I notice some new traffic lights in the photos. Are one set for cars, and another set for bikes? And will the traffic lights operate in such a way as to prevent southbound vehicles from making a left turn across the lane of bike traffic?
I apologize if my above comment was unclear. It didn’t meet my usually high standards. I can do better. What I meant to ask was will the new traffic lighting system stop left-turning vehicles while bikes have a straight through green light? Or will both bikes and cars have the same green light, and cars will be free to make left turns while bikes on the left have the green light to continue straight?
Yeah, that’s exactly it, just like the Dearborn cycletrack in Chicago.
I just drove down Dearborn on Friday and honestly it was very disconcerting. There was something unnatural about being on a one way street with green lights, but a red light for left turns, especially when in the leftmost lane becuase it is a normal thru travel lane as well.
I’ve heard people that bike on it don’t like the amount of light cycle time they lose to the left turn arrows, so… I guess a compromise everyone dislikes is the next best thing to a compromise everyone loves.
I’m curious just how much cycle time actually is lost to the green arrows. It could be either very little or a lot, depending on how SDOT decides to time the light. Ideally, the green arrow would happen only when a sensor detects there is actually a car waiting to turn.
This is one reason why I’m still undecided whether, the next time I’m biking down second, I ride in the cycletrack or just take one the car lanes. Uphill, of course, any signal timing is still a big improvement over the prior condition, where you couldn’t use 2nd Ave. at all.
yes. the signals go like this
EB Green
SB 2nd Ave Red
Left Arrow Red
SB Ped/Bike Red
EB Red
SB 2nd Ave Green
Left Arrow Red
SB Ped/Bike Green
EB Red
SB 2nd Ave Green
Left Arrow Green
SB Ped/Bike Red
Not that there aren’t those that are doing OK, but building an immense retail monstrosity that is only accessible by auto isn’t a guarantee for success any more.
True glen. Believe it or not Aventura mall north of Miami is pushing the use of public transit by building a new transit center as part of their latest growth plan. however it will be inside a parking structure – their fith on the property.
If I were Keemper freeman I would have argued to put east link as close to the bellevue collection as opposed to opposing it. I would have paid to have entrances from an underground station to give people direct access. Of course he doesn’t like trains so whatever.
It’s Unfortunate KF is way behind the times & he refuses to get it. People are demanding transit that isn’t bus based & he refuses to aid in a venture that may actually be a benefit to him & all of Bellevue for that matter.
He’s fine with trains per se, but he doesn’t like the people who ride them because poor people.
Same goes for Tukwila and Southcenter who were adamantly opposed to the initial route Link would have taken.
As I recall southcenter and tukwila were upset that the route wasn’t going to serve the mall. They actually wanted to bring people there so they can spend their money. Unfortunately sound transit concluded that it would be too expensive to implement given the routing to seatac.
Jack: Kemper says he was misquoted, and he just meant that people dress up to go to Bellevue Square in a way that they don’t do for Southcenter. And he surely knows the 550 has a stop on his property and goes straight to Rainier Valley.
John S: exactly. A smart mall owner would have asked for a station right next to the mall complex, as in Pentagon City and Metrotown.
Gordon: There are conflicting arguments as to why Link didn’t go to Southcenter. As far as I can tell, the original proposal was to keep Link on the surface from Rainier Beach station to Southcenter, 154th, TIB, Intl Blvd, and SeaTac. Tukwila threw a fit that it didn’t want trains on Intl Blvd because it had just renovated the street and didn’t want it torn up again so soon. So Link became elevated, and that seems to be when Southcenter was dropped. Maybe because of cost, maybe because of angle and height limitations (no sharp turns or ascents, but go over or under the freeway overpasses). So if Tukwila did argue for Link to go to Southcenter, it looks like it didn’t argue for it as much as it argued against trains on Intl Blvd, and that’s what carried the day.
And the JC Penney is closing at BelSQ this autumn…
“As I recall southcenter and tukwila were upset that the route wasn’t going to serve the mall. They actually wanted to bring people there so they can spend their money. Unfortunately sound transit concluded that it would be too expensive to implement given the routing to seatac.”
As I remember the Sound Transit staff person saying to me at the time this was happening, “It would cost 4 times the Hwy 99 alignment, without 4 times the increase in ridership.”
Plus, at the time, the thought was that ST2 would include some sort of connection off the HWY 99 alignment down to Southcenter, the Sounder station, and on to a (to be planned(ST3?)) eastide alignment (to Renton, at least).
That’s the Burien-Renton line they were talking about.
I believe things were referred to as ‘just lines on a map’.
Back in the time prior to ST1 (Sound Move), it was probably a bit hazier than that.
It was expected even then that the second south King County line would go from Burien to Renton. There was no specific routing yet, but there were some drawings of the transfer point: a shared-platform approach with it joining the Central Link track and then leaving it, and a separate-platform approach (two more platforms, no common track). All this early work is why Burien-Renton got prioritized for an ST3 study. East of Renton was much less clear: whether there would ever be a line to Bellevue.
Yesterday I tried to escape the heat in the Willamette Valley by heading out to SW Washington, as the Oregon Coast is a zoo when it is this hot.
The huge mall south of Aberdeen that is apparently abandoned inspired me to write this response to this post.
About three weeks ago a blogger here said “we can do better.” Today I’m seeing Kemper Freeman demonized and lied about in the echo chamber that is called the comment section again. When does the doing better start?
I want to clear up a repeated meme here. Tukwila didn’t reject Link on general principles, they rejected the initial alignment in 2002 because it would not stop at its shopping and commercial centers. That is the opposite of what Kemper Freeman is trying to do with East Link.
While I understand that some urbanists may loathe the suburban shopping mall, they are indeed part of the built space. Having link go to SouthCenter would have been a huge win for Sound Transit and an economic win for residents of Seattle and S king County. Minneapolis got it when their light rail system pulls in to the garage of the Mall of America right by a mall entrance.
its been a while I think I just got it backwards
Dead shopping malls has been happening for decades. There’s a “disposable” quality about our suburban expansion. The shiny new thing is on the edge, but ten years later it gets leapfrogged by a shinier newer thing further out. Because people want new things, not ten-year-old dingy old things. And greenfield land is cheaper to develop.
It has especially been happening with big-box stores, as shown in Big Box Reuse. (Look, Sam, I’m linking to a library page rather than Amazon. I’m promoting reuse.) Big-box stores are only built for a 20-year lifespan, because by that time the investors will have recoupled their investment and consumer tastes will presumably have changed. So it’s slapped up as a warehouse with a paint job. The early Walmart lots were abandoned as it wanted bigger stores that couldn’t fit on the lots, and the center of the emerging market base was now further out too. So it closed stores and left them vacant for years. The book talks about some cases of recycling the buildings for community centers, dirt-bike courses, libraries, small stores, etc.
Uh huh, uh huh … and in the documentary Idiocracy, which predicts what life will be like in 500 years, are drones flying goods to consumers, or do people have to shop at a city-sized Costco? And with that, I believe I have just won this argument.
The Amazon description says
Julia Christensen shows us how ten communities have addressed this problem, turning vacated Wal-Marts and Kmarts into something else: a church, a library, a school, a medical center, a courthouse, a recreation center, a museum, or other more civic-minded structures.
So it sounds like these boxes are being put to good use. The idea of the Box was to blend retail with warehousing, a good idea where there is space in the suburbs. However, with e-commerce and modern supply chain management, it’s probably the traditional warehouse aspect that is being challenged (if it can be ordered and delivered to my home, or to a small retail or UPS outlet for pickup, just stock it in a large regional one and deliver 1-day).
