Sound Transit is getting close to releasing the results of the North Corridor Alternatives Analysis (AA) and has started to brief partner agencies on the draft results. We wrote about the alternatives analysis previously. While bus options are being considered the most relevant question this analysis will answer is how different Link alignments, I-5 and SR-99 compare. Above is a table taken from a ST briefing given to the Edmonds City Council on August 2nd.
The draft results conclude that a SR-99 alignment would be 1.7 miles longer, require 10 additional trains for the segment, have a segment travel time of 4 more minutes, have 4,000 fewer daily riders, benefit new riders less and generally have the same environmental impacts beside impacts to properties.
More after the jump.
The slide below summarizes the impact these differences have on the costs and performance of the project. The alternatives analysis estimates that a SR-99 alignment would be between $590-670 million more than an I-5 alignment. The I-5 alignment is roughly half at grade, while the SR-99 is entirely elevated. This, in addition to the 1.7 miles of additional guideway and higher costs associated with working in the already developed and constrained ROW along SR-99 most certainly contribute to the higher costs. Due to higher cost and fewer new passengers the SR-99 alignment has significantly higher costs per new passenger.
The finalized alternatives analysis findings will be released mid September. I think it would be best to hold off on judgement until the details of the study are released.
Hmm, I would have thought that since there are more businesses along SR99, that there would be more reasons to ride it, besides just going to/from downtown Seattle.
I suppose it picks up fewer commuters because it’s harder to locate P&R’s in the SR99 corridor, but isn’t that what we want? More TOD, and people living closer together? I wonder if they accounted for adding bicycle lanes from the residential areas to SR99 stations.
Where are the additional riders coming from? From P&Rs along the way, or from the terminal attracted by a shorter transit time?
“I wonder if they accounted for adding bicycle lanes from the residential areas to SR99 stations.”
It’s not their job. Besides, wouldn’t it apply equally well to an I-5 alignment?
As with all models its about your assumptions and inputs. Once the final report is done I think we’ll have a better idea of what those are.
An alignment that starts at Lynnwood P&R, heads down to Mountlake Terrace Station, cuts over to Aurora, then cuts back to Northgate, is naturally unattractive to the masses of riders who go through Lynnwood P&R.
If ST had looked at having the line stay on Highway 99, the numbers would have probably looked much better for a 99 alignment. That horse has left the barn. Though it violates a number of transit nerd principles, it appears I-5 is the winner.
Still, it is not too early to start lobbying for the future extension to cut up to Highway 99 in Lynnwood, and stay on 99, and have some sort of BRT that runs all the way from 99 in Lynnwood to downtown Seattle.
What I imagine is a future line straight up 99, with no deviations, replacing RapidRide and Swift. Another line would go up 15th through Ballard, curve over to Northgate, and go up Lake City Way to Bothell or thereabouts. That would be the crosstown route, intersecting with both other lines. There could also be a shuttle line to replace route 44, and that would also connect all three lines (or the line to Ballard just splits, with half the trains heading east and other half going north.)
The TMP draws a line from Ballard to 520, instead of just terminating in the U-District. That’s probably politically more feasible.
Link can’t replace RapidRide any more than it can replace the 8. You still need RR E and the 101 for local stops. Link could replace Swift but that would mean eliminating 1/2 or 2/3 of Swift’s stops. That may or may not be acceptable to Snohomish County residents. On the other hand, keeping both Swift and Link and the 101 would mean three levels of service on the same street, which sounds excessive.
Note that Lynnwood is already planning TOD at Swift stations, which wouldn’t all be Link stations. And also that Snohomish County residents have not been told yet that Link might replace Swift. You’d have to have a year-long discussion with them before doing anything that dramatic.
What is wrong with 1-mile spacing between Link stations? That is the standard for urban rail all over the country. Currently Link has higher-than-average spacing at above 1-mile, but that is not a good thing as somewhat closer spacing is correlated with higher ridership (all else being equal). They could easily build one station at each Swift stop and eliminate Swift in the future. RapidRide is choosing the complicated route of having “stations” about every mile but keeping intermediary no-frills “stops.” So you just build a Link station at every RapidRide station, then keep an underlying local.
More broadly, the whole point of BRT in this context is as a placeholder for light rail! BRT is mainly a way to build the infrastructure and land use for rail, but with lower initial costs. Then as ridership grows and capacity becomes an issue, you convert. This is happening all over the world. It’s silly to build BRT without the intention of converting to rail in the future, except in cases like West Seattle where density will never be high enough to support rail.
Adding several more stations would raise the cost considerably. The voters voted for a plan with a certain estimated number of stations and cost. We’re already talking about adding stations at 130th and Alderwood Mall.
Zef, there is no way in hell that there will be two high capacity transit lines through Shoreline a bit less than a mile apart.
And to Brent: Aurora between 175th and 130th is mostly trashy 1950’s car-oriented development RIPE for bulldozing. Nobody lives between Linden and Midvale. It could all be leveled to a wonderful effect.
But to get the effect one has to have more frequent stations that Link is willing to provide.
Anandakos – nobody lives between Linden and Midvale unless you count the 700 apartments built between Linden and Aurora and 130th and 145th in the last 10 years. Presumably you wouldn’t level that.
The thing about upper Aurora is that some of those big box stores are doing really well, and big box stores = tax dollars for the city. The city doesn’t want to change upper Aurora into TOD. It wants TOD along Linden, and along upper Greenwood and in the Lake City core and maybe Aurora in Fremont, where it’s closer in and needs more of a facelift. But upper Aurora isn’t a redevelopment priority.
In other words, what Martin said somewhere on this thread: Lynnwood’s planned redevelopment is a lot more likely than unplanned Aurora redevelopment.
Wow, this sounds pretty damning for the SR-99 alignment. As much as I like the idea of TOD along North Aurora, getting the right zoning for it would be difficult. Only one of the proposed stations would be in Seattle, at N 130th, and the existing zoning there makes Roosevelt look dense.
It seems far easier to get transit to dense neighborhoods than to get neighborhoods with lots of high-capacity transit to densify. Newton’s First Law of Housing is even stronger than Newton’s First Law of Bus Routes.
It’s pretty easy to get density–just upzone and as long as the demand is there the land will get developed. Transportation, however, is what determines that demand and determines what kind of housing will be built. If they upzone on Aurora, developers will build because it is a relatively short commute to downtown. Without good transit, they will include lots of parking and that commuting will mostly be by car. With good transit (like RapidRide or future light rail), comes the opportunity to build apartments without much parking and to build a more walkable “urban” neighborhood. Transportation absolutely leads the way on development rather than the other way around, it’s just that usually the transportation in question is road capacity. Developers used to build streetcars first, then build houses for people who were enticed by an easy commute. Now they wait for government to build new roads and highways to empty areas, then develop the areas alongside them. It’s really the same thing, and it’s TOD advocates’ job to move back to the old model. That said, zoning has to be there first and it is prudent to start with high-quality bus service first to build demand before building rail. Bus service to Northgate, U District, and Capitol Hill is what has built the core ridership and density that light rail will build on further. SR99 can work the same way, by using RapidRide and Swift along with station-area upzones to build density and ridership, then converting to light rail in the future. Swift already has 1-mile stop spacing, so it would be simple to convert to light rail.
@zef The thing is changing currently zoned and built out single family areas to anything else, let alone a high density TOD, is unprecedented in the region.
SR 99 is not currently single-family, and the big box stores and strip malls are set so far back that just developing the corridor would be enough to get a huge amount of density. The question is, how much more valuable does the land have to be to get landowners to shift from the current single-use and build mixed-use? This is a case where just zoning for 6-story buildings might still not make the land valuable enough to change the current use. It’s very tricky to turn currently car-centered strips like Aurora into transit-oriented mixed-use neighborhoods, which is why most new development is either infill or built in brownfield or greenfield areas. I know I’m repeating myself, but that’s why it might be smart to work on the land use in conjunction with BRT right now, then transition to light rail once Aurora has proven itself capable of transforming from its current state.
@Zef I was talking about the stations along an I-5 alignment.
Then that should be our job one is holding zoning authorities accountable for aligning density and land use with the transportation planning. Aurora North is screaming for this kind of density and development. It makes the perfect place to add 100,000+ living units and it’s far better than having the 1/2 million new people that will come to King County by 2030 go to sprawl land.
Yeah, but the neighborhood around 130th & Aurora would have the opposite reaction that Roosevelt has had to upzoning. Because, TOD is WAY better than the hooker magnets that are there now.
I’d really like to see the data behind this because the conclusions regarding ridership and TOD seem patently absurd. An I-5 alignment requires massive east/west transit connections and/or park and ride lots for cars, and no substantive TOD within walking distance of I-5 stations. How many minutes would people take trying to get to the light rail and how does that compete with existing modes of transportation?
Ya, they can build it along I-5 cheaper but then, nobody’s going to ride it except those at endpoints. Unlike MLK where there is the potential of TOD there’s not much along I-5. The other lesson the MLK alignment should have taught ST is that if you build a line in the middle of a relatively sparsely populated thoroughfare and then don’t provide adequate east/west connections to the more dense neighborhoods, your ridership will be anemic.
A route 99 alignment may be more expensive to build but offers the essential quality of being closer to existing density, and massive opportunities to build new density in walkable communities. This is the primary value rail transit brings. If Sound Transit doesn’t want to do it right then save our money and do BRT or some other unimaginative project.
Uugh. The I-5 corridor should not be an option at all. Pure park&ride with zero potential for TOD. Why even bother with any of the stations? Everyone will park at the northernmost one anyway, for the free parking and quick commute from their sprawled out far suburbs. Goodbye urban rail, hello BART on it’s way to Pittsburb/Bay Point or Dublin/Pleasanton.
I do agree that Sound Transit should charge whatever they can get for parking, but seriously? These are established suburbs–the ship has sailed, and they are not ever going to be dense enough to support mass transit without relying on cars for accessing the station. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Link should not even go to the suburbs, but that ship has also sailed. The best we can do is have a hybrid system–BART in the suburbs and MUNI in the city.
