The grand opening of the Mountlake Terrace Freeway Station was yesterday, and that triggers a major service change beginning Sunday, and not only to the routes that serve it. Check it out.
Also, photos of the opening ceremony and a short story about the artwork.
If Sound Transit chooses light rail as the mode for the “North Corridor High Capacity Transit” project, would make sense to locate the Mountlake Terrace Link station near here. But where would it go?
Behind the park-and-ride? That would add several hundred feet from 236th to the platform make reduce pedestrian access to something that’s already more than a little pedestrian-unfriendly.
Maybe there’s nothing that can be done about that (it’s not likely to become a walkable, urban paradise), but these kinds of things consume a lot of my brain’s idle cycles.
ST is considering both an I-5 alignment and 99. That was the takeaway from last year’s public meetings, that 99 has enough support to warrant consideration, and that those two corridors are the most popular. 99-elevated may end up costing the same as I-5 because the freeway is so old that ST would have to rebuild parts of it if it installs anything next to it. That could tip the scale in favor of 99 with its superior pedestrian access and TOD potential.
But if Link is built on I-5, it will certainly stop at the Mountlake Terrace freeway station because of the P&R. I’ve seen a diagram, although I don’t remember it clearly. The walkway would be extended to the platform, and I think the train would cross over the freeway to put the platform on the west side.
A larger consideration is, will the station look overbuilt if the express buses are eliminated?
Express buses wouldn’t all be eliminated, LRT won’t be making it all the way to Everett for a generation.
Even while Link construction crawls toward Everett, wouldn’t the express buses from points north of Mountlake Terrace mostly terminate at the station?
ST Express bus service is very expensive per ride compared to most of the other services in the ST system. Plus, the projected travel time on Link from Mountlake Terrace to the U and downtown is much more competitive with express buses than Central Link is. Moreover, the express buses split the U and downtown destinations, while Link deftly serves both.
I just don’t see the Snohomish subarea pouring money into duplicate-head buses when North Link is so fast and will be much cheaper per ride. (That’s marginal cost, Norman.)
Ideally they would truncate the express buses at the nearest Link station, and ST might have an incentive to do that as the travel time is almost the same. The 510 et al could be truncated at Northgate and later at Lynnwood, and that would free up enough service hours to run it every 10 minutes like Link.
Hopefully Community Transit will do the same but it makes its own decisions, and at one point I heard they weren’t favorable to the idea of truncating their express buses. But that may change as CT’s revenues get more and more squeezed.
If CT is dependent on sales tax revenue, I can understand why they wouldn’t want to truncate at Northgate Station.
How loud is it down on the platform?
It is very quite on the platform. The paraglass used allows you to have a normal conversation as you would anywhere.
While it’s nice for this to be finally done, I have several issues with their design and implementation of it:
1) $35.4 million is way too expensive for a freeway station in such a low-density area. This money would have been better spent on maintaining our existing service hours or on improving infrastructure elsewhere.
2) The freeway station was designed with one and only one form of access in mind – suburban residents driving cars and parking in the parking garage. While the neighborhood is far from dense, there are actually quite a few homes that live within 1/2 mile or even 1/4 mile of the bus stop, as the crow flies. Unfortunately, due to a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs, the sidewalk distance for nearly all of these homes is much further than this, not to mention that any walking route to the station requires going down narrow sidewalks along a fairly busy street – exactly the type of route that sends the message to those few that actually do live within walking distance that they should drive and park in the garage instead.
Bicycle access to the station isn’t much better. 236th St. has two car lanes in each direction with no bike lanes and a very narrow sidewalk unsuitable for bikes. It is impossible to get to the station without going down 236th St. While experienced cyclists, such as myself, would be able to do it, asking a novice cyclist to bike to the station is a lot. Furthermore, the immediate approach to the bus stop requires riding up four levels of parking garage full of hazards in the form of cars backing out of spaces not watching for bikes (especially going downhill on the way back), not to mention a narrow walkway that is going to be filled with pedestrians catching the same bus.
Bicycle access is a huge issue if you want anyone living in Seattle to use this station because the lack of a walkshed and decent bus connections means that unless you have someone driving to the station to pick you up or call a taxi, the only way the station is usable is if you take your bike. Note especially that for anyone traveling from Seattle in the reverse direction, the 890-stall parking garage is completely useless to you, regardless of whether one has access to a car to park there.
3) If the whole point of spending $35.5 million to build a freeway station is to allow buses to stop there quickly en route to other destinations, why are the 511 and 513 the only buses stopping there? This decision means that trips from Mountlake Terrace to destinations such as Everett, Edmonds, Mukilteo require convoluted connections that should not be necessary. It means that trips to downtown or the U-district during all hours of the day will have longer waits and less frequency than they should be getting. This will be an especially big issue for people that want to go see the Mariners on a Saturday night who will have just one bus per hour, rather than two, to get them back. The long wait, followed by a crush-load once it finally comes means many of these people will still end up driving downtown instead, clogging up the freeways and downtown streets.
