two-car train every five minutes obviously matches the capacity of a six-car train every fifteen minutes.) That means that the stations themselves are much smaller. For instance, the Olympic Village station box is only 67m long while the Capital Hill station box is 166m long. And the Olympic Village was where the tunnel boring machine started, so it had to be big enough to handle the machine, segment loading and spoils removal. I suspect that the smaller station size is a big part of the cost difference.

        There is a concern that the Canada Line stations were built too small. The line now has a peak capacity of 8,500 ppdph and can a maximum capacity of around 16,000 ppdph with the three car trains and two minute headways (that will require the purchase of more trainsets). But at its rate of growth, it will be hitting its ultimate capacity at peak times in a few decades. I agree that the stations were probably built too small, and some aren’t very convenient, but I much rather have an imperfect system built than have a perfect system not built.

        Automation allows for high frequencies and shorter trains, so it has always been by suggestion that Seattle convert to an automated system. I would even look into the cost of burying Link in the Rainier Valley so that the whole system could be automated. That would be expensive, but it could end up really saving money on future expansions to Ballard, West Seattle etc.

      8. Definitely smaller stations helps, but a lot of it is dodgy procurement practices, a million laws and regulations, law suits, etc. It’s more fundamental than just “they bought something cheaper”.

        If we had tried to build the canada line, we’d likely have spent even more than the $4 billion we did end up spending.

    7. Because they want to make certain that the FEMA camps are also completed so that when they use South Bellevue as a staging area in The Big Roundup® there won’t be any snafus.

      1. Funny.. i just was talking about slow LINK construction on another post. But still, seven years to build U Link, which is only two stations long and a few miles long seems deliberately too long. I’m just scared that as we near the end of the project, they’ll discover some issue that would delay it’s opening. Just look at the First Hill StreetCar. That should have been operational by now. Long projects and delays is what make people distrust transit.

        And again, I understand that the tunnel traverses one of the most, if not the densest areas of Seattle, but seriously seven years is too long.

  5. South Bellevue Station gets down escalators. Rainier/90 doesn’t and there is a greater elevation change. Why is that?

    1. Republicans are going to have to choose between highways and no tax increases. The irresistable force meeting the unmoveable wall may cause them to discover the value of boring maintenance, which costs less and fits the traditional meaning of conservative.

      1. “American Road”- Pete Davies. Interesting read before making hard and fast decisions about the fate of the Interstate highway system.

        Just after WWI, the Army sent a convoy of military trucks- with the standard chain drive transmissions of the day- coast to coast to investigate how well the country’s road system could handle the military needs of a two-front war.

        The performance of the railroads in the recent one-front war worried the armed forces. What the convoy officers, including Dwight Eisenhower, discovered was that outside the cities, best suited mechanism would be a hippopotamus.

        Not a single truck would have made it if the convoy had not included a giant caterpillar tractor-recently used to pull tanks and cannons out of the mud in Belgium. Which at one point or another pulled every single truck for miles.

        So first very legitimate question about the system’s fate would be how much use the Interstates-which were specifically built as a defense project- will still be for the defense of the continental United States?

        We should pay particular attention to the parts of the system that run either through cities, or between cities and their suburbs. I don’t think this was any part of the original plans. Same with private cars in general. Remember how few people had cars in 1921.

        For urban, suburban, and regional transportation, as local parts of the system age require rebuilding, right of way and structures could easily be converted to transit without damage to national defense.

        Possibly assisting in defense by cutting fuel consumption, and also making it easier to evacuate people in time of attack or disaster. And not violating the system’s original purpose, in which the Army definitely did not include living patterns that did not yet exist.

        The form of “political correctness” I personally hate worst is one idea that has become accepted as fact across the United States these last few decades: that industry answerable to shareholders works better for public uses than industry owned and operated by us the people.

        Coffee stands? Fine. Car dealerships? Great. Everything people can take or leave by choice, no problem. Doesn’t classic free-market theory postulate completely free entry and exit from the system?

        Like 72″ screen TV sets. Not drinking water and sewers. Or systems required for the unity of our extremely large country- a condition which I think a great many of the present Congress and their forebears have hated since Appomattox.

        Fact: back in the ‘fifties, the John Birch Society considered Dwight D. Eisenhower, quote: “A conscious agent of the international Communist conspiracy.” Not sure if that Interstate lover Kemper Freeman was born yet, but if he was, he was luck he didn’t get blacklisted!

        MD

      2. Republican policy since Reagan has been borrow-and-spend. They prefer to spend money only on useless things, though, like missile defense fantasies.

        Really, I’ve never seen a worse political party in my lifetime. There is nothing conservative about it.

  7. That south bellevue station design actually looks good, which i am surprised at only because the other elevated stations have been unnecessarily monstrous

    1. What do you think of running a gondola between either Factoria or Eastgate P&R and South Bellevue Station?

      1. All gondola ideas that connect an HCT station to an HCT-less (sub)urban village should be considered. But this corridor depends on how ST3 turns out. If ST commits to Eastgate light rail or BRT, then this gondola would be duplicative. Of course, one may object that the HCT may skip South Bellevue station, and if it’s on the north side of I-90 it’s not close enough to the emerging Factoria village. But I would say wait and see what ST intends, and how feasable a pedestrian bridge or something from the shopping district to the station would be, or how a frequent shuttle bus could go to the station (perhaps based on the 240/241), and if none of those can serve Factoria adequately, then we can consider a gondola. But perhaps going somewhere else than South Bellevue Station, which is the middle of nowhere, not a good transfer point, and not very enticing to people who would otherwise drive.

