Last year I criticized Metro for not letting anyone know that boating Opening Day was going to create massive disruption to buses in the Montlake area.
That makes it gratifying to see that routes like the 48 now have the reroute listed under their alert page. To further help things, they’re adding a shuttle every 20 minutes to get people from Campus Pkwy (where the 43 and 48 will cross the canal) to the University Hospital area.
Bravo Metro! In a short time your new rider alert system has made it much easier to find out about service disruptions. In fact, it’s now Sound Transit that takes the hits for absent or uselessly generic information.
If you’re wondering why Third Avenue has been under construction recently, we asked SDOT about the work and they told us that the corridor is receiving some great bus and pedestrian improvements.
The Third Avenue/Belltown Transit Priority Corridor Improvements Project is located on Third Avenue between Cedar Street and Virginia Street. The project will create more attractive sidewalks and dedicated passenger waiting areas, while improving bus travel times in the corridor.
Specific Improvements to the Third Avenue/Belltown Corridor Include:
• Building concrete bus bulb/curb and sidewalk extensions to eliminate buses having to pull in and out of traffic at passenger loading zones.
• Making improvements to street lighting
• Building new curb ramps
• Installing new bike racks
We asked Bill Bryant, the Transit Program Lead at SDOT for more information on bus bulbs and he sent a detailed reply.
“‘In-lane’ bus stops prevent bus delays caused by the need for buses to swerve into and out of the parking lane to service bus stops. In-lane bus stops exist in many places in Seattle, primarily where no parking lane exists,” Bryant told us. “Where a parking lane exists, a bus bulb is often the best answer.”
Bus bulbs seem to be popping up all over the city recently, with more to come. “Locations exist on University Way, Alaskan Way, N. 45th St, Market St, Pine St, and others. SDOT is currently constructing new bulbs at the six Third Ave stops in Belltown, and will soon begin construction of a number of bulbs along Route 7 on Jackson St and Rainier Ave. Additional bus bulbs are in design as part of SDOT’s Market/45th (Route 44) transit corridor project.”
Crystal Mountain has began installing a $5.3M gondola to bring more skiiers up to the top of its mountain. With 18 cars it will bring 450 people up an hour, and has the capacity to add another 18 cars. The total run is around 8,000 feet and will take a bit under 10 minutes.
If Crystal (and Portland, for that matter) can do this, why can’t Seattle? We’re full of hills that are hard to access. Take a look at my proposed Galer Ski Lift route going up from Lake Union to upper Queen Anne. This would be under 500 feet, so travel at 800 feet/minute would take less than a minute. Currently it takes around half an hour to make this trip by bus. Further, Queen Anne would then connect directly to the SLU Streetcar* and therefore downtown.
Of course the Queen Anne Gondola would be much smaller than Crystal’s system. It would be less than a 10th as long, would require very few towers, we could downsize the equipment and settle for a 2-3 minute travel time, and you don’t have to lug all of this equipment high in the hills – just truck it in from the port. But even if it costs close to the $5.3M, that’s a tenth the cost of our South Lake Union Streetcar. What we spend in capital costs may pay back in bus service hours, since this would replace quite a few commutes. Plus we can pay for at least part of it with a LID, since this will surely increase sales at QA’s shops and will be a great tourist attraction.
It’s frustrating that it takes a half an hour to get downtown via bus from QA despite being just 2 miles away (that’s an average of 4 miles an hour), which is why I thought up this route. Are there any other locations where this might work (perhaps West Seattle)?
*there’s a significant walk now, but it’s likely it will eventually continue up Westlake
"New Portage Bay Bridge looking east," image from WSDOT.
Update @ 2:55 pm: WSDOT has posted a web page detailing the changes.
Original Post: The Seattle Times has the scoop on changes to new SR-520 west approach to mollify concerns that the Seattle City Council expressed in a letter earlier this month. One change that Mayor McGinn proposed to afford the ability for light rail in the future is included as well. Some of the proposed changes are:
• A direct ramp from the Washington Park Arboretum to eastbound 520 would be dropped, and other approaches could be limited to peak hours only, said Clibborn. These moves are meant to reduce Arboretum traffic and are more dramatic than what City Council members requested.
City Councilmember Mike O’Brien, as well as Paige Miller, executive director of the Arboretum Foundation, have suggested extra tolls on cars that use the Arboretum to reach the floating bridge and other moves to calm traffic.