In general, I disagree. We can and should upzone at every station, “existing suburbs” or not. TOD will form at every station if we let it. Stations become directly connected to all other stations – it will be a 14 minute ride from Northgate to downtown, and therefore becomes part of downtown. Wasting this new section of downtown as a sprawl-inducing park and ride should be a crime.
But specifically we’re talking about 99. That’s mostly not even suburbs – it’s sprawling, mostly run down commercial areas. Perfect for massive redevelopment.
I agree with Matt. The SR-99 corridor is ripe for large scale redevelopment. The star lake area alone could support TOD on the level than Northgate will. It’s that big, already commercially zoned and under performing.
I agree about the redevelopment potential, which is why I would never argue for park-and-rides on 99. I was talking about I-5. There should definitely be light rail on 99 in the future tied to development, but this is the wrong way to go for North Link. Light rail simply does not have the speed to go meandering around all over the place, especially when we do not have the capability of express trains like in the NYC Subway. We should be focusing on making sure Lynnwood creates an employment/housing center so that the line has a strong northern anchor.
I would resist the argument to develop TOD simply for the sake of developing TOD. Once the stations and built and the system is running, developers and local government will figure out what to do.
@Jack. You have more confidence in the common sense of politicians over NIMBYism than I.
Both Lynnwood and Montlake Terrace seem to want to center major redevelopment/TOD around their stations. I don’t think Shoreline is nearly so enthusiastic about the idea of doing the same along I-5. 185th might see some TOD as there is a large lot there owned by the Shorline School District.
I-5, thanks to Lynnwood TC, has tons of transit connections E-W and in many other directions. It doesn’t look like a good site for an urban rapid transit station, but that’s OK because it’s not what it is. Link that far north will more closely resemble a commuter line than any sort of rapid transit service. So Lynnwood TC is more like one of those suburban BART stations. It already works as an express bus station, so I hardly think you want to skip it.
Aurora looks more like a good transit corridor as you travel it, but it has plenty of flaws. Once you’re north of Northgate it’s not really very dense, and won’t be for a long time. It doesn’t have great transit connections and its walkshed is chopped up. I don’t think it’s beyond repair, but I’m not sure it has enough near-term potential to justify diverting a fairly direct line to serve it (like Cap Hill or the U District). To me, the best solution for that corridor is to establish a more direct line, that hems closer to a pure rapid-transit concept (closer stop spacing and less P&R emphasis than the I-5 corridor), staying reasonably close to Aurora all the way downtown. RapidRide D is a step toward that. Link serving 99, but only north of Northgate, screws up the whole concept.
“and won’t be for a long time” We should be building these things looking at the 100+ year timeframe. 99 has plenty of potential even in the decade-or-two timeframe, let alone looking at a century. I-5 stations do not. Ever.
“Lynnwood TC is more like one of those suburban BART stations” And I disagree that we should want such things. Park and rides, especilly free ones (Link’s standard so far) absolutely increase sprawl. The entire reason I’m supportive of Link is because we’ll have the potential to build TOD that would attract people to live in more dense areas. This can happen at 99. It will not happen at I-5.
Yeah, this concept is fundamentally flawed. If you lived in these hypothetical apartments on 99 and want to go downtown, you would still be better off taking RapidRide or an express bus rather than Link, and if you live in Lynnwood you’re better off with an express bus too, all because of the winding route of Link. Direct routes are best, and deviations should only be done if the payoff is huge (like hitting the U District and Capitol Hill).
Addressing Matt’s point, the issue with park-and-rides and sprawl really depends on where they are. These park-and-rides will be the middle of established suburbs–I fail to see how they would lead to “more sprawl,” when the area is already built out to suburban standards. They cause sprawl when they are built in sparsely-built areas with lots of empty space that developers can use. That is the concern with building light rail to Tacoma–there will be the temptation to put a station and park-and-ride at the southern edge of Federal Way, which would then encourage sprawl in the empty area between Tacoma and Federal Way.
[zef] Anything that makes it cheaper and easier to commute from the far suburs is sprawl-inducing. It’s not the existing suburbanites nearby I worry about, it’s the guy already drives to the city from Martha Lake. He’s got to pay $12 a day for parking, and drive through endless traffic to get to the city. Build a park-and-ride and you’ve just shaved 30 minutes and a few dollars off his commute, and he gets to relax and read the paper. When his wife sees a new larger house in Mill Creek or Valley View or Cathcart he weighs his options and decides he’ll eat the extra time for the luxury of a pool and a huge yard for his dogs.
People will live as far away as they can reasonably commute to, for the cheap land. Extending this “reasonably commute to” extends sprawl.
Matt, you’re not wrong, but you come off as a little sexist by assuming the guy works and the woman wants a bigger house. One of the interesting pieces of research that’s come out recently is that living in the suburbs is often harder on women than on men, since women (working or not) end up doing most of the kid schlepping in most households. When a (straight) family moves to the outer suburbs, it’s much more typical for the woman to report missing the city and the man to report enjoying the suburban peace than vice-versa.
Back to the original discussion: seems to me that the main point is that if suburban stops are set up so they can’t develop as destinations, then they’re going to be one-way commute stops and as such will always be cheaper to serve with express buses than with rail. So it’s not clear we want to extend Link to places that can’t become destinations.
That said, the only way in which rail causes sprawl beyond what’s caused by the park and ride/express bus combo is rail bias — that is, rail enables sprawl only when a family considering moving to sprawl has a commuter willing to take the train but unwilling to take an express bus. Some families do fit that description; I’m not sure whether it’s only a few or a lot, though.
[Steve] Agree on all counts. The *wife wants a bigger house* analogy came from my life – I’m currently looking to find a smaller place, but my wife keeps upping the square footage. But that’s more of a density advocate vs. wants privacy thing than a man vs. woman thing.
Love your “one-way commute stops and as such will always be cheaper to serve with express buses than with rail” point. Rail is for place-building.
@Matt: I don’t think a route up the I-5 corridor is ideal, but I do think it’s the best thing to do once you’ve decided to go east of Lake Union and Green Lake (well, maybe the best thing is to go to Lake City and then stop… but I haven’t heard anyone discuss that at all, so I’ll assume there’s some reason I haven’t considered that it’s an unthinkably stupid idea).
North of Northgate, 99 has more potential as a transit corridor than I-5. But the real corridor goes all the way to downtown Seattle. Consider the potential of Aurora, from the ship canal all the way up to the city limit. It’s the whole corridor, not just the farthest and weakest tip of it. We’re already taking steps to improve the whole corridor, and I think that will pay off more in the long run than running Link to 130th and Aurora.
Link is already destined to be a stupidly long regional system, because the region is already stupidly big. To me, building Link past Northgate doesn’t seem all that important. HCT on Aurora to at least Green Lake or so is more important, and at least Ballard is more important than that. There seems to be this drive to build out Link to Redmond, Everett, and Tacoma before all else (towns listed in decreasing order of how much I’m exaggerating), which is silly, and if I thought diverting to 99 would change the game in a good way I might just support it.
Well said! We are indeed building a “stupidly long regional system.” It is trying to be all things to all people. It will work if the suburbs manage to transform themselves from bedroom communities into centers in their own right. Otherwise it will be stuck in the middle zone of being too slow for the commuters but with not enough access in the city. Much like Portland, we are trying to use light rail for heavy rail purposes. As much as people malign BART, it is fast enough to work well over long distances. Link should be more like a city subway system with shorter total length and closer stops.
Aurora is horrible for TOD between 85th and 50th because of Green Lake and Woodland Park Zoo. Even at 85th, Greenwood would be a more logical place to put a station than Aurora. Which is really more direct, a light rail line that turns on a diagonal at 105th or so to serve Greenwood and Ballard, or a light rail line that runs an S-curve to Northgate? (That’s actually not a rhetorical question.)
That would require several different lines on the same tracks: Ballard-Lake City, Ballard-Lynnwood, Northgate-Lynnwood, and maybe even Northgate-Lake City to give those people their own direct route.
@morgan, the train would not be coming up Aurora at 85, it was envisioned to come across on or north of 105th after Northgate. That section of Aurora and beyond the city limits is perfect for high density development.
Charles, I think Morgan was talking off-topic about a hypothetical 2nd light rail line to the west of the currently planned line.
Al,
Based on ridership alone the North Corridor is the third most important segment of Link after North Link and U-Link. Note that even the low number for North Corridor ridership on 99 is higher than all of East Link.
The 130th station is at the commercial Center of the Bitter-Lake urban village. There are a lot of existing apartments around there and many new ones built in recent years. There are also many run-down commercial properties ripe for re-development.
Further North Shoreline seems to be trying to focus development/re-development around 155th, 175th, and to a lesser extent 185th.
What are V2040 Centers?
Some vision project Lynnwood has for its city center, IIRC.
http://www.lynnwoodeconomicdevelopment.org/Site/Content/Documents/CCP-SubAreaPlanSeptember2007.pdf
Wow, that’s actually a much better planning document than I expected. They are planning for 15-34 stories in the core area, and 5-13 surrounding that. I sounds like they really do want to create a mini-Bellevue, which is great! That would provide strong anchor for Link. Like Martin said in another comment, I trust this existing plan a lot more than a hypothetical densification of Aurora.
I agree that it looks like a good plan if it can indeed capitalize on the vision. What I’m concerned about is that we’ll build North Link and the other three stations won’t appreciably change minus a 500+ parking garage. Regardless of where it is going it’s costs hundreds of millions a mile and its important that that investment is capitalized on all along the line, not just at the end.
The PSRC Vision 2040 Centers (map here, big PDF. Specifically, they’re called Regional Growth Centers. Northgate is one, and the next one north is Lynnwood. So that line about serving V2040 Centers better via I-5 probably refers to the having the line more directly connecting the Lynnwood and Northgate RGCs (and further along the line, the U-District and Downtown Seattle RGCs too)
This is an important point. If Lynnwood is really planning on getting more density (they are planning for it, although I have my doubts on the followthrough), you really want a straight shot south from there, without this kind of deviation. Aurora is not a Regional Growth Center, so our hope of TOD might not ever happen in that corridor. It pretty much consists of big box stores with big parking lots, and it will be tough to convince those landowners to build mixed-use apartments instead.
