This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
As South Lake Union fills up, so does the streetcar.
Speaking of ridership — ORCA’s now serving 200,000 riders a day. That’s half of Metro’s 400,000 daily boardings. Of course, not all ORCA holders use Metro, but it puts it in perspective. Not bad, considering institutions like UW still haven’t adopted it (but will soon).
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Kudos to the Bellevue City Council and Sound Transit for agreeing to a compromise alignment for East Link that brings the stops close to people, not pavement.
I still think we’re in for a bit of a show when the vast majority of folks who live along Bellevue Way south of Downtown (the ones who don’t get too involved in this stuff) realize what might getting built in their neighborhood (just like the residents of Montlake or the Rainier Valley), but still… onward to Redmond!
For anyone looking to travel on Link this weekend, be prepared for spottier service as track maintenance will reduce trains to single-track running between SODO and Columbia City stations. Sound Transit is finishing the installation of switch heaters near the OMF (Operations and Maintenance Facility). The heaters will allow switches to be fully operational when snow and ice bring pandemonium during the winter months.
Service will be reduced from normal 10-15 minute headways to 20-30 minute headways. Single-track running also means that only one platform will be used for both northbound and southbound trains at Mt. Baker and Beacon Hill stations. ST will have signage and staff on hand to direct riders. The service disruptions are expected to last from 10PM tonight through 5AM Monday morning.
The philosophy behind the plans for Link stations in the Rainier Valley was that people would take “alternate” transportation — buses, bikes, and feet — to get to the train. A couple of weeks ago, we looked how the bus side of that plan was working out. Today, walking and biking:
Walking
Sound Transit invested a lot in improving sidewalks, along MLK in particular. However, MLK is a relatively undeveloped, low-density corridor by Seattle standards, and the density was further reduced by eminent-domain seizures for construction staging areas. The walkshed, measured in people, is simply not that large. West of the line, the steep and heavily wooded side of Beacon Hill further restricts the accessible area.
If walk-up ridership is to significantly improve, the most important thing is to upzone and aggressively encourage dense development, although sidewalk improvements are urgent in the places where they are needed.
Bicycling
Sound Transit was sure to put bicycle racks at each station, and more importantly trains are well designed to accommodate bikes. However, the failure to put any sort of bike infrastructure on MLK itself — just rebuilt for the train — is a huge failing. A quick glance at the latest Seattle Bicycling Guide Map (pdf) shows the pitiful bike infrastructure around most stations.
Beacon Hill is served by sharrows, and Rainier Beach has an actual bike lane (thick blue) and bike trail (green) approaching it. For the other three Valley stations, there are oh-so-inviting “unmarked, un-signed connectors” (yellow lines) in the rough vicinity of the station. There isn’t even a signed bicycle route (dotted black line) that takes you directly to any of the five stations in the Southeast.
Building along the relatively sparse MLK corridor, with little to no parking, was a conscious decision to trade lots of ridership now for the promise of a more development, and therefore, more ridership, in the future. While that decision is defensible, it makes it all the more imperative that the City make minor improvements in pedestrian and bike access, as well as doing whatever is necessary to bring about the development that was the purpose of the routing in the first place.
The Sound Transit Board unanimously moved to modify the preferred alternative for the East Link project as reported yesterday. B2 modified (112th Ave SE) and C9T (downtown tunnel) are now selected as the preferred alternative for the South Bellevue and Downtown Bellevue segments for East Link.
The Board also adopted a new fare policy and ST Express bus and Link light rail fare changes.
[Update from Sherwin:] Here is a press release (PDF) from ST that breaks down the meeting and motion.
Metro is putting another bus on a stop diet. Route 8 is the latest to see some stops removed, after routes 28, 7, 16, 48, and 120 have all had some stops removed in the last handful of years.
The 8 currently services 70 stops, but 18 of those will be removed which will increase the average stop spacing to about 1,080 feet from 940 feet.
“The projected travel time savings is one minute per direction,” said Linda Thielke, a spokeswoman for Metro. “The exact operating cost savings won’t be known until more detailed scheduling work is completed.”
The 8 recently faced a major service change. Last September, to coordinate with Link light rail, the 8 was extended deep into the Rainer Valley and its frequency was boosted to 15-minute service all-day. These major service changes may have affected the route’s reliability, spurring Metro to evaluate removing some stops.
Just 6% of route 8 riders will have to change their stop. Other bus routes affected by the stop closures include are routes 1, 2, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 27, 36, 43, 81, 84, 106, and 107.
The list of affected stops is available from Metro’s website. Affected riders have until April 30th to comment on the changes, which will go into effect on May 16th.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Free or reduced-priced compact flourescent light bulbs have been a successful way for utilities to help customers reduce energy use. In return, power companies don’t have to add as much power generation capacity thanks to the lower demand. But what about water? Building sewage treatment plants costs money. Without fanfare or any media notice (except at QA View), Seattle Public Utilities began giving out brand new efficient toilets, delivered to your home and installed by a professional plumber – all for free. You have to be fairly low income to qualify, and you have to have an old toilet and live in your own home, but other than that there aren’t any strings – just a shiny new piece of porcelain ready to save you around 24,000 gallons of water and $140 a year.