I’m surprised they haven’t converted some of the malls to low cost housing. The common area, atrium, would make a great seasonally controlled park/play area.
I like the idea of repurposing the buildings to meet a wider cross-section of community needs. I don’t like some of the specific designs that kept the building footprint as-is, behind a sea of parking that makes walking to the facilities unpleasant.
“with e-commerce and modern supply chain management, it’s probably the traditional warehouse aspect that is being challenged (if it can be ordered and delivered to my home, or to a small retail or UPS outlet for pickup, just stock it in a large regional one and deliver 1-day”
Online ordering will probably never replace retail completely, but I could see the “Amazon model” becoming more common, but with small showrooms for browsing. That was predicted back in 1887 in “Looking Backward”. (If “predicted” is the right word for a utopian novel.)
But stores would have to abolish delivery charges. They might be able to do that from the savings of not having as many giant stores.
Another thing. If you go to a pure showroom and get free delivery on whatever you buy, then you can take a bus to the showroom; you won’t need a station wagon or its parking space. Maybe the showroom will have a stock of a few small items for impulse buys or immediate needs, but everything large will be delivery only.
Second, a smaller showroom would be more like an “urban format” store like City Target, so it would fit into pedestrian neighborhoods better.
But please, put the warehouses in a line so that workers can get to them by bus. The Kent industrial area is at least partly served by the 150, which is a trunk route from 5am to 1:30am. Other places like IKEA and the Issaquah businesses, not so much so.
I recently heard something on the radio, and I’m too lazy to look it up, so no source. With my failing memory, consider this all a rumor. Anyway, this retail expert said that malls aren’t really that popular, and aren’t doing that well. In just about any city, they are never the most popular retail area. For example, while Southcenter or Northgate might seem like big retail centers, they pale in comparison to downtown, or the U-District, or even Ballard. To make matters worse, the malls simply aren’t as popular as they once were. Many are failing, for reasons mentioned. People used to go to the malls because it was simply the most convenient way to get stuff. Now, the most convenient way to get stuff is via the internet. So, the only reason to go to the mall is because it is fun. While some may find malls fun, it is tough to compete with cities for popularity. How many bars, brew pubs, unique little cafes or restaurants does a typical mall have, compared to a downtown shopping area? Not that many, by my count. It’s not just big cities that are attractive, either. Plenty of older, small towns have refurbished themselves into attractive centers (Parade ran a story about them). Mount Vernon and Bellingham are good local examples of this. Burien is a bit of a mix, with malls on the outside, and nice retail in the center (it had unfortunate timing — the major redevelopment occurred just as the recession hit).
As the analyst said, though, malls are pretty good at reinventing themselves. A lot of the smaller malls will go through tough times and probably go belly up, but the bigger ones will become more urban, and likely add housing. I could easily imagine Northgate, for example, adding a few more apartment buildings in the mall itself (to go along with the ones next to it). Likewise with Southcenter.
Wow, Mike, fun to run into another reader of Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_ — that’s my girlfriend’s favorite utopia.
Kemper Freeman is only the property owner though. The people who need to be convinced that Link would work at the mall are the store owners. They are the ones that really have the most to benefit one way or the other. If they are the ones pressuring Kempwr Freeman to keep Link away then he is really only acting as a relay for them.
It’s all based on Kemper’s vision, not on pressure from the merchants. Kemper has expanded Bellevue Square at least twice, thus changing the overall merchant profile even without replacing existing merchants. His condos and Safeway across the street are another part of his vision. I’m not sure how involved he was in Lincoln Square or the Bellevue Arts Museum, but those complement it. The remaining aspects of his vision are the expanded lanes on NE 8th and 405, and the free parking garages he has constructed, and keeping trains away from the precious car paths.
Possibly if merchants made a big united push for better transit access to their stores, it would have some influence. But the East Link train has already left the station and won’t be making a Bellevue Square stop.
Lincoln Square belongs to Kemper. The Bellevue Art Museum is using space provided by Kemper.
IKEA Portland, near PDX, has frequent MAX service. IKEA Seattle has hourly DART service, never on Sundays. This is a business that should encourage the use of public transit for its employees especially, but for customers as well.
I’m fairly sure though that Kemper wasn’t involved with the original planning and development of Lincoln Square, but only got involved when the original developers went belly up. There was an awfully long period when the North building was just a hole in the ground.
73 mile line, construction began in 2009, to be completed in 2018:
Link: 17 miles, construction began in 2008, to be “completed” in 2016.
Am I missing something?
London system decades in planning…
That’s why I limited my timeline to the actual construction.
Government support of transit as the primary form of motorized transportation, and the willingness to spend money to build it right, rather than quarter-steps which only partly address the problem. Also, 72 miles in enormous Greater London (the largest city in Europe) is perhaps equivalent to 15 miles in Seattle, which is much smaller and density drops off quickly.
The big difference is money, right? London is more populous and transit is more popular there, so they can raise money faster. You could point to plenty of fast-growing subway systems in Chinese cities or even the comparatively fast rate at which highways get built here.
It’s worse than “construction began in 2008” because we already had the DSTT (though obviously it had to be modified). We can only raise money at a rate sufficient to build a few pieces at a time. In more populous, more transit-oriented cities they can get all the money at once and build many segments simultaneously.
Take a look at the Crossrail map. Only there segments, in London proper, at Heathrow Airport, and under the River Thames, are tunneled, the rest being surface-level. Building surface lines is easier and quicker to do than tunnels and elevated lines, which are a necessity in Seattle.
Moreover, while there are substantial works outside the tunnels, virtually all the right of way outside of the Central London tunnels and the new Thames crossing is on pre-existing (generally operational) rail lines. Londoners tend to think of it as 15 billion pounds for 6 miles of new railway. Finding money was by no means easy. The better part of the first decade of the third millennium was spent trying to find a funding source, and significant compromises had to be made when the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the decade.
Yeah, exactly. The same thing is true for our system. Northgate Link is about 4.3 miles, and will take about nine years to complete (construction started in 2012, and should be done by 2021). Lynnwood Link adds 8.5 miles, and will take about five years (2018 to 2023). In other words, it is almost twice as fast to build about twice as many miles. Tunnel construction is slow. But so too is planning.
The Lynnwood overlap is interesting, and I doubt it is common knowledge (although I’m sure most of the people on this site know about it). I remember reading a comment by someone who said the Northgate station should have lots of parking because it is “a terminus”. I had to point out to him that it will only be a terminus for two years. This is a huge contrast with the rest of our system. It’s been a really long wait for, arguably, the most important section (downtown to Capitol Hill to the UW). The next step, especially the piece that includes the U-District, is a painfully long wait as well (five years). But then, boom, two years later it goes all the way out to Lynnwood.
I understand the greater density of London and the geography. I understand that they have more money to pour into a project. I understand that they planned this out for quite some time. What I don’t understand is that, once a project starts, per mile-why it takes so much longer here? If you look at the Portland MAX construction projects, they are done in a fraction of the time that our Link system takes. OK, no tunnels. But, then, London is almost totally tunneled.
I’m just saying that, looking at other systems, ours seems to take forever to build out. Money: They don’t have much in Portland. Tunnels/digging: They have way more in London. Why do these projects take so much longer here?
Dude, it’s taking roughly the same amount of time to build a mile of track for both systems — 9 years vs 8 — almost identical.
Why the difference in size? It’s all about the money. Want to build 73 miles of LR in the local region? Raise your taxes high enough to pay for it! It’s pretty simple — if you want to triple the amount of infrastructure that ST brings on-line over the next ten years then triple the amount of revenue we give them to do it!
