Seattle Transit Blog

Sound Transit’s route to Federal Way is no longer just a vague line extending south from the Angle Lake Light Rail Station to residents attending an open house as the extension project moves into the pre-construction phase.

With design plans still developing for the stations, residents had little to react to during open houses hosted by Sound Transit last week. However, residents expressed concern about the accessibility of the stations and what they say is a lack of parking planned at each station. Comments included providing better bus service to the station and the need to build future parking adequate for the next 30 years.

Sound Transit plans to build parking at each station. At the Kent/Des Moines station, a 500-space garage is planned directly east of the station. A 1,100-space garage will replace a 600-space surface parking lot at the 272nd Street Station, and at the Federal Way Transit Center, Sound Transit is planning a second garage adding 400-spaces to the existing garage which currently holds roughly 1,200 cars.

Despite that the future Federal Way Station planned near the downtown area of the city, several residents doubted Federal Way could become a walkable city with the rainy weather.

With one resident commenting, “Sound Transit hasn’t planned for the people. They want us to be a walking city, but it’s the Pacific Northwest.” Another resident chimed in suggesting Sound Transit should make it easier for commuters to be dropped off at the station.

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The Northgate Link Extension is on schedule and on-budget, but without a $1.17 billion grant from the federal government the continuation of the light rail north toward Lynnwood will likely be delayed, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff said Tuesday.

Touring the construction site of the future Northgate Station with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, Rogoff said, “In 2016, the administration made a commitment of $1.17 billion for this project (Lynnwood Link); our plan and work now is about getting the current administration to keep to that commitment.”

Rogoff added the agency was “dumbfounded and disappointed” earlier this year when the new administration sought to zero out funding for light rail to Lynnwood.

Jayapal promised to do everything she can to “ensure that the Federal Transit Administration follows through on funding the Lynnwood Link.”

“Our entire delegation understands the need to protect transit dollars here, and we are going to continue to make sure that we deliver as a federal government,” Jayapal said. “We understand we have a rough road to hoe to make sure we get these federal dollars, but I’ll tell you, I think our region has an enormous case to make for why this is a bipartisan necessity for transit in our region.”

Rogoff credited Jayapal, Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Congressman Rick Larsen for securing $100 million in 2017 for the Lynnwood project. Congress has yet to approve a second installment of $100 million for 2018.

According to Sound Transit, the agency is in the final stage of the process of securing a $1.17 billion Full Funding Grant Agreement through the Federal Transit Administration for the Lynnwood Link extension under the Capital Investment Grant Program, also known as the New Starts program. A Full Funding Grant Agreement, scheduled to be executed in 2018, would guarantee the entire $1.17 billion grant for the Lynnwood extension.

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A few weeks ago, Lizz reported that the union representing Metro bus drivers, mechanics, and service supervisors (among others) approved a new collective bargaining agreement with significant changes to work rules.  The most notable of these changes is that part-time Metro drivers can work on weekends.  In exchange, union negotiators secured two big concessions from Metro.  First, Metro accepted a lower ceiling on the number of part-time drivers, with the limit changing from 45 percent to 33 percent of all drivers.  Second, Metro agreed that no drivers, either full- or part-time, will have to work split shifts on weekends.  The changes will be effective in September 2018.

Far from being the arcane, inside-baseball news you might think, this is a major win-win for Metro and the union, and a big deal for Metro riders.  If implemented well by Metro, it could result in more service on the road for the same amount of money.  Depending on how drivers ultimately choose to pick their work under the new rules, it could also make driver recruitment easier—important in an era where Metro has been struggling to keep enough drivers to operate current service, let alone add significant service hours as funded by the City of Seattle and contemplated by Metro’s own Long-Range Plan.

To explain why this is such good news, we’ll have to dive into the murk of bus-driver work rules a bit, below the jump.

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The south half of downtown, set on a steep hill, has always presented accessibility problems.  With elevation changes of as much as 50 feet per block, people with impaired mobility frequently have difficulty traveling even one block in the east-west direction.  For the transit network, this results in an intermodal transfer challenge: there is more than 100 feet of elevation gain in the four blocks between the Colman Dock ferry terminal and Metro’s Third Avenue transit spine.