But Aurora is in the city of Seattle and the city should be advocating for this kind of density and this is the perfect place to put it.
But I also point out that many people that live in North Seattle also commute to Everett and many other places.
One metric you could add to your chart is cost per mile.
They should have just followed the old Interurban route and gone straight north and south up and down SR-99. That would have put it almost all at grade…and it could have been fully built. With parking at the stations, it could have served all of downtown, Ballard, the stadiums, SeaTac, Federal Way and beyond.
Missing of course would be Beacon Hill (which has always had 12 minute bus service to downtown)…and all the unused stations in Rainier that have yet to foster any kind of significant “urban growth”.
They could’ve just never taken out the old interurban and have it turn into something like the Norristown High-speed Line or SEPTA’s routes 101 and 102. Same could’ve gone for the railway on the today’s Burke-Gilman ROW.
I agree that the old Interurban route would be a good starting point for a transit line.
But we have to account for what’s changed since then. Building east of the lakes instead we will significantly improve transit service to Cap Hill and the U District, two of our most important transit destinations outside of downtown. And once we’re out that way, it makes sense to go to Northgate. And so on.
I probably shouldn’t bother to mention that Rainier Valley stations aren’t empty at all, because if you cared to know you could have read the many posts with data showing they’re not.
I think that should just be a future light rail line, creating a second north-south trunk line. The 99 line could cross the current one at Tukwila, continuing on to SouthCenter like Central Link should have done.
By the way, there is pretty massive development happening around the Rainier Beach station and moderate development elsewhere in Rainier Valley. The TOD is going really well so far down there–the disappointments are Beacon Hill and Mt Baker, which could be doing a lot more.
Rainier Beach? Don’t you mean Othello? The only exciting thing happening at RBS is the local residents whining about having to pay their own RPZ fees.
Mount Baker is in the process of going through a potentially excellent upzone. Nothing’s going to happen there until that process is complete.
“all the unused stations in Rainier”
You brought that up the other day, and somebody replied with data showing that the stations account for a pretty good percentage of Link usage. These sorts of anecdotes (“there were cars on 45th, so there should be no transit”) don’t translate to a workable policy.
“The Interurban right of way” south of Seattle does not travel along SR99. At least, not north of Fife. It left the existing I-5/SR 99 routes at the curve to the north and went diagonally across the intervening ridge to Pacific and north along the west edge of Auburn and Kent.
North of downtown it did NOT travel through Ballard. It used Seattle Transit trackage to 85th and Evanston via the old Phinney/Greenwood route traveled by the 5 today, then turned north on its own right of way now occupied by the City Light trunk line.
It did not “serve all of downtown, Ballard, the stadiums, SeaTac, Federal Way and beyond” because it did not serve Ballard, SeaTac or Federal Way.
[OT] repost in open thread later today.
Obviously you don’t appreciate my quixotic reply to the AA process.
Note to self.
“Must focus on narrowly defined comments in the future”
or
none at all
As much as I hate highway alignments for all the obvious reasons, I also can’t stand our tendency to create curvy alignments that take the least direct path possible. If Link could jog over to 99 and then just go straight up 99 all the way to Everett, that would be ok, but this idea of jogging west, going north for a bit, then back east? That would be a patently stupid idea, whatever the TOD potential. Rapid transit actually does have to compete with things like cars and even express bus service if we want it to be successful, and nobody wants to sit on a train that deviates a bunch during their trip. We already made the mistake to have Link deviate east to the Rainier Valley and then back west to the airport. Link also does a big deviation to serve the U District and Capitol Hill, but that’s worth it given the huge ridership demand. Aurora, on the other hand, will continue to be a wasteland for a long time to come and the additional “maybe” ridership from TOD would not be worth the lost time and cost of the deviation. Why not hold out for a future light rail line all the way up 99? We already have RapideRide coming up, plus Swift goes the rest of the way. The BRT will probably lead to some moderate development along the corridor, setting the stage for a future light rail line which will then be much more successful.
I would also say that anyone who thinks Snohomish County is going to densify or do TOD in any meaningful way is deluding themselves. Once Link crosses the county border it really should act as a commuter line with heavy reliance on park-and-rides. If we can convince them to do some dense clusters around stations, that would be great, but their built environment is pretty much set around car dependence. Shoreline is a better bet for density along the 99 corridor, but again it makes more sense to leverage BRT as much as possible, especially at Aurora Village where the BRT lines will meet. SR99 light rail would then be a good candidate for ST3.
I hate to be “that person” but I also have to agree with Zef. It makes no sense for the right of way to zig-zag all over the place. People want a direct line to get them to their destination as fast as possible.
I would must rather see the investment in seeing Hwy 99 become a BRT corridor (read, seamless transit corridor, no transferring at Aurora P&R) with a HOT/HOV lane going up the middle of the highway itself.
If built properly, you can have a “light-rail/rapid streetcar” that can be created in the future. This means the roadbed would have to be built to accommodate the future weight, utilities, etc that would allow for LRT or RSC to be installed in less time and less overall money.
It will take 10+ years to really see Aurora become a transit friendly, walkable corridor that we desire but it will also be difficult without the developer backing that doesn’t see Aurora as an attractive place to build until other communities start stepping up to clean it up and reduce the number of car dealerships along the corridor.
There are a lot of positives but getting there is the challenge. Link needs to be in the I-5 corridor and it keeps the project within budget and in scope.
As for ST3… I don’t foresee that coming forward until after ST2 is mostly built out and completed… If it were to show up in the 2016 time frame, I surely would not vote for it.
Why wouldn’t you vote for ST3 in 2016? I can see an argument against it in terms of political viability until there are improvements from ST2 to campaign on, but what’s the downside of voting for it?
I’m really surprised by these results, as I thought 99 was a clearly superior alignment that would do better. It looks like a lot of it depends upon the planned densification of Lynnwood. If Lynnwood in 20 years looks like Bellevue now (probably a stretch) then getting there quickly and only serving commuters in King County north of Northgate makes sense. In any case, in the long term 99 should have light rail and we should push ST3 as soon as is politically realistic to accelerate that and the many other necessary expansions. I guess one advantage of an I-5 alignment is that it will be less likely to be delayed and will make a quick expansion via ST3 more likely.
I’d bet on the planned densification of Lynnwood over the unplanned densification of Aurora.
Aurora can’t be in ST3. That would put it before 45th and Ballard-West Seattle, which are clearly more urgent, and further from I-5.
Mike, that is only a problem if you assume that West Seattle is a good candidate for light rail. It isn’t, and the Transit Master Plan analysis pretty much confirms it. It would be insanely expensive to build, would go to a spread-out low-density part of Seattle with little room for growth, and would simply not attract the kind of ridership needed to make it worth the cost. That’s just the way it is. Ballard and 45th would get very good ridership, and 99 would have very good development potential. We need to stop thinking that the Monorail alignment was a good alignment–it wasn’t!
The 45th line and Ballard-downtown line are more URGENTLY NEEDED than Aurora, and DENSER than Aurora. Agreed that West Seattle may be marginal. If ST3 has enough money for Ballard-downtown, Ballard-UW, and Aurora, fine. But that’s unlikely. If ST3 can afford only one or two of these, Aurora isn’t going to be it. Because people will say it’s “too close to I-5”, and “you can’t just leave Ballard out again, especially since it’s so far from I-5”.
I’ll buy the straight line argument. But then why not support the 15th Ave Alignment?
What happened to the 15th Ave Alignment?
It was dropped in the previous phase, along with a Lake City Way alignment. They had fewer riders than these two alignments, and there was less community support for them.
15th would be just as bad as I-5 in development potential but would have higher cost and impacts.
Interesting, but I’d love to see a cross section of 99 and how they imagine an elevated LRT being integrated there. I’m surprised I-5 is so strong, but if that’s the facts..
The only real comment I have is that it feels like an opportunity lost for 99. LRT along there could have been a catalyst for transformation, especially when it comes to some of the big box stores there and the moat of (mostly unused) parking around them.
I’m surprised 99 did so badly. Fewer riders? I assume that means most riders will come from Lynnwood TC and they’d be put off by the 4-minute travel time difference. ST may be caught by the requirement not to count future TOD as “new riders” because the projects aren’t yet under construction. I believe Othello and other stations were under the same constraint.
Lynnwood TC is must-serve because it’s the largest city between Northgate and Everett. Lynnwood is zoning for a large downtown like Bellevue, and TOD nodes at Swift stations. Downtown Lynnwood and the adjacent Alderwood mall area absolutely deserve one and maybe two Link station. The fact that Lynnwood TC has all bus transfers to southwest Snohomish, and a P&R within walking distance of downtown, are additional reasons for a station there.
One of the main purposes of Link is to provide rapid transit between the regional centers, meaning Lynnwood-Seattle and Bellevue-Seattle. Not just for those wasteful single-family commuters but for two-way all-day travel between the areas. A region of 3.5 million people needs that.
I was hoping for the Aurora alignment, but the $600K difference in this financially-constrained environment really shoots it down. The North Corridor depends on additional funding from federal grants or other places, so every dollar extra means it’s less likely it’ll be built.
So then the question becomes, what can we do for Aurora absent this Link line? Improving RapidRide and adding Swift are two obvious conclusions. The 358 is currently 45 minutes from Aurora Village to downtown. Bringing that down to 30 minutes is feasable, and would lead to a 15-minute average trip for shorter distances. RR E’s frequency must be at least as much as RR A, 24 hours. Aurora has tons of decaying big-box lots that could be converted to TOD. You don’t have to convince every owner, just one or two of them at a time. And NIMBY voices would be weaker on Aurora than Roosevelt or Beacon Hill because nobody can call it beautiful or quiet as-is. And Aurora would still be eligible for future Link at some point.
Yeah with such a high cost differential, it kind of mutes everything else. I think pushing now for large rezones around the I-5 alignment stations is also important. Now is the time to push for that before an alignment has been picked.
Has RRE already been started? Is it too late to push for transferring Swift to ST and just extending it to downtown?
