Our many spies have uploaded many of their opening weekend photos in our Flickr pool. Enjoy, and contribute any high-quality photos of your own. There’s also the STB photostream, which solely consists of photos taken or obtained by STB staff. To be clear, the photostream is a subset of the pool.
I think opening day was an unqualified success. Sound Transit planned for the worst, and instead, we had a best case scenario. Every train I rode was full – some packed to the brim, some just standing room only, all well used.
I have a story about ORCA I’d like to share. Yesterday we saw some problems with the ticket vending machines at a few stations – cancelling a transaction could leave the TVM ‘hung’ indefinitely. Sound Transit already had the contractor on standby in case there was a problem on opening weekend, and overnight, a patch was written by the contractor, tested, and applied to all TVMs to fix the problem. This is unheard-of turnaround, and it just goes to show what a tight ship Sound Transit is running.
I want to say thank you to all the Sound Transit staff who gave up their weekends – sometimes as long as 7am-10pm – to pull this off without a hitch. Also a huge thank you to all the volunteers who helped out – I saw a couple of regular commenters handing out literature and answering questions. I have never seen ST staff smile so much before.
And thank you to the people who took 92,000 rides. We’ll have to wait for University Link before we see that many again!
It still hasn’t sunk in yet. Seattle finally has mass transit.
Just like the streetcars of a generation ago this system will forever shape Seattle’s urban form. It will connect the region like it has never been before. Unlike the streetcars of the past I feel confident in saying that this system will never get ripped out. Just like the New York subway or the London Underground, LINK will over the next few decades become an inseparable element of the city.
Lets not fool ourselves, there is lots of work to be done. University LINK is just getting underway and ST2 will be built out over the next 15 years. Development near stations has yet to occur, leaving the station areas feeling desolate and empty. It will be interesting to watch the neighborhood plan updates. In many ways while yesterday was the end to what so many people have been working towards for longer than I have been alive, it is the beginning of so much more.
I know that all of us at STB learned a lot yesterday. Hands down Beacon Hill was our favorite station. The artwork at the station was great and the station entrance was pleasant and pedestrian scaled. I love the seating and bamboo. Actually, the artwork all along the line was amazing. The only other system that I know with comparable public artwork is Stockholm’s Tunnelbana. The artwork transform the stations from a simply utilitarian places that you pass through, to a place that constantly surprises. This really shows why 1% for art is important.
What a weekend. We won’t have anything like this for years to come.
ST’s twitter feed is reporting that the July 18 ridership figures have been updated to 51,000.
Meanwhile, the preliminary 4 pm Sunday count is 29,800, putting us at over 80,000 with two hours left to go.
Also, they’re reporting that the last roundtrip train leaves each end at 4:47pm tonight. That means the last train in each direction should be 5:20-ish from the endpoints.
The shuttle buses will continue to run.
UPDATE: Final ridership numbers this weekend are 92,000!
We often talk about Seattle’s inability to act – we spend a long time talking, we can’t agree on the best course of action, an infrastructure project in one part of the city often elicits a “what does it do for me?” attitude from others. I think this happens for two reasons.
First, we’re very educated. Seattle consistently ranks near the top of the list, just over half of over-25s in the city have bachelor’s degrees. We all have our own ideas for how things should be done, and enough confidence in our own abilities to be a little dangerous.
Second, though, it’s horribly difficult to get around. Live around 25th in Ravenna, want to go to Ballard? You’ll be sitting in the same traffic as everyone coming from the U-district, and once you’re there, good luck finding parking. The bus? Sure, the 71 runs pretty often, and if you stand at the corner of 65th you can watch both ways for a 372 or 68, but then you have to transfer to the agonizingly slow 44. And this is probably one of the easier neighborhood to neighborhood trips in the city – try getting to the Madison Valley from anywhere north of the ship canal at rush hour.
