Month: April 2012

Last Thursday the Sound Transit board approved alignment and station locations to be included in the Draft Environment Impact Study (DEIS). Like East Link, Sound Transit has identified 3 different segments:

• Segment A – Northgate to NE 185th St
• Segment B – NE 185th to 212th St SW
• Segment C – 212th St SW to Lynnwood TC

Each Segment has several variations of station locations and guideway alignment. While ST2 initially identified four stations, five stations appears to be a possibility if the cost and ridership benefits of the stations outweighs the ridership lost due to the additional travel time and additional costs incurred by the station. Continue reading “NE 130th Added to North Corridor DEIS”

Tomorrow evening is the second installation of the City Builder Happy Hour. Like at the first event, the hosts want to hear about people’s “audacious ideas” to support more growth and sustainable development in Seattle. Last time it was the idea of a gondola from Capitol Hill to Seattle Center. This time you are invited to send your idea in on the back of cocktail napkin. I’m going to put my ideas here, in this post, instead.

When I last wrote about the happy hour, I talked about the “myth of Big Development,” and somebody has done a great job of running with that idea, creating a great visual image. I’m still withholding judgment about whether a happy hour is going to get us where we need to go. “What could it hurt?” you ask.

In my opinion, we’re rapidly approaching the time when doing nothing but talking about things is going to be harmful, even if we have a few beers while we’re doing it. I’ve about had it with meetings, however well intentioned, that don’t lead to creating the political momentum behind the ideas that will fundamentally change our approach to land use in Seattle. Having said all that, here are some “audacious ideas,” parts of which I’ve shared before.

Continue reading “Will Beer and Big Ideas Lead to ‘Big Development’?”

Documentary series from the BBC.

Although not a perfect case, the #35 does bring to mind an important point.  Details matter.  When you cut a bus service down below a frequent schedule, some people find it inconvenient to have to wait so they find other ways to travel.  When that schedule drops to a few times per day other riders find there’s not enough of a backup plan in case they miss the last bus, so they start driving to be sure they can get home.  And when these few buses arrive at strange hours of the day (the #35 arrives at 3:39 and 4:09 in the afternoon, and that’s it), it may drop almost all of its ridership since there are far stronger factors that affect work hours than just a bus schedule. Continue reading “The Tragedy of the Infrequent Route”

People love Seattle.  So what do we do about our popularity?  Here are our choices.

1. Allow additional housing capacity throughout Seattle (how and where to do this is open for debate), allowing people that want to move here to move here without kicking those with less money out.

2. Keep our restrictive zoning that only allows a small rate of growth, and allow affordability to plummet as rents go up to match demand.

The housing crisis won’t last forever.  We can ride the next building boom, or watch as the suburbs do it for us.

Now that a large of chunk of Pierce County is no longer in the Pierce Transit district, where they paid taxes, received service, and voted down a ballot measure to maintain PT’s service level, a large area in Eastern Pierce County is solely served by Sound Transit.

Yesterday, the Sound Transit Board followed the proposal of Board Member and Sumner Mayor Dave Enslow and created Route 596, a replacement for PT 496 and connecting parts of Bonney Lake, Buckley, and Enumclaw to the Sumner Sounder station.

ST Express Route 596 will function as a fast, limited-stop service for passengers making long-distance regional trips, with direct connections to commuter rail and other transit modes. The route serves 290 boardings each day and will be timed to meet morning and afternoon Sounder trains…

[The 596] resurrects a previously-operated connector bus route that voters approved in the 1996 Sound Move ballot measure. Known as ST Express Route 582, that service operated between Bonney Lake and Tacoma. It was gradually phased out when Pierce Transit began operating Route 496 service in 2007.

It will begin running June 11th, the first workday after PT wraps up the 496 on June 8th. The $253,000 operating cost for 2012 will come out of the Pierce subarea reserves.

We’ve listed our email address as contact@seattletransitblog.wpcomstaging.com for quite some time now. If you’re still sending email to seattletransitblog@gmail.com, it’s not getting to us. Please update your records accordingly.

• Everyone loves Seattle. We all knew that already, but now it’s official.
• The who’s who of hipsterdom. Seattle is so over!
• Times Editorial Board – “A four-mile segment [of I-5] would open the next year, from Olive Way to Ravenna, and I would make my dad drive me on it several times. I loved freeways. When I grew up I wanted to build them.”
• Building mixed use for the housing, retail just a selling point.
• East Link cost savings open house tonight.
• North Corridor Link station at NE 130th a shoe in, expect fireworks over NE 175th and NE 185th at ST Board meeting today.
• DC Bikeshare already almost operationally profitable. Imagine milk run bus service with a farebox recovery of 97%!
• First Hill Streetcar, fun vs. utility… yes please!
• Future of Bauhaus uncertain, lots of community concern.
• Thesis on  DC height limits, how to grow and protect historic buildings.
• Mossback not as grumpy as usual, new nuanced opinion of growth and density.
• Mercer West cycle track in the works, key to high quality connection between Lake Union and Waterfront.
• A walkable Northgate? Go on a walking tour with Futurewise, Feet First and Cascade. RSVP here.
• Tax density, not all land uses are created equal.
• Why SR-520 draw span is opening more often.

This is an open thread.

Five years ago I moved back to Seattle from the Bay Area and realized that public transportation in Seattle was in a very bad way. There was discord over light rail and Sound Transit’s future. There was confusion about buses – unfortunately this continues, as Bruce Nourish has so well documented. Life-stealing and welfare reducing congestion was rampant, with no clear plan to deal with it in sight. The viaduct replacement project was a mess. Worse yet, there was the failed monorail project, which cast a dark shadow over public transportation and our city’s make-it-happen-attitude. I started the Seattle Transit Blog in part because there was no obvious place to discuss these issues online – and I wanted there to be.

I like to think that the blog has had a part in the greater discourse in our community on this topics- and I don’t think that it is untrue or unlikely. Certainly, not all of these have gone the way the members of the blog would have like them to have gone – and many of them have split the blog staff itself. We have often disagreed with each other and argued with our readers. But I’m comfortable speaking for everyone who has written here to say what we are most proud of is the level of discourse and the knowledge of our commentariat.

For the blog’s longevity, we can only thank Martin Duke. Mr Duke has worked to put an organization in place to ensure the blog’s – and hence the discussion’s – long-term survival. He’s worked diligently to ensure there’s always a place for the voices of both the fresh and the weary.

Looking back, what I see the top stories of the last five years: Continue reading “Five Years of Seattle Transit Blog”

Last night, I dropped by Metro’s open house for the proposed Route 120 speed and reliability improvements, and chatted to Metro staff and neighbors. Much of the public feedback consisted of fairly predictable requests by neighbors to save their favorite stops, but I noted a couple of items of information or concern:

• Whether the northbound queue jump rechannelization near Andover will work. Currently, the north end of Delridge Way provides two general purpose lanes in the northbound direction. Local residents were concerned that the loss of a general purpose lane at that intersection would make traffic congestion significantly worse and provide little benefit, as, in the morning rush hour, Delridge is often gridlocked north of Andover. They proposed shortening the bus lane so that the bus would merge south of the intersection.
• The 125’s detour to serve the Chelan & Spokane stops under the viaduct will likely go away. This detour is classic Metro: sending a bus a minute out of its way to save a very small percentage of riders a five-minute walk; getting rid of it puts the 125 on the same alignment as the 120, and is a big win for most riders.

Metro’s Have a Say website has all the details about the proposed changes, along with contact information and a survey for feedback; comment deadline is this Friday, April 27th.