I asked them about that when I went on a Swift tour the other day and they said their analysis showed there would be very little demand for such a combined route. No one would take such a long route end-to-end, because it would take forever and there are plenty of express buses for that purpose. Aurora Village is also a big transfer node that they are trying to develop, so it is a decent place to force a transfer. I think that’s reasonable for now, but it is too bad to have a weird shift from one BRT to another. I wish they could have coordinated it better or just gotten Sound Transit to do it.
By the way, Swift is way better designed than RapidRide. It stops only every mile, it uses all off-board payment, has bike racks inside, BAT lanes, signal priority, the works. They were smart and kept the underlying local service intact so they could do the wide stop spacing. RapidRide’s big mistake is trying to be a local and a limited at the same time, with its confusing mix of stops (where you pay the driver), and stations (with off-board payment). I would call Swift a type of BRT and RapidRide an example of “Enhanced Bus.”
A single Swift route from Everett to Seattle would be longer than the old 174, so it would have bad reliability. You really have to split such a route, and Aurora Village makes a good place to.
“Why not hold out for a future light rail line all the way up 99?” Because Aurora south of 130th is ridiculously low-density and there is the Ship Canal to cross. If you stay on Aurora you have to clone the Aurora Bridge (it is NOT strong enough to support Light Rail). If you deviate to StoneWay (a possibility) you have to tunnel under the northwest arm of Lake Union.
If you deviate to Fremont you have to tear up the neighborhood south of Woodland Park or tunnel from 50th south.
It might be feasible to extend Ballard Link along Holman to Evanston and go up to the Interurban ROW, but that’s an even greater “deviation” than the mile between the Interurban ROW at the southwest corner of Evergreen-Washelli and Northgate Station.
What do those numbers in “Frequency Vehicles required” mean? It looks like some information was lost in formatting. Is it saying “10 minutes peak and off peak”, “32 or 42 cars required”, “4 trains running simultaneously”? Most importantly, does it suggest 10 minutes off-peak until 10pm, or is there a “15 minutes” that got cut off?
4 minute frequency peak, 10 minute frequency off-peak, 32 or 42 vehicles required.
I think it means 4 car trains running at that interval will require xx vehicles to cover service. Remember, we will have vehicles from Central Link that will be used for the N/S corridor. East Link will have a different pool of vehicles (from my understanding at least..)
This is depressing.
By 2025 (that’s when I estimate North Link to Lynnwood and East Link to Redmond will be completed) we will have a lot of sprawl-supporting park and rides in suburban areas, and a pretty weak network within the city. Sure, Rainier Valley-Downtown-Capitol Hill-UDistrict-Northgate is nice, but so much is missing. What about stops in Belltown, Queen Anne, SLU, Ballard, West Seattle, Fremont, Greenwood, etc. etc.? The fact is Seattle is a difficult city to get around by transit (or automobile, for that matter) and neighborhood connections are weak.
This is not San Francisco where there is very high density, adjacent neighborhoods, and a consistant urban fabric. Outside of the core area, we are a node-based city with lots of dead zones, SFH areas, and sections that feel like outer suburbs.
Sure, the suburban BART stations aren’t great, but at least in the city and inner East Bay they have a pretty good transit network (BART/MUNI/CalTrain) and their land use policies, walkability and overall urban feel are light years ahead of ours. That’s why SF feels like a big city, and Seattle does not.
I know Link is a regional system but we need a robust intra-city transit network to bring together those nodes. It’s going to be depressing to watch Lynnwood and Redmond take priority over the next couple of decades while Seattle continues to be a balkanized, fragmented city.
Agreed. After Link gets to Northgate we should have many higher priorities than extending it northward.
Seattle has several times more transit than Lynnwood or Redmond, and it’s going to remain that way and increase (now that 40/40/20 is gone). I agree that Seattle needs more rapid transit lines, but the decision not to build them was made over the past three decades. We don’t have the money to build all of Seattle’s HCT corridors right now, so there’s going to be a 20-30 year lag while they’re built one by one.
SF has always seen itself as the capital of the West Coast since the early 1900s at least. That’s why it feels like a big city. LA is bigger now but SF is more cultural (as its advocates see it). It did not un-densify in the mid-century. I.e., it kept its small-lot zoning and did not rip up its streetcar tracks. There was a time in the 1970s or 80s when SF could have lost its cable cars, but the citizens voted to refurbish them instead.
The biggest transit problems in SF are that BART’s Marin line was voted down, so the stations in the north and northwest of the city were never built, and a Geary Street subway was never built either.
I would generally disagree that it’s hard to get around Seattle by transit. We have a good frequent network that connects all the neighborhoods you mention. Grade-separated rail would improve on that, but it’s not as if it’s not there. It sounds like you are just not counting buses as real transit.
[zef] And it sounds like you are over-counting buses as real transit. It takes over half an hour to get the 2 miles from Queen Anne to downtown – and much, much longer to get to any of the other neighborhoods.
Buses make sense for slow local connections and for long-distance commutes. We need something path-seperated with few stops to connect our neighborhoods, and we can walk or take buses from there. (yes, BRT could do this job, if we had real BRT. but we don’t)
Which route is it you are referring to? It takes me about 30 minutes even in the peak to get from Ballard to downtown on the 18, so I don’t see how Queen Anne would take the same amount of time. Are you using the most extreme congestion scenario or a typical trip?
My only point was that Seattle has a better-than-average frequent network that includes crosstown connections, which is why all those neighborhoods have high percentages of transit users and non-car households. That shouldn’t be taken for granted, and we should make sure to keep adding frequency to the bus system while working towards rail in the future.
Check out the schedule for the 2. Even off-peak it’s scheduled to take 18 minutes from Mercer (already at the bottom of the hill) to 3rd & Union (which is only the north end of downtown). If you’re going from the top of the hill to somewhere closer to Pioneer Square, it could easily be 30 minutes.
Ballard to downtown you get to use the pseudo-freeway that is 15th Ave W. But Queen Anne riders get the slow bus on winding neighborhood streets.
2E from near Trader Joe’s to downtown, typical day. Don’t even try the regular 2 or the 13. You’d actually have to factor in late buses to get the 30 minute number on the way to work using the 2E, but it’s consistantly well over that on the way home. And that’s for one of the “one seat rides”. Actually, back when buses ran on 1st I found that a 3-seat-ride was faster, using your nice and quick Ballard buses.
Now that I have to also drop my son off at preschool, the slow, slow, frequently stopping 14 has been just too much (20 minutes each way for 1.6 miles, 15 minutes between buses – total commute time of well over 1.5 hours per 5 mile trip) and I’ve switched to driving. I’m hoping to find a way of changing this (tried biking with my son yesterday – only 45 minutes total – might stick to that until it rains).
That “good frequent network” is as invisible as the apartments on Dearborn where all the #42 riders come from. Seattle has a few corridors with 15-minutes-or-better schedule, but very few of these are 15-minutes until 10pm seven days a week. Most of them stop being frequent at 7pm, and are half-hourly on Sundays.
The 12, via Madison, is painful. I can often outwalk it from Boren to 3rd during PM peak.
Pike/Pine between 3rd and Bellevue takes entirely too long to get anywhere. Again, I can often outwalk the 14 or 43 from Convention Place to B&O Espresso.
But more importantly, we do *not* have frequent, rapid transit connecting any of these neighborhoods with anywhere except downtown and (sometimes) the U-District. Tell me how I can reliably get from Capitol Hill to Queen Anne/Fremont/Ballard in less than 45 minutes. (The fastest trip for many of these commutes should involve the 8, but half the time Denny is so congested that it’s not worth it, and the other half, the 8 is running half-hourly.) Any of those trips would be 10 minutes in a car, or 15 at most.
Most of all, it’s this type of cross-town transit that Seattle is sorely lacking. We don’t have a frequent network; we have one hub, with a few frequent but disconnected spokes.
“Good frequent that connects all neighborhoods you mention” — I would challenge that statement. Make pairs out of a random private home (apartment or house) in each neighborhood and a “destination” (e.g. a business) in each neighborhood. Then reverse the pairs for the trips home. I would bet at least half of all such pairs would take 45-60 minutes to travel for the better part of service hours. The proportion would probably go up if you limited times of day to outside commute hours or examined a selection of private residences. “Good frequent service” actually means I can reasonably step out my door and be at most destinations in roughly half an hour for most of the day, barring major traffic events or acts of god.
FFS, the 48 which is one of the most heavily used buses in the city and it only has 15 minute headways (or worse) most of the day (commute hours it’s just around ten). 15 minutes is a laughably large headway for something you want to call “good” and “frequent” — assuming you use the same bus both ways (assuming a one seat ride!) it means just missing a bus added 15 minutes to your trip. By comparison, a similarly circuitous route in San Francisco, the 22 (which goes from the SE side of the city through the Mission then to the north) has less than ten minute headways the entire day (early morning to ten or so at night) through much more dense traffic, stops far too frequently and lots of stop lights and no dedicated lanes.
Obviously San Francisco is (much) more dense than Seattle and has greater transit usage, but let’s not kid ourselves about what “frequent” is. Our goal (however lofty) should be to make public transit as fast and reliable as using a private automobile. Anything less is saying that some people won’t be permitted to fully participate in society (always risking being late to appointments or always being forced to spend more time to get places) because they can’t afford or can’t drive a private automobile.
I do want the main buses to run every 10 minutes, and then every 5 minutes. But the public is not willing to put up enough money for that yet. You have to first fill in the gaps in the 15-minute standard, and then people will use the buses more and demand a 10-minute standard. Then you implement a 10-minute standard and soon people are saying, “There’s enough demand for buses to run every 5 minutes, so let’s do it,” and then it’s done.
Zef, I’m guessing your Ballard-to-downtown example is AM peak, and probably on the express routing.
For a PM peak inbound, 35 minutes is bare minimum, 45 minutes is standard, and an hour is not unheard of. And that’s if the inbound buses are able to come on time in the first place, or at all. Add in the post-5:33 drop in frequency, and you can easily be blocking 75 minutes just to be sure you’re downtown. Add another 30 to get anywhere else — even just up Cap Hill.
