Sound Transit

This is an open thread.

71 Replies to “News Roundup: Going Ahead”

  1. Excellent outcome on the Roosevelt zoning – 65 ft will be good for both the city and for the neighborhood. I think even the folks in Roosevelt will look back at this some day and agree.

    And I wish there was more information out there on D-to-M. That project is huge for regional transportation, but has been flying a bit under the radar. Glad to see it’s progressing well….

    1. The folks in Roosevelt will only look back and agree if RDG builds a project that is people/pedestrian/public open-space friendly. Otherwise, all of their website and in-meeting rhetoric is just the usual developers’ crap. They are already showing their colors by placing a pole barn on the busy intersection abutting the sidewalk on two sides.

      Many of the pro-65 ft advocates including council members kept talking about affordable housing. But no one said exactly what that means in square footage or in dollars per square foot.

      Yes, we’re waiting to look back someday.

      1. If the neighborhood is concerned about design then the issue of 65 vs. 40 ft is spurious as it is possible to build junk at either height. If that is the concern, then focus on design and not height. And, under certain conditions, it might actually be possible to get better design at 65 ft anyhow.

        Na, zoning to 65 ft is the right decision – what actually gets built is the next decision. If the neighborhood truly cares, they will focus on the next step and focus on good design.

      3. At least with the re-zone the Sisley properties get re-developed and won’t sit and rot for who knows how much longer.

  2. There’s a discussion on the Wallyhood blog about a pedestrian who was struck by a car and injured while crossing N 45th St at Wallingford Ave N. The driver then sped away.

    Commenters are alleging that this may have been because of the queue jump bus signal on westbound N 45th St at this intersection. Then someone says that since the sign by the signal for the queue jump lane says “Bus Signal” rather than “Bus Signal Only” that cars can legally use it. Now someone is calling for its removal.

    Is there a law that specifies that these “bus signal” lights are for buses only? I couldn’t find anything in the Revised Code of Washington, the Seattle Municipal Code, the Washington Administrative Code, or the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

    1. Transit vehicles are permitted to use signal preemption devices per RCW 46.37.670. I haven’t found anything that specifies what form, if any, that signal preemption devices must take. Obviously they require components to be installed on the signal themselves.

      Title 46 is intended to be construed in a way that gives benefit of the doubt to the authority that placed the traffic control device, as per Paragraph 4 of RCW 46.61.050. You’d have to prove with competent evidence that the “BUS SIGNAL” sign violates the rules of Title 46. One way to do that might be to argue that the meaning of the sign is unclear. I doubt this would be a winning argument.

    2. You also can’t just run someone down because the light turned green. The law is pretty clear about that. :-)

  3. I think the “Kirkland Buys Rail Corridor” story needs a bigger audience, myself. This saga needs to be spread to as many planners as possible, to showcase how successful they could be with their bike trail plans.

  5. Sightline’s Clark Williams-Derry looks at induced demand. Not only does 1% increase in road capacity lead to 1% extra road travel (leading to more sprawl), but also increased transit capacity leads to more travel (leading to more sprawl). Of course, if you don’t build park-and-rides you have a chance at building density out in the suburbs -then extra travel is less of a big deal. But the study he links to is an important back-up documentation to what logic and economics models already told us.

    1. This is why environmentalists should never support road expansion projects, no matter what they’re bundled with. And why road contraction should be one of our top transportation priorities.

    2. It’s funny how people pick and choose economic theories to support their positions.

      Induced demand applies to roads, but not to housing or development!

      1. It’s pretty clear for roads – adding capacity allows access to cheap (far) housing. You’re using a “free” resource of road capacity that’s in high demand, and free resources in an open market will be consumed completely.

        What’s the equivalent “free” resource you’re offering for city homes?

      2. Wait, the “free” part is just describing pricing. I admit not to reading the grist piece, but if it relies on pricing it’s incorrect. Induced demand is where increasing the supply of something increases demand for it. It has nothing to do with being free.

        This is obvious with, say, night clubs. Night clubs open up near other popular night clubs. It’s also obvious with health care (a visit to a doctor can induce demand for further treatment).

        A community with more amenities is more attractive and that could increase demand to live there. This is why cities exist.

      3. Induced demand in the context of roads has everything to do with the cost of using the road. The cost that influences induced demand the most is cost of one’s time. There’s a point where the time spent stuck in traffic is bearable. Decrease the time penalty and more people will choose to make trips on that road. That’s assuming there was pent up demand in the first place; a pretty safe bet on a highly congested highway. I guess a housing example would be the UW adding more dorm space. The cost of staying in the dorms is about the same and given the pent up demand for living on campus the dorms will remain at capacity until more are built than there are students that want to stay in them. The difference is that that for heavily used roads the pent up demand is typically greater than any practical amount of added capacity can meet. With the dorms the demand is limited by enrollment. They pretty much know how many beds to add to meet the demand and adding more won’t allow the UW to increase enrollment.