The 73 miles quoted for Crossrail is a very misleading number: sufficiently misleading as to border on an outright lie.
“high-frequency commuter/suburban passenger service that will link parts ”
…like Sounder?
Like Sounder’s physical infrastructure. But: “Nine-car trains will run at frequencies of up to 24 trains per hour (tph) in each direction through the central tunnel section.” (Wikipedia) That means 12 trains per hour on each branch, or 5-minute headways. Cutting back for evening service might be 15-30 minute headways, which is still subway frequency and allows people to make spontaneous trips without a car. (London’s existing mainline trains are less frequent than that, but some of them have been converted to the London Overground which is at subway frequency. So I expect Crossrail will be too, especially if part of the goal is to relieve several overcrowded Underground lines.)
“The big difference is money, right?”
Yes, but government attitudes and priorities affect how much money is available. London is not only bigger and richer, but its government puts transit first, is willing to set higher taxes for transit, congestion charges for transit, and to just say no to exurban highway expansions. Los Angeles has a “30/10” plan to build 30 years’ worth of metro lines in 10 years. We should do the same, and build Seattle Subway and Seattle’s transit master plan now. It’s not pie-in-the-sky projects, it’s a 50-year backlog that London and Vancouver and European and Asian cities have taken care of but we’ve neglected. But it takes willingness on the part of local officials, and willingness and funding from the state, and willingness and funding from the federal government. All that has been lacking.
Even the somewhat dreadful transit situation in Chicago involves rebuilding a dozen stations at a time, with the city throwing extra money in on top of whatever the CTA is spending. There really is a question of attitude.
Gothenburg, Sweden, which has the very street rail system Seattle needs, has a shopping mall called “Nordstan”, with a station in its basement served by several main car-lines, as well as a very large bus transit center in the middle of its surface parking lot. The place is also so big that any supermall around Seattle could serve for a mop-closet in there.
As a professional, Kemper Freeman has likely known all about the place, and could tell you its gross and net receipts. Just a personal take on the man, based on a couple of up-close encounters with him, is that his whole anti-rail campaign was a bargaining chip for something else he needed from local government. Probably completely unrelated to transit.
Also based on three visits to Gothenburg, I also think their approach of reserving much surface street space of streetcars, combined with a serious busway and numerous bus-only lanes would work very well here. I think they’re also planning several miles of subway there too- though the soils make tunneling hard.
Would be good if we could develop a system of “Transit Sister Cities.
Mark Dublin
How does Gothenborg compare to Stockholm?
Kemper is doubtless weighing the difference between what affluent Swedes want and what affluent Eastsiders want. Taking transit to buy high-end clothes and jewelry is just so not with it. And why take a bus to the mall when the car is in the garage (with a door right off the kitchen!). Seattle is not his target market; otherwise he’d love Link as a way for customers to avoid bridge congestion and tolls. The only target people who could take Link to Bel Square are coming from Mercer Island or Redmond, and they’re a small part of the clientele.
Link could have easily served Bel Square if it ran down Bellevue Way.
Stockholm is a much larger town, Mike, about 800,000 people, Gothenburg about 500,000. Looking for comparison of the atmosphere in both cities, Stockholm feels more like University Street Station neighborhood combined with South Lake Union, writ large, while Gothenburg is Ballard magnified and energized- like it was forty years ago, not now.
Stockholm is business and finance. Gothenburg, pronounced Yoo-te-bory,, is a working port, along with manufacture. In much of town, you can see ships of all sizes, moored and underway. Also a pretty intellectual place: biggest yearly trade fair is for the publishing industry- had to leave my hostel and go up to Oslo for two says because my room had been booked for the fair months back.
Gothenburg is by far the most laid-back city in the Nordic lands. Jay-walking is deep in the culture, and absolutely no problem for street rail. City has been purposely redesigned for walking and bicycling, meaning much less automobile traffic than average.
Around Brunnsparken, the Westlake Center of Gothenburg where you could mistake Westlake for a restroom size-wise, the tiny number of pedestrian signals aren’t either obeyed or likely necessary. Sixty-foot steetcars and buses, some triple-articulated. Didn’t even see any close calls.
Riding with a senior instructor, I saw a woman pushing a baby carriage directly toward the train from the left. The driver tapped his bell. The woman didn’t either stop or look up, but simply slowed her speed slightly so the train could roll by. “We always do that. No exceptions.” Successful street rail depends enormously on this habit- Seattle needs to be studying right now if there is any way to speed up the acclimatization. It’ll save a fortune in operating time and legal fees.
Icelandair flight 680, leaves Sea-Tac 4:30 pm. Morning espresso at Reyjkjavik airport. Three more hours to Copenhagen, downstairs to the train, four hours north to Gothenburg. Breakfast possible at Lund train station fifteen minutes north from Denmark, train north in less than half a hour. Should be part of ST3. Sister Transit City first candidate.
Mark
Gothenberg’s system is like an infinitely-better-designed MAX.
It has basically nothing to do with “street rail”.
Though technical in nature, I hope your link helps to clarify that Mark’s incessant invocation of Gothenburg as “the very street rail system Seattle needs” is mincing words.
For the record, Gothenburg does not run on the gleeful tourist charm of a collection of meandering, traffic-addled SLUTs. The city functions thanks to its coordinated, mobility-minded network of exclusive-ROW and invariably lane- and traffic-prioritized transit vehicles that just happen, thanks to their age and particular history, to come in the form of trams.
There is virtually zero mixed-with-general-traffic-running to be found in the city. Slow segments are constantly being improved and replaced. Tunnels are being built (and acknowledged as long overdue).
And that is only to serve an urbanized area of barely 550,000 and a couple of miles across. The longest branch is barely 6 miles, is fully grade-separated, and ends at a social-housing project in the freaking boonies!
Make no mistake: this is not nostalgia transit. It’s not “street rail” in the sense that those words imply. And it would not be remotely helpful for movements in any city whose population and built areas and mobility needs stretch beyond a couple of miles, as ours most certainly do.
Gothenburg is proof that housing density planning is just as important as transit network planning for any effected mass-transit system. Just look at a satellite image of the city to see the differences. When we stayed there for a few weeks, we were able to use transit to easily reach any part of the city.
Yup. Also something Mark misses completely when he compares it to “Ballard 40 years ago”.
I cannot see how the anti-Kemperism jives with his support of BRT. He has not been anti-transit, just pro-BRT over rail.
In that sense, going with BRT (which I myself am not advocating) would have brought the same rapidity and frequency of transit to Bel-Square a decades in advance of running LINK over a bridge.
So why the hate?
Most BRT advocates are active when the topic is light rail, but the’re MIA when the topic is building a BRT line and paying for it. If they do speak up in designing a BRT line, it’s to water it down to make it less expensive. That makes it slower and less frequent, which makes it less able to fulfill its BRT goals.
As someone who is a big proponent of BRT for certain areas (Tacoma, Everett, West Seattle, etc.) and grade separated light rail for others (Ballard, Central Area, South Lake Union, etc.) I have to agree with Mike. In my opinion, BRT makes a lot of sense for areas that were built around freeways. In that sense, it is the state that has done most of the heavy lifting for anything resembling BRT. Adding exclusive lanes (or almost exclusive lanes) as well as exclusive ramps and exclusive stations can make a bus ride as grade separated as Link (which, as we all know, is not completely grade separated). I don’t remember Kemper ever lobbying for more HOV lanes or ramps from the state.