Thanks to Matt for a much calmer initial reply than I might have mustered.
…Oooh! And thanks to Rachel for the best-worded debunking of the “adequate network” assertion I’ve seen in a while!
Rachel, your last paragraph really hit home with me.
If I have three or four errands to do in different parts of the city, I simply can’t do them all. There’s no such thing as “making a quick stop” on the way to anywhere. Evening plans have their “worth” judged against the inevitable hassle of getting back to my home (even though my home is 40 feet from Ballard’s so-called Urban Village transit node).
A few days ago, when I was parsing for Brent how London’s Oyster card price-caps are set, I felt the need to include a reminder that 4+ separate trips per day on public transport is a matter of course in cities like London. It seems that few people in Seattle ever use transit more than twice; it’s just too darned difficult to do so!
Whenever I return from a trip back East, I find mobility ambitions re-set to East Coast standards — I find myself trying to do a bunch of things consecutively, assuming it will go smoothly and all will be accomplished. The awakening to our reality is invariably rude.
Living car-free here feels, as you said, like less than full societal participation. It’s all very deflating.
d.p.: Thanks. :)
From the tone of your comment, I’m guessing you *could* choose to have a car. I certainly could but greatly prefer not to primarily for personal reasons (driving stresses me out a lot and I know if I had a car, I would be tempted to drive more which would be stressful). To quote you: “Living car-free here feels, as you said, like less than full societal participation. It’s all very deflating.” Now imagine you don’t have a choice to own a car. Maybe you have a medical condition that precludes driving. Maybe you just have so little income that you’d greatly prefer to spend that money on something else (for example health care!)
I get to choose to deal with the inconveniences of not owning a car (and I can afford zipcar and have friends with cars and I can afford a bike that can haul cargo). Someone who doesn’t have a choice is being told by all their fellow citizens that they are worth less because they can’t drive. Their time is worth less and their inconvenience is less important.
“If I have three or four errands to do in different parts of the city, I simply can’t do them all.”
That’s what my car-driving friends tell me is the reason they won’t use transit: because they can’t get as much done in a day. I in contrast have accepted that I can only do a few things per day, and I’d rather do that than dealing with all the aggrevations and expenses of a car.
Transit should be as fast as driving. That’s why we need limited-stop buses and trains running all day between all neighborhood centers. Nobody would rationally spend 45 minutes on a bus stopping every two blocks, except that we’ve somehow built a system like that. A local system is necessary, but an express system on top of it is needed too. The NYC subway has it down perfect: you take an express train to the nearest express stop, walk across the platform, and often there’s a local train with its doors already open. That beats sitting through ten local stops.
[Reposted from lost Disqus comments. Short version: Rachel, you are absolutely correct, and that’s why there is such import to Metro understanding its higher purpose and getting that even 15 minutes is not frequent and that reliably slow is not transit! Mike, you definitely get it, but you need to drop your preoccupation with “ultra-frequent + ultra-local = happiness.” With current Link plans, and with continued emphasis on commuter expresses of limited use to most, that’s already what we have. We need something structurally better.]
Completely on the nose, Rachel. It seems like I may be even more of a “choice” non-driver than you are. I have no strong taste or distaste for the act of driving; it doesn’t stress me out, and truth be told, the rarity of the event (3 or 4 times a year) actually makes it kind fun, novel, and exciting. My position is that, without a strong desire to drive or to own a vehicle, the costs/hassles/uncertainties of car ownership can’t be justified. The moment one owns a vehicle, it becomes a primary expense and the tangible asset requiring the most frequent mental attention. I would resent it if a city’s nonchalance about its inadequate public transit forced all of that upon me.
While I would in no way try to compare my situation to that of someone who lacks a vehicle due to poverty – being poor is a logistical nightmare that most financially comfortable people could never begin to imagine – the sub-standard transit forces hands in the same way. One may begin to prioritize bringing (or desiring to bring) an expensive, unpredictable, and distracting possession into one’s life, because the twin benefits to flexibility and time come to override what might otherwise be logically ordered priorities.
This city needs to get serious about intra-urban transit mobility for the sake of both choice and non-choice riders. FWIW, if I were to buy a car, I would need to change apartments, as I’ve chosen to live in the 2-block area of Ballard where parking nightly and parking long-term are both exceedingly difficult. If the city outside of this 2-block radius ever hopes to overcome new-development designs that worship at the altar of the underground garage – if the city wants to take a true step towards city-hood, with the unavoidable side-effect of expanding the areas in which parking is difficult – it has to start making car-free living look much more appealing than it does.
Mike, the trade-off that you have accepted is not a necessary one. North America only contains a single city in which car ownership won’t occasionally make life easier (and even that one’s outer boroughs find the things handy sometimes). But we have more than a few cities that won’t make you sacrifice “getting as much done in a day” to go car-free. That kind of resigned thinking is exactly what Rachel deemed untenable, belittling to those who make the choice and near-dehumanizing to those whose choice is made for them.
Your posts are full of evidence that you totally get this. The “nobody would rationally…” line above demonstrates as much. But a city that can’t be bothered to run reliably <30-minute frequencies on some of its highest-demand corridors at any level of stop spacing is never going to be overlaying extreme expresses over extreme locals. So I remain confused why you’re always advocating the two extremes and overlooking a logical midpoint that works better everywhere it’s tried. Not 2 blocks. Not 2 miles. Exchanging longer walks for faster service is very different than having vehicles blaze through entire sections of the city without stopping at all. The 66 in Eastlake is more useful than either the 70 or the non-stop 71-3s. And the15X and 18X would be much more flexible if they stopped once or twice in Interbay. (BTW, even in NYC, it’s only the very high frequencies that make the express+local transfers work. An extended wait for just the last mile is a highly unpalatable experience.)
All of that is why the “Link is regional” insistence is so perplexing and so bothersome to me. I know that’s the parroted political line, but is there any rationale for it that holds water? “Regional” basically means super-express, which the stop spacing reflects. But you’re running that with a “light rail” that is much better designed for frequent stopping followed by a quick return to medium speeds than it is for truly high speeds. You’re also designing it to serve corridors whose lengths and commute-priority biases might actually do better with a fixed-schedule commuter vehicle than all-day high-frequency transit. By supporting this mode as “the regional one,” you squander both the capital funds and the semantic authority to demand intra-city transit on anything better than the “local modes” which you have just said “rationally” need to be superseded. See the trouble that gets us into?
DP, it’s not an either/or thing, it’s a both/and thing. We need to address both longer-distance trips and shorter-distance trips. My impression is that you would not set foot in suburbia, can choose an inner-city job, and don’t have any relatives or friends in suburbia. I grew up in Bellevue, I have relatives in Bellevue and Lakewood. My roommate drives to a night job in Kent, has reserve duty in Fort Lewis (which he has to drive to) or Everett (which he can sometimes bus to), and was earlier looking for firefighter jobs — the only places that were hiring were Black Diamond and University Place (Tacoma). We attend amateur MMA fights, which are almost exclusively in the suburbs and rural areas. This is just one example of why not everybody can just live in work in the inner city where there’s lots of transit, and why we need comprehensive transit across the entire metropolitan area.
Don’t think of Link as a replacement for those other kinds of transit you want. Think of it a a complement to them. Yes, we can only afford so many things at a time. But that’s a perennial problem. If we build that inner-city transit you want instead of Link, we’ll leave a hole in the transit system, one that is less understood but nevertheless just as real as the gaps you cite — and is THE reason why so many people are driving and thus demanding AWV and 520 improvements. The only way to break the cycle of driving-by-necessity rather than driving-by-choice is to provide comprehensive transit both for inner-city trips and for “metropolitan” trips.
Also, my emphasis on stop spacing is perhaps based on my experience growing up here. I’ve ridden the 15 local reverse-commute, the 71/72/73 reverse-commute, the 358, and the old 174 enough times to get really aggrevated when it makes every single stop along the way and there’s no 194 or 360 alternative at that time. Yes, street improvements may be able to make a good compromise between 5-block stops and reasonable travel time, but I’ll believe it when I see it. That’s why I’m so impressed that Link has the travel time of an express but can still make semi-local stops — enough for most of my needs, even if it’s not so ideal for somebody living at Graham Street or 15th & John. A good RapidRide line can complement Link on the same street — it’s not an either/or situation.
It’s pointless to argue whether Link should have been heavy rail when that wasn’t a possibility. The heavy rail ship sailed in 1973. I used to prefer heavy rail with its 13-car trains (BART, Marta, DC Metro) but I’ve grown to like the smaller scale of light-metro. (Although the Los Angeles blue line is laughably underbuilt. LA has three times the population of the Bay Area, yet the Bay Area has BART and LA has light rail???)
The engineers say Link has adequate capacity, so I’ll believe them for now. If it turns out to be overcrowded… well that’s better than being empty.
You’re correct that I have less reason to head to the ‘burbs then you, but I’ve certainly wished I could head to the Eastside for an evening social outing without worrying about 90-minute slogs home or being stranded entirely after a certain hour.
So yes, of course the suburbs need bi-directional transit that’s easier to use and has a wider span of service.
But let’s be honest: none of your examples above demand 10-minute frequencies or qualify as “spontaneous trips.” And as a carless urban resident, you must be able to recognize how much more often you have spontaneous city transit needs or would benefit from high intra-urban frequencies than you would on your cross-boundary trips.
And most of your above-suggested needs aren’t enabled by any present or future Link proposal, at any frequency. You simply can’t wishfully-think around the problem of suburban walksheds. What has been so frustrating to me about ultra-express bias for any “rapid transit” is that it compounds the inherent limitations of walkshed in its suburban segments by artificially limiting walkshed in the city. The result is the exponential – and totally avoidable – shrinkage of potentially useful trips.
I wasn’t saying that heavy rail should be operating to the boonies; that would be an even bigger waste. I was saying that light rail isn’t optimized for high speeds or long distances, and running the second-widest stop spacing in America with them can’t help but deny their purpose as an urban transit solution. BART’s 350,000 ridership may sound like a lot of people, but it represents an infinitesimal mode-share within its coverage area. You could live across the street from a BART stop and it still wouldn’t be useful for 90% of your needs. The mode-share reflects that. Link’s will too.