It seems like a nitpicky, minor barrier to travel, but it does significantly affect where people are willing to spend their time – and what neighborhoods they’re exposed to. I think a lot of the city simply isn’t aware of what’s over the next hill because they never really have a reason to go there. We often don’t know about big chunks of our own city. This came through in a recent comment from Jason:
“Favorite quote of the day (from an older woman who clearly doesn’t spend much time in the city proper): ‘Oooooh, so THIS is where SoDo is! I always wondered.'”
This is part of why I really don’t mind street level rail, and it’s one of the things that excites me most about Link. On Monday, people commuting into Seattle are going to see places they’ve never been before, and a bunch of them are going to think “I should come check this out next weekend”. Nobody driving up I-5 is thinking “Gosh, SoDo looks really fun, I should come back there!”
This will take time. A lot of time. The approach to Othello Station from the south, for instance, is desolate – but that will start changing with the coming development I mentioned yesterday, and the north end of the station already has quite a bit of cool stuff (including Tammy’s Bakery, a fantastic Vietnamese bakery). When people find these businesses, they will come back, they will talk about that neighborhood, and a section of Seattle that’s been largely ignored will start being part of the city again.
I think we’re seeing the beginning of Seattle’s reintegration as a single city. It will take more infrastructure, of course, but the Valley is a fantastic place to start.
With things shut down for the night, Sound Transit estimates that total ridership was 45,000. We’ll see how tomorrow affects the full weekend figure.
Remember that Link runs 10am-6pm tomorrow.
I’m sitting here after a lot of rides, letting my feet rest and thinking about all we’ve seen.
A few comments on the trips taken today: Tukwila had serious crowds. Sure, not three or four hour waits, but there was a steady wait of 20-30 minutes (some 3-400 people) through most of the day. I really like the station – the bus bays under the platform will allow for easy transfers, and I think several adjacent properties look like they could become transit oriented development.
Othello had a great little festival – there were breakdancers and live music, some local artists selling their creations, the Undriver’s License folks and Transportation Choices Coalition were there. The Station at Othello Park also had a presence – essentially the first TOD for Central Link, a six story project with about 20,000 square feet of retail and some 350 apartments will break ground shortly on the southeast corner of the intersection. The developer also wants to build something similar in the space to the northeast of the station.
Columbia City has some fantastic public space on the corners just to the east of the platform – it does feel like Sound Transit helped the city out a lot, creating plaza space that we’re going to be very thankful for in the next few decades.
Mount Baker is cool space, but definitely needs a coffee stand and a newsstand. I hope the neighborhood uses the station for gatherings, but there’s a dearth of seating. There’s also a huge TOD opportunity around this station.
I was worried that Beacon Hill would take up too much space, wasting land that could be used for density later, but I think they’ve done a good job here too. It looks like the space just to the south of the main station could be a cafe or restaurant with seating spilling over onto the station plaza. All we need is to get rid of the parking lot across the street…
I’ve taken a lot of photos, and I’ll be doing a photo post or two later on tonight when I get them off the camera.
One last note: the spoilsports trying to downplay ridership are not to be believed. Every single train I’ve been on in the last eight hours has been standing room only. If anything, I suspect Sound Transit is undercounting, given how overwhelmed the people with the counters have looked.
All our multimedia people are still out on the trains, but here’s what’s out there right now:
My impression: a well-run event. It was almost the perfect sweet spot for someone looking to ride: packed trains, but modest waits. ST’s hiring of performers to entertain lined-up riders was a nice touch.
As of 3pm, the ridership total is 30,500. Waits are consistently 15-30 minutes.
The noon total was 13,000. The STB predict-o-tron says 50,000 the first day.
Follow us on twitter @seatransitblog all day.
Eric, Bejan, Martin and I are riding Link all day! I started at Westlake, then met Bejan and Eric at Beacon Hill to check out the amazing public art. The deep sea creatures in the stations are beautiful, and be sure to have a look at the bubbles in the wall across from the elevator! You can’t miss them. Surface level at Beacon Hill is also nice, the station plaza has wonderful bamboo and some seating.
