• Via expands to the Renton Highlands
• Pedersen will remain Seattle Transportation chair
• The website for the new ORCA is live
• Metro canceling some trips through Jan. 21 due to driver shortages
• Teamsters strike still delaying Link projects
• A list of all the transportation-ish bills in Olympia
• WSF neglect is starting to show

This is an open thread.

Seattle’s new Mayor does not seem to be a fertile source of pro-housing legislation, having campaigned on skepticism about changing single family zones. But instead of struggling for dimes, we can pick up dollar bills at the state level. The bills are SB 5670 and HB 1782, and as explained by local treasure Dan Bertolet, would legalize:

Up to sixplexes on all residential lots within a half-mile of a major transit stop in cities with populations of 20,000 or more.

Up to fourplexes on all residential lots elsewhere in cities of 20,000 or more.

Duplexes on all residential lots in cities with populations of at least 10,000.

There are also substantial limits on parking minima, and some anti-displacement measures. Cities could skip these prescriptions and instead adopt city-wide density minima, but they would have to show this did not have disparate impacts — no putting all the growth in the “urban renewal” sectors and leaving the upscale places untouched.

• Sam Zimbabwe out at SDOT; what does it mean?
• Kent Keel staying as ST Board Chair
• West Seattle/Ballard EIS will arrive January 28th
• Escalator switching at CHS
• North Sounder is landsliding again
• An update on Safe Routes to School
• Worst year on Washington’s roads ($) since 2006
• Pandemic trends in ridership, by neighborhood type
• Boston experimenting with free buses

This is an open thread.

Sound Transit recently released a revised Link schedule that will take effect January 8th “to better reflect actual trip times.” The main difference is that a Northgate-Angle Lake trip turns out to be 4 minutes slower, from 53 minutes to 57.

There are four spots where it loses one of those minutes: Roosevelt-Northgate, UW-U District, Westlake-Capitol Hill, and Mt. Baker-Beacon Hill. No doubt, to some extent these particular segments are not the only source of delay, but just where it rounds up to full minutes.

This is actually a good news story: Columbia City-Capitol Hill will still be 21 minutes, 1 minutes less than the time pre-pandemic. I’d speculate it to be a function of recovering ridership, and the resulting frictions adding 7% to overall times. But ST’s John Gallagher says that the Northgate segment is a bit slower than expected, and on the older segments two more minutes makes it easier to stay on schedule and respect timed transfers.

No one is going to remember the Durkan administration, positively or negatively, based on its transit or land use legacy. The twin crises of the pandemic and a reckoning with racist policing will dominate the historical record. But here at STB, we always size up the outgoing mayor (Murray, McGinn, Nickels) on this basis. And her legacy will largely be stasis, with isolated progress and some major setbacks.

The preceding Murray administration had largely locked in a transportation agenda with a vehicle license fee for bus service, Move Seattle, and Sound Transit 3. A first Durkan term would therefore always have been one of consolidation. Ms. Durkan campaigned as a policy continuity candidate from a productive but scandal-ridden predecessor. On this measure, her term was a disappointment.

2021 was the slowest year at STB in well over a decade. Nevertheless, both readers and commenters turned out when we did:

Most Read

This snow will stick around a while. In non-pandemic, normal work week times, this might have been a snowpocalypse event.

Meanwhile, Metro’s Emergency Snow Network is in effect. ST express has Snow reroutes but Link is basically unaffected. 6 Sounder trips are suspended.

With 2021 coming to a close, our region has set sail on a major, exciting, one-in-a-generation opportunity to restructure and reform our transit network thanks to billions in capital investments. In 2008, regional voters approved Sound Transit 2 (ST2), and these investments are now bearing fruit as our regional light rail network will nearly triple in size. We must prepare before this is complete in 2024.

Northgate Link gives us a preview of what’s coming, as bus and light rail integration reshapes our idea of what’s possible with transit. Our bus-based, one-seat ride network is changing as trains reemerge to play a large role. In addition, the pandemic fundamentally changes how our transit network will be used, as many traditional commutes disappear. Transit’s role in moving 9-5 workers into a few hubs migrates into a broader community-and-corridor-based network serving a wider variety of people 24/7. While there will still be a need to serve major centers such as Bellevue, UW, Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett, their role and magnitude as transit magnets is still uncertain.