Link may offer you the benefit of transferring to the suburbs without having to go downtown. But you don’t need the most expensive form of infrastructure imaginable to achieve that particular end. You just need to stop thinking of the other forms of express suburban service as point-to-point from downtown. Aiming for better urban cross-town service that connects with flyover stops can achieve the same ends without wasting billions on service of otherwise limited use.
In a regressive and therefore perennially tax-starved state like this one, investing excessively in high-performance transit for one type of trip can only mean skimping in high-performance transit for others that may be more valuable.
You keep addressing the 2-block molasses-bus counterexample. Keep in mind that I’ve argued for stop consolidations as well as route consolidations for the sake of frequency as long as I’ve been here. So there’s no disagreement there. I suffer the 15/18 counter-commute on a regular basis. But an all-day, two-way 15/18x would be a problem, too. There’s no good reason why I should have to suffer 15 stops to get to Dravus or to Whole Foods (or late buses from the LQA detour to get back) because downtowners need to stop zero times along the way. Especially since Dravus and the Magnolia Bridge ramps are so evenly and logically spaced along the express routing. Those 2 stops are all you need to put all of Interbay, 1/3 of Magnolia, and the west slope of Queen Anne within the walkshed of most reasonable people. But the express runs blow through without giving access to any of them. It’s wasteful and absurd, and it contributes to the sense that we’re running a separate-but-equal(ly-priced) transit system for white-collar downtowners.
Building Link with 18X thinking (times 6 runs per hour) provides excessive transit to some while offering inadequate access for many. There’s no way to spin it that makes it makes sense.
[I really thought I checked all of the slashes. Sorry.]
I’m totally depressed by this. So much for my dream of one day taking light rail from my house to work, and so much for 130th & Aurora getting redeveloped. And so much for Seattle north of Northgate getting any kind of high-quality rapid transit, since the stop at 145th & I-5 would serve like what, 5 people? And don’t even get me started on Rapid Ride on Aurora and how stupid and pointless it’s going to be.
I have a hard time believing the numbers are really that much worse for the 99 alignment. If the choice is between 18 minutes on light rail from Lynnwood, or being stuck in traffic on I-5 for an hour, I think people will take the light rail. I don’t see how that 4 minutes saved by staying on I-5 really makes such a huge difference to ridership. Especially given the HUGE ridership on the 358 from downtown to points north of 130th on Aurora (plus the commuter buses that serve Aurora Village and the Shoreline P&R).
But, if that’s what ST says the numbers are, I guess Aurora is off the table. Seriously, depressing.
If our only hope for another light rail station in North Seattle is to get Sound Transit to move the 145th Street station south to 130th Street, we need to push the city to upzone that area. If Seattle shows a desire for the station, only then will Sound Transit move it. 145th would be a waste, but 130th could be a neighborhood.
I live on 130th. It’s now a wilderness, but it could be a city!
ST has already half-agreed to add a station at 130th if the Aurora alignment is chosen. The 130th and 145th stations may be pushed to 135th and 155th where there’s greater activity, although there’s a counterargument that 130th and 145th are better for east-west buses.
I was talking about along I-5 only. Aurora is as good as dead, from the looks of it. A station at I-5 and 130th could be so much more productive than a station at I-5 and 145th. Better soil, too.
It’s not dead if it turns out ST used horrible assumptions.
That’s the I’ve heard of a station at I-5 and 130th. What are its advantages? From Google Maps it looks like there are just a few houses or apartments on the NW, NE and SE corners, and a woodsy park on the SW. There’s an expanse of green on both sides of the freeeway but I assume that’s part of the freeway ROW and is unbuildable.
Both 145th and 130th are in single-family wilderness, so that doesn’t make a difference. They both have park-and-rides close to the intersections, too. They’re both on main east-west arterials.
But on the other hand, a station at I-5 and 130th would have over twice as much private (buildable) land within 1/8 mile of the station than a station of I-5 and 145th. Twice as much within a 1/2 mile walk, as well. We just need to convince Seattle to upzone the area. The edge of the Pinehurst multi-family/commercial district is less than 1/2 mile away along Roosevelt Way. Roosevelt Way itself is a boon to walking, cutting diagonally across the neighborhood. Connect the station to that and your walkshed increases.
Furthermore, I wasn’t kidding about the “better soil” comment. There’s a creek running under the 145th interchange. Wetlands are nearby. It’s in a little valley that would be good for a small farm or a golf course, but not for large buildings. 130th is up on the hill with hard, gravelly soil that drains very well. Much easier to build a bunch of multi-story buildings on.
I mean, that would be better than nothing if the city can convince ST to put the station at 130th instead of 145th. At 145th (and we’re talking the east side of freeway as where they’d place the stations, right?), you’d have the freeway on one side, and Jackson Park Golf Course on the other. So that leaves the NE corner of 145th as the potential walk shed for the station. As opposed to putting it at 130th, where you still have I-5 on one side, but there ISN’T a golf course. So, that’s double the potential for development. It’s still not nearly the potential you find on Aurora, of course, but since that appears to be out…
Of course, Metro would still need to come through with transit that runs E-W on 130th/125th. To get from Aurora & 130th, to Lake City and 125th, requires at least one transfer, at Northgate. Or, you could walk from Meridian, over the freeway, and all the way to 15th. Heck, getting from 130th & Aurora to Northgate takes a half hour on a local circulator route, or a transfer. And frankly, I don’t trust Metro to come through. They’ve shown zero interest in serving the designated urban hub at Bitter Lake in any meaningful way.
“[N 130th-Lake City] requires a transfer at Northgate.”
It does now but a direct route to 130th Link (and continuing to Aurora in any case) is not impossible. I could see either a new route or reconfiguring the 41 that way. (Although there would be a lot of opposition to moving the 41 away from the “urban village and transit center”. But maybe the 75-east could be sent to 130th instead.)
What about TOD potential near the 145th Station on 15th Ave? It’s only half a mile away and a short ten minute walk from 145th/I-5.
Also, maybe potential re-zones for sections of 1st and 5th Aves near the station? I agree Aurora has more potential but I don’t understand why people are saying there is no potential for TOD/dense development with the I-5 alignment.
Seattle and Shoreline would have to cooperate on any upzones at 145th regardless of alignment.
Not to mention the school at 145th.
Today, there are two major problems with transit along the North Seattle/Shoreline sections of Aurora:
1) East-west connections between the I-5 corridor and the SR-99 corridor are terrible. The only stop of the I-5 buses along that area is 145th St. and, outside the peak, there is zero east-west service along 145th St.
2) The jurisdictional boundary at Aurora Village forces unnecessary transfers. I’m all for grid-oriented routes that require transfers when it makes sense based on the geometry of the streets. However, a forced transfer for a trip straight down 99 from, say, Shoreline to Lynnwood, just because you cross a county line does not make sense.
Link down Aurora would have the potential to help with both of these issues. However, based on the chart Adam posted, it appears ST has already made up their mind that that’s not going to happen and, given the cost difference in our struggling economy, I can’t say I really blame them. I do find their ridership projections a bit depressing, though. It’s essentially saying that the only real source of passengers is park-and-ride service to downtown – a very expensive form of ridership that would leave trains mostly empty during non-rush hour.
Given that Link on Aurora appears out of the question, I would like to see Metro focus on improving the above points with buses. A simple grid structure around the Shoreline/Lake Forest Park area would do wonders. The most obvious route that comes to my mind is 145th St, but another candidate that might be Lake Forest Park->Edmonds via the new Mountlake Terrace transit center. Of course, both these routes would need to be frequent to be worth riding – a bus running once an hour would run nearly empty.
With regards to the second point, perhaps if KCM and CT could work together, RapidRide E and Swift could thru-route each other, along the same bus to continue along 99 from downtown all the way to Everett.
There will have to be east-west buses on at least some of 130th, 14th, and 175th if Metro is going to get people to Link stations. They failed in that in Rainier Valley but that was due to the fact that only the 194 was eliminated so there were only a few service-hours available. Metro will have a big chunk of service-hours available when the 41/66/71/72/73 are eliminated. Plus it could replace the 301, 304, and 308 with all-day Link shuttles, and fold the 316 into the 346.
I hope ST studies a better SR-99 alignment and asks more complete questions of the modeling. This SR-99 seems designed to fail; jogging back to I-5 makes the through trips longer and misses markets in Edmonds (e.g., Edmonds CC and Stevens Hospital and potential multifamily housing). It seems ST is attempting to do it all with one mode. Instead, a SR-99 that stayed there all the way to Lynnwood would be faster than that modeled and serve better markets where transit is slow today; I-5 is where transit is fast and can remain fast; it could remain fast with tollling. The issue should not be maximum Link ridership, but maximizing total transit ridership, bus and Link and all agencies. Link could be designed to reach pedestrian activiity centers, present and future, and not to connect with park-and-ride lots. ST should shift away from its BART service design. If I-5 continued to provide fast long distance trips, Link could provide fast frequent service to places with more density and two-way all-day demand for transit. SR-99 Link could have more stations than modeled. In Seattle: Northwest Hospital, North 130th Street, and North 145th Street. In Shoreline: North 160th, 185th, and 192nd streets; the last one only has a parking lot; the first has east-west service, the Sears triangle redevelopment parcel, and SCC; the second has east-west service and the Richmond Highlands activity center. Edmonds: CC and Stevens Hospital. Mountlake Terrace already has its freeway stop and fast frequent transit. Today, Edmonds and Shoreline and both more dense than Lynnwood. ST ought not want stations in the I-5 envelope. In the south, ST served good markets (e.g., Rainer Valley, Capitol Hill and the U District); they did not stay in the freeway envelope. Why should the north corridor be different.
Can we really believe this analysis? It is promoting light rail as commuter rail, which is not it’s primary purpose (express buses on freeways are often faster, even more so as future traffic declines in tandem with escalating oil prices).
Prospects for transit oriented development are better away from freeways, where town centers can develop without being overrun by cars. And don’t forget all the stops in between the cities, stops that would not be very pleasant (or even exist) if on a freeway ramp. But these become more heavily used if adjacent to local businesses and institutions. Most people who take the light rail at the station where I live (Othello), walk there. How many people would walk to a freeway light rail stop?
