Month: December 2014

It’s been another great year for us here at STB, and we’d like to thank you all both for reading our work and continuing to make our comment threads some of the most substantive and informative that you’ll read anywhere. As would be expected with something as specialized and nerdy as transit blogging, interest can sometimes be an inch wide and a mile deep, with posts occasionally striking a nerve and generating huge pageviews and comment threads. Our top 10 posts alone generated nearly 10% of our pageviews for 2014, almost exclusively on content related to improving or expanding transit capacity and performance. Seattle Subway, for instance, took 4 of the top 10 most read and 2 of the most commented. Without further ado, here they are:

Most Read:

10. 9 Ways to Make Seattle Public Transit Better (September 27): Frank’s post entering STB into the brave new world of listicles strikes a nerve with riders frustrated by all the little things that degrade the everyday experience of riding transit.

9. Let’s Build Rail to West Seattle (Option A6)! (July 22): Seattle Subway’s guest post arguing for quality over quantity when it comes to West Seattle Link.

8. U-Link Walking Tour Photos (June 9): I had a blast walking from Montlake to Westlake underground back in June. ULink is now <500 days from opening!

7. Sound Transit Listens to Public, Will Study Sand Point Crossing (September 29): Seattle Subway’s victory lap guest post announcing the inclusion of a Sand Point rail crossing in the Sound Transit Long Range Plan.

6. Let’s Build the Ballard Spur! (June 23): Guest author and Seattle Subway veteran Keith Kyle taps into an endless well of desire for rail between Ballard and UW.

5. Metro Cuts: When and Where (April 25): After the failure of Prop 1, my post lays out in detail the then-proposed-but-since-mostly-canceled cuts and their timing.

3. (tie) Visualizing Cuts to Metro’s Frequent Transit Network (March 31): By far the shortest post in the Top 10, but also one of the most effective. Oran creates a slider that uses his wildly popular Frequent Transit Map to visualize Metro’s proposed cuts.

3 .(tie) What Could $800 Million Do? (February 13): Ben kicks off what would be a year full of Bertha-related speculation, hand-wringing, schadenfraude, official confidence, and general turbulence, arguing that even with all the sunk costs already committed, the remaining $800m available (were the project to be cancelled) could buy the Center City Connector, a reconnected SLU/LQA street grid, make RapidRide truly rapid, and make up the difference between an elevated Ballard line and a Queen Anne tunnel.

2. Explainer: Why We Need to Save Metro (April 7): Frank’s post does an overdue and obvious thing, eschewing acronym-speak and insider language to distill and simplify the stakes of April’s Prop 1 for the general reader.

1. Let’s Build a Sand Point Crossing (Option SP1)! (July 8): Want to get people talking and reading? Propose visionary, highly controversial new projects. Seattle Subway’s guest post argues for the inclusion of a 3rd Lake Washington crossing in Sound Transit’s Long Range Plan, earning nearly double the pageviews of the other posts in the top 10, with just this one post getting 1.5% of our annual pageviews.

Most Commented:

Continue reading “Top 10 Read/Commented Posts of 2014”

[UPDATE: Bruce Gray now says “We’re still receiving and testing new data sets. If all goes well, we’ll deploy the new set into OBA on Monday, the 5^th.”]

You may have noticed recent persistent problems with OneBusAway reporting only scheduled arrivals on certain routes. I’ve certainly noticed them on the 24, 33, and certain other Lower Queen Anne routes over the last few weeks, as that’s what I ride the most. It turns out that this is related to an upgrade, according to ST’s Bruce Gray:

Yes, our folks have been working on a fix. We recently enhanced OneBusAway data to allow it to provide accurate information to users on reduced-service days (like the Friday after Thanksgiving). This enhancement created other problems with the data that we have been troubleshooting over the last month. We expect to have a fix in place early next year.

If it’s any consolation, the result of this disruption should be a better product.

As is becoming a tradition, there will be extended hours for New Year’s Eve on Central Link Light Rail, the Seattle Center Monorail, and Tacoma Link.

From the monorail’s holiday service page:

On December 31. 2014, the Monorail will be open until 1:00 AM for the New Year’s Eve fireworks at the Space Needle. Due to regulations, the Monorail will carry its last passengers from Westlake Center to Seattle Center at approximately 11:15 PM. We will resume service from Seattle Center to Westlake Center once we receive the ‘ALL CLEAR’ from the Fire Marshall (estimated to be 12:20 AM) – from this point we will carry passengers until 1:00 AM.

The last southbound Link train will depart Westlake Station at 1:13 am.