As to East Side BRT versus light rail, a case can be made for BRT. But keep in mind that one of the big advantages of light rail is that it can handle a much higher volume of riders. At some point, light rail is simply a better deal, even if BRT is just as fast and cheaper to build. This is especially true if there are lots of intermediate stops. It just becomes too expensive for buses to serve all those stops. The east side has reached that stage, while other areas have not.
In the case of Freeman and Sound Transit, it was a moot point. People had already decided to build light rail to the east side. So even if he felt like BRT made more sense, there was no reason to oppose light rail going to the mall, especially when the mall sits next to a very urban area.
Sources tell me that Fare Enforcement Officers on Rapid Ride routes are being instructed to tone down the enforcement part of their job. Example, before, when a person would board and not pay and ride for a good amount of time, but only go to the farebox when they saw FEO’s boarding, the FEO’s would stop them from paying after the fact and ask for ID., etc. Now, the FEO’s are instructed to let the person pay and pretend no scam or fare evasion is taking place, all in the name of public relations.
[citation needed]
I actually heard it from a FEO a couple of days ago. I asked them a question. They didn’t get into the details of it, but they said if when they board, and they see someone who was already on the bus walking up to the farebox to pay, they are not to stop them, like they used to do. Now, I don’t know what they would do if they make contact with a person who is still seated, but then says they want to get up and pay. Maybe they draw the line there and don’t let them pay, and go ahead and take down their information and issue them a warning or ask them to leave the bus. But this FEO told me they are changing the way they do some things in order to be more PR friendly. I would think if they gave everyone they caught evading the fare the opportunity to pay, then there would never be any incentive to pay.
I was on the Rapid Ride E several weeks ago, going north on Aurora. The Fair Enforcement Officers made a woman get off the bus, even though she wanted to pay. The FEOs got off, too, and I assumed it was so they could write her a ticket.
I didn’t say they were stopping fare enforcement, but they are changing and softening some of their tactics.
Sam said “Example, before, when a person would board and not pay and ride for a good amount of time, but only go to the farebox when they saw FEO’s boarding, the FEO’s would stop them from paying after the fact and ask for ID., etc. Now, the FEO’s are instructed to let the person pay and pretend no scam or fare evasion is taking place, all in the name of public relations.”
What I saw was the FEOs boarding, finding a non-payer right away and not allowing her to simply pay and continue riding. She got kicked off, even though she tried to pay, and I presume she got a ticket, too.
If the FEOs are changing and softening their tactics, I didn’t see it.
They needed to do something. Metro’s FEO’s have been known to be plain rude, and shall we say “selective in the profile” of persons they check.
Also, even Ben Schiendelman has been kicked off a bus by FEO’s.
Metro’s FEO’s have been known to be plain rude, and shall we say “selective in the profile” of persons they check.
Have they? Every experience I’ve had they checked everyone, systematically, as the ST FEOs do.
Why didn’t Ben pay his fare?
Didn’t say Ben didn’t pay his fare. But he did get into a dispute with them and he was kicked off a bus.
And DJW, chances are your profile and mine differ. capice? In my experience, I was treated differently than others on the bus.
Metro should declare RapidRide E a one-zone service and stop trying to enforce two-zone fares on it. That would allow more people to use off-board payment, and would streamline the service and lessen fare disputes.
“There was less than a five-minute window to catch the bus” on the way home, Clubb said. “If you missed it, the wait was 40 to 45 minutes for the next one. Rather than continue to lose time, I was willing to spend $30,000 on a car.”
Reliability problems and transfer penalties plague LAs Metrolink.
This scenario, unfortunately, regularly occurs with Seattle buses as well. There are many cases where a connecting bus leaves 2-10 minutes after the first bus, but due to unreliability, you have a good chance of missing the connection and having to wait another 30 or 60 minutes if both buses are infrequent. Implementing a more elaborate system to prevent missed connections (such as buses contacting each other by radio) and then coordinating schedules for the more important connections would be helpful, but there is still the tricky question of whether you hold connecting buses if the first one is extremely late.
However, LA’s Metrolink doesn’t have to deal with street traffic or traffic lights, so I’m not sure why it’s so unreliable now–is it freight trains? And does Sounder deal with similar issues?
This happens many times at Kent Station, but over the years they’ve boosted the frequency the principal trunk route, the 150, and of course, now have Sounder for rush hours, so it’s not as bad!
LA Metrolink — a combination of freight trains, trespasser strikes (and there are some really badly designed level crossings in LA which have really high rates of strikes), and a rash of locomotive failures in the last few years. Hopefully some of this will be remediated.
For the most part, I am usually able to plan things so that the number of times I actually find myself waiting more than 10 minutes at a bus stop is actually quite rare. For instance, I frequently walk, jog, or bike the shorter segment of a multi-segment trip to eliminate connections. (For example, I often travel from Crossroads Mall to the UW using only the 545 and my feet). If the trip is short enough so that transit offers no real time advantage over walking/running (e.g. Green Lake to Ballard), I will often just ignore the transit options completely and use my feet for the entire trip. I also chose where to live so that the potential for unreliable connections can only occur for oddball trips to places I don’t frequently visit – never on a routine commute to work and back.
And, of course, thanks to new services of the 21st Century, it has never been easier to summon a car ride to get you home, anytime you are confronted with a missed connection, or any wait for a Metro bus that is looking to be unacceptably long. Between Lyft, Uber and Car2Go, nobody with a smartphone and bit of spending money is captive to Metro anymore – with or without a personal car.
Hope somebody scrolls this far down on an open thread, because some terminology is extremely important here.
In the Nordic countries, there’s no such term as “light rail”. Sweden’s “Tverbanna” refers to a function rather than a mode- literally to link what we’d call “heavy rail” stations, which LINK does not do, because, like Gothenburg, we don’t have this caliber urban rail requiring linkage.
In the Scandinavia, if any part of the line is street running, the term is “sparvagn”, with the little circle over the first “a” making pronunciation “spore-vang”, meaning literally “track carriage.” At Sickla Udde station, in an expensive neighborhood like South Lake Union in its dreams, a big triangular yellow sign says “Yaller ej Sparvagn, meaning “This yield sign doesn’t apply to streetcars” Which on line in question are 2-car Flexity Swift trains same size and varied right of way as LINK.
Except that part of the line is down busy streets of 17th century width past street parking, as well as full-sized fully reserved rail allowing around 60 mph.
Fully agree that general layout of downtown Gothenburg is very different from Seattle. But it didn’t come out from under the glaciers that way after the Ice Age. Present design is result of years of planning and reconstruction expense. Since Seattle is a city in a much bigger and richer country, same effort shouldn’t be beyond us.
Which would make close transit relationship between two cities a very good idea. And incidentally, Sweden is getting an increasing number of private automobiles, and suburban shopping malls. And in same category, there’s Also no immunity to McDonald’s. Gothenburg recently built a highway tunnel along its waterway- looks about same length as our DBT.
But it assumption that what’s wrong here is permanent is both wrong and lazy. In transit and politics both. Since Mr. Freeman is a fascination here….fact that something was forest and cow-pasture didn’t slow him or his colleagues down at all.
Mark
Chinese Company Showcases Ten 3D-Printed Houses
Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering has constructed a set of ten single story, 3D-printed homes which it produced in under 24 hours. The homes, printed in prefabricated panels which fit together on site, were created using WinSun’s custom-built 3D printer which measures 10 meters by 6.6 meters, and took the company twelve years to develop.
