Sounder Station - Tukwila

Sounder Station – Tukwila by WhenEliseSings

This is an open thread.

62 Replies to “News Roundup: Does It Matter?”

  1. I don’t think you have the right link for the Tacoma Rescue Mission and Sounder story.

  2. I wonder if Grace is trying to manage the BART strike from her hotel room in Portland?
    (local joke only!)

  3. Sounds like Lesser Steinbreuck is showing some passive aggressive opposition to Light Rail within the city.

    If he wants “Real BRT” would he be serious about constructing exclusive right of way lanes for those buses rather than a few extra pencil sticks of exclusivity like we have now?

    2. Given that his constituency is the same constituency that has fought BAT lanes tooth and nail wherever they have been built within the city, it would show a perverse form of guts for him to advocate them explicitly. I’m guessing that’s one reason he’s being so rah-rah about BRT in general without ever getting into any specific proposals.

      2. That’s who all the public BRT supporters are. If you’re mode agnostic, you support service that can meet the demand in the corridor (and not just “for the next five years”).

      4. Depending on snowfall, that red would fade away after a few winters. :-) Red notoriously fades quick. It’s why many stop, yield and other signs containing red legend (as it is called in my MUTCD-talk) fade to pink.

        In addition, striping companies normally don’t put down red markings so trucks would have to be designated especially for red pavement markings or else you will get orange yellow lines or pink white longitudinal markings.

        One idea, and it has been done with pavers within roundabouts, is to dye the concrete. There are red dyes available…granted they may be a bit brown. Even the ones used at D Street in Blaine just south of the International Boundary ended up being a little bleached by the sun.

        D Street Roundabout (Blaine, WA) Dyed and Stamped Concrete

      5. Fading does not seem to be a concern for the City when it comes to green paint. :)

        But you are correct,dying the concrete would, even if it turns out a shade of brown, would show the permanence and seriousness towards transit of the politician.

    3. i.e., he supports the status quo, but wants to give the illusion of open-mindedness to the STB crowd

      1. At least he approves of all the modes to Ballard being studied. Even doing a study of light rail to West Seattle has gotten the big thumbs down from Peter.

    4. Word to all mayoral candidates:

      If you really mean business about Bus Rapid Transit, be ready to put some money where your mouth is and your boots in a fighting stance. Real speed means same caliber reservation as light rail, on surface and wherever else it has to run to keep moving.

      With attendant budgetary and political confrontations.

      Fact that since buses can’t be coupled- though Russians have tried this with standard, including pretty beat-up, trolleybuses, faster bus platoon goes, more space it takes up. A four car LINK train will be 360 feet long at 60 mph. Six articulated buses at same speed need a third of a mile for safety.

      I’d agree to building right-of-way to rail spec and running it with buses until trains arrive- wish this had been done with Beacon Hill tunnel and MLK. Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel would be excellent model.

      But like Yoda would put it, “Make transit rapid, paint does not!” Either on buses for “branding” or on pavement for stripes.

      Mark Dublin

  4. Not that there needs to be another example of why LRT to Ballard will need a tunnel, but twice this week, at around 6, a giant barge and a giant ship being tugged both had the bridge go up. Since they were so large, they had to take turns navigating the bridge cut, which took between 15 to 20 minutes. Meanwhile, cars, buses, bikes and people were swarmed as far as the eye can see.

    Obviously a separate canal crossing for a streetcar would negate the startup lag time once the bridge finally goes back down, but if you are shooting for as high as 10 minute headways, you now have three trains backed up at what could still be considered a peak commute time. That supposed 20-25 minute ride to Ballard has nearly doubled.

    The bridge going up for that long at that time of day is not something that happens every day or even every week, but the fact that it happened twice in one week should be example enough.

    1. A tunnel or a very tall bridge. If the rail is elevated on both ends (which is one proposal) than a bridge makes a lot of sense. If there is a tunnel on both ends, then a tunnel underneath makes sense. You are absolutely correct, though, a drawbridge would be a terrible compromise as it would slow down the entire system. Imagine three trains backed up behind the bridge. Then what? Let all three go to the end, but the spacing is all wrong. So not only do you have to wait a long time if you are on a train, but you would have to wait longer if you are waiting for a train. This would be really bad.

      1. A crossover would have to be installed at Market and one of those backed up trains would end there and reverse back. Sucks for the passengers but it will ease the “pain” so to speak.