Historically, Metro handled this challenge by having one or two north-end routes serve Colman Dock directly, laying over on Alaskan Way.  The routes climbed to Third Avenue via Yesler, providing accessible transfers to other service, before heading north.  But when waterfront construction began in earnest in 2012, Metro had to leave Alaskan Way.  Instead, it began using First Avenue, which is at nearly the same elevation as the upper level of Colman Dock and accessible from the dock via a safe, flat pedestrian bridge.  First route 16, and then route 62 starting last year, picked up on First and used Seneca to bridge the elevation gap between First and Third.

But now, Metro is again getting displaced, this time by Center City Connector construction along First.  On September 23, route 62 will begin using Third exclusively.  And this presents a significant problem for users who have difficulty making it up the hill.  During the day on weekdays, there is an accessible route from First to Third, using public elevators or escalators inside two downtown buildings.  But the accessible route is not available nights or weekends.  The only meaningful transit service that will now serve the vicinity of Colman Dock is route 12, a frequent east-west route using Madison and Marion Streets.

And it gets worse.  Route 12 doesn’t make the trip to Third easy, because it has no stop near Third.  Uphill stops are located on Marion at First, near the end of the Colman Dock bridge; at Second; and then on the far side of Fourth.  Given that the vast majority of transfer connections are on or under Third, this stop placement is perverse.  Mobility-impaired users making connections from Colman Dock benefit very little from having the 12 available, and other users transferring from buses on Third to the 12 have to walk unnecessarily far.

Fortunately, the problem should be easy to fix.  There is no physical obstacle to locating a stop on Marion at Third, next to the north side of the Central Building.  To maintain schedule and reasonable stop spacing, the stop at Second (which is actually less than a block from the stop at First) could be removed.

Metro and SDOT may be reluctant to fund this fix, despite its simplicity, because bus service on Marion is going away.  RapidRide G, the “Madison BRT” route on which SDOT will soon begin construction, will run eastbound along Spring rather than Marion.  From Spring, the new route will provide easy access to Third.  But RapidRide G will not begin service for two more years.  Mobility-impaired users are losing route 62 now, and deserve this easy, inexpensive accommodation in the meantime.

Mayoral candidates Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon debate how Seattle’s next mayor would address our city’s most pressing issues: growth, affordable housing, and homelessness (via Seattle Channel).

This is an open thread.

The latest iteration of the One Center City plan considers 3rd Ave transit-only all day, a cycle track on 4th, and some 4th Avenue buses moved to 5th and 6th.

A delay in the convention center project gave bus riders a reprieve, as buses can use the Downtown Transit Tunnel until 2019. But as the “period of maximum constraint” rapidly approaches, the list of near-term projects to ease congestion is not yet final.

“We need to move on this fast,” said Tom Brennan, a consultant with Nelson Nygaard working with SDOT, King County Metro Transit, Sound Transit and the Downtown Seattle Association on the One Center City plan.

During the One Center City advisory group’s monthly meeting Thursday, Brennan presented the latest recommendations to ensure the city keeps moving when a handful of large construction projects begin.

To speed up bus travel times and improve reliability, Brennan said an all-day car ban was being considered for Third Avenue. Currently, during the week the street is reserved only for buses between 6 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6:30 p.m. The proposed recommendations for Third Avenue would also extend the transit-only lanes north to Virginia Avenue and enable off-board fare payment at all stops between Jackson and Stewart Streets to allow for all-door boarding and lower dwell time.

After the group previously debating several options for a north/south bike lane, the latest recommendation places a protected two-way bike lane along the west side of Fourth Avenue between Main and Vine Street. SDOT anticipates the section between Seneca and Pine Street will be finished by the end of October. The segment from Pine to Vine Street would open in 2018, and the last portion between Main and Seneca Street by 2020.

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Sound Transit has released their July Ridership Report and Link is still going strong, up 16.7% overall.

