Space at a transit center in the heart of a growing downtown should be at a premium. Strangely, The Bellevue Transit Center has a 2,100 square foot building uselessly taking up space. Here’s why I think it should be repurposed, and I’d love to see some ideas on how that could happen. First, a bit about what is there: the Bellevue Transit Center has 12 bays, 23 bus lines, and thousands of passengers every day. It also has the Bellevue Rider Services Building, which Sound Transit described in 2008 as
…adjacent to the Bellevue Transit Center. Several rider amenities are available including transit schedules and other rider information, public phones, community information, bike racks and public restrooms. The building also houses a station for the Bellevue City Police.
The majority of the stations users are workers in the core of Bellevue. They are extremely likely to have access to transit schedules via computer or smartphone. They are also unlikely to need a public phone (wait, there are still public phones?), or access to paper community information. There are no bike racks in the building (though there are *many* in the nearby area), and the police station closed 3 years ago. A bike shop apparently was in the building several years ago, but it failed. In addition, just a few feet away is a small building attached to the transit center that housed a ticket office at one point. Now, it is a very expensive and big map holder so you can find your bus in the 12 bays of the transit center.
Before going forward, you have to wonder what Sound Transit and the city of Bellevue were thinking here. In 2006, payphones had all but gone the way of the dodo bird, and the city of Bellevue’s Police headquarters is two blocks away — why would they need a station so close by? The public restrooms are a nice item to have, but I’m frankly surprised they have lasted – Seattle’s experiment with public restrooms didn’t go as well. A recent visit to the bathroom showed that they were dirty and almost unusable. Overall, it seems like the building you would want in 1985, not in 2006 and certainly not in 2014.
If the plan for the building is making you scratch your head, the financial details of the structure might cause some discomfort. Despite being physically part of the transit center, the property the building sits on is owned by the owners of the office building next door (disclosure: my business is a tenant in that building). Sound Transit has a 30 year lease that narrowly allows for a police station, a bike shop, bus route information, telephones and a bathroom, but essentially nothing else. According to Bruce Gray, spokesman for Sound Transit, they’ve reached out to the landlord for permission to do something else there, but they haven’t heard back.
Moving forward, that leaves a $3.5m, 2,100 square foot built in 2006 sitting mostly empty. ST is responsible for all operating expenses until 2034, and pays a rent that fluctuates based on the appraised value of the property but was $70,000 for 2014. Here are some ideas on how to fix this:
- Rent it out as a small office or coffee shop. Even if the landlord asks for money to make this change to the lease, Sound Transit could make this into a less expensive waste and maybe even make a few dollars.
- Open a Bus Pass Sales Office. This would be similar to Westlake’s ticket office and could sell senior and child ORCA cards.
- Work with Seattle’s new Pronto Bike Share. Maybe Pronto Cycle Share wants to expand to Bellevue and could use the space to start operations. Alternatively, maybe a bike shop would work in 2014 even though it didn’t work when the building opened.
- Close the Building altogether. Perhaps one of the adjacent buildings would be willing to accommodate public use of the bathroom at a lower cost than the current use of the building. That still leaves a pricey rent payment to contend with.
What would you do with this building?
I think this is the key phrase here:
“According to Bruce Gray, spokesman for Sound Transit, they’ve reached out to the landlord for permission to do something else there, but they haven’t heard back. ”
Until the property owner agrees to allow changes to the lease, Sound Transit’s only options seem to be to keep the current lease or try to break the lease.
If the building is as useless as you say, breaking the lease might be the better option. They could hang some paper schedules near the bus bays instead and save the money being wasted on the lease for more service hours or other capital spending.
That sounds nice, but commercial real estate contracts don’t frequently come with tenant-friendly escape clauses. If ST goes this route, I can almost guarantee that it’s going to hurt the bottom line, meaning that keeping the space vacant to minimize appraised value and operating cost might actually be cheaper. (Of course, this assumes that they are unable to think of something, anything, better to do with the space.)
SoundTransit need only announce that they want to make it a homeless shelter and the landlords will call them about 2 minutes later
2 minutes? Why such a long delay?
That would be a violation of the lease.
Screw the lease, add showers to the bathroom and put up signs announcing the public clean–up station.
Maybe that would engender a more compliant landlord.
Oh yeah, post the landlord’s name as well.
What it would “engender” is a lawsuit for breach of contract. The lease language is very specific about prohibiting social service functions.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=600+108th+Bellevue+for+lease
A retail store specializing in curlers and flip-flops?