      2. We cannot build 140′ buildings in SLU, what makes anyone thing we’d get a transit only bridge of that height built? The neighborhood groups would go bananas over it.

        A tunnel is the only choice.

      3. @Mark — I wouldn’t be so sure. Remember, folks voted for the Monorail over and over. That included a similar bridge. Really, that wasn’t what sunk it. The financing and the fact that it was a Monorail (not light rail) sunk it.

      4. Re: the Monorail Vote, I believe the financials on the project overwhelming sank the initiative. Other than that, I think the ability of it to get as far as Queen Anne from West Seattle, had broad appeal.

      5. There was no Ballard monorail bridge in the final proposal – it terminated in Interbay, I thought?

      7. @Ben — If memory serves, the last proposal (the one that failed) didn’t go that far. So you are probably right — there was no bridge in the last proposal. But that is my point. That vote failed, while the other votes (which, at the very least, implied a large bridge even if there wasn’t money for it) passed. As mentioned, the financials were the killer. It meant they had to take another vote, and it failed. There were tons of things wrong with the proposal (as mentioned on this blog) but widespread opposition to a tall bridge wasn’t one of them.

        For whatever reason, folks don’t mind bridges as much as the mind tall buildings. I can see their point. We can all enjoy the bridge, but most of us won’t get to live or work in a nice high rise. I think you could also argue that a bridge, by its very design, tend to be prettier. Obviously there are exceptions, but I think a lot of folks think a new bridge would look cool, while new buildings only block out the sun. A silly assumption really (there are ugly and pretty buildings and bridges) but I’m guessing there is a lot of strength to that sentiment. Plus, this is Ballard. Big bridges go along with the industrial motif (so to speak).

      8. There were different proposals for bridges early on, and I remember one woman saying at a meeting, “It’s clear which one Ballard wants!” That one was a large bridge across the bay shaped like a ship’s sail. So at least that person, and however many Ballardites she spoke for, didn’t object to a large bridge.

    2. I still don’t see why not put the rail across the Aurora Avenue bridge. It’s recently been seismically retrofitted. If it needs some more retrofitting, it can get some more retrofitting.

  5. Guilty plea in the Justin Ferrari murder case. Justin was a commenter here, and the investigation used bus cameras in finding him.

    Good Citytank article on conservative and liberal shifts toward urbanism. Related, check out this map on the mortgage interest deduction in the Seattle metro area. That’s a huge subsidy for sprawl.

    In an interesting real-life experiment (free coal in the north, not in the south, similar populations), free coal cut the average lifespan by 5.5 years in China. Relevant to Seattle transit in that we’re deciding whether to allow a massive amount of coal to ride though our city on rails. Coal is an enemy to mankind.

    Pictures of Toronto’s floods, including shots of trains, cars, and subway stations under water. Brought to you by pushers of gondola technology. (to be fair, floods like that are not ever likely to come to hilly Seattle or our subway stations.)

    1. Note that that Chinese air quality study stops in 1980, which is long before China’s economic explosion got started. Surely it’s many times worse now. The real (anecdotal) air-quality horror stories didn’t start coming until about 5-10 years ago.

      1. Let’s see… 1.3 billion Chinese, I’ll imagine 1/2 of them deal with coal smoke. Let’s assume an 80 year non-coal lifespan, and 5 years shorter life with coal. Stacking those 5-years up, that’s the equivalent of erasing 40.6 million lifetimes.

        There are some huge assumptions in those numbers, but if it’s anything close to that it just might be the largest man-made source of death ever. Even Pol Pot only managed to kill off 1 to 3 million people.

  6. Sounds like upwards of 10 additional daily oil trains will start running in the Pacific Northwest (not all of them through Seattle) starting by the end of the year.

    Its been amazing how quiet those proposals have been so far…

    The Port of Morrow coal/grain export terminal also passed another hurdle this week from a meeting I was in. Sounds like this facility will be the first to go online at the rate they are proceeding.

    1. Oil trains? Lovely. I’m sure the folks in Lac-Megantic, or the few of them that are left, can tell us all about it.

      1. Jim,

        Certainly won’t happen on my watch. In a situation like that, I’ll have no problem tying down 110 cars worth of hand brakes, as long as at the end of the day, I can have a nice cold frosty one to recoop with, ha!

