21,870 weekday, 14,026 Saturday, 12,749 Sunday. This is up from March, though that had to be revised downward by 30/weekday to 21,311/14,139/8,881.
On a completely unrelated note, don’t feed the trolls.
April 2011 Link Ridership
CTAC III Wants Your Opinion
Seattle’s Department of Transportation has an alphabet soup of committees exploring various transportation problems. The Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee III (CTAC III) is tasked with matching funding sources to all the various transportation projects in the various master plans, as well as basic road maintenance needs.
If you’re a Seattle resident, I encourage you to fill out the online survey about what transportation investments are important to you, and your willingness to pay taxes to support it.
There are also workshops starting yesterday evening (oops), and continuing tonight and Thursday. Showing up and having a conversation with decision makers is always more effective than submitting uninformed comments.
Metro’s New Hybrid Buses In Service
Metro’s 40-foot Orion VII Next Generation hybrid diesel-electric buses began carrying passengers on Monday. The restyled New Flyer articulated (DE60LFR) buses entered service a few weeks ago. Both of these buses feature the new seats we reported last month. They are low-floor and have automated stop announcements powered by GPS. These 170 Orions are the first low-floor 40-foot buses Metro has purchased since 2003.
The buses are running on routes in South King County. The Orions were spotted running on Route 128 between the Admiral District and Southcenter. The DE60LFRs can be seen on major South King tunnel routes like 101, 106 and 150. If you want to find out which buses are running on which route, you can check the status of a vehicle on OneBusAway using its coach number. The Orions are the 7000 series (7000-7169). The DE60LFRs are coach numbers 6866-6921. For example: Coach 7001 (for other coaches, change the 7001 to the desired number)
I rode a DE60LFR on Route 106 in those new seats. I really like the improved ergonomics. Unlike the old seats, I never slipped in these seats, even as the bus twisted and turned through Georgetown. The concave back fits snugly with my back and keeps it from moving sideways. The cushion was adequate. The lack of a high back didn’t stop me from taking a nap. It makes sitting sideways tolerable. Your feelings may vary.
Read Metro’s press release on the new buses for the costs, funding, and fuel savings.
This month only: feel free to use more energy
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Dear Washington,
I know, we’ve started getting good at saving energy, and that’s a good thing – keep at it. Except maybe wait a month or two. You see, because we had a huge amount of snow this year we actually have too much energy – not a problem we’re used to having in our modern world. Our dams are so full that not only has the Bonneville Power Administration (the folks in charge of these things) cut off coal and natural gas plants, but they’ve even started cutting off wind farms. The issue is that unless we generate a whole lot of electricity using our dams, we’ll have to “spill” water, or allow it to bypass our generators, and that apparently oxygenates the water and is bad for fish. Of course that’s a terrible deal for the wind producers who have gone and invested in a renewable power source just to be told to turn off their wind turbines for a while.
So, for a limited time only, don’t bother line drying your laundry. Power wash the driveway like you’ve been meaning to for years. Take a few long hot baths (assuming you have an electric water heater). But enjoy it while it lasts. Your local wind farmer will thank you.
(I actually think the best thing they could do is announce a statewide one month rate reduction. That will keep those wind farms in business. Or even better – use smart meters for real-time pricing, to let you know hour by hour what your electricity costs and let you – or your next generation super-smart dishwasher – base your usage on how strong the wind is blowing on the other side of the state. )
OneBusAway on Front Page of Times
Today the Times featured a front page, above the fold story about OneBusAway. Most of the story is essentially about how awesome it is, which most OBA users already know, but at the end of the story is some new and uncertain news.
…
The timing couldn’t be worse, but now the future of OneBusAway is in limbo.
Ferris will finish his Ph.D. next month then work for Google at its Zurich, Switzerland, office, with a team that works on transit and direction services.
Local supporters are looking for ways to keep the project going. King County is talking to companies about contracts to support and extend the project.
At the UW, Dorning hopes to raise enough money from transit agencies and others to hire a part-time developer to maintain the system.
“An extremely high priority is to make sure it keeps running — we need to figure it out,” Dorning said.
In a way, the project will continue in Zurich, where Ferris hopes to keep working on it while building more tools to help people find and use all kinds of transportation.
“My goal,” he said, “is to go to Google and do this worldwide.”
New Apartments at Othello
Any Link riders through the Valley have no doubt noticed the monolithic Station at Othello Park going up for what seemed like forever. Well, it’s done*, and the Seattle Times wrote it up:
Other developers will judge the Station at Othello Park’s success by how much rent it can charge and how quickly it fills up.
A new project is doing well if it leases 20 apartments a month, researcher Cain says. By that measure, the Station is right on target.
As for apartment rents, Cain says, the Othello project is charging about 40 percent more per square foot than older buildings in the Rainier Valley, Beacon Hill and the Central District — but about 12 percent less than the average rent at similar new buildings on Capitol Hill and other neighborhoods closer to downtown…
But Southeast Seattle is a new frontier for the industry. Before the Station at Othello Park, “that area hadn’t seen any conventional [for-profit] new construction in many years,” Cain says…
“I have heard lots of developers say they are waiting to see how the Station at Othello Park does,” said Al Levine, the [Seattle Housing] authority’s deputy director.
It’s nice to hear that the initial reports are good, but as with everything else let’s not judge the first project of a hoped-for rebirth of the Rainier Valley based on a few months of data.
Because of developer hesitation, this is, however, a relatively important project. And if it turns out that the Rainier Valley is so hopeless for market-rate development than not even light rail can rehabilitate it over the next decade or so, then that would call in question, if not light rail as a whole, then the decision to go through the Rainier Valley in general and especially via MLK in particular.
* The article implies it’s done, but a source tells me the complex is leasing but not quite done with construction.
Sunday Open Thread: Bybanen i Bergen
Upcoming North Link Meetings
Both Roosevelt and Brooklyn Stations have reached the 30% design stage and will have a new round of public meetings. Sound Transit will hold an open house for Roosevelt on May 26th, 6 pm at the Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center. The 30% design Open House for Brooklyn Station will occur June 9th, 6pm, at the Hotel Deca. We reported on the last Brooklyn meeting (and the followup) earlier this year.
Northgate Open House Report
by TIM BOND
On Tuesday Sound Transit held an open house for Northgate Station. Northgate Station is the northernmost station of North Link, which will stop at Roosevelt and Brooklyn stations before connecting to U-Link. This $1.35 billion (2010 dollars) ST2-funded extension is expected to open in 2021. Northgate station alone is expected to add 15,000 daily boardings by 2030; the entire North Link segment is expected to add 62,000 daily boardings. Both numbers assume a full ST2 buildout to Lynnwood.
The alignment consists of 3.3 miles of twin bored tunnels and one mile of retained cut/fill and elevated tracks. The cut/fill section will be very similar to the segment that currently parallels I-5. Previously the alignment was to transition from below to at grade at NE 75th, however last year Sound Transit revised this moving it north to NE 85th which will save approximately $10 million. The retained cut/fill section will parallel I-5 and will become elevated at NE 95th and will continue to the elevated station to be constructed just west of the Northgate Transit Center.
Lots of diagrams and details below the jump.
Link Ridership by Station, June 2010-February 2011
STB recently obtained from Sound Transit per-station boarding statistics for both June-October and October-February. This continues the series from the first half of 2010.
A cursory glance at the numbers shows little qualitative difference between the first data set and the next two, so I think the analysis back then still stands. The June-October period is the peak ridership to date, and interestingly about half the total growth was at Westlake and Seatac.