      4. Induced demand, despite the fancy name, is really just Econ 101. As the supply of a good increases, its price decreases, and the quantity consumed increases.

        With housing, or a good for which the main cost is money, the same thing applies. If you increase the supply, by building more units, you lower prices, which increases the quantity of housing consumed.

        The “novel” part, with respect to roads, is recognizing that time is part of the cost. If you increase road capacity, you decrease the time it takes to travel on that road (the cost), which increases the amount of traffic that the road sees.

        This is also why tolls are a consistently successful way to keep roadways free-flowing. If you assume that everyone is willing to spend a certain amount of resources on transportation, and that there’s some exchange rate between time and money, then it stands to reason that the more money you ask people to pay, the less time they’ll be willing to spend. Thus, the equilibrium price shifts sideways — more money, but less time.

      5. I actually think this makes sense to some degree. People’s budget-based limits when looking for housing are pretty similar to their time-based limits when planning a commute.

        It’s complicated by the fact that there are a lot of different kinds of housing that appeal to different people. Developers in the US are pretty bad about making multi-family buildings appeal to actual families, compared to much of the rest of the world, and that’s intimately tied to Americans being more picky than most about living in houses with yards. And those preferences are tied up in cheap fossil fuel energy. Without cheap fossil fuel energy attitudes would change considerably.

        Although I want to see freeways (and certain other roads) removed and infill housing built instead of sprawling the region, zoning codes can’t be the ground floor. The idea that zoning in Roosevelt is the first in a series of epic battles for the economy, environment, and social justice sounds pretty overblown. If we all were to take the bold step of taking full financial responsibility for the environmental impacts of our energy usage, the other stuff (zoning and transportation policies, among other things) would flow forth from that.

      6. With housing, or a good for which the main cost is money, the same thing applies. If you increase the supply, by building more units, you lower prices, which increases the quantity of housing consumed.

        The problem is when you build housing along with other amenities, it’s not obvious that prices have to go down. In Roosevelt’s case we’re building a tiny amount of housing (500 units or something) to go along with an awesome commute, a ton of great retail and a massive amount of walkability. Prices are going to go up there with this amount of housing.

        The demand is being induced by the train station, and the amount is much, much more than even this zoning is going to allow. Over time, eventually they are going to have to increase this zoning and spread it further, just because the demand is going to go crazy.

      7. @Andrew: I thought you were saying that, all else being equal, adding housing might not reduce local housing costs; that’s an interesting argument that’s hard to prove but may be true in some areas. If all you’re saying is that vastly improving transit service to an area will increase housing values, every density hawk in Seattle agrees with that.

      8. To Andrew’s original point: I think, whatever you call it, it’s a reasonable point that dense cities can be desirable, so in theory when you add supply by building up you’re also adding demand. I’d have to see some strong evidence to buy that this added demand is anything close to the demand you’re satisfying by adding supply.

      9. The real problem is that road-sprawled housing has hidden costs — externalities — which end up being paid by everyone, not just the people who chose to build housing out in the middle of nowhere, and not just the people who campaigned to expand the roads. If it didn’t have these hidden costs, then nobody would *care* about the induced demand.

        These costs are pretty obvious now in a number of Rust Belt cities which simply cannot afford the size of their road, sewer, and water systems compared to the actual population density — they have utilities designed for a much higher population. They could continue to supply city services to the existing population quite effectively *if everyone moved to more clustered housing*, but instead it’s 5 abandoned buildings, 1 occupied, 5 abandoned, 1 occupied, and it’s completely impractical. Yet political pressures make it impossible to fix, because everyone wants *their* house to be one of the survivors.

        Better not to create this dynamic in the first place. Every place shrinks eventually (these things go in cycles); a city full of multifamily housing simply ends up with a bunch of it temporarily converted to single-family housing, but a city with nothing but single-family housing ends up with abandoned buildings.

  6. Just a big shout-out for ST today. They put a new survey guy on-board the Northline Sounder this morning, and he was great at listening and taking notes. Hopefully someday they’ll create a “quiet car” w/o any cellphones, and one where the cellies can yack and yack.

    1. And a nightclub car, complete with a full bar, a disco ball, and dancing. (what, why just sit around texting on your commute? We used to have a dancing car that went up to Snoqualmie.)

      1. LIRR used to have a bar car (still do on certain trains to the Hamptons). Now they just sell beer on the platform at Jamaica and Penn, and bring the carts onboard on certain trains towards the end of peak.

      2. My Dad used to ride the ski train to Snoqualmie…he loved it and I always wished we still had something like that today. If we ever had passenger rail through Stampede Pass, construction of a short spur from the tunnel’s east portal could still take you to Hyak. (Yeah, I know it would never happen…but it would be an enjoyable way to get to the mountains winter or summer).