        But yes, 10-20 additional trains starting soon. BNSF is hiring 400+ division wide over the next year to support these trains. Good time to work for the railroad =)

  7. I might get flamed for saying this, but I’m also wondering whether a high-quality Brisbane-style “open” busway might work in the West Seattle-Ballard corridor. (See http://www.humantransit.org/2009/05/brisbane-a-short-tour-of-the-south-east-busway.html and other articles on Human Transit about Brisbane’s busways). The infrastructure would be very similar to a grade-separated light rail line on this corridor (probably elevated over 15th Ave W, then tunnelling under Lower Queen Anne and downtown, then elevated over SoDo and the West Seattle Bridge) from Ballard to Alaska Junction, except without rails. However, the actual buses operating on this busway could spread out over numerous corridors in Ballard, Magnolia, and West Seattle without requiring a connection.

    The advantages of this type of busway are, as Jarrett describes:
    -Lower cost, because no rails, catenary, or maintenance base has to be built. I’m not actually sure if this is true for this case because I’ve heard that buses need wider tunnels/guideways (is this true?)
    -Direct service to downtown from almost all areas in Ballard, Magnolia, and West Seattle without requiring a connection (at least during peak hours). The geometry of this corridor seems to be ideal for this type of “open” BRT since there are many low-demand corridors feeding into a high-demand corridor through chokepoints. Only the high-demand section between Alaska Junction and Market Street needs to be built to maintain one-seat-rides.

    The disadvantages, as I can see:
    -This busway may not be very legible if buses turn off (to Magnolia, for example) before reaching the end. However, I think this could be fixed with proper branding efforts.
    -Busways often have a lower capacity than light rail or metro: it is up to studies to figure out whether capacity in this corridor can be met with proper BRT (not one that runs at-grade only every 5 minutes, as the TMP studies)
    -Operating costs will be more expensive.

    Overall, would this be an option worth considering?

    1. Here’s a big problem to add to the list: reliability. You’re talking about taking your expensive high-speed transit system, breaking it up, and running it in mixed traffic on city streets? You’re asking for most of the problems of our current system: bunching, delays, buses stuck in traffic.

      Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great improvement over what exists. But it sounds like a pretty bad end result considering the money we’re spending.

    2. I think you pretty much summed up why it doesn’t make sense. The initial cost savings are minimal. It is not the rail that is expensive, it is making it grade separated. Compare the streetcars with the 99 tunnel. The streetcars are pretty cheap. The tunnel isn’t, and that doesn’t include the buses themselves (only the road that the bus can ride on). Meanwhile, the buses can’t be automated and carry far fewer people. This makes the operating costs more expensive.

      BRT makes a lot of sense where we can leverage the existing infrastructure, such as a freeway. For example, I think BRT makes a lot of sense on 99, especially when the tunnel is complete. To make that line great, we would need a few things, though, some of which are expensive:

      1) A stop above Fremont (discussed on a previous STB post).
      2) An elevator or tram from Fremont up to the stop.
      3) Similar elevators or trams to stops on East Queen Anne.
      4) Better stops for downtown. This could include:
      4 a) An additional tunnel from 99 to the Westlake station (or some other part of the existing transit tunnel).
      4 b) Additional stops inside the 99 tunnel. Traffic lights would have to be added to warn carpool riders (or the lane be set aside exclusively for buses and some other warning system used). The bus would then continue to West Seattle.

      Item 4 would allow the buses to run very fast. Essentially, you wouldn’t hit any cross traffic until you are at Greenlake or West Seattle.

    3. It would be almost impossible to build an exclusive busway in the sections (lower Queen Anne, Belltown, downtown) that need congestion relief the most urgently unless you put the busway in a tunnel. If you build a tunnel, rail is a superior mode for traveling within a tunnel — the tunnel can be quite a bit smaller, which means cheaper to dig, and speeds can be faster.

    4. Not that I think Steinbreuck is remotely serious about good urban transit, but it is worth pointing out that Josh’s suggestion of real and “open” BRT to West Seattle is not outrageous.

      The dirty little secret about West Seattle is that it’s a sprawling, mixed-income suburb filled with people who desire access to the city while explicitly living apart from it. This is obvious to anyone who has ever been there or known people who have lived there. (And yes, pointing out the obvious on STB will often get you flamed).