We had lunch at the Columbia City Ale House (remember the meetups we’ve had there?) and we’re heading back out to zoom down to Tukwila and see some of the other stations.
We also tried out the ticket vending machines. While Link is free this weekend, I was still able to add money easily to my ORCA, and you can buy them at TVMs as well!
Be sure to come out today! The lines aren’t bad, everyone seems to be loving the train, and you’ll probably run into someone you know! We’ll post more later.
There are two of these, actually. About half an hour ago, Mayor Nickels’ train started at Westlake, and Mayor Jim Haggerton of Tukwila’s train started there. The two trains met at Mount Baker station for the opening ceremonies. We’ve got a short clip of Haggerton’s train headed across the Duwamish:
Update: Here’s Dave Ross introducing the mayors at Mount Baker Station. “Seattle has a working light rail system!”
Edit: Apparently, it may be a few minutes before these videos are “processed”.
Good morning everybody!
Apparently, there’s some kind of train thing happening today.
Last night I went on the very last preview ride with Oran. Some of Seattle’s original transit supporters were present – Jim Ellis and Aubrey Davis both rode to Tukwila. This was also the first time I’ve seen state legislators on board – Representative Scott White (46th LD) was pretty pumped, although it’ll be some ten years before stations open in his district. Also from the 46th, Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez-Kenney seemed to enjoy the ride.
I have to say, the bike rack issues reported by the Stranger don’t seem so bad. The bicycle in question was that of City Council candidate and Sierra Clubber Mike O’Brien – a tall guy with a big bike. Most bikes aren’t going to stick out into the aisle nearly as much as his did, and cyclists will learn to hold onto their bikes when they’re on the hangers. There is a difference between these hangers and those on the MAX in Portland – their racks allow bikes to hang parallel to the direction of the train’s movement, so they do swing less. Perhaps when we get more trains, we can design this differently.
We’ll see you all on the train today!
If you haven’t checked recently, our Twitter feed has been relaunched, so that it’s no longer just an announcement of each post on the blog. Today, especially, it’ll be hopping.
********
Today is for Jim Ellis, who’s been fighting for this day longer than anyone else.
It’s for all the tourists who have shown up at the airport and wondered where the train was.
It’s for baseball fans who found the bus schedule useless in post-game congestion.
It’s for anyone who’s sat on the 7, 36, or 42, slogging up the Rainier Valley.
It’s for ST CEO Joni Earl, who saved this train from oblivion.
It’s for Patty Murray, Greg Nickels, Ron Sims, and all the other politicians that made it happen.
It’s for anyone with a stroller or wheelchair that had to struggle with the bus lift.
It’s for revelers who’ve had to leave something early because that’s when the last bus left.
It’s for millions of Puget Sound voters who finally did the right thing.
It’s for my son and Andrew’s daughter, who will always have a fast, safe, and reliable way to get around.
Commenter Lloyd has a few others who deserve recognition:
Former Capitol Hill pharmacist and City Council Member George Benson would have loved being with us – I’ll never for get his ear-to ear grin the day the Waterfront Streetcar opened lo these decades ago.
Less well known, but equally important would be former postman, historian and photographer Warren Wing who, in about a half dozen books published in the 1980s and 1990s, reminded us in text and photographs of the trains, streetcars and rights of way we lost from the 1930s through the 1970s. I last saw him at the opening of the Kent Sounder station in 2001 – he looked as proud as could be that local passenger trains were again serving the route of his beloved Seattle to Tacoma Interurban, albeit on a slightly different route and reduced timetable.
Enjoy the ride, George and Warren!
and Kaleci:
Another person to note would be Walter Shannon, the last surviving motorman on the Everett-Seattle Interurban. It was a shame that he recently passed and couldn’t be here. I remember meeting him at Sounder’s first day on the North Line.
I think he would have been one of the happiest people on earth this weekend.
RIP, guys.
Add your dedications in the comments.