Sound Transit is a regional transit agency, created because inter-county transit was so lacking. Link is a regional rail line even though it also deals with the largest intra-Seattle bottlenecks. Because people from outside Seattle are going to UW, Capitol Hill, Northgate, and the stadiums at all hours, just like people from Seattle are going to Lynnwood and Bellevue. It’s good to consolidate disparate freeway buses into one rail line, with one consistent schedule that takes you to any of its destinations at all times. This Link line is not in-city rapid transit a la the Chicago El, and the tri-county area will not consent to build that until after ST2 Link is fully funded. Seattle can make a few stabs on its own in the meantime, with one or two rapid-streetcars, but it doesn’t have the money to build all of Seattle’s HCT corridors right now.
Mike: yes, that is the question, what should north Link do? ST has multiple modes to provides its regional connections; Everett has regional express and Sounder. What north Link alignment would maximize cost-effectiveness and transit mobility, and at the same time help with land use? What alignment would provide that fast frequent connection to the U District and Capitol Hill to the most suburban riders? Would not an I-5 alignment be redundant to express bus service that is already fast?
The express buses would be cancelled because Link does the same and more. Sounder would remain because Link doesn’t go anywhere near Edmonds and Mukilteo. Maybe it’s just as well to keep Link away from Aurora so that something more appropriate for Aurora can be built.
Several people have said Aurora needs more stops than Link with its regional mission can provide. The 358 is currently 45 minutes from downtown to Aurora Village. Bringing that down to 30 minutes would satisfy almost everybody. A few more street improvements and stop deletions would come within spitting distance of that, and could be done with either RapidRide or a streetcar. Or if all these stops are oh-so-precious, add a Swift layer, which again could be bus or streetcar. We need Link screaming to Lynnwood and we need an improved Aurora, but it may not be the best idea to combine the two.
We could also extend the E or Metro-Swift from Aurora Village to the Mountlake Terrace Link station. That would give a one-seat ride from north Aurora to Link, and subsume a separate east-west route that would otherwise have to exist. Of course that would not allow for a single inter-county Swift route, but as I’ve said elsewhere that route would be too long to be reliable.
Everyone keeps citing suburban BART stations as a terrible model. But a lot of the far-flung East Bay suburb BART stations – like Walnut Creek or Lafeyette – are on Freeways but also within a short walking distance of a pedestrian-friendly walkable area.
Lafayette, for example has a quaint walkable downtown and some apartments and condos within a few minutes walk of the Freeway BART station:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&pq=walnut+creek+bart+station&xhr=t&q=lafayette+bart+station&cp=4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1366&bih=566&wrapid=tlif131373511045510&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
Im 100% on-board for better transit connection within the city and think ST3 needs to revolve around West Seattle to Ballard. But for these suburban areas (lets face it – north of Northgate is suburban) I see no problem with I-5, especially considering the cost. I just don’t see Aurora transforming into a walkable TOD paradise. At best, it certain sections would resemble “downtown” Lake City.
I’ve always wanted to try out the Panda Express just off SR 24 in Lafayette! I’m so glad that billions of tax dollars went to building 104 miles of high-capacity transit and paying upwards of $10/passenger subsidies on the outer branches in order to make my corporate strip-mall Americanized Chinese food dream a reality!
BART remains the quintessential example of rapid transit that didn’t need to be rapid transit. Most of its mileage covers corridors of uni-directional and once-per-day demand. At most, the outer BART corridors should have been Metra-style hourly commuter rails requiring infinitely less capitol expenditure for grade separation. Or rapid transit lines half the length and with a single, massive P&R at the end of each (same effect as the longer lines with 6 P&Rs).
To the extent that Link mimics a BART model, it is a mistake, and no amount of “realpolitick” defensiveness can forgive that kind of money misspent.
FYI, James, that’s mostly me expressing exasperation at the “Link is regional, Seattle needs ‘local modes'” falsehood underpinning our entire transit-building policy. BART comparisons particularly get my goat.
I wasn’t directly disagreeing with your I-5/Aurora input.
Yeah, BART is not the model to follow; BART has spent and is spending all its money to go where the density isn’t. But at least to some degree, subarea equity should protect us from being BART.
That may be true (that BART is not a good model to follow) but San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley have far better transit and mobility than Seattle due to BART,Muni, etc. Not to mention, much denser development, great urbanity, better land use, etc.
Let’s put it this way – I would be thrilled if Seattle was as easy to get around (within the city proper) as San Francisco (within the city proper).
And to add to that – BART needs to go all the way around the bay. Currently, there are plans to take it to Santa Clar, but that would still be only 2/3 around the bay. Why are they spending money on the suburban lines (Pittsburgh,Pleasonton) when the inner-bay is not completed?
BART doesn’t have service beyond Millbrae because San Mateo County is not part of the BART taxing district. Building the San Mateo County Extension (to SFO/Millbrae) required quite of bit of negotiation, and San Mateo County has never been that happy with the service pattern. Santa Clara County isn’t part of the BART district either, but they cut a deal with BART to get the current extension, similar to what San Mateo County did.
re: “Lynnwood’s planned redevelopment is a lot more likely than unplanned Aurora redevelopment.”
This is, of course, a false choice since both options are going to Lynnwood – the 99 route just takes an extra 4 minutes to get there. What we should really be comparing is Aurora’s unplanned redevelopment vs. I-5’s unplanned redevelopment. Can Aurora develop enough to make up for the lost ridership of those 4 minutes? I’d say definately. For all we know Aurora can far outpace Lynnwood’s redevelopment. But that line will serve both areas.
+1. And I also really don’t understand why 4 minutes is causing that much lost ridership. I’d like to hear a better explanation of that.
BART has a daily ridership of 350,000 and MUNI has a daily ridership of 150,000. That’s nearly 500,000 people a day who travel by Heavy and Light rail in the Bay Area (not including commuter rail). Seattle would be lucky to have those numbers in 50 years.
So, while BART isn’t perfect, it is far, far better than anything Seattle will have for many decades.
Meh. Take a look at the King County population density/employment density maps (sadly, Snohomish county doesn’t have such comprehensive demographic info easily available). The stretch from Lynnwood to Northgate is pretty thin, apart from a small blotch of moderate density around Shoreline. There’s no comparison to the Rainier Valley or even Seatac.
I can’t say I really blame them for wanting to just hug the freeway and cheaply leapfrog this low-density area.
DP – you’re exagerrating. Most of BART goes around the bay, which is relatively dense development. It’s only two segments of two lines (Pittsburgh and Pleasonton) that go out into the deep suburbs.
BART does indeed have a daily ridership of roughly 350,000. When you multiply that by the mean per-rider subsidy of $6.14 and consider ridership patterns, the sense of waste should drop your jaw.
I’d love to see ridership parsed by segment (rather than individual station egress), but anecdotal evidence suggests that the impressive 350,000 number comes disproportionately from the central segments between SFO, the southern fringes of Oakland, and the northern fringes of Berkeley. (The outer-segment stations each manage 1,500-6,000 passengers, actually pretty impressive commuter numbers, but they still provide less than a quarter of total system ridership despite 2/3-3/4 of the track mileage.) Inner vs outer usage is even more lopsided off-peak; outer BART lines are the antitheses of all-day corridors.
There may be more residential density around the bay’s shores than inland, but it’s far from walkable density and does not really justify the level of service that has been built and maintained. Also, the distances travelled by the average rider from Fremont or Richmond (or, in the future, San Jose) are not “spontaneous travel” distances. Trips of that length require planning anyway, which diminishes the need for high-frequency transit. (At some lengths, a less frequent – but published and accurate – schedule is actually more useful than frequent-but-unpublished. BART ringing the bay will prove a pointless endeavor, when improvements to CalTrain would actually better meet the needs of the corridor.)
I’ve read that the $6.14 average BART subsidy actually translates to subsidies of $30+ per rider on the outer segments! Is that truly the model that Seattle should want to chase?
(Also, I can’t help but point out that the D.C. Metro, which indulges much of the same suburban sprawl-chasing folly as BART, but which also criss-crosses D.C. proper in a manner highly useful both to city residents and those suburban visitors, enjoys 2-3 times the ridership for similar construction costs. Which should serve as a warning about Link being BART while Seattle transit remains sub-MUNI!)
DP – Those are all good points, I can’t argue with you there.
“the distances travelled by the average rider from Fremont or Richmond (or, in the future, San Jose) are not “spontaneous travel” distances. Trips of that length require planning anyway”
They wouldn’t require planning if BART had express trains like the NYC subway does.
“improvements to CalTrain would actually better meet the needs of the corridor.”
I always hated visiting people on the penninsula because Caltrain runs hourly, and it would be a big negative for living and working there. BART actually works for people, and I’m glad it’s finally being extended on the east side to San Jose, and on the west side to SFO. They should just finish the ring and put Caltrain out of its misery (except the baby bullets).
Also remember that BART could have gone all the way around the Bay and up to Marin in the 1970s if San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, and Marin County hadn’t voted it down. Instead people have had to suffer for decades with slow infrequent Caltrain, slow infrequent buses, and driving, because of BART’s gaps.
No, no, you missed my point.
Any time you take a trip of that distance, it cannot be “spontaneous travel.” Why? Because you end up far away from your starting point. No running back to get lost keys. No picking up the sick kids from school on a moment’s notice.
The level of frequency is inversely proportional to the planning required. The planning required is directly proportional to the distance the trip will take you from your starting point. That’s why it’s okay for intercity trains to run only 4-8 times daily — you’re going for at least a day or two anyway. And why it’s okay that long-distance flights may be once daily — you’re probably going to be gone for many days in between.
You can never make a “quick hop” from Fremont to SF because it’s actually quite far. So there isn’t much difference between making that trip on a 15-minute-headway subway (where you show up and wait 1-15 minutes) or an hourly commuter rail (where you show up precisely when you know the train is leaving).