• The section across Portage Bay, from the Montlake Interchange to Interstate 5, would be narrower and perhaps have a 45-mph speed limit, Clibborn said, to reduce noise and provide “more of a boulevard feel.” Earlier, the state Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed a standard highway segment, with a new seventh lane for merges and exits.
• A second drawbridge would be included across Montlake Cut. King County Metro Transit needs those extra lanes to improve bus connections, but a plan for better transit flow has yet to be worked out, Eddy said. Seattle leaders also have called for room for new bike and pedestrian paths.
• An open-air gap would exist between new westbound and eastbound lanes at Foster Island, a change also promoted by Mayor Mike McGinn. If light rail is added someday, trains would exit from the middle and head directly toward the stadium station, presumably on a new Union Bay bridge.
We need to see more details on the changes to get a good idea of things, and we’d like to see a “better transit flow” plan sooner rather than later. Overall, though, the city council is likely to respond positively to these changes.
The gap described in the last bullet point would make future rail more viable if region eventually wants it. Even though I’m not supportive of light rail across 520 because bus service would do a better job for the foreseeable future, I’d support changes like the gap, to hedge my analysis, if the costs were low enough. WSDOT apparently feels the costs of that particular change are low enough to include without much prodding. (I should note that our coolness on light rail over the new span is not the straw man that “it isn’t in the plans” but rather that there is no concrete destination in the Eastside suburbia to run another light rail line toward, with Bellevue and Overlake already being served by East Link. There are arguments of merit, not of process.)
Michael Ennis, of the right-wing Washington Policy Center, has a post extolling the virtues of vanpooling. Although there are plenty of distortions in the piece, I actually agree with one of its points, which is that vanpools are a cost-effective solution to moving people on work trips.
Aside from that, though, his argument seems to be the following:
People driving by themselves is awesome, since people choose it over other options.
Vanpools are a cheap way to move people to and from work.
One of the tensions with High Speed Rail is balancing the desire for stops among communities along the route with the desire to keep the train moving to its destination. This resolves that tension.
And they might set the thing on fire, to curb the environmental impact. I wonder if this kind of thing was anywhere in the spreadsheet WSDOT used to determine how many lanes 520 needs, or whether we can get along without a new viaduct.
Yesterday was the mailing deadline for an all-mail election in Whatcom County to raise the sales tax by 0.2%, in order to avoid a similar story of deep cuts to transit service.
Early returns indicate it is losing by 247 votes, or 0.58%. You can follow this story as it develops by checking out Jared Paben’s Traffic blog at the Bellingham Herald. Election results from the source are available here.
I don’t know enough about the jurisdictions to speculate on why Walla Walla would have a similar measure win by 50 points, but it would be so close here. I don’t mean to suggest the areas are at all similar, but if anything I’d expect Walla Walla to be more conservative.
Streetsblog DC reports that the federal TIGER II grants will look at land use, hopefully encouraging transportation projects to be built with larger goals in mind:
Perhaps the biggest news in today’s announcement was the U.S. DOT’s intention to marry its decision-making on the new TIGER-esque grants with the process for allocating $40 million in land-use aid at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). If the two agencies can sustain that goal past the period of public comment on the new grants that begins this week, their move would take the cooperative ethos that has defined the Obama administration’s sustainable communities effort to the next level.
In its preliminary TIGER II guidance, published in today’s Federal Register, the U.S. DOT wrote that officially linking its grant decision-making with HUD’s would ideally “encourage and reward more holistic planning efforts and result in better projects being built with federal dollars” by recognizing the inextricable connection between transportation and local planning.
The U.S. DOT’s criteria for choosing TIGER II winners differ in several notable respects from those for the original program. At least $140 million of the new grants are required to go to rural areas, and localities selected to receive federal funding would need to provide a 20 percent match — a requirement that had been waived for the original TIGER competition in view of the economic downturn.
TIGER grants are competitively-awarded transportation grants that pit highways against transit projects, and roads against bike projects, and award based on a project’s merits rather than formula funding. $1.5 billion worth of TIGER grants were included in Obama’s stimulus package that passed early in his administration. (The Transport Politic has a great entry on this policy as well.)
A new jobs bill including yet another round of TIGER grants is on “life-support” according to WSDOT’s federal funding blog.