Formed with a cement-based mixture containing construction waste and glass fiber, each of the houses cost just $5,000 to build.
posted photos of the 2nd Ave Protected Bike Lane in my Flickr account here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gordonwerner/sets/72157647314401525/
I notice some new traffic lights in the photos. Are one set for cars, and another set for bikes? And will the traffic lights operate in such a way as to prevent southbound vehicles from making a left turn across the lane of bike traffic?
I apologize if my above comment was unclear. It didn’t meet my usually high standards. I can do better. What I meant to ask was will the new traffic lighting system stop left-turning vehicles while bikes have a straight through green light? Or will both bikes and cars have the same green light, and cars will be free to make left turns while bikes on the left have the green light to continue straight?
Yeah, that’s exactly it, just like the Dearborn cycletrack in Chicago.
I just drove down Dearborn on Friday and honestly it was very disconcerting. There was something unnatural about being on a one way street with green lights, but a red light for left turns, especially when in the leftmost lane becuase it is a normal thru travel lane as well.
I’ve heard people that bike on it don’t like the amount of light cycle time they lose to the left turn arrows, so… I guess a compromise everyone dislikes is the next best thing to a compromise everyone loves.
I’m curious just how much cycle time actually is lost to the green arrows. It could be either very little or a lot, depending on how SDOT decides to time the light. Ideally, the green arrow would happen only when a sensor detects there is actually a car waiting to turn.
This is one reason why I’m still undecided whether, the next time I’m biking down second, I ride in the cycletrack or just take one the car lanes. Uphill, of course, any signal timing is still a big improvement over the prior condition, where you couldn’t use 2nd Ave. at all.
yes. the signals go like this
EB Green
SB 2nd Ave Red
Left Arrow Red
SB Ped/Bike Red
EB Red
SB 2nd Ave Green
Left Arrow Red
SB Ped/Bike Green
EB Red
SB 2nd Ave Green
Left Arrow Green
SB Ped/Bike Red
rinse and repeat.
At the completely opposite end of the scale from the video, a fair number of suburban shopping malls in the USA are abandoned:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140411-is-the-shopping-mall-dead
Not that there aren’t those that are doing OK, but building an immense retail monstrosity that is only accessible by auto isn’t a guarantee for success any more.
True glen. Believe it or not Aventura mall north of Miami is pushing the use of public transit by building a new transit center as part of their latest growth plan. however it will be inside a parking structure – their fith on the property.
If I were Keemper freeman I would have argued to put east link as close to the bellevue collection as opposed to opposing it. I would have paid to have entrances from an underground station to give people direct access. Of course he doesn’t like trains so whatever.
It’s Unfortunate KF is way behind the times & he refuses to get it. People are demanding transit that isn’t bus based & he refuses to aid in a venture that may actually be a benefit to him & all of Bellevue for that matter.
He’s fine with trains per se, but he doesn’t like the people who ride them because poor people.
Same goes for Tukwila and Southcenter who were adamantly opposed to the initial route Link would have taken.
As I recall southcenter and tukwila were upset that the route wasn’t going to serve the mall. They actually wanted to bring people there so they can spend their money. Unfortunately sound transit concluded that it would be too expensive to implement given the routing to seatac.
Jack: Kemper says he was misquoted, and he just meant that people dress up to go to Bellevue Square in a way that they don’t do for Southcenter. And he surely knows the 550 has a stop on his property and goes straight to Rainier Valley.
John S: exactly. A smart mall owner would have asked for a station right next to the mall complex, as in Pentagon City and Metrotown.
Gordon: There are conflicting arguments as to why Link didn’t go to Southcenter. As far as I can tell, the original proposal was to keep Link on the surface from Rainier Beach station to Southcenter, 154th, TIB, Intl Blvd, and SeaTac. Tukwila threw a fit that it didn’t want trains on Intl Blvd because it had just renovated the street and didn’t want it torn up again so soon. So Link became elevated, and that seems to be when Southcenter was dropped. Maybe because of cost, maybe because of angle and height limitations (no sharp turns or ascents, but go over or under the freeway overpasses). So if Tukwila did argue for Link to go to Southcenter, it looks like it didn’t argue for it as much as it argued against trains on Intl Blvd, and that’s what carried the day.
And the JC Penney is closing at BelSQ this autumn…
“As I recall southcenter and tukwila were upset that the route wasn’t going to serve the mall. They actually wanted to bring people there so they can spend their money. Unfortunately sound transit concluded that it would be too expensive to implement given the routing to seatac.”
As I remember the Sound Transit staff person saying to me at the time this was happening, “It would cost 4 times the Hwy 99 alignment, without 4 times the increase in ridership.”
Plus, at the time, the thought was that ST2 would include some sort of connection off the HWY 99 alignment down to Southcenter, the Sounder station, and on to a (to be planned(ST3?)) eastide alignment (to Renton, at least).
That’s the Burien-Renton line they were talking about.
I believe things were referred to as ‘just lines on a map’.
Back in the time prior to ST1 (Sound Move), it was probably a bit hazier than that.
It was expected even then that the second south King County line would go from Burien to Renton. There was no specific routing yet, but there were some drawings of the transfer point: a shared-platform approach with it joining the Central Link track and then leaving it, and a separate-platform approach (two more platforms, no common track). All this early work is why Burien-Renton got prioritized for an ST3 study. East of Renton was much less clear: whether there would ever be a line to Bellevue.
Yesterday I tried to escape the heat in the Willamette Valley by heading out to SW Washington, as the Oregon Coast is a zoo when it is this hot.
The huge mall south of Aberdeen that is apparently abandoned inspired me to write this response to this post.
About three weeks ago a blogger here said “we can do better.” Today I’m seeing Kemper Freeman demonized and lied about in the echo chamber that is called the comment section again. When does the doing better start?
I want to clear up a repeated meme here. Tukwila didn’t reject Link on general principles, they rejected the initial alignment in 2002 because it would not stop at its shopping and commercial centers. That is the opposite of what Kemper Freeman is trying to do with East Link.
While I understand that some urbanists may loathe the suburban shopping mall, they are indeed part of the built space. Having link go to SouthCenter would have been a huge win for Sound Transit and an economic win for residents of Seattle and S king County. Minneapolis got it when their light rail system pulls in to the garage of the Mall of America right by a mall entrance.
its been a while I think I just got it backwards
Dead shopping malls has been happening for decades. There’s a “disposable” quality about our suburban expansion. The shiny new thing is on the edge, but ten years later it gets leapfrogged by a shinier newer thing further out. Because people want new things, not ten-year-old dingy old things. And greenfield land is cheaper to develop.
It has especially been happening with big-box stores, as shown in Big Box Reuse. (Look, Sam, I’m linking to a library page rather than Amazon. I’m promoting reuse.) Big-box stores are only built for a 20-year lifespan, because by that time the investors will have recoupled their investment and consumer tastes will presumably have changed. So it’s slapped up as a warehouse with a paint job. The early Walmart lots were abandoned as it wanted bigger stores that couldn’t fit on the lots, and the center of the emerging market base was now further out too. So it closed stores and left them vacant for years. The book talks about some cases of recycling the buildings for community centers, dirt-bike courses, libraries, small stores, etc.
Uh huh, uh huh … and in the documentary Idiocracy, which predicts what life will be like in 500 years, are drones flying goods to consumers, or do people have to shop at a city-sized Costco? And with that, I believe I have just won this argument.
The Amazon description says
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Box-Reuse-Julia-Christensen/dp/0262033798
(no Kindle version, sadly)
So it sounds like these boxes are being put to good use. The idea of the Box was to blend retail with warehousing, a good idea where there is space in the suburbs. However, with e-commerce and modern supply chain management, it’s probably the traditional warehouse aspect that is being challenged (if it can be ordered and delivered to my home, or to a small retail or UPS outlet for pickup, just stock it in a large regional one and deliver 1-day).