Two nice pieces of reporting from the Stranger today:
The Link bike rack doesn’t appear to work so well in practice:
They really did seem like the first bikes that had ever been hung there: Whoever had designed them had evidently never tried putting a bike in it. The handlebars jutted so far into the aisle it was difficult getting around them, and as soon as the train started moving they swung dangerously at standing passengers. Several of the guys who had designed the visual displays in all the stations were standing nearby talking, and one of them was preoccupied by the poorly designed bike rack and kept talking about how he would reconfigure it. “I think you have to lose one of those seats,” he said, pointing to a pair of seats across the aisle from the rack.
Dominic Holden reports Metro is not collecting as many 5 million fares a year (out of 400 million rides), but he isn’t all that concerned about it. The figure is highly questionable, as many commenters on Slog have pointed out.
Beacon Hill Blog has a great tour of the Columbia City neighborhood being served by Link light rail starting in sixteen hours. They also have tours up of the Othello station, Rainer Beach station, and the Tukwila station.
We all heard about the c-curb madness. A few weeks back. (Our very own Oran has a great photo gallery on Flickr of the intersection in question. It’s worth a view.)
And it sank in a little bit: Light rail means more than some temporary changes and construction delays, it means an altering of our city.
Mostly this alteration is a good thing: Less emissions, less crowded buses, more options. But in other cases, change can be frustrating. Sometimes you lose free parking opportunities in another neighborhood from your own. Sometimes you get wires in the way of your view. Sometimes you can’t make a left turn into a gas station. And, you know, any change will end up frustrating at least one person used to the time before.
My neighborhood, Capitol Hill, has seen its own share of changes because of light rail. But on the other end of it, once we’re used to these changes and annoyances and benefits and efficiencies, the city is going to be better off. Light rail opens in seventeen hours and twenty minutes.
by GREG NICKELS, Mayor of Seattle and Chair of the Sound Transit Board
This is the last installment in my recollections leading up to the opening of Sound Transit’s first Light Rail line tomorrow. In six previous installments I have reflected on the highs and lows of the twenty-one years that I have been involved in this epic journey.
In many ways, the ground breaking on November 8, 2003 ended the political debate over whether mass transit would serve Seattle (though ST 2 engendered a vigorous debate on whether it should be extended beyond Sound Move).
In my first month as Seattle Mayor I gathered all the City staff working on the project and let them know our job was to team with Sound Transit to make sure the system got built — as promised to the voters. This was a relief to many staff who really did not know whether the previous administration supported or opposed building the project.
Once we broke ground, I enjoyed visiting the construction impacted neighborhoods twice a month and talking with the property owners, shopkeepers and residents; trying to anticipate, prevent and solve problems. In doing this I was taking a page from Seattle City Councilmember George Benson’s work during the construction of the Downtown Seattle transit Tunnel in the 1980s.
Like grief, dealing with a huge project in your neighborhood is dealt with in distinct stages. Fear, anticipation, resignation, relief and excitement among them. Seventy-five percent of the small businesses along the MLK portion of the route at the start of construction are still there – I’m proud of that. The street has been transformed, as has the neighborhood. And the presence of Light Rail will connect the people of the Rainier Valley neighborhood to lots of new and exciting job and educational opportunities – just a short train ride away.
Columbia City is approaching this opportunity most creatively, going so far as to have pedicabs available to whisk people from the station to their historic business district nearby where Light Rail riders can enjoy great restaurants, a farmer’s market and theater.
This first line will be warmly embraced, especially when the thirteenth station – SeaTac Airport, opens late this year. But it is only the beginning. The next line, north from downtown to the University of Washington, received its $813 million Full Funding Grant Agreement from the Federal Transit Administration in December and has already broken ground. Those two underground stations on Capitol Hill and at Husky Stadium will basically mark the completion of Sound Move and will open in 2016.