        Leavenworth used to hold the national ski jumping championships and the Great Northern would put on several “specials” from Seattle to get the crowds up there (the jumps are still visible north of town). With a much needed eastbound morning train Seattle-Spokane and v.v., to complement the Empire Builder’s evening departure, a seasonal stop could be built at the west portal of the tunnel (Scenic) with shuttle service up the mountain being provided by the resort…or…a gondola (!)

        Hell, then you could run a DMU out to the coast connecting with the Cascades at Lacey/Olympia or Chehalis! And a spur service from Spokane to Pullman! And….

        (shutting up now)

      4. Heck, just take the Primera Chepe from El Fuerte, Sinaloa to Cd. Chihuahua on the CH-P “Copper Canyon” line. They have drinks, and you can have it while hanging your head, arms and whatnot out of the passenger car as you traverse the 86 tunnels and 13 bridges! No need for the disco ball, you have Mexican music instead!

      5. Looking at a map I just realized the train goes right through Steven’s Pass. Is there train service to that ski resort? There certainly could be.

      6. Yeah, on The Milwaukee Road. I recently talked to an older gentleman who took the ski train up to Hyak.

      7. There was never service to Stevens Pass, at least as a ski area–once the second (current) tunnel was built in the 1920s it was quite a haul from the portals up to the pass. When the line was first constructed it crossed the pass through a series of switchbacks but there was nothing like a ski area there then. There was a tourist lodge of fairly decent size at Scenic, which is basically where the west portal of the GN tunnel is today (or, if you’re driving, where the Iron Goat interpretive area is, at the base of the steep climb to the top of the pass). The only town between there and the pass was the ill-fated Wellington, site of the avalanche disaster that spurred GN to construct the current tunnel.

        Snoqualmie Pass did, as noted, have the Milwaukee Ski Bowl at what became Hyak. I think the old station building is still there, though don’t recall for sure. The Milwaukee Road ran the service from Tacoma and Seattle up the Snoqualmie Valley, above where I-90 is now. Dad loved it as a young man…I got the impression that the whole adventure was a bit of a party since no driving was necessary!

      8. Scenic is only about 3 miles from Steven’s – that’s certainly close enough for a gondola run, or they could just run a shuttle bus.

        “the whole adventure was a bit of a party” How could it not be? It had a dancing car!

        Man we’ve lost a lot of cool trains.

      9. Scratch that. Google maps was wrong – Steven’s is only about a mile from Scenic. That’s an even easier gondola run, and you could go right to the top from the train station. I vote for a twice-daily ski train from Seattle, complete with a dancing car.

      10. I have thought for many years that a gondola would be a great idea from a Scenic station should ski service actually ever become a possibility. From an existing station (Leavenworth), the ski area runs an employee shuttle as many of the seasonal workers lived there…or at least they used to. I don’t know if it’s still done that way. If they can run an employee shuttle, why not a ski shuttle for passengers alighting at Scenic? At least until the gondola is built :)

        You’d still need a second passenger train to make it work as there’s not much in the way of lodging up there. The trains would only need to stop there in season, and probably only Fr-Sa-Su. No worries!

      11. Before we talk trains to Stevens Pass to ski, has anyone taken Trailways up which stops right at the ski area?

      12. Stevens used to run a free shuttle service from the Cheveron station just east of Monroe. I made use of that a time or two. With the addition of the parking at the Nordic area I think they dropped the Monroe shuttle. Mmmm, looks like they’ve re-instituted a shuttle, at least on Saturdays: Grease Bus

      13. Yeah, because driving to Monroe and taking a shuttle is pretty much the same thing as dancing on a train, taking a gondola up to ski all day, then riding back with a cup of cocoa while watching the snow-covered trees go by. :-P

      14. No, but it beats driving, especially if you’re alone and best of all it’s a reality rather than a fantasy. Do you have any idea how much environmental work goes into installing a new lift inside the boundary of an existing ski area? And CNL is never going to build a lift that only uploads a handful of skiers in the morning and downloads them in the evening. There is a ski train option; Amtrak to Whitefish.

      15. I was thinking about the limited use aspect of that as well. It would be useful to get a permit to build a slope down to Scenic. Then they could run the gondola as a ski lift as well.

      16. Metro North’s commuter lines to Connecticut still run bar cars on evening runs out of Grand Central Station. To my knowledge, it is the only line in North America that still has bar cars. They are so popular that patrons have even started a web site to identify which evening trains will have them (http://www.wheresthebarcar.com/).