I’m surprised they haven’t converted some of the malls to low cost housing. The common area, atrium, would make a great seasonally controlled park/play area.
I like the idea of repurposing the buildings to meet a wider cross-section of community needs. I don’t like some of the specific designs that kept the building footprint as-is, behind a sea of parking that makes walking to the facilities unpleasant.
“with e-commerce and modern supply chain management, it’s probably the traditional warehouse aspect that is being challenged (if it can be ordered and delivered to my home, or to a small retail or UPS outlet for pickup, just stock it in a large regional one and deliver 1-day”
Online ordering will probably never replace retail completely, but I could see the “Amazon model” becoming more common, but with small showrooms for browsing. That was predicted back in 1887 in “Looking Backward”. (If “predicted” is the right word for a utopian novel.)
But stores would have to abolish delivery charges. They might be able to do that from the savings of not having as many giant stores.
Another thing. If you go to a pure showroom and get free delivery on whatever you buy, then you can take a bus to the showroom; you won’t need a station wagon or its parking space. Maybe the showroom will have a stock of a few small items for impulse buys or immediate needs, but everything large will be delivery only.
Second, a smaller showroom would be more like an “urban format” store like City Target, so it would fit into pedestrian neighborhoods better.
But please, put the warehouses in a line so that workers can get to them by bus. The Kent industrial area is at least partly served by the 150, which is a trunk route from 5am to 1:30am. Other places like IKEA and the Issaquah businesses, not so much so.
I recently heard something on the radio, and I’m too lazy to look it up, so no source. With my failing memory, consider this all a rumor. Anyway, this retail expert said that malls aren’t really that popular, and aren’t doing that well. In just about any city, they are never the most popular retail area. For example, while Southcenter or Northgate might seem like big retail centers, they pale in comparison to downtown, or the U-District, or even Ballard. To make matters worse, the malls simply aren’t as popular as they once were. Many are failing, for reasons mentioned. People used to go to the malls because it was simply the most convenient way to get stuff. Now, the most convenient way to get stuff is via the internet. So, the only reason to go to the mall is because it is fun. While some may find malls fun, it is tough to compete with cities for popularity. How many bars, brew pubs, unique little cafes or restaurants does a typical mall have, compared to a downtown shopping area? Not that many, by my count. It’s not just big cities that are attractive, either. Plenty of older, small towns have refurbished themselves into attractive centers (Parade ran a story about them). Mount Vernon and Bellingham are good local examples of this. Burien is a bit of a mix, with malls on the outside, and nice retail in the center (it had unfortunate timing — the major redevelopment occurred just as the recession hit).
As the analyst said, though, malls are pretty good at reinventing themselves. A lot of the smaller malls will go through tough times and probably go belly up, but the bigger ones will become more urban, and likely add housing. I could easily imagine Northgate, for example, adding a few more apartment buildings in the mall itself (to go along with the ones next to it). Likewise with Southcenter.
Wow, Mike, fun to run into another reader of Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_ — that’s my girlfriend’s favorite utopia.
Kemper Freeman is only the property owner though. The people who need to be convinced that Link would work at the mall are the store owners. They are the ones that really have the most to benefit one way or the other. If they are the ones pressuring Kempwr Freeman to keep Link away then he is really only acting as a relay for them.
It’s all based on Kemper’s vision, not on pressure from the merchants. Kemper has expanded Bellevue Square at least twice, thus changing the overall merchant profile even without replacing existing merchants. His condos and Safeway across the street are another part of his vision. I’m not sure how involved he was in Lincoln Square or the Bellevue Arts Museum, but those complement it. The remaining aspects of his vision are the expanded lanes on NE 8th and 405, and the free parking garages he has constructed, and keeping trains away from the precious car paths.
Possibly if merchants made a big united push for better transit access to their stores, it would have some influence. But the East Link train has already left the station and won’t be making a Bellevue Square stop.
Lincoln Square belongs to Kemper. The Bellevue Art Museum is using space provided by Kemper.
IKEA Portland, near PDX, has frequent MAX service. IKEA Seattle has hourly DART service, never on Sundays. This is a business that should encourage the use of public transit for its employees especially, but for customers as well.
I’m fairly sure though that Kemper wasn’t involved with the original planning and development of Lincoln Square, but only got involved when the original developers went belly up. There was an awfully long period when the North building was just a hole in the ground.
73 mile line, construction began in 2009, to be completed in 2018:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
Link: 17 miles, construction began in 2008, to be “completed” in 2016.
Am I missing something?
London system decades in planning…
That’s why I limited my timeline to the actual construction.
Government support of transit as the primary form of motorized transportation, and the willingness to spend money to build it right, rather than quarter-steps which only partly address the problem. Also, 72 miles in enormous Greater London (the largest city in Europe) is perhaps equivalent to 15 miles in Seattle, which is much smaller and density drops off quickly.
The big difference is money, right? London is more populous and transit is more popular there, so they can raise money faster. You could point to plenty of fast-growing subway systems in Chinese cities or even the comparatively fast rate at which highways get built here.
It’s worse than “construction began in 2008” because we already had the DSTT (though obviously it had to be modified). We can only raise money at a rate sufficient to build a few pieces at a time. In more populous, more transit-oriented cities they can get all the money at once and build many segments simultaneously.
Take a look at the Crossrail map. Only there segments, in London proper, at Heathrow Airport, and under the River Thames, are tunneled, the rest being surface-level. Building surface lines is easier and quicker to do than tunnels and elevated lines, which are a necessity in Seattle.
Moreover, while there are substantial works outside the tunnels, virtually all the right of way outside of the Central London tunnels and the new Thames crossing is on pre-existing (generally operational) rail lines. Londoners tend to think of it as 15 billion pounds for 6 miles of new railway. Finding money was by no means easy. The better part of the first decade of the third millennium was spent trying to find a funding source, and significant compromises had to be made when the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the decade.
Yeah, exactly. The same thing is true for our system. Northgate Link is about 4.3 miles, and will take about nine years to complete (construction started in 2012, and should be done by 2021). Lynnwood Link adds 8.5 miles, and will take about five years (2018 to 2023). In other words, it is almost twice as fast to build about twice as many miles. Tunnel construction is slow. But so too is planning.
The Lynnwood overlap is interesting, and I doubt it is common knowledge (although I’m sure most of the people on this site know about it). I remember reading a comment by someone who said the Northgate station should have lots of parking because it is “a terminus”. I had to point out to him that it will only be a terminus for two years. This is a huge contrast with the rest of our system. It’s been a really long wait for, arguably, the most important section (downtown to Capitol Hill to the UW). The next step, especially the piece that includes the U-District, is a painfully long wait as well (five years). But then, boom, two years later it goes all the way out to Lynnwood.
I understand the greater density of London and the geography. I understand that they have more money to pour into a project. I understand that they planned this out for quite some time. What I don’t understand is that, once a project starts, per mile-why it takes so much longer here? If you look at the Portland MAX construction projects, they are done in a fraction of the time that our Link system takes. OK, no tunnels. But, then, London is almost totally tunneled.
I’m just saying that, looking at other systems, ours seems to take forever to build out. Money: They don’t have much in Portland. Tunnels/digging: They have way more in London. Why do these projects take so much longer here?
Dude, it’s taking roughly the same amount of time to build a mile of track for both systems — 9 years vs 8 — almost identical.