Average daily ridership for Link in July was:

• Weekday: 77,081 (+16.8%)
• Saturday: 57,037 (+15.2%)
• Sunday: 45,017 (+17.7%)

Other weekday modal ridership stats:

• Sounder: 17,355 (+6.7%)
• Tacoma Link: 2,839 (+2.0%)
• ST Express: 66,411 (+0.5%)
• Sound Transit Systemwide, +8.3% Weekday, +9.2% Total Boardings

My charts below the fold. [Read more…]

At the beginning of the summer, Sound Transit inverted the weekday Link schedule. Instead of two-car trains all day with a few three-car trains during rush hour, three-car trains would run all day and a few two-car trains would supplement peak capacity. This increased the proportion of three-car trains during rush hour from about one-third to two-thirds.

The initial story suggested this was a response to summer peak demand. Yesterday, ST’s Kimberly Reason confirmed that the higher capacity is here to stay:

Sound Transit is maintaining 3-car train operations on Link to accommodate increasing ridership, especially with Husky and Seahawks seasons underway. More people are relying on light rail to travel to the airport, attend games, and commute to work in region experiencing robust economic and population growth.

There are no plans at this time to return the old arrangement.

It wasn’t so long ago that Metro service changes arrived in the dead of night, accompanied mainly by dread about whether your favorite route would be on the chopping block.  But it’s amazing what a few years of explosive economic growth will do.  County Executive Dow Constantine trumpeted Metro’s service changes starting next Saturday, September 23 in a press release, which noted that this will be the sixth consecutive service change in which Metro adds new service.  Between Seattle voters’ approval of Proposition 1 and increased Metro revenues, Metro will be running the most service it’s ever run.

The headline news with this service change is the welcome replacement of the last three “Night Owl” routes with expanded late-night service on selected regular Metro routes.  But there are other good changes too, including some real frequency improvements and an encouraging number of well-thought-out “bug fixes.”  Learn more about what’s happening below the jump.

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• Erica Barnett explains why development around Rainier Beach Station is anemic.
• Seattle Council Candidate Pat Murakami is not going for the STB vote.
• Pierce Transit now has a pay-by-phone app. It is not <facepalm> integrated with Metro’s pay-by-phone app.
• Seattle working to rezone Uptown, simplify design review.
• You may have heard: Amazon is seeking a second headquarters in North America. Everyone was able to use the news to confirm their complaints about Seattle politics. For my confirmation-bias favorites, see Jon Talton ($) and Matt Yglesias.
• Spin and Limebike looking at Bellevue.
• Seattle has a nominee in Streetsblog’s “sorriest bus stop” bracket.
• Kenmore tries to create a town center ($).
• Seattle finally reaches a deal to fill the hole in front of city hall ($). Councilmember Sawant, surprisingly, makes a critique that is absolutely on-target. Down with plazas!
• Jarrett Walker contributes to my little debate on fare policy, perhaps by coincidence.
• SDOT releases plan for 23rd Ave Phase 2.
• Jon Grant wants to build 5,000 homes for the homeless in 5 years.
• Kitsap Transit buys a used ferry for the new Kingston-Seattle route.

This is an open thread.

When cars began rolling off assembly lines a hundred years ago, cities were reshaped to accommodate the automobile. Sidewalks narrowed to widen streets, parking garages appeared, transit systems disappeared, and eventually Interstate 5 splintered downtown Seattle from neighborhoods to the east.

This resulted in a city that is unfriendly and at times a dangerous place to be a pedestrian, a lesson Seattle Department of Transportation highlights in its recently released “New Mobility Playbook”.

As rapidly evolving technology is once again transforming how people move around the city, SDOT released the Playbook, a set of goals for integrating new transportation choices into the system.

“With cars, we forced our city to adapt to the technology instead of shaping the technology to serve the people living and working in our city,” states the playbook. “This time around, we want to do things differently. Instead of allowing the technology to shape the city, we’re mobilizing the technology to serve the people’s needs.”

In the playbook, SDOT defines new mobility as a “technology-enabled, seamless, nearly door-to-door transportation system” which “allows Seattleites to treat urban transportation as a customizable, on-demand service.”

The New Mobility Playbook lays out two scenarios: actively shape the future or leave it to chance. In the first possibility, despite rapid growth congestion doesn’t increase as autonomous vehicles are shared rather than privately owned. Transit choice increases in underserved communities as the city leverages a data infrastructure system to manage the transportation system in real-time.

[Read more…]

It’s been a while.

If you’d like Frank and I to try to answer your question on the next podcast, submit it in this comment thread by Wednesday evening.