After the defeat of the infamous doomed shotgun marriage of Roads and Transit in 2007, there was little political appetite to explore a transit ballot for 2008. Given our experience in 1996 (and $4/gallon gasoline), I was convinced that the 2008 Presidential ballot was the right one for light rail. In addition I believed that the Legislature would take away the region’s ability to place transit on any future ballot (as they had stopped Sound Transit in 2006) and take the taxing authority for highways. Fortunately there was a core group of ST Board members willing to engage the issue and we went to work. Ultimately on July 24th all but two boardmembers agreed upon a plan and it went on the ballot.
Sound Transit 2 passed with a 57.02% yes vote on November 4, 2008 – 60.5% in King, 54.21% in Snohomish and 49.08% in Pierce County. Light Rail will expand north from the University to Northgate and on out to Lynnwood, south of the airport to Federal Way and east across Lake Washington to Bellevue and out to Redmond. These projects will be complete in 15 years. I have no illusions that there will be no further challenges in building such an extensive set of projects (such as the current economic crisis) – there is a lot of work ahead! But when complete, 70% of the residences and 85% of the jobs in Metro Seattle will be within an easy bus ride, bike ride or walk of a rail station. With a capacity of one million passengers a day, it will transform how we get around.
I’ve wondered — how often does someone get to see through such a journey in their career? From the 1988 advisory ballot through passage of ST 2 and opening the initial line it has been an amazing adventure. While certainly not easy (1995-96 and 2000-01 come to mind!), it has been an incredible honor to work with the elected officials on the ST Board, the staff (Joni Earl for instance) and particularly the interested citizens (Mona Lee and Dick Burkhart come to mind) who have engaged, often passionately in this saga. I do wish the voters had approved the Forward Thrust plan in 1968, but what a ride my generation would have missed! For someone who wants to make a difference in people’s lives it has been the chance of a lifetime.
The author is the mayor of Seattle.
Less than 48 hours!
Come here for all your opening day coverage! Saturday, we’ll be massively ramping up our post frequency. Follow us here; better yet, try twitter, where it’ll be even more excessive. The whole staff will be roaming around, posting and tweeting; we welcome your photos in the Flickr pool.
And oh, so much news:
I’ve decided, provisionally, to stop whining about the perceived editorial slant of the Times. Every editorial desk has its own biases, including STB’s, and there’s no reason to get particularly worked up about the fact that theirs is substantially different from mine.
However, there are two really major facts missing in Sonia Krishnan’s really weak piece about the lack of park-and-rides around light rail, facts that could have been included with a little more research, or, just reading this blog:
First, for all the poor souls who have no choice but to drive to light rail, there are scattered pay lots in the Valley. In my part-time effort I’ve identified two: one near Beacon Hill (with very restricted hours), and one 3 or 4 blocks from Columbia City. At $3/day, along with fares it would cost you 7 bucks a day to go downtown, which beats driving there. Through the magic of the market, this is provided at no cost to the taxpayer. Of course, light rail opponents aren’t interested in the system’s cost when they’re bashing it for not including their pet feature or routing.
Secondly, this has to be about the weakest unchallenged complaint of the year:
With her Metro bus stop in flux, she said, she’ll probably end up driving to work.
Hunter said she’d be happy to take the Metro bus to the station, but it’s still unclear how her route might change because of light rail.
Her Metro bus stop is in flux! Why, every morning, it randomly moves about as if by magic!
It is factually incorrect to state that the route change is “unclear”; King County has decided on the change and publicized it. If Ms. Hunter is “unclear” how her route might change, she might have paid a little bit of attention to the three mailers that Metro sent to everyone in the Valley, or come to an open house, or seen any of the local ads, or occasionally checked the Metro website, or even now gone here. And it isn’t as if the September 19 service change won’t get more publicity in the Southeast than usual.
I’m being a little harsh on Ms. Hunter here: people are remarkably ignorant of developments that affect them greatly, and should have the right to be. But for a local reporter who ostensibly “covers” transportation to not be aware of this — or not bother to point it out — is pretty contemptible. It would be trivial to check if bus changes would affect Ms. Hunter’s commute, but Ms. Krishnan declined to do so.
