The City of Bellevue released the voting results (pdf) from the latest East Link workshop. I don’t have the city demographics handy to compare to the norms, but the voters were mostly (if not necessarily disproportionately) longtime residents (> 15 years, with 41% over 25 years) who arrived at the meeting at Bellevue City Hall by car.
The results are obviously not scientific measures of Bellevue opinion. However, among people with enough motivation to show up, Westside-running and retained cuts were the winners among the options. In direct contrast to the streetcar debates, center-running wasn’t very popular.
In related news, Bellevue Councilmember Kevin Wallace wants to apply potential alignment savings to the City’s tunnel contribution, rather than ST’s (currently unfunded) share:
Planners last month presented six options for a potential route on that stretch of road, and two of them featured a new downtown-tunnel concept that would save an estimated $75 million on East Link construction.
Now City Council member Kevin Wallace is asking whether Sound Transit should subtract those savings from the $150 million Bellevue promised to help make a tunnel affordable.
Follow the link to read the rest of Hicks’ reporting on dueling grassroots organizations, which apparently includes a new city-wide pro-B7 effort to raise $100,000.
I sincerely hope they build the alignment that runs in the least amount of traffic possible so they can have frequent and fast service. Don’t do MLK All over again please.
MLK isn’t slowing down Link. As others have commented, signal preemption has been working fine in both SODO and along MLK for months.
Buses in the DSTT are slowing down Link, with equipment failure, wheelchair loads, crush loads through too few doors, bus drivers playing tour guide, and a bay system designed for a bus only DSTT.
IT is slowing it down in that it is limited to 35 miles per hour along that entire stretch, and that they will never be able to run more frequent than they do now if I remember what I have read correctly.
Signal preemption does work fine, but sheer speed limits slow it down, and my ideal world is a 1 car train every minute or two as opposed to a 4 car train every 7 minutes….
maybe thats just me, but I think that’d be nice. Most of the time I lose is in transfer wait times. so the difference between 6 and 7 minute headways or down to 1 or two minutes, is HUGE for me personally.
Geeze Alex, most elevators don’t even run on 1 minute headways, without multiple cars. Light rail only pencils out with large loads, which means multiple car trainsets. The longer the train the better.
Running one 100-car train per day doesn’t help anyone. Downtown it makes sense to prioritize load over frequency, particularly during peak times, and especially since the tunnel stations are so big there’s not much risk of overcrowding the platforms.
The question is whether ridership is as dramatically punctuated in the valley. If not, you’re better off running many short trains. And if we’d built the Valley segment grade-separated, they could travel faster, increasing turnaround.
Of course, my last point is irrelevant due to the choke point that is the tunnel. But when the buses get kicked out, I can foresee the Valley run easily slowing the entire system down.
It won’t slow the entire system down. The MLK stretch has more than enough capacity for future south end demand. Trains from the north can be short-turned downtown or sent to the Eastside.
Where are MLK riders going? If it’s to downtown or within the RV, I think they’d be best served by converting the line to a streetcar (retaining transit priority) and rerouting Link to Southcenter via grade-separated ROW, where it would rendezvous with a southern extension of the MLK streetcar line.
But I’m not a politician.
I just prefer very very short headways because that is where I lose about half my time, my other gripe is radial planning rather than fully connected planning, that also wastes immense amounts of my time.
With the retained cut option, is it possible to “lid” it in the future?
That’s odd that west-running was favored since east-running seems to have less of an overall impact to homes and wetlands. Of course, center running has the least such impact…
And according to that linked article about the options, it says west-running is not compatible with the cheaper tunnel alternative. Am I reading that correctly? Something’s gotta give here…
I’ll be explaining this all in an upcoming post.
just keep it as grade separated and free of crossings as possible
Which also will help limit noise from crossing bells and trains honking at semi-suicidal pedestrians crossing against the warning lights. (You’d think people forget that they occasionally trip once in a while…)
a new city-wide pro-B7 effort to raise $100,000
Don’t be fooled. This is a campaign war chest to run candidates next year against any Councilmembers who don’t throw themselves on the tracks (so to speak) for B7. B7 is dead, may it RIP. But Surrey Downs is going down with the fight, and taking anyone who doesn’t agree with them, with them. So ask yourself, what happens if they take out Claudia Balducci, someone with a great amount of reason, a fair and objective method, and the respect of her peers on both sides of the lake, in next year’s election? Do these people think that Sound Transit leadership is likely to fill her seat on the Board with someone from Bellevue? Not likely in the least. Bellevue will be so hosed at that point – and deservedly so, if voters fall for this tactic.