How about another Starbucks? Right now, patrons on the east side of the TC have to walk all the way to the west side of the TC for a coffee fix. That’s of serious concern for the coffee-addicted public.
Also appears to be a violation of the lease.
Why in the world did they agree to such a ridiculous lease? Now they are stuck with it because the envisioned usages failed to pan out.
Most leases are for a single use, such as a restaurant or a retail store. The owner wants to know what the use will be. This lease may actually be more diverse than usual, by having several different uses. The space is no larger than a branch bank. Also, the owner may be promising other tenants that the space won’t compete with them. Businesses look for a building with a minimum number of competitors.
There are very few public-facing entities in the neighboring building (Bellevue Corporate Plaza). There’s Corporate Deli, DeVry, and a bank. Aside from the hallways, parking garage, and indoor USPS mailboxes, there’s very little you can access without a key card.
And if the line is too long there, they have to walk all the way across the street to Key Center!
Bellevue Transit Center is also an East Link stop. How about a permanent East Link open house, aka the Milepost 31 solution?
Actually, this is the only reply I’ve read so far that makes sense. If light rail is considered ‘suspicious’ by any number of people, then this location would be a great place to have something similar to Pioneer Squares’ “Milepost 31.” If nothing else, it would be a place to ‘advertise’ for Sound Transit; they could put up posters that say things like “1 million people rode the bus last year and saved $1200 on tolls” or something along those lines. Monthly/quarterly updates on transit projects, maybe focusing on the Eastside so regular riders could read them as they’re waiting for the bus(not everyone takes the time to go to different websites to get info).
A bodega? More transit stops need small grocer/newsstand/snack shop places like these.
“According to Bruce Gray, spokesman for Sound Transit, they’ve reached out to the landlord for permission to do something else there, but they haven’t heard back.”
Three things:
1). What was the “something else” ST wanted to do?
B). Why wasn’t ST more persistent in trying to contact the landlord until they got a response?
There’s also a pair of bathrooms in there.
Oh, covered in the next paragraph.
The bathrooms in the building next door are clean, but locked.
And open for less hours than the Honey Bucket it replaced.
“Open a Bus Pass Sales Office”
Isn’t it kinda beyond ridiculous they aren’t already doing this? Seems to me this the exact type of thing they should’ve been doing from the start.
There’s an ORCA card vending machine there, which does something like 75% of what a pass sales office can do.
But it’s the senior and child cards that are the egregiously difficult ones to get.
This is a particular problem in parts of town (like the Eastside) where many interesting journeys require a Metro/ST transfer. When traveling with someone else’s kid (say with one of my children’s friends) it’s outrageously difficult to avoid both cash fumbling and paying over four times the proper fare.
TriMet’s Pioneer Square retail office / ticket sales office also serves as a regional tourist and travel information office. Would something like that work until the lease is up?
The advantage of the TriMet office is it’s in the downtown of the main city. A tourist office in downtown Bellevue might not make the most sense since it’s not a big tourist destination and it’s quite car-centric. It’d be like TriMet having the same sort of office in Vancouver (ignoring TM’s service area).
I’m frankly surprised that they opted for a land lease instead of acquiring the property. On a worse case, the land could have been used for a bus layover space.
I’m also puzzled how a 2100 square foot structure would cost $3.5 million to construct.
The ideas listed are good. A Pronto bikeshare hub would be an excellent use of the facility.
Who ever is responsible for operating the transit center MUST staff it appropriately to keep the bathrooms in clean and working order. This is a problem at several transit centers that have bathrooms. It would be better to have porta-potties shipped in than to have to see the condition of those bathrooms.
I also think the city of Bellevue should take a serious look at this station as a regional intermodal transit hub when EastLink arrives. I think they should be envisioning something akin to the Transit Center in Everett with its beautiful lobby, the Mount Vernon Transit center that hosts public buses, AmTrak trains and private bus carriers. Maybe Bellevue should invite Community Transit to have more routes from its service territory to Bellevue. Maybe Greyhound or Bolt Bus or other private carriers could have stops in or near this center. And we definitely need 24 hour service between Seattle and the Eastside.
Has ST approached the landlord to see if it might be interested in cancelling the lease so that it can pursue more lucrative tenants? Even if ST has to pay a penalty as the initiating partner, it may be less than future rent payments and utilities and periodic site visits.
However, if the landlord does install a more lucrative tenant, it may be a bank or something even more useless to transit-riding pedestrians.(Only a minority belong to that bank, and others would be charged ATM fees.)
I imagine a tenant that can’t go out of business (ST) and is locked into market-rate rents for the next 20 years is pretty hard to top.