But a trip from Ballard to Capitol Hill. 5 miles. Not that far. Should be doable for a quick errand. Shouldn’t take all day. Shouldn’t require a ton of planning. That’s when real, frequent, unscheduled transit can actually be of use.
Link and Metro (and BART defenders) have this unequivocally backward.
Important logical connective tissue:
“You can never make a “quick hop” from Fremont to SF because it’s actually quite far… and therefore you’re inevitably going for hours whether the transit is ultra-frequent or just pretty frequent.
(That is the true difference between regional transit and urban transit. Neither wishful thinking nor political priority-shuffling can transcend basic geography. Even your ultra-expresses, with their fractional walksheds, can’t change that far is far.)
Actually, I think that’s the true difference between the east and west coasts.
Back in Boston, everyone I knew had a standing unstated rule that a trip was only worthwhile if you planned to spend at least as much time at your destination as you would in transit. It was reasonable to drive 30 minutes to Costco, since you’d probably spend at least an hour shopping. From Boston to New York was at least a day trip — 3-4 hours each way means at least 8 hours there. Any further, and it’s an overnight.
In college, I had a bunch of friends from California, and I was shocked to hear that they would have no problem driving 2-3 hours one way to spend 30-60 minutes at their destination.
When you’re surrounded by that much suburban sprawl, I guess you don’t really have a choice…
Aleks, my Northeast distance biases clearly match yours.
All things being equal, the progressive worsening of traffic on the West Coast can be expected to put the kibbosh on any propensity for ultra-long-distance “spontaneous driven trips.”
So why would we want BART or BART-like transit systems restoring that propensity? Especially since doing so requires insane and unsustainable levels of subsidy? And especially when shorter transit trips do not enjoy the same spontaneity-enabling frequency/reliability, a condition that can’t be divorced from the money wasted subsidizing the long ones?
100% with you, d.p. Just wanted to point out where part of that difference in perception may have come from. :)
By the way, Aleks, Seattle is the first big city I’ve ever encountered where a surprisingly large sub-set of citizenry behave in the exact opposite manner: they never leave their little corners of the city. They work from home or in their same neighborhood, and their entire social and recreational lives are set in that neighborhood.
And this is by choice, not by financial necessity. It would be like choosing to live Bozeman, Montana and never leave, except that they’ve chosen to do so within the context of an actual city.
I’ve encountered people from Greenwood who rarely go to Ballard or the U-District and never go downtown. I know people who hardly leave Ballard, period. Tonight, on my way back from grabbing dinner in the I.D., I ran into an acquaintance who had never heard the term “I.D.” and had no idea where our Chinatown was.
I can’t help but presume our cruddy transit connectivity plays a role in this. I can’t imagine encountering a Bostonian who would never leave the neighborhood — the T makes using the rest city to easy to deny or refuse.
[too easy]
DP, the people you’ve met who never leave their neighborhood may be unusual. I’ve always thought of that as a Chicago/New York thing. “We don’t cross that street because it’s hostile territory.” The Los Angeles thing is that the entire metropolitan area is your neighborhood. Seattle is in between. Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have stronger neighborhood identities than LA but people do travel in a wider area so they’re not “stuck” in their neighborhood. There is a strong city/suburban bias in some people, but that’s for the entire Seattle or Eastside as a whole, not for individual neighborhoods. There are people who prefer certain “kinds” of places, such as U-district/Capitol Hill together, or the Rainier/Beacon area, or the Ship Canal to Northgate. But they’re rarely confined to a single neighborhood.
The only people I’ve seen who totally don’t know about other neighborhoods is some poor kids in Rainier Valley, who don’t really know that Southcenter exists, or think of it as some mythical entity like Washington DC. But that’s a case of too-poor-to-travel-and-buy, not a willful shutting out of the rest of the region. “Suburbanites” do tend to drive around a lot and be in many neighborhoods, and think that’s perfectly normal.
Perhaps the people you’re referring to have only lived here a few years, so they haven’t gotten around to exploring yet or they’re bringing their one-neighborhood mindset from elsewhere.
2 things:
The cities of Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace are heavily pushing for an I-5 alignment.
The major lesson from MLK is that you CANNOT have a surface alignment through that kind of development. A streetcar Link is not. Rapid Transit requires exclusive ROW.
Some problems with the old interurban route:
* It was street-running between downtown and 85th. So no ROW through the most congested part of the region.
* The ROW is a bit far back from where you might want stops on a modern transit line. For example you’d want a stop at 105th & Aurora rather than over 1/4 away where the interurban ROW crosses 105th.
* The South line largely duplicates the Sounder route.
I hope the detailed analysis includes an Interurban alignment, at-grade. This graphic seems incomplete to me.
I would think that SR99 would have more riders since it would be more useful in general. I-5 would just be replacing commuter buses and provide very little more functionality.
I think we need to leave the I-5 alignment alone so we can do something better there at some point. Put in Light Rail and it’s done. Running up 99 makes more sense to me anyway because there’s things to do there and people live there. I-5 is and always will be Park and Rides strung together. Electrified Sounder would make more sense there if we’re going to do anything. Light rail makes more sense when you’re stopping more often.
Wait, there’s going to be 4 stops on I-5 between Northgate and Lynwood? Where in the world are they going to stop? I can’t think of more than two places to stop and one of them has one person board each bus, the other usually has 2 or 3 so most of the ridership comes from Lynnwood P&R.
I have a hard time imagining fewer people boarding the 5 stops on 99. The 99 alignment will STILL pickup everyone from Lynnwood P&R plus everywhere between. I call bull.
Wouldn’t the 99 route pick up the majority of the passengers from the I-5 route (Lynnwood P&R) in addition to the people boarding along 99? I can see it being slower or more expensive but I can’t imagine it pickup up fewer people. I don’t know how that’s possible.
A 4 minute delay will lead to a large drop in ridership, and they are projecting that 99 will not generate enough to compensate. 4 minutes is a pretty big delay considering the total length of the line.
You make a good point about the water crossing, it would be pretty tough. It may be that BRT is the best permanent solution for 99.
Completely on the nose, Rachel. It seems like I may be even more of a “choice” non-driver than you are. I have no strong taste or distaste for the act of driving; it doesn’t stress me out, and truth be told, the rarity of the event (3 or 4 times a year) actually makes it kind fun, novel, and exciting. My position is that, without a strong desire to drive or to own a vehicle, the costs/hassles/uncertainties of car ownership can’t be justified. The moment one owns a vehicle, it becomes a primary expense and the tangible asset requiring the most frequent mental attention. I would resent it if a city’s nonchalance about its inadequate public transit forced all of that upon me.
While I would in no way try to compare my situation to that of someone who lacks a vehicle due to poverty – being poor is a logistical nightmare that most financially comfortable people could never begin to imagine – the sub-standard transit forces hands in the same way. One may begin to prioritize bringing (or desiring to bring) an expensive, unpredictable, and distracting possession into one’s life, because the twin benefits to flexibility and time come to override what might otherwise be logically ordered priorities.
This city needs to get serious about intra-urban transit mobility for the sake of both choice and non-choice riders. FWIW, if I were to buy a car, I would need to change apartments, as I’ve chosen to live in the 2-block area of Ballard where parking nightly and parking long-term are both exceedingly difficult. If the city outside of this 2-block radius ever hopes to overcome new-development designs that worship at the altar of the underground garage – if the city wants to take a true step towards city-hood, with the unavoidable side-effect of expanding the areas in which parking is difficult – it has to start making car-free living look much more appealing than it does.
Mike, the trade-off that you have accepted is not a necessary one. North America only contains a single city in which car ownership won’t occasionally make life easier (and even that one’s outer boroughs find the things handy sometimes). But we have more than a few cities that won’t make you sacrifice “getting as much done in a day” to go car-free. That kind of resigned thinking is exactly what Rachel deemed untenable, belittling to those who make the choice and near-dehumanizing to those whose choice is made for them.
Your posts are full of evidence that you totally get this. The “nobody would rationally…” line above demonstrates as much. But a city that can’t be bothered to run reliably <30-minute frequencies on some of its highest-demand corridors at any level of stop spacing is never going to be overlaying extreme expresses over extreme locals. So I remain confused why you’re always advocating the two extremes and overlooking a logical midpoint that works better everywhere it’s tried. Not 2 blocks. Not 2 miles. Exchanging longer walks for faster service is very different than having vehicles blaze through entire sections of the city without stopping at all. The 66 in Eastlake is more useful than either the 70 or the non-stop 71-3s. And the15X and 18X would be much more flexible if they stopped once or twice in Interbay. (BTW, even in NYC, it’s only the very high frequencies that make the express+local transfers work. An extended wait for just the last mile is a highly unpalatable experience.)
All of that is why the “Link is regional” insistence is so perplexing and so bothersome to me. I know that’s the parroted political line, but is there any rationale for it that holds water? “Regional” basically means super-express, which the stop spacing reflects. But you’re running that with a “light rail” that is much better designed for frequent stopping followed by a quick return to medium speeds than it is for truly high speeds. You’re also designing it to serve corridors whose lengths and commute-priority biases might actually do better with a fixed-schedule commuter vehicle than all-day high-frequency transit. By supporting this mode as “the regional one,” you squander both the capital funds and the semantic authority to demand intra-city transit on anything better than the “local modes” which you have just said “rationally” need to be superseded. See the trouble that gets us into?
Obviously a slam dunk for the I-5 alignment, always has been. The problem is, Metro only has the #347/8 providing non-peak service to the Shoreline stops. Parking in their two Shoreline stops is minimal. Street capacity on both N. 145th and to a much lesser extent N. 185th is considerable in peak hours. No commercial activity is along that corridor.
By contrast, the 99 alignment didn’t answer the question whether the Interurban Corridor could be used. It avoids the density-rich employment and housing center at 220th in Mountlake Terrace/Edmonds in favor of swinging back to I-5 along a very congested SR-104 to obviously appease Mountlake Terrace politicos.
A fairer comparison would have been to swing back at 220th and follow the Interurban into Lynnwood. Then, of course, one of the initial options studied should have been an elevated, grade-separated busway, but then doing all of these things would have indicated an objective study vs. one where the answer was pre-ordained.