As always, try to keep it to one, answerable question.

The Mayoral Primary inspired more discussion between growth advocates and renters’ advocates. Renters’ advocates wonder why market urbanists* didn’t rally to Nikkita Oliver. Market urbanists wonder why Oliver didn’t embrace developers who can address the affordability crisis.

There are also some attempts to bridge this gap and form common cause against NIMBYs that oppose both density and public housing: Galen Herz’s essay is an outstanding example of this genre. Although I can’t endorse everything he recommends, it’s a useful starting point to not be outraged that other people are inspired by different issues than you are.

Nevertheless, it is common rhetoric that current policy is “just” resulting in “luxury” units, doing nothing to address the housing shortage. Leaving aside its factual validity, this assessment is philosophically bankrupt.

Instead, construction of market-rate units, provided it’s a large net increase on density on the site, has significant positive public policy impacts. For one thing, today’s fancy apartments are tomorrow’s “naturally occurring” affordable housing. That doesn’t solve the problem today, but it does prevent us from continually having to solve it in the future.

Moreover, there are two possible outcomes to blocking such housing. The market urbanist prediction is that would-be residents will instead enter the market for existing housing, thus driving up rents for current residents. Everyone agrees that this would be bad. For market skeptics, the alternative must be that would-be residents are living outside the city instead.

Even that outcome is bad. First, rents in the suburbs matter. Second, encouraging people to live farther from work is not good for congestion, productivity, or the environment. Affluent residents build the tax base to fund the city’s progressive dreams. Most importantly, the central rationale for subsidizing housing is to be inclusive and not deny people the opportunity to live here. Artificially limiting units fundamentally undercuts the entire philosophical foundation of progressive intervention in the housing market.

* Throughout this essay, “market urbanists” do not refer to people that believe that all housing problems can be addressed through the free market. This rhetorical position seems to be more common in the imagination of renters’ advocates than among actual people in the debate.

Generated by Will Geary using an open-source data repository known as Transitland. Other cities available here. While it doesn’t seem to include Sounder, it hits just about every other regional bus system.

This is an open thread.

Automatic cameras have been approved by the state legislature to monitor speeds, discourage drivers from running red lights and penalize cars not yielding to stopped school buses. But so far, they are not authorized to keep cars out of transit-only lanes by consistently ticketing offending vehicles. (A previous STB post explored the path to using automatic cameras in Seattle.)

According to Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center, using cameras to enforce transit-only lanes is a much more difficult undertaking than it might seem and complicated also by privacy concerns. Here’s what Hallenbeck had to say, transcribed and edited for clarity and length.

LG: What are some hurdles to using automatic cameras to ticket vehicles using transit-only lanes?

MH: Okay, so first the problem comes from the geographic problem of interweaving lanes. For example, look at Highway 99, which uses what’s called Business Access Transit (BAT) lanes to solve the problem of how to make right turns across the bus lane. You don’t want people to have to drive three blocks out of the way in order to come back around. The reality is, there’s no good way to make a right turn across the (transit-only) lane and be safe. So the solution is, you let cars in the (transit-only) lane, so they can make right turns into the shopping centers. Then, of course, you want people — as they come out of those shopping centers — to make a right turn onto the street.

Once you allow that, now you’ve given permission for cars to be in that lane to make the right turns. The problem is now, is how far are you allowed to really drive in the (BAT) lane and can I (the camera) watch you long enough to actually determine if you are in fact a violator? You can’t just say car bad, car fine. Determining what is a violation makes the technology much more difficult.

Unlike with school buses (with onboard cameras), where the technological opportunity to use a camera to catch (offending drivers) is really simple. The camera points in a particular place, and it’s only on when the (bus) stop sign switch is on, and then it’s triggered by something going by.

If you wanted to use the same kind of technology for the BAT lane, you need video versus photo.

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As Metro evaluates fare simplification, one thing is clear: getting more riders to use ORCA would be a win.  ORCA speeds up boarding times and makes for more efficient bus service. Unlimited ORCA passes, such as PugetPass and the employer-provided Passport, make people more likely to use transit, by reducing the marginal cost of a trip to $0.