King County Metro will usher in an entirely new network in several parts of King County to integrate with four different Link extensions (!), a topic which will be heavily covered by this blog. Two new RapidRide Lines will enter service thanks to partnerships between King County, Seattle, Burien, and White Center as the first new RapidRide lines since the F Line in 2014. Madison G Line offers an opportunity to restructure transit service in the densest part of our state, while the H Line upgrades crucial north-south service in a long corridor with a community strongly tied to transit. RapidRide is the linchpin in Metro’s frequent regional network offering marquee service to nearly 70,000 pre-pandemic riders on the busiest corridors. Improving service on existing Lines could be in the cards as well with Metro hiring staff to evaluate opportunities for investment (based on KCM job postings earlier this year).

• The ST2 projects were cruising along, but now there’s a concrete driver strike ($)
• Everett and CT will do another study on merging
• Feds send Metro $396m to make up for Covid losses
• Another bikeshare vendor — the more, the merrier
• Inside Metro’s 2022 budget
• Marko Liias is the new Senate Transportation Chair. There is no better friend in the Senate of non-SOV travel.
• New ferry will be the Wishkah ($)
• Meet the new Amtrak CEO ($)
• New books about transit maps

This is an open thread.

OMF at S. 336th St is “preferred”

On Thursday, the Sound Transit Board made the responsible decision and designated S. 336th St in Federal Way as the “preferred” site of South Link’s Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF). It has not actually eliminated the other two sites from consideration, but the process will put somewhat more weight on 336th.

Zee Shaner, writing on the Sound Transit blog:

Shortly after the Northgate, Roosevelt and U District stations opened in October, riders quickly noticed that next train information had disappeared from 1 Line platform digital signs. Passengers wondered why it was ‘broken’ and when we could ‘get it working again’.  

We want to clarify that the system is working just as it always has, but we made the deliberate decision to turn it off until its replacement arrives in the spring.   

Why would we turn it off? 

A well-written piece that answers a lot of questions readers have been asking on Twitter and here on the comment threads.

From the Governor’s blog:

Gov. Jay Inslee’s 2022 supplemental budget proposes significant funding to reduce poverty, increase housing and resources for homeless individuals, expand K-12 learning supports, invest in clean transportation and green economy, decarbonize buildings, and protect salmon habitat.

The governor released his budget in Olympia on Thursday and was joined by David Schumacher, director of the state Office of Financial Management. The full budget presentation followed three events earlier in the week, with new salmon investments, climate strategy investments and homelessness funding.

The climate strategy includes lots of electrical decarbonization efforts, including a $1,000 tax credit rebate for e-bikes, and up to $7,500 for electric cars. There’s also an unspecified investment in “clean bus technology, and improvements to transit, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.”

On the housing front, there’s $800M to build new affordable housing and help people stay in their homes, and, of note to our readers, a proposal to legalize “missing middle” housing types:

Inslee is proposing a change to statewide policy that would allow for creation of a greater variety of “middle housing” types such as duplexes and townhomes in areas within a half mile of major transit stops in large cities. This change will also allow duplexes in most areas of large and mid-size cities. The state will provide technical assistance, including developing a model ordinance, to help cities implement these new measures.

One can dream that eventually “housing” and “climate” will cease to be discrete initiatives in the minds of our politicians (and voters). But good stuff nonetheless. On to the legislature.

More reporting and commentary: Seattle Times, Publicola, The Urbanist.

The recent stall of a Sound Transit light rail train after the Apple Cup has brought on a public discussion on communicating with transit customers. Let’s hope that conversation continues. It is an important one.

Have you ever felt a touch of fate? Several weeks ago I decided to take public transit from Seattle to visit the Kinsey Collection Exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum. (Fantastic show for a more visceral understanding of African American history. Gone now but you can check out on The Kinsey Collection website.) It turned out to be a freakishly on-target, real life look at public transit customer communication.

It all started with my smug self meeting up with reality on the trip back to Seattle.

• Lizz tells the story of vision-impaired people struggling to navigate transit
• Everett Council considers states its priorities for Link
• By some metrics, some are pronouncing microtransit a success
• More camera enforcement ($)
• More electrics for PT
• Seattle grows faster ($) than suburbs 2010-20
• Traffic is back, transit ridership still down
• Natural gas buses aren’t carbon-neutral
• TriMet running out of drivers; it’s an emergency

This is an open thread.