"Spotting new buses", by Oran
  • McGinn proposes $20 car-tab fee, higher parking taxes. This would fund basic road maintenance, and a few bike and pedestrian projects. It also makes it a little less likely Ballard/West Seattle light rail is going to happen. Downtown Seattle is the seventh most expensive in the U.S. to park in, which may mean we’re doing something right.
  • In an expected move, the city council sent a letter to the Sound Transit Board asking them to pay for conceptual engineering on the First Hill Streetcar extension — backstory here.
  • Bellevue Council votes 4-3 to ignore the question of the 112th alignment and reaffirm support for B7; also, more about those condo owners that want to sell.
  • Councilmember Clark proposes turning part of Pike St. pedestrian-only during bar time on weekends. We should try it.
  • Overrun-amendment sponsor clarifies his thinking, is less threatening than certain other legislators.
  • Two new open-air markets downtown. I believe the area above C/ID station was intended as a market area, but that seems to not have panned out.
  • Crossing the tunnel tracks could cost you $66, even some time in jail.
  • From Tacoma Tomorrow: another freeway atrocity in planning, Hertz may start car sharing, Intercity Transit will ask voters to bring their sales tax from 0.6% to 0.8% on August 17th.
  • Burien TC garage now funded, but I wish we could abolish the term “transit-oriented garage” unless they store buses in it.
  • Buffered bike lanes on N 130th St, and downtown on 7th Ave.
  • Trolleybus supporters have a Facebook group.
  • Obama administration trying to address sprawl, at least a little bit.
  • Two new “sustainable transportation” (1, 2) certificates available at UW.
  • Historic Photos: Seattle’s monorail through the years
  • Oh yeah, Sunday was Link’s one-year anniversary. Gushing here.

This is an open thread.

27 Replies to “News Roundup: One Year Later”

  1. yes … extend the First Hill Streetcar to Aloha … and then to the U District!

  2. Um… If we had the seventh most expensive parking in the U.S. and a completely functional transit alternative, then we’d be doing something right!

        1. A corollary worth noting:

          The “7th most expensive” figure refers to all-day parking. Perhaps not coincidentally, rush hours have by far the best Metro service and the most elective ridership.

          However, one can still park for a few mid-day hours or for an entire evening for $6-$8 (at Pacific Place, for example), which one can absolutely not do in Boston or in Midtown Manhattan. And Metro has comparatively horrible mid-day/evening service carrying very few elective riders!

    2. The weird thing, is it seems like some Downtown parking garages don’t really fill up. It looked like there were very few cars in the upper levels of the 10-story garage at 2nd & Pike in the middle of the day today, from my perspective in a bus on 2nd. Anyone know if those garages do in fact have excess capacity a lot of the time? I’ve also heard anecdotally that the Macy’s garage doesn’t get all that much use compared to its size.

      1. Last night I saw an Impark billboard downtown touting their, if I recall correctly, over 400,000 parking spaces. In a city of less than 625,000 people. All I could think was, Ugh.

        The best part about their website is the “Go Green” section, in which they lay claim to being the first “Carbon Neutral Parking Company” in North America. They use low-lead paint and solar-powered meters! Never mind that their sole business is encouraging and enabling the leading carbon-producing activity.

    3. do i understand the list is as follows:
      1. midtown NYC
      2. downtown NYC
      3. honolulu
      4. boston
      5. san francisco
      6. chicago
      7. seattle

  4. I’m not a fan of monorails … but the historical photos from the PI are always cool to see

  5. Just came back from a walk to the waterfront. SDOT crews were installing pay stations along Main St. Striping crews were also preparing to install new striping to accommodate the new parking. It appears that the Waterfront Streetcar will not be able to return to 2-way operation on Main St.

    1. What was the problem with the Waterfront Streetcar? I wasn’t here for it, so maybe I missed something, but I have a hard time understanding why no government official likes to even be reminded of it’s existence.

      1. There was no problem with the streetcar. When the Olympic Sculpture Park was built, the maintenance barn was destroyed. They never replaced the barn.

        That’s it. Really. The problem was the complete lack of intelligent planning in order to accommodate a replacement barn. From the outside, it almost looks like it was killed on purpose but no one can think of a motive.

        A large metal object like the maintenance barn could have fit quite well in a sculpture park. Any artist could have come up with an attractive way of integrating it into the area.

    2. They have installed concrete bus stop pads on top of the tracks, so a parking restripe is the least of worries when it comes to getting the waterfront streetcar back on the rails.

    3. As they say whenever people criticize road diets or things like that, paint is cheap. It can be easily restriped if/when the Waterfront Streetcar comes back. Hopefully it could be double tracked through there anyways if it is reincarnated.

  6. Re: “Trolleybus supporters have a Facebook group.”

    This blog ought to have one, too!

  9. DP, Zed, Aleks: So you think Link stop spacing is too wide (subthread in middle of comments) and I think it’s just fine. The practical question is, assuming Link won’t be changed much, how do we provide comprehensive transit around it?

