Month: June 2010

Last month’s weekday ridership (pdf) on Central Link was 21,774, up 8% over April and a new record.  The figures were 18,710 on Saturdays and 13,641 on Sundays, both records if you discount the large crowds on opening weekend.

Thanks to seasonal variations and other factors, it will be difficult to discern any trends until we have year-to-year comparisons for the entire Seatac-Westlake line, which should happen early in 2011. I’m not sure what else is to be said about these numbers that hasn’t been said in the monthly threads on the same subject.

Update by John Jensen: I thought I’d share a graph of the average weekday ridership thus far. Since the late December opening of the airport stop, we’ve seen a nice upward slope in ridership.

Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review blog briefly featured a study that compared a neighborhood of suburban Woodinville to one in urban Ballard. The blue lines in the graphic above illustrate the 1 kilometer reach of a pedestrian walking from the red dot in the center. This so-called walkshed is an important measure of ability from one to get from point A to B and helps us explain why one who lives in Ballard is more likely to walk to the grocery store or the local park than one in Woodinville.

The graphic also explains to us why transit ridership in Ballard is likely to be much higher than ridership in Woodinville, and why Woodinville has more driving. The study notes that those who live in communities like the Ballard neighborhood above drover 26% fewer miles than those in cul-de-sac-based communities.

Some cul-de-sacs are better than others, of course. Some suburban communities have cut-throughs that allow pedestrians and bicyclists to reach arterial streets and other roads efficiently. Most frequently, however, the paths available to pedestrians in suburban communities are the same twisty, maze-like roads that cars navigate. When developers don’t afford pedestrians an efficient means of getting around, it’s no surprise that many suburbs turn to auto-dependency.

We’ve spoke about the benefits of the urban street grid (and its political effects) before. Other reactions on the walkshed study are available at Infrastructurist and Human Transit.

We’ve already mentioned this in an earlier news roundup, but it’s a slow news day:

The city of Seattle has put together a brief online poll to measure the community’s interest in expanding pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access across the city. Some of our readers may want to give their thoughts so the Mayor can argue he has a mandate for his various green transportation initiatives.

It has come to our attention that Gordon Werner’s post last week, “BNSF, Washington State to Pioneer HSR Negotiations,” is substantially plagiarized from Fred Frailey’s article in Trains magazine.

I’ve pulled the offending text in the original post. Although we are not professional journalists, we take this kind of thing seriously and will conduct a short investigation to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.  We apologize to our readers, Trains magazine, and Mr. Frailey.

Upon further reflection, the recent post on extending the North Link tunnel, while it does cite the source, does not meet our internal standards for quoting other sources. It has been modified accordingly.

We’ve won the war on the car:

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

Larry Lange has a long but neat meditation Central Link and the MLK corridor, almost one year after opening. It’s refreshingly non-hysterical.

He places special emphasis on development prospects in the corridor, which is appropriate. If we don’t see more Othello Partners-type buildings along MLK over the next couple of decades, the MLK alignment (as opposed to the regional light rail project as a whole) would be a failure in my opinion.