      The only remotely “destination” focal point in West Seattle is the Junction, and the only remotely concentrated residential area is the new one arising in the Triangle just to the Junction’s east. Both are honestly quite tiny compared to any other part of this city that we would remotely consider for high-capacity transit. The Junction is actually smaller (and the nearby population lower) than the commercial district of Upper Queen Anne, whose access even to a rail line that would be built in its immediate vicinity remains a subject of intense controversy.*

      The rest of West Seattle sprawls along linear corridors, sprawls around low-scale shopping centers, or just plain sprawls in every direction. Some of these corridors provide a lot of cumulative transit demand (i.e. Delridge), but none creates the critical mass for rail.

      Furthermore, West Seattle’s detachment has the already-demonstrated benefit of working better for BRT than any other corridor for which the mode has been considered. With RapidRide C’s bi-directional bus lanes on the bridge and extended inbound bus lane on 99, the area already has faster, easier, and more reliable bus service than any other Seattle neighborhood of a similar distance from the city center, including many larger and busier neighborhoods. To become “real” BRT, a significant and uncompromised investment would be needed on the final stretch into and through downtown: getting stuck on post-viaduct Alaskan would not be an option; that goes double for Columbia, whose grade has negated the use of passive restraint on RapidRide.

      But the advantage of real BRT, including an improved downtown ROW, could be felt across West Seattle with an “open” system that could split to serve the Delridge corridor and the various parts of past-the-Junction West Seattle that will never have the demand to make a single central rail line work.

      ——————

      Meanwhile, as a supporter of real, effective rail as the only long-term solution for Northwest Seattle, I must again remind readers that Martin’s non-subway TMP link in no way makes a useful case to the reticent Steinbrueck crowd. Considering only the possibility of surface routing, and predating any specifics of ROW, and correctly finding no difference in running time between modes on otherwise-identical surface trips, the original TMP simply threw an additional 5,000 riders at the streetcar option because “rail bias”. No source, no survey, no math. Just a presumption rendered as a number. That’s a tautology, not a “comparison”.

      ——————

      *(Although I was avoiding STB at the time and therefore never commented on it, I’d like to say that I quite liked and appreciated Mike Orr’s Queen Anne article. He made, I think, the correct case that a stop beneath QA Hill, like the one at Beacon Hill, must be less about raw cost-benefit numbers than it is about rectifying the problem of having populated central areas of the city that are virtually cut off from the rest of the city by transit, with very slow southern access and nonexistent northern/western/eastern access. West Seattle has quite the opposite situation: the access is already quite good considering its distance and layout, and rail would not necessarily make it any better.)

      1. In fairness, I don’t think there’d be much controversy about UQA if it (1) didn’t look like it was going to add about a billion dollars to the price tag and (2) didn’t have opportunity costs i n terms of other places to serve.

      2. Excellent points, both by d. p. and William.

        Personally, I would like to see us do BRT right, along 99. I think for the money, you could get great service. See my post up above for some ideas.

        In defense of West Seattle, it is a peninsula, with a only a few connections to the rest of the city. This means that a rail system could work well if there is a really good feeder system. Personally, I would start with a really good BRT system, then see if it gets swamped. If so, then replace it with rail. The parts of the BRT that need fixing aren’t specific to West Seattle (so far as I know) so it isn’t like it would be a wasted investment if the BRT is finally replaced with rail. Plus, I would guess that this is something that the city could do itself (as opposed to Sound Transit). If so, then it would please a lot of people. Rightly or wrongly, there are a lot of folks in West Seattle who are pissed off about the failure of the Monorail, the traffic which is a huge mess and the fact that lots of other systems are being built or planned while nothing much (except a slow BRT) is being done for them. Making solid improvements to a BRT system would go a long way towards making folks there happy.

        The most densely populated part of Queen Anne will be served by new rail. I think it makes sense to serve other parts via trams and BRT (along Aurora). This isn’t an ideal solution, but one that is relatively affordable.

      3. West Seattle access to downtown via bus is pretty good for the most part, but very time consuming and occasionally convoluted going North/Northwest—–approx 44 minutes to QA during the weekday assuming timely arrival via one or two buses and a little walking; this trip would be an hour plus on the weekend with longer periods between buses and flakier arrival patterns.

      4. William,

        And would there not be a significant opportunity cost in building a multi-mile rail line to a quandrant of the city that is fundamentally laid out in a way that does not support it, and would not see a significant mobility improvement because of it?

        Also, I can’t see the station costing any more than Beacon Hill. Expensive, but not as outrageous as you say, and probably an order of magnitude less than an entire southwest line with a brand new Duwamish crossing.