      2. The Oakland Airport Connector item I posted above is a technology that is sold by the same people who sell gondolas (Doppelmayr). A South Bellevue to Eastgate cable-pulled track system with an intermediate stop at Factoria is technically feasible and wouldn’t require running a new LRT line. It would likely cost somewhere between $350M and $500M depending on headway, which affects the track design and the number of vehicles..

        The recent ST studies summarily ignored this technology (as well as they ignored a DMU option to Issaquah).

      3. I think the Gondola idea is interesting in this case. A Gondola is about the least impactful technology available to the Mercer Slough.

        However I think that a growing Bellevue College will require light rail even if served with a gondola would require adding stations there, in Factoria and probably one more in Eastgate. Which starts to impact travel times since Gondolas are still slower.

        Furthermore a Gondola on the I-90 corridor would lose support (especially among electeds like board member and Issaquah mayor Fred Butler) for Sound Transit’s plans in Issaquah. A starter line with planned expansion towards them is a surer thing then a Gondola line.

      4. I love gondolas but this is rail line material. South Bellevue > Factoria > Eastgate > Issaquah TC > Downtown Issaquah > Issaquah Highlands

      5. @Peter — You got that half right — South Bellevue > Factoria > Bellevue College is OK for rail as long as you solve the Mercer Slough problem. That part makes sense. But after you get past there you have miles and miles of nothingness before you get to Issaquah, which doesn’t have much, really, and can be served just fine via BRT (or express buses on HOV lanes).

    2. The South Bellevue link does not reveal whether the ground-level design has changed. Prior iterations have been awful for bus transfers.

      1. Are you surprised? Which station has good bus transfers, outside of the tunnel? They’ve all been awful.

      2. See p. 10 of http://www.soundtransit.org/Documents/pdf/projects/eastlink/WEB_SoBel_90perc_Nov2014.pdf

        This shows that northbound buses will stop on Bellevue Way without diverting. The walk from the base of the escalators looks like a couple hundred feet with an elevation change.

        There is a bus loop for southbound buses; it looks like they enter from the north, go directly to the platform adjacent to the station and exit to the south. There may be some conflict with cars entering and leaving the garage.

        It looks pretty good to me.

      3. This is actually a decent argument for Light Rail interling. The station is perfectly designed for train transfers thanks to the central platform and poorly designed for Freeway buses or BRT.

      4. On a related note, does anyone have a good feel for how buses will interact with East Link? I assumed that Mercer Island would be the big transfer station, with South Bellevue serving neighborhood buses. In other words, if a bus gets on a freeway, it goes to Mercer Island. This makes sense to me, just because the Mercer Island station is essentially on the freeway (buses would have grade separation right to the station). But now I wonder if they expect more buses to serve South Bellevue. Is this a problem? Anyone care to share their knowledge of the traffic situation there.

      5. @Ross B, the general consensus among ST and KCM seems to be that Mercer Island is a better location due to the HOV direct access ramps leading right up to a station entrance. That eliminates some weaving to/from the HOV lanes and delays getting to/from South Bellevue station.

        With that said, however, no determination has been made as to which bus routes would truncate at which station because East Link’s opening is so far away. The focus now is on ensuring that the stations, Mercer Island especially, are built to accommodate bus truncation. The designs for Mercer Island (there’s a new one being presented next week) emphasize minimal bus stop-to-station entrance distances and no street crossings.

        The other component is how hard Mercer Island will push for more parking for island residents; the Mercer Island City Council has tried to tie their approval of the bus truncation stuff to more parking. ST is presenting some initial concepts of a parking structure to be built at the Mercer Island Community Center next week, so we will see how that goes.

      7. Ah, yes, I now recall the second-draft improvements AW describes. That’s about a million times better than what was in the original plan.

        The station is probably still too far from the street — more a problem for the multi-turning buses than the pedestrian access, actually — but at least there won’t be the 17 turns in each direction and the loop-de-loops below the trackway that the first plan called for.

        This won’t be the transfer point for highway buses, but it will be important for buses on their way from Factoria to Old Bellevue. And since these buses will be evenly split between transferrers and through-riders, it is extra important to keep the Transit Center penalty to a minimum, and to never repeat the disaster of Tukwila International again.

  8. Does Community Transit have a mid-day yard in or near Downtown Seattle or do their buses have to deadhead all the way back north?

    1. Yup.
      It’s in SODO at 5th Pl S & S Bayview St, right next to the SODO Busway. You can see the buses parked in the lot when you’re on Link.

    2. Drive north (or ride a bus) on I-5 during afternoon rush hour, observe the zillions of Community Transit buses going the other way with “Not in Service” signs, and your question will be answered.

