West Seattle RapidRide

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

I concentrated my fire on Eastside RapidRide last month, largely because I don’t know anything about West Seattle. However, at least one STB commenter attended the West Seattle open house and came away unimpressed.

Look, I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m opposed to bus service. I take the bus every day and usually have a pretty pleasant experience. I was broadly supportive of Snohomish County’s Swift plan because it seems to improve service while being creative with funding sources, rather than sucking the oxygen out of light rail.

However, the key to good rapid transit is dedicated right-of-way. Failing that, restricted right-of-way (like an HOV lane) is a reasonable alternative. When a ballot measure promises BRT, and includes a large chunk of funding that could have been used to rapid transit like rail, I expect at least one of the above. In many cases, RapidRide provides neither.

Pontoons

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Looks like the plan to save money by building smaller, light-rail-incompatible pontoons for the new 520 bridge has been scrapped. Instead, we’re goign to save money by building the pontoons now, before the design for the rest of the bridge is complete:

Gov. Chris Gregoire last month commended WSDOT’s Early Pontoon Construction Project, part of a $4 billion fiscal plan for the bridge, citing emergency preparedness, and an estimated $400 million savings from reduced pontoon size and lower inflation-related construction costs.

The plan calls for completion of the pontoons by 2013. A bridge replacement is not expected before 2018.

Engineers are designing pontoons as long as 360 feet — the length of a football field — and strong enough to support a state-mandated, six-lane freeway — two general-purpose and one HOV lanes each way — with potential capacity for future light rail.

Sounds good to me. Not unlike the Viaduct solution: agree on what we agree on, and kick the can down the road on the rest.

ST Visioning

Posted on by Adam Bejan Parast

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I wasn’t able to attend the ST workshop but I did look through the pdf that STB has on his page (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2008/01/31/2004157186.pdf). I wasn’t really surprised by most of it. There was one glaring omission though.

In ST2 there was money to do a study for HCT from the UW to Ballard via NE45th. I don’t see anything about that. Everyone know that getting East/West in this city is a nightmare and ST and Metro really need to address this. I think that they should have at least 3 high quality E/W BRT routes that help people get from one side of the city to the other and allow them to transfer from LINK to RapidRide or other local service. If we aren’t going to have light rail for a while we have got to have a good BRT network.

(Full size http://students.washington.edu/adambp/mytake.jpg)

I have done a quick little overlay (see above) of what this would look like on their map. All of these routes exist so service hours could be taken from those routes. Also with LINK some current bus service can be redistributed to help pay for this. Possibly on busy streets like denny the buses could go a block or two north and use bus only streets.