        Cynic,

        West Seattle has extremely fast access to downtown, excepting the last few thousand feet in times of crush traffic. Fix that, and West Seattle gets good painless-transfer access to anywhere else with good service. U-Link opens: West Seattle has good access to those places. Build a northwest subway: West Seattle has good access to that.

        The greatest danger is a compromise that puts a significant portion of a northwest subway at grade though Belltown or downtown. Such a compromise — “it’ll only be slightly less reliable; it’ll only add 5 minutes to the trip” — would be indicative of authorities failing to understand that a system is only as good as its weakest link. West Seattle would no longer have an improved trip to LQA or further Northwest. And Ballard/QA would get eternally arduous connections to everywhere.

        Such a compromise remains a depressing likelihood, appearing in 5 out of 8 official preliminary alternatives. The primary reason I have long advocated the East-West Spur is that it would tap into the Link trunk system with a shorter, cheaper subway, and with no possibility for at-grade cop-outs that would render the proposed northwest line far less useful for users from anywhere.

      5. I would not automatically assume that an east-west spur would have no at-grade cop-outs. If we can build a streetcar from Ballard to downtown, we can just as easily build a streetcar from Ballard to the U-district. Yes, everyone on this blog knows it would just as slow an unreliable as the 44 is today (and probably no more frequent, either), but in the eyes of some people, the mere fact that it’s a train would encourage riders and spur development, and that’s all that matters to them. After all, if you don’t like your streetcar being slow and unreliable, you can always drive.

      6. Nope. The slope of Market between Phinney and 6th NW is way too steep for that.

        That cop-out is not available.

  9. This came up on the transit subreddit.

    Salt Lake City: A Conservative State Builds Progressive Transit

  10. If you can believe the Times story re-run, the Mayor only lowered parking rates in Chinatown. If you can trust Publicola to get the story right, he also lowered rates in 14 other neighborhoods.

    Forget the timing angle. Campaigning is campaigning, and a mayoral election is exactly the time to debate these policy matters publicly. We know Councilmember Burgess doesn’t like the mayor, but do we have reason to believe Burgess is lying about his own policy positions on market-based pricing?

    It is intriguing to see a growing cadre of current and former elected officials line up as the public surrogates for Ed Murray. One could call that “corroborations” I suppose, but to what end? Good policy? Or keeping people who they don’t consider part of their club away from positions of power?

    In the case of these articles on parking rates, it appears that the councilmembers like the policy the mayor proposed and is now ordinance, but disagree with some details of implementation, in particular, being too responsive to a neighborhood that built up a statistical case that the parking rates weren’t meeting their goals. They seem to want each and every little parking rate change to require a council vote, or I may be reading too much into it.

  11. Could someone breakdown the pros/cons of sub-area equity? I basically know that it means 80% of the funding for a project comes from that sub area. I’m not really sure why we enacted this initially. Also how is it working now in comparison to when it first started?

    1. Sound Transit’s subarea equity means that 100% of the taxes raised in one subarea have to go to projects directly benefitting in that subarea. The North King subarea is Seattle, Shoreline, and Lake Forest Park. North King is responsible for Link from Shoreline station to Rainier Beach station, but the adjoining subareas are responsible for the track from the last station to the subarea boundary.

      Rainier Station on East Link is an issue of interpretation and controversy. Originally East King was going to pay for all of East Link south of Intl Dist including Rainier Station, because the line was being built for East King’s benefit, and the incidental benefit to Rainier Valley seemed insufficient to charge North King, especially since Rainier Valley might have preferred something else instead. (E.g., a streetcar on Jackson and Rainier to Mt Baker station.) But then Bellevue wanted a downtown tunnel, and convinced ST to reassign the cost of Rainier Station and the track west of it to North King, because it is in fact a Seattle station and Rainier Valleyites might use it as an express to downtown or to go to Bellevue or Microsoft. So which view is correct is a matter of interpretation.

      Sounder has no stations in North King except downtown, and its ridership is overwhelmingly suburbanites, so I think it’s charged 100% to South King, Pierce, and Snohomish. In Kent and Auburn, it’s their primary ST benefit since Link doesn’t go there.

      ST Express I’m not sure about. I think they’re all charged to suburban subareas even though some like the 550 are heavily bidirectional. Metro was more into charging half-and-half for all-day expresses and only the residential side on unidirectional peak-expresses, but I think ST may do that less.