…and who really needs a wad of twentys when waiting for a bus?
Ahh, just what we need, more big banks locking up prime real estate in urban and neighborhood cores. (Looking at you, Chase in Fremont)
But downtown Bellevue never pretended to be quirky.
It actually would be quite convenient to not have to cross the street to the Bravern Bank of America. You could miss a bus waiting to cross back!
How can it be a market-rate rent when the lease was signed several years ago and nobody knows what rents will be in ten years but they’ll probably be higher? Is it a variable-rate lease?
The lease adjusts every so often based on the appraised value of the property.
If the building should be repurposed soon, an assessment of the transit center overall, is warranted. New purpose options accompany a transit center redo. Recommend reducing overall size and number of bus stalls. Replace many with a 5-minute frequency, short-line town circulators, first fleet of 4 special design, low-emission, easy boarding, specific destination stops on time and reliable. This sort of conceptual designwork in transit affects land-use and development. One day, an empty plaza could be the better idea.
Oh, and uh, close Bertha down, now, not later. The Box C/C Tunnel/Seawall in the FEIS should work fine.
North portal work can be applied to the more ideal 3-block extension of the Battery Street Tunnel north.
That option actually manages traffic better there as well. How about that? What? You don’t care?
Nope, we don’t care, “Sam of the Pearl”.
How strictly do they define “bike shop”? The place everyone called “that bike shop” nearest where I used to live was a Harley place that attracted a lot of Hells Angela types.
Maybe such a place could also be tapped to be part of the Link fare enforcement team? And community policing as well?
It was a bicycle repair place, not a store.
I was going to say in my previous paragraph that maybe it could sell skateboards. I meant it as something that wouldn’t be allowed, but you have a point that if “bike shop” is stretched, bicycles are close to push scooters which are close to skateboards.
Repair and storage place
What about a library branch? Reading material is always nice to have. Sure, some people have gone completely paper free, but many libraries are quite busy still. The Gladstone, Oregon library operates out of a tiny space with most of its material coming from other branches via reserve request. Something like that might work here. Come in, get your book, and get the next train 10 minutes later (once Link arrives).
A joint library/coffee facility would be a great addition to this transit center. The condition of the restrooms could then be more closely monitored. Since the police station is so close nearby, the transit center could easily be foot-patrolled to discourage drunks and derelicts from loitering about.
I’d venture a guess that Elbar has never been to Bellevue.
There are not just one but two Starbucks at the transit center.
1500 feet to the north sits an 86,000 square foot public library, which is connected to the transit center by Sound Transit Express’ busiest route which has 5 minute peak frequencies.
Tim: I lived on the Eastside (Kirkland and Redmond) 1989-97, but haven’t been to the transit center for quite a while; when I do go there it’s usually for a quick transfer to/from the 271.
I remember the transit used to have something called ‘pulse time’ to allow for easy transfers when I lived there.
ST could use the space as an adjunct construction office for the East Link/BTC Station. That’ll give it a use for a few years.
+1
If the building is to be repurposed soon, an assessment of the transit center overall, is warranted. New purpose options accompany a transit center redo. Recommend a reduced overall transit center ‘size’ and number of bus stalls. Replace some standard buses with more frequent, easy-boarding, town circulator (Denver 16th St Shuttle-type), on shorter, specific destination routes for an ideal transfer to/from LRT.
I like the bodega-type ideas. In Berlin, it’d be a “Kiosk.” You could get a Currywurst or a Döner, or, for those sadly still nostalgic for the GDR, a Ketwurst. Pommes (French fries) with ketchup or mayo. Sweets. Overripe apples and bananas. Coffee and tea, of course, but also bottles of beer. I hear hipsters like PBR, let them have it. Maybe a small wine selection, and a growler tap or two. Small selection of past prime flowers for those who need to make up with a partner, but are not trying too hard. A place to have packages sent and picked up. Newspapers and magazines. Quick charges for electronic devices.
My vote would be for opening a bus pass sales office, which are desperately needed, particularly for senior and youth passes, which – my understanding – are restricted to only being sold at Westlake, the Metro office on 2nd & Jackson, and one other place near there. Perhaps the new low-income passes could be distributed there as well.
There is still a need for paper bus schedules, however. Not everybody was born with a smartphone in their hand, i.e., not everybody’s a millenial. Yes, there’s an ORCA machine outside the building as well, but again, not everybody is attuned to that, and there’s some measure of safety inside.
There is a Starbucks across the transit center, so another primarily-coffee shop isn’t needed. However, though there would be some overlap, a sandwich counter might work.