Longer headways also means less bike-on-bus capacity, which will make any bike-on-bus trips there unreliable (especially since the CT-operated ST buses only have two-bike racks, rather than three-bike racks). Again, for someone living in Seattle to be able to use the service and not have last-mile problems, bringing a bike on the bus is almost mandatory. Yet the lack of bike capacity and the lack of reliability that comes with it means that anyone who isn’t prepared to pedal the whole way should just drive the whole way instead.
So, at the end of the day, we spend $35 million, with the only real benefit being that Mountlake Terrace residents can drive a shorter distance if they want a park-and-ride lot with lots of empty spaces and some all-day service, plus, perhaps, a little bit better parking availability at Lynnwood Transit Center on weekdays. While, money aside, we are still better off with the freeway station than without it, this was a classic example of spending too much money for too little benefit. These are exactly the kind of boondoggles that make people not vote to raise their taxes for more transit.
Yeah, I’d recommend that pretty much all of the 400-, 800-, and 500-series routes in the area should stop there. It’s already quite time-consuming to get from south county to Everett.
Here are just a few projects along the I-5/downtown-Everett corridor that would have made a more cost-effective use of funds:
1) Northgate transit center pedestrian bridge and freeway station. This would allow 510 and 511 to complement the 41 to provide high frequency service to Northgate all day 7 days a week, as well as provide quick service between Northgate and Lynnwood/Everett which currently stinks (the fastest present option is to walk or run to the 145th St. station and board 510 or 511 there). It would also speed up route 303 trips my eliminating the costly detour into the transit center. This would give us much of the benefits of Link now, rather than 10 years down the road.
The pedestrian bridge to allow access to the freeway stations from both sides of the freeway would also provide access between the transit center and North Seattle Community College and the surrounding neighborhood. By shortening the walking distance, this would eliminate the need to transfer to connecting buses to get to these areas. When Link goes to Northgate, the bridge will become even more important to provide station access to the west side of I-5.
2) Olive way freeway station – provide improved access to capitol hill while allowing ST to eliminate the costly detour of route 545 each weekday morning.
3) A cheaper freeway station at Mountlake Terrace:
– exit ramp from I-5 HOV lane to southbound to 236th St.
– entrance ramp from 236th St. to I-5 northbound HOV lane
– no construction work on the south side of 236th St. (use existing ramps)
– bus stops along 236th St., with more room for passengers than what today’s street would permit
– bike lanes on 236th St.
– trails through the forest next to the park-and-ride to provide easy pedestrian access to adjacent homes
– Introduce an all-day cross-down local-service route from Bothell->Edmonds passing through the I-5/236th St. station
You realize that (1) and (2) couldn’t be built with Snohomish County funds, right?
$35 million wouldn’t get you much for 1 or 2. Olive way freeway station might cost that much in construction mitigation per month (okay hyperbole a bit, but not much).
I don’t think #3 would be cheaper at all. If you built a 236th St HOV ramp, it probably would have meant the entire reconstruction of the interchange with SR-104.
As for operational savings, Mountlake Terrace now has seven-day-a-week service at hardly any increase in cost and CT is able to save operational cost by combining commuter markets.
Concerning bike lanes, I am sure you would be welcome to introduce this topic to the Mountlake Terrace City Council.
As for a new local route from Bothell to Edmonds, who would operate it and how would you get from Bothell to Mountlake Terrace?
They could extend the 331 to Bothell and have it work with 131. Sure, that’s not connecting with Mountlake Terrace TC, but there are more commercial areas along that routing.
Has there been any consideration of altering the south end of SWIFT to serve Mountlake Terrace TC?
Yeah, but getting between Aurora Village and Mountlake terrace TC isn’t easy. The freeway and lake make it difficult, since there aren’t any fast ways around them.
Use 76th Ave W and Lakeview Dr. Eliminate stops south of Lakeview for the time being.
Alternatively, re-route the CT 101 as I am suggesting instead. Do we really need both routes serving Aurora Village TC?
Why does the 510 not serve MTFS? Isn’t there a market for 1-seat rides between Mountake Terrace and Everett?
maybe because ct would lose passengers from the 201/202 and swift and they didn’t want that.
I assume it’s because before the 510 there was no all-day express to Everett and it took an excrutiating 2-3 hours on the precursors to the 358 and 101. So there was pent-up demand for a direct route to Everett. Now, maybe, it would make sense to stop at a freeway “transit center” and to consolidate the all-day north-south routes, especially off peak.