    1. Any action taken against global climate change by less than a thousandth of the world’s population will be futile in the whole.

      But international bodies and treaties will set limits for emissions, and thus national bodies will set policies to encourage fewer emissions. People, cities, countries stuck with necessarily-energy-intense living patterns will do worse. We don’t want to be one of those!

      The pledges the leaders are making today are not actually sufficient to solve the problem. And we’ll probably fail to honor them, anyway. Hooray, we’re doomed! It doesn’t make much sense, in an age of global trade, to assign emissions to any one country, anyway… plenty of American profits are made from Chinese emissions! And Chinese profits from American emissions! So how about saying something about per-capita emissions? Or assigning emissions to consumers, and then looking at them on national levels?

      1. If you look at the math, we’re at 407 ppm, and China by itself is adding 1 ppm each year. We supposedly need to get down to 350 ppm. But if China’s co2 peaks in 2030, the US could go to zero and we’d still be at LEAST 420, from China’s co2 alone! We could get to 450, where things are irreversible, easily by 2030 with this scheme.

        It’s pretty close to being over.

      2. That’s exactly why we shouldn’t separate emissions by the country where the fuel is burned.

        A big part of the decline in US and European carbon emissions is these countries essentially outsourcing their manufacturing. A big part of the growth in Chinese emissions supplies western markets and drives western profits.

        Capital is pretty liquid and shipping is pretty cheap. Global climate change is global, and needs to be solved fairly for people around the world, not in terms of country-by-country horse trading.

      3. China’s going to drop emissions as fast as they can. Why? Because their government is *fundamentally sane* and would like to have a habitable planet to govern. (And at this rate they’ll be governing all of it.) Also, China is now dominating the solar panel industry; they have every reason to expand it as fast as they possibly can and shut down all other forms of energy. It means they win.

  10. A few weeks STB asked you commenters to go out and take pics of public transit. And I’m just here checking to see if you are doing what you were asked to do. If so, please provide the links to your Flickr or Instragram accounts that I can check. I’m only interested in recent photos, since the photo request was made. The bloggers here put a lot of time and energy into this site, and don’t ask for anything in return. They provide for you a place to come and discuss transit and land use issues, free of charge. So when they ask you for a favor, one would hope you would get up off your lazy ass and help them out. So, let me see some of the photos you’ve taken.

    1. A few weeks STB asked you commenters … one would hope you would get up off your lazy ass”

      We all share one ass, Sam? Who knew?

      I guess, given the questioner, that may be true.

  11. Fulton Center looks like a space port. Is this the same thing as the Calatrava designed hub in lower manhattan? Or is that something different..?

    1. Different. Calatrava’s design is the porcupine, two blocks away.

      Fulton is a lot more functional.

  12. I went to the Link-bus integration meeting in Ravenna. It was small-group discussions. My group had two Metro planners and five other people. There’s no “information” to report since it was all asking us questions: what kinds of transportation do you use, what are your primary three transit trips. what issues do you see with bus routes and Link integration in the U-District, Ravenna, and northeast Seattle, do you prefer all the current routes or fewer routes that are more frequent (i.e., consolidation), are there any specific things you want this round to address (e.g., holes in the network, streets needing transit lanes, bus stops to close).

    Things I learned: the signal blocks between buses and trains in the DSTT is due to “fire codes”. (What, it’s worse for a burning bus to set fire to a train than to another bus?) Bus priority throughout 45th Street is on their radar. A 65th route from Roosevelt Station to Magnuson Park is a goal for 2021 (not sure if that meant west to NW 65th too or not). Buses going down Montlake Blvd to UW Station would have to stop on the west side of the street, not at the station or its lot. The walk from UW Station to the Stevens Way bus stops is expected to be 5 minutes. Several participants reported widespread pass-ups (100% full buses) on the north-south routes on Lake City Way, 15th, and 25th. One person asked for southern stops on the 522 (between 125th and 75th). The planner said Metro has repeatedly asked ST for this but ST won’t do it. He also said that when the 522 was created, north Seattle was given a choice of having it go to the U-District more frequently or to downtown, and 75% of the feedback was to go downtown.

    The next meeting is Monday evening focusing mainly on Capitol Hill. I’d recommend that anyone who has concerns about the routes attend it. The third meeting is Thursday mid-day at the UW.

  13. Can see rationale for keeping safety cushion between the front end of a train and the back end to a bus. A train rear-ending a bus would definitely be a lot worse than the other way around.

    But harder case to make for holding a bus away from the back of a train. If collision related fire is the issue, why not insist on a full-block separation of buses? Assessment of safety considerations of inadequate training and zero coordination in DSTT aren’t off topic here, but in my case should be. Next posting, maybe.

    Meantime: what do we know about the world’s real experience of cable-ways, aerial and underground? San Francisco cable cars, whose technology dates back a hundred fifty years, speak well for the concept. Though when system was refurbished about twenty years back, commentators said that a lot of critical knowledge had been lost.

    So first question I’d ask about cable system is: “Is your chief engineer a Scotsman?” And second: “How many horse’s lives does he expect the system to save?” But Europe’s experience suggests Austrians are pretty good too.

    MD

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