Why the difference in size? It’s all about the money. Want to build 73 miles of LR in the local region? Raise your taxes high enough to pay for it! It’s pretty simple — if you want to triple the amount of infrastructure that ST brings on-line over the next ten years then triple the amount of revenue we give them to do it!
The 73 miles quoted for Crossrail is a very misleading number: sufficiently misleading as to border on an outright lie.
“high-frequency commuter/suburban passenger service that will link parts ”
…like Sounder?
Like Sounder’s physical infrastructure. But: “Nine-car trains will run at frequencies of up to 24 trains per hour (tph) in each direction through the central tunnel section.” (Wikipedia) That means 12 trains per hour on each branch, or 5-minute headways. Cutting back for evening service might be 15-30 minute headways, which is still subway frequency and allows people to make spontaneous trips without a car. (London’s existing mainline trains are less frequent than that, but some of them have been converted to the London Overground which is at subway frequency. So I expect Crossrail will be too, especially if part of the goal is to relieve several overcrowded Underground lines.)
“The big difference is money, right?”
Yes, but government attitudes and priorities affect how much money is available. London is not only bigger and richer, but its government puts transit first, is willing to set higher taxes for transit, congestion charges for transit, and to just say no to exurban highway expansions. Los Angeles has a “30/10” plan to build 30 years’ worth of metro lines in 10 years. We should do the same, and build Seattle Subway and Seattle’s transit master plan now. It’s not pie-in-the-sky projects, it’s a 50-year backlog that London and Vancouver and European and Asian cities have taken care of but we’ve neglected. But it takes willingness on the part of local officials, and willingness and funding from the state, and willingness and funding from the federal government. All that has been lacking.
Even the somewhat dreadful transit situation in Chicago involves rebuilding a dozen stations at a time, with the city throwing extra money in on top of whatever the CTA is spending. There really is a question of attitude.
Gothenburg, Sweden, which has the very street rail system Seattle needs, has a shopping mall called “Nordstan”, with a station in its basement served by several main car-lines, as well as a very large bus transit center in the middle of its surface parking lot. The place is also so big that any supermall around Seattle could serve for a mop-closet in there.
As a professional, Kemper Freeman has likely known all about the place, and could tell you its gross and net receipts. Just a personal take on the man, based on a couple of up-close encounters with him, is that his whole anti-rail campaign was a bargaining chip for something else he needed from local government. Probably completely unrelated to transit.
Also based on three visits to Gothenburg, I also think their approach of reserving much surface street space of streetcars, combined with a serious busway and numerous bus-only lanes would work very well here. I think they’re also planning several miles of subway there too- though the soils make tunneling hard.
Would be good if we could develop a system of “Transit Sister Cities.
Mark Dublin
How does Gothenborg compare to Stockholm?
Kemper is doubtless weighing the difference between what affluent Swedes want and what affluent Eastsiders want. Taking transit to buy high-end clothes and jewelry is just so not with it. And why take a bus to the mall when the car is in the garage (with a door right off the kitchen!). Seattle is not his target market; otherwise he’d love Link as a way for customers to avoid bridge congestion and tolls. The only target people who could take Link to Bel Square are coming from Mercer Island or Redmond, and they’re a small part of the clientele.
Link could have easily served Bel Square if it ran down Bellevue Way.
Stockholm is a much larger town, Mike, about 800,000 people, Gothenburg about 500,000. Looking for comparison of the atmosphere in both cities, Stockholm feels more like University Street Station neighborhood combined with South Lake Union, writ large, while Gothenburg is Ballard magnified and energized- like it was forty years ago, not now.
Stockholm is business and finance. Gothenburg, pronounced Yoo-te-bory,, is a working port, along with manufacture. In much of town, you can see ships of all sizes, moored and underway. Also a pretty intellectual place: biggest yearly trade fair is for the publishing industry- had to leave my hostel and go up to Oslo for two says because my room had been booked for the fair months back.
Gothenburg is by far the most laid-back city in the Nordic lands. Jay-walking is deep in the culture, and absolutely no problem for street rail. City has been purposely redesigned for walking and bicycling, meaning much less automobile traffic than average.
Around Brunnsparken, the Westlake Center of Gothenburg where you could mistake Westlake for a restroom size-wise, the tiny number of pedestrian signals aren’t either obeyed or likely necessary. Sixty-foot steetcars and buses, some triple-articulated. Didn’t even see any close calls.
Riding with a senior instructor, I saw a woman pushing a baby carriage directly toward the train from the left. The driver tapped his bell. The woman didn’t either stop or look up, but simply slowed her speed slightly so the train could roll by. “We always do that. No exceptions.” Successful street rail depends enormously on this habit- Seattle needs to be studying right now if there is any way to speed up the acclimatization. It’ll save a fortune in operating time and legal fees.
Icelandair flight 680, leaves Sea-Tac 4:30 pm. Morning espresso at Reyjkjavik airport. Three more hours to Copenhagen, downstairs to the train, four hours north to Gothenburg. Breakfast possible at Lund train station fifteen minutes north from Denmark, train north in less than half a hour. Should be part of ST3. Sister Transit City first candidate.
Mark
Gothenberg’s system is like an infinitely-better-designed MAX.
It has basically nothing to do with “street rail”.
Some Gothenberg photos and summary information:
http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Gothenburg,_Sweden
Thank you, Glenn.
Though technical in nature, I hope your link helps to clarify that Mark’s incessant invocation of Gothenburg as “the very street rail system Seattle needs” is mincing words.
For the record, Gothenburg does not run on the gleeful tourist charm of a collection of meandering, traffic-addled SLUTs. The city functions thanks to its coordinated, mobility-minded network of exclusive-ROW and invariably lane- and traffic-prioritized transit vehicles that just happen, thanks to their age and particular history, to come in the form of trams.
There is virtually zero mixed-with-general-traffic-running to be found in the city. Slow segments are constantly being improved and replaced. Tunnels are being built (and acknowledged as long overdue).
And that is only to serve an urbanized area of barely 550,000 and a couple of miles across. The longest branch is barely 6 miles, is fully grade-separated, and ends at a social-housing project in the freaking boonies!
Make no mistake: this is not nostalgia transit. It’s not “street rail” in the sense that those words imply. And it would not be remotely helpful for movements in any city whose population and built areas and mobility needs stretch beyond a couple of miles, as ours most certainly do.
Gothenburg is proof that housing density planning is just as important as transit network planning for any effected mass-transit system. Just look at a satellite image of the city to see the differences. When we stayed there for a few weeks, we were able to use transit to easily reach any part of the city.
Yup. Also something Mark misses completely when he compares it to “Ballard 40 years ago”.
I cannot see how the anti-Kemperism jives with his support of BRT. He has not been anti-transit, just pro-BRT over rail.
In that sense, going with BRT (which I myself am not advocating) would have brought the same rapidity and frequency of transit to Bel-Square a decades in advance of running LINK over a bridge.
So why the hate?
Most BRT advocates are active when the topic is light rail, but the’re MIA when the topic is building a BRT line and paying for it. If they do speak up in designing a BRT line, it’s to water it down to make it less expensive. That makes it slower and less frequent, which makes it less able to fulfill its BRT goals.
As someone who is a big proponent of BRT for certain areas (Tacoma, Everett, West Seattle, etc.) and grade separated light rail for others (Ballard, Central Area, South Lake Union, etc.) I have to agree with Mike. In my opinion, BRT makes a lot of sense for areas that were built around freeways. In that sense, it is the state that has done most of the heavy lifting for anything resembling BRT. Adding exclusive lanes (or almost exclusive lanes) as well as exclusive ramps and exclusive stations can make a bus ride as grade separated as Link (which, as we all know, is not completely grade separated). I don’t remember Kemper ever lobbying for more HOV lanes or ramps from the state.