    DP called Link “light commuter rail” and says, “Rapid transit will remain intercity only… In-city trips will be deemed unworthy of rapid transit”. In other words, Link is more like BART than a subway. Well, I think we need something like BART to tie the region and urban villages together. But in any case, if Link is not suitable for many in-city destinations, what can we do to compliment it and provide that mobility?

    It’s not a foregone conclusion that Westside Link and Ballard-UW Link have to be the same as Central Link. They could be done as traditional light rail (e.g., San Jose) since they’re not the regional trunk. So maybe stops every ten blocks in Ballard & Wallingford, and wider in Interbay. You just need to watch the total end-to-end distance. As it grows, either the stop spacing needs to be wider or something more rapid needs to be provided too. The five-block spacing on Aurora is just maddening.

    And there is growing support for at least a couple of infill stations, at Graham and 133rd. Elsewhere (50th, 72nd, 80th, 85th, 92nd, etc), I think frequent buses/trolleybuses/streetcars are fine. Given that Metro defines RapidRide as “frequent buses with medium stop spacing”, that would define what’s needed on 15th NE/5th NE and eastern Capitol Hill.

    I just cry when I see MAX downtown, San Jose light rail, the LA blue line, or the Duesseldorf U-bahn. That’s not rapid transit! It’s not giving people a time-competitive alternative to cars, even if it does contribute some short-distance trips. It’s a joke that LA has 2-3 times the population of the Bay Area, yet the Bay Area has BART while the blue line seems to be half the size and half the speed. The best commuter rail I’ve seen in the US is PATH, which runs frequently 24 hours and covers distances nobody would want to walk. That’s the kind of thing that gets people out of their cars.

    “You also implicitly debunked the idea that “express-to-local” transfers, as seen elsewhere and advanced by Mike and others, would be facilitated by anything being operated, built, or planned in Seattle.”

    What? I said I ride the 30 to work, transfering (now) from a bus and (future) from Link. If you live in north Greenlake and want to take Link, you’ll have to transfer because it’s unlikely rail will be going there for a long time. Same if you live on NE 52nd Street and don’t want to walk from Brooklyn. Express-to-local transfers will happen no matter what we build. 3-minute headways may be unrealistic for now, but 5 or 10 minute headways would be a massive improvement, and would extend the de facto reach of LR. And when/if gas reaches $5-6-7 a gallon, most people won’t be able to drive and we’ll need 3-minute headways (like the streetcars were in the 1920s).

    1. Personally I don’t think that the stop spacing is too wide, and I think that looking at overall stop spacing is a rather useless metric, because it doesn’t take in to account areas where a station would never be warranted under any circumstance. Looking at specific stop locations is interesting though. I think when retrofitting a city for rapid transit you have to very carefully site the stops to make sure that the huge investment is worth it. Our urban village designations are designed to accommodate future growth, and need to be the first areas served with high-capacity transit. Roosevelt is an urban village, Maple Leaf is not. Hence no station in Maple Leaf. There’s no sense in spending millions on a stop in Maple Leaf to serve a handful of single-family homes just to make in-city travel slightly easier for a few people. The money would be better spent on projects like rail from Ballard to UW, something that will benefit thousands of people and tie together several urban villages, or on improving east-west bus service to link neighborhoods to Link stations. The way to make our investment in Link most effective and improve transit for the greatest number of people would be to re-orient all of Metro’s service in northeast and southeast Seattle so that it runs east to west and connects to the closest Link station. No one would care if they weren’t within walking distance of a Link station if there was a bus coming by every 5 minutes to take them there. The “transfer penalty” becomes meaningless if services are frequent enough. Just think how much cross-town service Metro could provide for the same cost as route 7 or 48. When Link is finished a transit map of Seattle should look like a spine and ribs, not a pinwheel like it does today.

      1. And I don’t mean to imply that Link is perfect and that there aren’t places that should have had stations that don’t. In some cases that can be rectified, and in others if including those stations would have resulted in no light rail then what can you say?

      2. Wait are you using the 48 as an example of a pinwheel route? Because it’s definitely a cross-town route, avoiding Downtown but attracting the highest ridership in the system (before Link, we’ll see how much the ridership went down when it stopped serving MLK and the 8 replaced it).

        1. No, not route 48 specifically. There will always be a need for some parallel north-south service. I was just using that as an example of a long-haul route that uses a lot of bus hours that could be eventually re-purposed in to providing high-frequency service to Link stations. If route 48’s length were cut in half it’s frequency could be doubled for the same cost. When Link stations open in the U-District and Roosevelt there won’t be a reason for the 48 to go all the way from Mt. Baker to Green Lake. We’re building Link to do the type of long haul service that is now done with buses. I think that when North Link is done Metro needs to do a better job of re-orienting service to bring people to the stations. What’s the point of having a backbone if you don’t have any ribs?

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