      Metro and other transit agencies do not have subarea equity in ST’s sense, although the term is sometimes used for Metro’s subarea policies. For many years until 2012, the county imposed a 40/40/20 rule on Metro, which meant that 40% of new service hours had to be deployed in the Eastside, 40% in south King County, and only 20% in Seattle. A similar formula applied to cuts: the highest proportion had to come from Seattle routes. This was intended to gradually raise suburban transit to Seattle’s level. It ignored the fact that Seattlites are much more likely to take transit, live closer together, don’t have cars, have overcrowded buses, are poor (although poverty has partly shifted to south King County), etc. The Eastside has the highest level of overservice, with almost-empty buses in affluent single-family neighborhoods, as a legacy of 40/40/20. The county finally understood a bit of urbanism in 2012 and repealed the rule, but it will take courage on Metro’s and councilmembers’ part to shift the remaining excess hours from the Eastside to Seattle.

      Metro also has — or at least had — smaller subareas it calls “subareas” which are district-sized: northeast Seattle, southeast Seattle, west Seattle, etc. It used to reorganize one subarea at a time once or twice a year on a rotating basis, but conserving the total service hours in each subarea. Now Metro has gone through so many rapid policy changes I don’t know if it will continue to do this. Its recent changes have been multiple subareas simultaneously. But even if it’s more willing to shift hours across subareas now, I’m sure it still keeps the model as a general guide to avoid shortchanging a district.

    2. As to why ST’s subarea equity exists, its suburban boardmembers insisted on it when ST was created in the 1990s. (Non-Seattle mayors are the majority of ST’s board.) They were afraid that they’d end up paying for three Link lines in Seattle and nothing in their subareas. Urban transit fans were against it because it hindered the ability to put transit where it was most needed and would be most used. But now some are saying the tables have turned, and now that Link is set to reach Lynnwood, Redmond, and Des Moines, we need subarea equity to ensure that additional (very critical) lines get built in Seattle rather than all the money going to suburban extensions. Since suburbanites are a majority of ST’s board, that’s a real possibility. Of course, suburban boardmembers may be more enlightened than this, and recognize that Seattle has a unique need for the most transit, and that good Seattle transit improves the entire region’s economy. But they could go the bad way.

    3. As Mike says, it’s ABSOLUTELY PARAMOUNT to keep it now – because the political power on the ST board is 2:1 in favor of the suburbs. If it’s lost, it’ll mean Seattle money going out. I’ve already heard there are boardmembers trying to get rid of it.

  13. On Sunday somebody asked about streetcar headways in 1940. I don’t have information for 1940, but I did find a document that has lists streetcar headways in 1926. Midday headways were usually 10 minutes; peak headways were more frequent with AM service at about 7-8 minutes and PM headways at about 5-7 minutes. The busiest single streetcar line was the 21 PHINNEY which ran AM peak cars every 3-6 minutes, midday cars every 8 minutes and PM peak cars as often as 2.5 minutes.

    It was also mentioned that building the original trolley network in 1940 took about 1 year, which was quite a feat of civil, electrical and social engineering. But by the mid 1960s much of that overhead system was falling apart and in need of constant attention. But the overhead system installed in the late 1970s is still a functional and effective system–almost 35 years later. It needs regular maintenance but it rarely seems to suffer from the catastrophic breakdowns that were too often a part of the original network by the late 1960s and early 1970s.

    1. Othello: Hell Too
      Rainier Beach: An Icier Rehab
      Sea-Tac Airport: Rarest Tapioca (or, Car To Parasite! Airspace Tarot!)
      Pioneer Square: Queerer Pianos

  14. The tiniest bit of positive rail news often not only makes the roundup, but gets its own post, so it’s odd that the Canadian rail disaster wasn’t mentioned by STB.

    1. What’s odd . It wasn’t passenger rail and it didn’t happen in Western Washington. While freight mobility is an important part of the tranportation story, it’s rarely considered here.

  15. The mixed use development sounds interesting. It might be fun to live in a lively place that mixed retail, entertainment, housing and restaurants. It might cut down on having to jump in the car for a bottle of water or a snack. Kind of a European village style life, although most people here probably aren’t familiar with the apartment over the store lifestyle that is common in Brooklyn. It will be interesting to see how those places near Kent Station end up.

  16. Gondola report.

    Urban gondola systems planned for 5 cities in Mexico.

    Lima, Peru’s urban gondola system will break ground in September.

    Bogota, Columbia’s urban gondola system has been funded

    LaPaz, Bolivia’s urban gondola system is under construction, and they link to pictures.

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