The last Tacoma Link streetcars depart Tacoma Dome Station at 12:36 northbound and Theater District Station at 12:48 southbound.

A full list of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day service reductions can be found here.

Cute animation showing Montreal’s plan towards a fully electric transit system. I like how the electric bus is assembled and plops down on the ground like a toy.

The stream of news from the deep-bore tunnel project has been uniformly bad: stuck for months for an unclear reason, the completion date has slipped to August 2017 at best ($). The rescue effort itself is causing the already brittle viaduct to sink, along with a chunk of Pioneer Square. It’s unclear, at least to me, who will end up paying the ballooning costs, but there certainly will be lots of litigation ahead.  Nothing catastrophic has happened – yet.

Back in 2009, I joined many others in thinking that the deep-bore tunnel project was a bad project at any price, and now that it is sure to take longer and more likely to cost taxpayers more than budgeted, that judgment looks better than ever. We believed Seattle could do just fine without another highway through downtown, particularly with alternative transit investments, and thought closing the viaduct would illustrate that for everyone. I continue to believe that.

In my circles, the new developments spawn some justified gloating, and renewed calls to both close the viaduct now and halt the project. Indeed, halting the project would be a fabulous decision for all the reasons linked to above. However, were I convinced that the project was critical to the city’s future, I wouldn’t let a few overruns or delays change my mind, just as I didn’t when Sound Transit ran into somewhat similar problems early in its first critical project. And much to my dismay, as it turns out we haven’t seen any of the defections that would indicate this project is really in political trouble.

As for closing the viaduct, everyone agrees that it isn’t safe in the event of an earthquake. For many people, that’s enough to shut the thing down, as even Gov. Gregoire threatened to do by 2012, and that’s an entirely reasonable viewpoint. But for many others, earthquake risk is worth avoiding whatever economic damage closing the viaduct would cause. Now that the viaduct is settling, WSDOT insists it is still as safe as it was.  WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson writes ($) that if it weren’t, they would simply apply stopgap techniques to shore it up. To claim that the measured settling demands closure of the viaduct implies at least one of two things: WSDOT’s engineers are incompetent, or managers are willfully ignoring technical advice for political or reputational reasons.

I have no special insight into what goes on at WSDOT, and for all I know a huge scandal revealing one or both of the above could surface tomorrow*. But functioning in a technical society requires placing at least a little trust in the judgment of trained professionals, and I think we have to give them the benefit of the doubt on this narrow matter.

* or – God forbid – a catastrophe proving their incompetence.

• Is the Times slowly going urbanist? Two articles about I-405’s traffic miseries this week, correctly diagnosing the problem as “jobs and housing too far apart” ($) and that [“freeways] destroy city neighborhoods and …are actually congestion generators.” ($)
• Want a good primer on the SEPA and EIS processes? Read the SonicsRising sports blog, seriously.
• Hyperbole of the week: proposals for 7-story zoning around the (still 9 years away!) 185th St Link station are “monstrosities” representative of “excessive and unbridled greed”.
• Bertha’s new best-case scenario? Seattle Tunnel Partners says late 2017, a date that WSDOT won’t endorse until repairs begin.
• New census figures show the wealth disparities among King County’s cities, with median family incomes ranging from $48,000 in Tukwila to $96,000 in Seattle to $230,000 in Clyde Hill.
• Business Vancouver looks into TransLink’s performance ahead of next year’s transit funding measure, noting that Vancouver has the “lowest light rail operating cost in the world”. Cough cough, driverless trains.
• Community Transit just won some planning money for Swift II.
• Long ‘out of scale’ for the traditional high-rise neighborhood, the First Hill McDonald’s is closing, replaced by a more neighborhood appropriate 17-story tower.
• Seattle Bike Blog pushes back hard on SDOT’s proclamation of Holman Rd as a “complete street”.
• 1 million bike trips over the Fremont bridge in 2014? We’re at 997,000 with one week to go.
• Whether it’s a sign of renewed cooperation or just plummeting oil prices busting the Bakken boom, Amtrak now thinks it can keep the Empire Builder on time. The old schedule resumes January 12th.

This is an open thread.

The limited release of the Seth Rogen / James Franco vehicle The Interview means that Columbia City’s Ark Lodge Cinema is the only venue in King County ($)  (at the moment) one will be able to see it. That makes it a fine choice for our light rail excuse of the week (LREOTW).

The premiere is Christmas night at 9:30pm, with showings at both 2:30pm and 9:30pm through January 1.

If you don’t have many occasions to ride Central Link, this is a good excuse to get into the Rainier Valley for something you can’t get many other places.