Yet 29% of Metro riders currently pay cash.  How might we reduce that number? Eliminating cash altogether, as London has done, is one option.  A cash surcharge, as Brent has discussed, is another.  Reducing the $5 card fee is a third, which we have long advocated for and which KC Exec Constantine is proposing as part of his overall fare-simplification scheme. Metro’s mobile ticketing app may also help.

But there’s a simple, proven way to get more ORCA cards out in the world, reducing cash payments: install more ticket vending machines (TVMs).

Currently the main ways to get an ORCA card – if you’re out and about downtown – is from a partner business (such as Bartell Drugs) or* from a TVM.  TVMs are located at Link and Sounder stations as well as a half-dozen suburban park-and-rides.

But there are no vending machines at the busy bus stops in greater downtown.  Aside from the Union Station / International District Station area there are no street-level TVMs downtown at all.   You have to know to go underground to a tunnel station (which soon won’t have any more buses) or across the street to the drug store (which entails leaving the bus stop and perhaps getting stuck in a checkout line). A vending machine at the bus stop would be a superior solution.

(Consider that just 35 TVM locations generate three times as much ORCA revenue as all 100+ retail locations).

Metro knows that vending machines are in short supply.  When the Ride Free Area was eliminated a few years ago, their mitigation report suggested adding vending machines to downtown bus stops as a time-saving measure.

According to Sound Transit, TVMs cost $58,000 each (not including maintenance).  Putting 20 of them downtown would cost just over a million dollars.  To put that in perspective, Metro estimates that buses spend over a million hours a year at the bus stop while passengers get on and off — an annual cost of $150 million.  If a couple dozen ORCA vending machines reduce dwell time by a single percentage point, they will have easily paid for themselves in the first year of use.

With ORCA2 on the horizon, it’s understandable that agencies are reluctant to invest big money in TVMs right now. And certainly street-level TVMs would be subject to substantial wear and tear.  But if One Center City is truly the all-hands-on-deck emergency that it’s being promoted as, then increasing TVM deployment ought to be part of the discussion.

Update 9:09PM: Upon re-reading the list of ORCA retail locations, it turns out you can’t even buy an ORCA card at a downtown retail establishment. Even more reason to add TVMs!

Tuesday Metro presented a list of proposed services changes slated for next March to members of King County Council’s Transportation, Economy and Environment Committee. The proposal includes adding over 50,000 hours of service and eliminating bus Route 99.

As the proposal added service to only one Eastside bus route, Councilmember Claudia Balducci criticized the proposed changes.

“The Eastside took the brunt of the hits during the downturn,” Balducci said during the committee meeting. “And we haven’t seen that service back, yet every time one of these maps comes through, I don’t see it. So where is it? Why don’t we get made whole?”

Balducci said there’s a tremendous amount of demand for bus service east of Lake Washington north and south, and “it seems like pulling teeth to get service.” Councilmember Kathy Lambert echoed Balducci’s remarks.

The proposed changes needing council approval are:

• Route 74:  Additional trips added between University District and Sand Point portion of the route to provide every 30-minute midday service on weekdays
• Route 99: Route deleted
• Route 102/101: Reassigns eight peak Route 101 trips to Route 102, which will add five northbound AM peak period trips and three southbound PM peak period trips to Route 102
• Route 153: Adding every 30-minute midday service (currently there is no midday service)
• Route 183: Adding every 30-minute midday service and 60-minute weekday night service (currently there is no night service)
• Route 930: Additional weekday hours so every 30-minute service extends later into the morning and begins earlier in the afternoon

[Read more…]

• SDOT finished its sidewalk survey. There’s a lot of work to do.
• West Seattle Transportation Coalition provides its ST3 input to Sound Transit. Most readers won’t like the conclusions: park and rides! driverless cars! tunnels everywhere!
• This 11-lane monster ($) in Bothell is an abomination.
• Uber discounts for Link riders.
• The trouble with bike helmet laws.
• The dream of per-mile vehicle taxes ($) will not die. Just raise gas taxes!
• Misplaced Limebikes are probably part fun mischief, part malice, but they’re not good for people that are hoping for better mobility options in Seattle.
• Kitsap fast ferry broken again ($).
• Two new Jarrett Walker lessons: the cost of peak service and the problem with transit as the school bus.

This is an open thread.