As to East Side BRT versus light rail, a case can be made for BRT. But keep in mind that one of the big advantages of light rail is that it can handle a much higher volume of riders. At some point, light rail is simply a better deal, even if BRT is just as fast and cheaper to build. This is especially true if there are lots of intermediate stops. It just becomes too expensive for buses to serve all those stops. The east side has reached that stage, while other areas have not.
In the case of Freeman and Sound Transit, it was a moot point. People had already decided to build light rail to the east side. So even if he felt like BRT made more sense, there was no reason to oppose light rail going to the mall, especially when the mall sits next to a very urban area.
Sources tell me that Fare Enforcement Officers on Rapid Ride routes are being instructed to tone down the enforcement part of their job. Example, before, when a person would board and not pay and ride for a good amount of time, but only go to the farebox when they saw FEO’s boarding, the FEO’s would stop them from paying after the fact and ask for ID., etc. Now, the FEO’s are instructed to let the person pay and pretend no scam or fare evasion is taking place, all in the name of public relations.
[citation needed]
I actually heard it from a FEO a couple of days ago. I asked them a question. They didn’t get into the details of it, but they said if when they board, and they see someone who was already on the bus walking up to the farebox to pay, they are not to stop them, like they used to do. Now, I don’t know what they would do if they make contact with a person who is still seated, but then says they want to get up and pay. Maybe they draw the line there and don’t let them pay, and go ahead and take down their information and issue them a warning or ask them to leave the bus. But this FEO told me they are changing the way they do some things in order to be more PR friendly. I would think if they gave everyone they caught evading the fare the opportunity to pay, then there would never be any incentive to pay.
I was on the Rapid Ride E several weeks ago, going north on Aurora. The Fair Enforcement Officers made a woman get off the bus, even though she wanted to pay. The FEOs got off, too, and I assumed it was so they could write her a ticket.
I didn’t say they were stopping fare enforcement, but they are changing and softening some of their tactics.
Sam said “Example, before, when a person would board and not pay and ride for a good amount of time, but only go to the farebox when they saw FEO’s boarding, the FEO’s would stop them from paying after the fact and ask for ID., etc. Now, the FEO’s are instructed to let the person pay and pretend no scam or fare evasion is taking place, all in the name of public relations.”
What I saw was the FEOs boarding, finding a non-payer right away and not allowing her to simply pay and continue riding. She got kicked off, even though she tried to pay, and I presume she got a ticket, too.
If the FEOs are changing and softening their tactics, I didn’t see it.
They needed to do something. Metro’s FEO’s have been known to be plain rude, and shall we say “selective in the profile” of persons they check.
Also, even Ben Schiendelman has been kicked off a bus by FEO’s.
Metro’s FEO’s have been known to be plain rude, and shall we say “selective in the profile” of persons they check.
Have they? Every experience I’ve had they checked everyone, systematically, as the ST FEOs do.
Why didn’t Ben pay his fare?
Didn’t say Ben didn’t pay his fare. But he did get into a dispute with them and he was kicked off a bus.
And DJW, chances are your profile and mine differ. capice? In my experience, I was treated differently than others on the bus.
Metro should declare RapidRide E a one-zone service and stop trying to enforce two-zone fares on it. That would allow more people to use off-board payment, and would streamline the service and lessen fare disputes.
“There was less than a five-minute window to catch the bus” on the way home, Clubb said. “If you missed it, the wait was 40 to 45 minutes for the next one. Rather than continue to lose time, I was willing to spend $30,000 on a car.”
Reliability problems and transfer penalties plague LAs Metrolink.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-metrolink-riders-20140908-story.html
This scenario, unfortunately, regularly occurs with Seattle buses as well. There are many cases where a connecting bus leaves 2-10 minutes after the first bus, but due to unreliability, you have a good chance of missing the connection and having to wait another 30 or 60 minutes if both buses are infrequent. Implementing a more elaborate system to prevent missed connections (such as buses contacting each other by radio) and then coordinating schedules for the more important connections would be helpful, but there is still the tricky question of whether you hold connecting buses if the first one is extremely late.
However, LA’s Metrolink doesn’t have to deal with street traffic or traffic lights, so I’m not sure why it’s so unreliable now–is it freight trains? And does Sounder deal with similar issues?
This happens many times at Kent Station, but over the years they’ve boosted the frequency the principal trunk route, the 150, and of course, now have Sounder for rush hours, so it’s not as bad!
LA Metrolink — a combination of freight trains, trespasser strikes (and there are some really badly designed level crossings in LA which have really high rates of strikes), and a rash of locomotive failures in the last few years. Hopefully some of this will be remediated.
For the most part, I am usually able to plan things so that the number of times I actually find myself waiting more than 10 minutes at a bus stop is actually quite rare. For instance, I frequently walk, jog, or bike the shorter segment of a multi-segment trip to eliminate connections. (For example, I often travel from Crossroads Mall to the UW using only the 545 and my feet). If the trip is short enough so that transit offers no real time advantage over walking/running (e.g. Green Lake to Ballard), I will often just ignore the transit options completely and use my feet for the entire trip. I also chose where to live so that the potential for unreliable connections can only occur for oddball trips to places I don’t frequently visit – never on a routine commute to work and back.
And, of course, thanks to new services of the 21st Century, it has never been easier to summon a car ride to get you home, anytime you are confronted with a missed connection, or any wait for a Metro bus that is looking to be unacceptably long. Between Lyft, Uber and Car2Go, nobody with a smartphone and bit of spending money is captive to Metro anymore – with or without a personal car.
Hope somebody scrolls this far down on an open thread, because some terminology is extremely important here.
In the Nordic countries, there’s no such term as “light rail”. Sweden’s “Tverbanna” refers to a function rather than a mode- literally to link what we’d call “heavy rail” stations, which LINK does not do, because, like Gothenburg, we don’t have this caliber urban rail requiring linkage.
In the Scandinavia, if any part of the line is street running, the term is “sparvagn”, with the little circle over the first “a” making pronunciation “spore-vang”, meaning literally “track carriage.” At Sickla Udde station, in an expensive neighborhood like South Lake Union in its dreams, a big triangular yellow sign says “Yaller ej Sparvagn, meaning “This yield sign doesn’t apply to streetcars” Which on line in question are 2-car Flexity Swift trains same size and varied right of way as LINK.
Except that part of the line is down busy streets of 17th century width past street parking, as well as full-sized fully reserved rail allowing around 60 mph.
Fully agree that general layout of downtown Gothenburg is very different from Seattle. But it didn’t come out from under the glaciers that way after the Ice Age. Present design is result of years of planning and reconstruction expense. Since Seattle is a city in a much bigger and richer country, same effort shouldn’t be beyond us.
Which would make close transit relationship between two cities a very good idea. And incidentally, Sweden is getting an increasing number of private automobiles, and suburban shopping malls. And in same category, there’s Also no immunity to McDonald’s. Gothenburg recently built a highway tunnel along its waterway- looks about same length as our DBT.
But it assumption that what’s wrong here is permanent is both wrong and lazy. In transit and politics both. Since Mr. Freeman is a fascination here….fact that something was forest and cow-pasture didn’t slow him or his colleagues down at all.
Mark
Chinese Company Showcases Ten 3D-Printed Houses
http://www.archdaily.com/543518/chinese-company-showcases-ten-3d-printed-houses/
Ah, the Sears Roebuck Catalog houses of the 21st century…