Reading the tea leaves

Daimajin did some excellent reporting by publishing the presentation from the Sound Transit workshop. Here are some observations from thinking about it for a few days.

First of all: this is basically ST thinking out loud, so let’s not get too worked up about the details. Still, it’s good to see which way they’re thinking.

I like the plan. It ain’t 50 miles of light rail, but given the political constraints it’s actually a bit better than I expected.

Light Rail

On the light rail front, the plan meets this blogger’s twin priorities of getting to Northgate and Bellevue, throwing in the extension to Star Lake (and maybe Overlake) too.

As for the Tacoma and Everett systems: I can’t imagine that the ridership is huge, but I’m fine with it for two reasons. First, they’re between a rock and a hard place: the criticism of Prop. 1 was that it was “too big” although it just barely got to all three counties. At the same time, they can’t leave themselves open to the accusation that they’re sending “all the money to Seattle”. Secondly, at least the tracks are generally pieces of the long range plan. I can’t think of any reason to go to Fife accept that it eases the job of eventually connecting the two systems together.

Sounder

On the South line, more trains and more parking. Meh, it’s good, but pretty obvious.

On the north line, I’m liking the new stops, and Broad Street in particular. The Ballard station does something for disgruntled voters in that area, and Broad Street is critical to picking up commuters to growing job centers in Belltown and South Lake Union.

Buses

I found this part really intriguing (no, really!). I’ve been working on a post about how LINK will affect bus service, and this really started the wheels turning.

It would appear, assuming they were careful with the way the diagrams were drawn, that the general operational concept will be that express buses terminate at outer light rail stations and dictate a transfer to get downtown. The line from Lakewood and Tacoma seems to terminate at Tukwila (except during peak hours); the Snohomish and Lake City lines at Northgate; and Eastside lines at UW or Mercer Island.

In general, I support this approach. The traffic on each of these corridors is going to get worse and worse, while rail commute times remain more or less constant. Introducing a transfer, while kind of annoying, will both free up bus assets and probably save time for commuters.

[Aside: I’ve also been toying with the idea that it might make sense to route buses deeper into the city, but directed to locations not well served by light rail. For instance, the 545 from Overlake could drop downtown-bound passengers off at Husky Stadium (faster for them anyway), and then continue on to SLU/Queen Anne, or Ballard, both of which it’ll be somewhat inconvenient to get to from Link, SLUTs nonwithstanding. However, that’s nothing but pure speculation, unencumbered by facts, on my part.]

The bus service is listed here as BRT, which as we’ve discussed ad nauseum can mean a lot of things. To me, it embodies two key attributes: dedicated (or at least restricted) right-of-way, and extremely frequent service. The current ST Express makes a decent effort of the former, and pretty much gives up on the latter except on the 545, 550, and 590.

I see a ton of direct access ramps here, and that’s a big deal for the ROW issue. But is ST considering increasing the frequency on all its routes by a factor of 3 or more?