    2. The South Sounder line had a quiet car, but cancelled it. I notice transit systems throughout the country are adopting the concept and here we dropped it :(

  7. They are doing work on Kent Kangley now all the way through February!

    I was on it the other day and it was amazing in the work zone…going from Interstate level traffic down to one half empty and the other half with one lane of stalled cars.

    It was like being transported back in time. I imagined as if LINK were being built and the whole thing were put on a road diet, with a wide two-way bike and pedestrian causeway running from Covington to Renton…

  9. I apologize if this question has been covered before, but is dual tracked Link a future possibility on the BNSF corridor even after they build the multi-use trail?

    1. It’s a possibility, albeit it looks like a pretty unlikely possibility at this point.

      seattletransitblog.com/2011/12/12/kirkland-may-buy-eastside-bnsf-segment/

      1. Agree with Jim. The corridor is kaputz, fini, has a fork stuck in it, gone forever.
        A sad commentary about how Seattle politicians can’t see over their [ad hom]

      2. Please explain how ‘Seattle politicians’ get to decide what Kirkland does with the ROW?

      3. I think MIke means “Seattle area” politicians, as in Regional.

        Kirkland should do as they please.

        While we’re at it, we should get rid of eminent domain. Smacks of social engineering if you ask me.

      4. Eminent domain is simply the expression of the fact that property rights in land are created by, enforced by, and exist solely due to government.

        As long as judges and police are enforcing these government-created property rights, we need eminent domain in order to make sure democracy has some sort of meaning when it comes to land. Otherwise, frankly, any mega-billionaire could, given enough time, buy up nearly the whole of Seattle, turn everyone into his tenants, install his own tollgates on all the roads, and rule the city as your sovereign lord, and no matter who you elect, you wouldn’t have any say about the matter at all, forevermore. We call that “feudalism”.

        Eminent domain should, however, only be used for purposes which both benefit the public and are democratically approved. No more of this business of using it to benefit favored cheapskate developers.

      5. Yes, but whose Eminent Domain is better? Sound Transit’s, King County’s, Kirkland’s?

        You’re just not getting into the Property Rights spirit, Nathanael.

      6. Heck, Kirkland could designate Lake Washington Boulevard as a highway of county wide significance.

        They could use eminent domain to widen that to lessen the traffic congestion through the downtown ares.

      7. There is a priority of eminent domains. The state is first, Sound Transit second, and the cities third. I’m not sure whether the county is above or below Sound Transit. But that’s why Bellevue couldn’t override ST on the south Bellevue alignment or a downtown tunnel, and why ST couldn’t use the UW laundry facility for Mt Baker Transit Center.

    3. It makes me sad that this region is going to waste a perfect opportunity to provide dedicated ROW N/S mass transit on the eastside. I really just don’t understand this area sometimes.

  10. You know what’s annoying to me? The web interface of One bus away doesn’t do a good job of noting which future buses it has data for or which ones are just showing scheduled information. It took me a depressingly long time to figure that out, because it was completely unbvious from the ui.

    1. It says “scheduled arrival” or “scheduled departure” and the count down is in black, not blue/green/red.

  11. I’m glad to see that the Sounder extension to Lakewood is moving along. That eventually means Amtrak Cascades will be able to use the Point Defiance Bypass.

  12. A slight tangent here but check out this video of some workers on a rail cart whizzing down the Brightwater Tunnel.

    I’m wondering if you could get from Woodinville/Bothell to Shoreline quicker at this speed than by car?

  13. GetAround car sharing just announced Portland as the second peer-to-peer car sharing city. San Franciscans can already sign up for this service to rent your car out to other city dwellers that need a car. Go vote for Seattle for the next GetAround car sharing city. I’d love to do something with my second car that sits on the street 99.9% of the time.

  15. Has Metro published a full list of where they will place the eleven new ORCA vending machines?

    It occured to me they might not intend to place them all over the county, but rather up and down 3rd Ave, and maybe some other CBD streets, instead. They may have valued getting ORCA into people’s hands that highly to avoid an October meltdown.

    Still, I’ve been hoping that rear-door ORCA readers will be the new feature for the C/D line, since that route doesn’t have zone fumbling issues.

    Adding rear-door readers to all downtown buses will probably be less of a nightmare than having a dozen different ORCA readers for each different agency/zone permutation at each stop.

    Also, call boxes for people with questions they would otherwise ask operators at length would help. (Yes I know, most everyone has cell phones, but you can’t expect confused people who hold up whole busloads — and every bus behind them — with lengthy questions will figure out how to read the Customer Service number on signs.) “Just push here to be connected to a Metro Rider Information Specialist.” Set it up so the responding MRIS will know exactly where they are calling from, and can deftly transfer them to someone who understands the caller’s native language better.

    So what if an MRIS only responds during business hours. That’s when someone steps on the bus and asks long questions, oblivious to how many buses he is holding up in line. I’m not so worried about other hours.

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