If this turns out to be as popular as their kitchen compost bin giveaway (more compost = less trash to haul down to Oregon), they’ll run out of toilets quickly.
Hey, toilets are infrastructure. Sort of.
Tomorrow, the Sound Transit Board is expected to modify its preferred alternative (motion: PDF) for East Link. On Monday, in a surprise move, Bellevue Mayor Don Davidson voted with councilmembers Balducci, Degginger, and Chelminiak to sign a term-sheet that establishes the basic funding principles of financing a C9T tunnel. With this non-binding term-sheet (PDF) now approved by Bellevue, the ST CEO Joni Earl will likely sign off on it as well and move forward to select B2 modified and C9T (downtown tunnel) as its preferred alternative. C11A (downtown at-grade) will be chosen as a secondary backup alternative for the downtown segment. These were all earlier recommended by ST’s Capital Committee on April 8th after it was found that Bellevue’s obligated funding gap for C9T was far more possible with a B2 connection.
While C9T is the alignment of choice for the vast majority of Bellevue residents, there will likely be discontent among neighborhoods that have eagerly supported pushing light rail away from the South Bellevue Park and Ride, and to the BNSF corridor. This B7 route has been shelved by ST multiple times because of multiple concerns, including low ridership which wouldn’t justify its construction. The Bellevue City Council voted 4-3 for B7, and 7-0 for C9T.
The board meeting will take place tomorrow, April 22nd, in the Ruth Fisher Boardroom at Union Station from 1:30pm-4:30pm. Public comments will be taken near the beginning of the meeting (the agenda can be found here). We’d encourage you to make it out and show your support to move forward on ST’s decision.
This is an open thread.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Now that I can actually spend some time blogging, let me make a few comments on the 520 bridge and light rail, a debate which seems to have come back into the fore, thanks to a last-minute protest from Mayor McGinn and several other Seattle-area politicians earlier this year.
[The current design is for 4 general purpose lanes plus 2 HOV/Transit lanes (HOV 3+). McGinn wants 4 GP lanes plus 2 transit-only lanes (bus now, light rail later). ]
If you haven’t been following the details, it’s important to note that the Governor decided back in 2008 to opt for a light-rail-free design. The environmental impact studies all proceeded from that assumption. Putting light rail back into the plans would require a new EIS and a delay to the project. How long? McGinn says 6 months. The State AG and the feds say 2 years. The project cost would certainly increase by several hundred billion dollars as well.
Serial Catowner has some serious qualms about the current design. I’m sympathetic. $4.5 billion is a lot of money to spend on oil-dependent infrastructure in the year 2010, when we know we have to seriously reduce our carbon output in the next 20 years.
A lot can happen between now and. say, 2040, when we might realistically see light rail on 520. Oil could be $20/gallon, all cars could run on electricity, and Microsoft could decamp for Bangalore, leaving its office complex in Redmond looking like the old GM and Ford plants in 2010 Detroit. All of these things will affect the 520 bridge.
It’s a lot to try to plan for.
So we’ve come, in 2010, after over a decade of discussion, to this messy compromise known as “Option A+.” It’s not perfect. In some ways, it’s kind of ridiculous. But it’s the result of a lot of messy compromises and stakeholder meetings that many people who are not me spent time attending and working with. Not having attended a single outreach meeting on the project, I don’t feel right complaining too much about the chosen outcome. Balancing the demands of the Arboretum, the UW, Microsoft the surrounding neighborhoods, and other interest groups can’t have been easy.
It is easy, however, for me to sit in front of my computer here at night, shake my fist, and demand my preferred design. But those groups I mentioned above have political clout, specifically because they’ve organized, and the project is a result of that organization.
This leads me to my next point: if there’s a better design, what’s the strategy for making it a reality? If you’re asking to delay the project by up to 2 years and add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost, you have a responsibility, I would think, not just to make an engineering argument, but also to make a political argument. How will you get your design implemented? Mayor McGinn is not exactly a political powerhouse right now. Quite the opposite, actually. And Frank Chopp and Ed Murray are voicing opposition because they know it plays well with their constituents, but they’re unlikely to try and seriously derail the project.
Finally, even if there is a political strategy, it comes with an opportunity cost. More effort and money trying to get potential light rail on 520 could reduce the amount of actual transit that gets built elsewhere. Not only that, there’s a case to be made, not by me, but by Sound Transit and many others, that buses are better on 520 from a transit perspective, because they can serve multiple destinations. So even if you somehow manage to delay the project long enough to get pontoons and a bridge deck big enough to maybe someday carry trains that no agency has plans to build, it’s not clear that it’s a better solution even from a pure transit perspective.