1) 125 of the 385 spaces at the Burien Transit Center will be closed to allow some construction there. I understand they’re putting in new bays. There’s alternate parking all over the place, as listed where I linked.

2) Sound Transit has new Google Maps mashup of Central LINK, which is a nice companion to the Google Maps tour that Ben did a while back. Unfortunately, the Convention Place Station is incorrectly depicted as a stop, and the feedback link is busted.

Update: The Convention Place mistake is fixed.

18 Replies to “In Other News…”

  1. I pray they use some kind of Google Maps mashup for arrival details next year. NextBus is more busted than their feedback link.

      1. Yes, but NextBus is trying so hard to push into the market that I’d imagine that the “zOMG NEXT BIG LIGHT RAIL OPENING” will be a nice catch for them.

        I’d like them to back off or stop sucking. One of the two.

        1. I never found NextBus to be very user friendly. The integration between the Seattle Streetcar site and nextbus is really poor. It’s basically a frame showing nextbus’s sucky site. If I were a transit agency, I’d like to have full control over how the information is presented.

          Unlike Metro’s MyBus tracker, nextbus’s arrival information is not available in an XML feed, making it difficult for someone to get data to use in an application. Metro should also release their Google Transit feed to the public for developers. This warrants a whole topic for itself.

    2. The stations will have electronic signs announcing time till the next arrival. No need for any internet stuff.

      1. Yes, I know it will have signs, but in Portland I make heavy use of the online countdown which is something I’d like here. Check next arrivals online then run out the door just in time. No need to stand around for 5-10 minutes off-peak.

        1. Well hopefully the LR will be running often enough that it isn’t necessary to see when the next train will be. I don’t check the BART schedules (living this summer in SF) because I only need to take it in the city and there are myriad trains for most hours of the day.

          It would be nice, however, to have a good website in order to check on simple things, like when the last train is coming, or holiday schedules, or things like that. The website probably would be really helpful for first time riders, especially the realization that they don’t need to plan their whole trip before they leave the house, since the train runs every five or ten minutes or so.

          Also, it seems to me that the google map that Sound Transit has made has been corrected.

        2. Yeah, I called about the convention place station on the map. The Sound Transit staff are almost universally friendly. :)

          I’d love there to be “next train” times on the website. I’m also going to be interested in getting the subway stops a street-level “next train” indicator, but there could be issues with people running down the stairs that make that a bad idea.

  2. We can’t even get our website to tell us all the stops a bus makes, or a useful map that shows the exact road and stops it makes.

    1. I wonder if you guys could start just embedding google transit code? I bet they’d love it.

    2. Sound Transit does list all the stops on a route and shows them on the route map, both on the website and in the book.

  3. A few months ago, I put together some Google maps of a bunch of Sound Transit rail. You can see them
    here.

  4. It’s worth noting that none of the alternate P&Rs listed for Burien are anywhere near the existing Burien P&R except the Burien municipal lot. Burien P&R is already past capacity so this is going to suck for P&R users and bus riders in Burien who don’t have bus access to Burien Transit Center. This makes it all the more disappointing that there isn’t money for station access in Burien in the proposed ST2.

    1. Not to mention the lack of feeder buses around Burien. There’s a couple, but not enough. I visit family in Normandy Park from time to time, but with only two major north-south routes (131/132)– each of which only comes once an hour — it’d be nice to have a feeder to the P&R so I could take a faster bus downtown (120?).

      1. What a great place to move service hours currently on the 7, 42, 194, 71, 72, 73… :)

        1. @Ben-
          Honestly, I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm or not…it’s hard to tell on the net… ;-)

        2. It’s serious. Link is going to replace tons of service hours, and those hours are going to go to serve currently underserved routes.

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