Various anecdotes coming in this morning suggest that OneBusAway is finally fixed, after over a month without real-time data on many key routes. Furthermore, the software will accurately reflect holiday schedules in the future. Spokesman Bruce Gray explains:
We put a new build up at 7 a.m. that so far appears to fix the major issues we had been seeing. Turned out to be a compression problem on a couple files.
While there were many aggravating aspects of this rollout, not least the lack of information before I asked for it, the good news is that Sound Transit is executing a program of actually improving OneBusAway rather than letting it stagnate.
Meanwhile, King County announced a new region-wide trip planning app this morning. which will include real-time arrival data. We’ll have a review of it next week.
Join the crowds taking transit to the Seahawks (Photo from KingCounty.gov)Once again, the Seahawks have won home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs, and will begin their playoff drive this Saturday, at 5:15 p.m., against the Carolina Panthers.
In addition to the myriad of regular transit service, including frequent Link Light Rail service to and from the airport, the game will be served by special Sounder train service, and shuttles from Northgate Transit Center, Eastgate Park & Ride, and South Kirkland Park & Ride. Shuttle fares are $4 cash each way. You can also take Metro route 41 from Northgate, ST Express 554 from Eastgate, and Metro route 255 from South Kirkland.
Two Sounder trains will take off from Lakewood Station at 1:50 and 2:30, arriving at Century Link Field at 2:57 and 3:43. A third train will take off from Sumner Station at 2:37, arriving at the CLink at 3:19. North Sounder Service, weather permitting, will take off from Everett Station at 2:15 and 2:30, arriving at 3:14 and 3:29. The full schedule is available here.
New since last year is frequent service on King County Metro’s brand new Rapid Ride F Line, connecting to both Tukwila Sounder Station and Tukwila International Boulevard (light rail) Station, running past midnight.
As per tradition, trash talk against the home team is off-topic and will be deleted.
Update: samuel will be coming to the game on the ferry.
Ballard Terminal Railroad loses its appeal to reactivate freight rail on the Eastside Rail Corridor (PDF here), and Cross Kirkland Corridor trail construction continues.
Want a rundown of all transit projects nationwide for 2015? The Transport Politic has you covered.
The best city for jobs in the country? Right here.
The Coast Starlight will be split in two for 3 one-week periods in the next two months, with Seattle-Portland and Eugene-Los Angeles trains bridged by buses. If only we had an extra Talgo set lying around for the SEA-PDX section…
When we last left the Northgate Pedestrian Bridge project, it had failed to qualify for a $15M federal grant, putting $10M in local matching funds in jeopardy. Before Christmas, Mike O’Brien and Larry Phillips sent their fellow Sound Transit board members a note asking them to ignore the next deadline for federal grands in 2015 and instead simply commit to finding the funding for the project.
The pedestrian bridge is an excellent project and it would be a damn shame if Northgate station opened without it, so kudos to O’Brien and Phillips for making the ask to their fellow board members. The bridge would serve 7,000 trips per day. To put that in context, Northgate Station is expected to have 15,000 daily riders by 2030. The bridge would drastically transform the transit options for North Seattle Community College and the surrounding neighborhood.
Sound Transit has the money, with U-Link and North Link coming in under budget. The board just has to authorize the expenditure. Given that the agency’s recently-updated system access policy calls for considering pedestrian and bike access at stations, the bridge should be a no-brainer. If Sound Transit is going to continue to site stations directly adjacent to I-5, then it ought to do everything it can to make non-motorized access as pain-free as possible. Let’s build this bridge.
There are a lot of opinions about what Sound Transit should do in Snohomish County, and (in our comment threads) precious few of those opinions come from there. To rectify that, I chatted with Sound Transit Boardmember, and Everett Councilmember, Paul Roberts for his perspective of what is desirable and feasible in that subarea. This is Part 2 of 2. (Part I)
Mr. Roberts is a self-described “recovering planner” who has served in numerous transportation and environmental advisory positions, and almost two decades as Director of Everett’s Department of Planning and Community Development, before “failing at retirement” by doing some consulting and serving in elected office.
It’s well-understood that only dense land use can fully utilize the capacity of rail. As a City Councilmember, what are you prepared to do to make it happen in Everett?
We’ve already done a lot of Transit Oriented Development along the Swift line. That’s the same thing we’d have to do for Link. It’s critical, and I’ve long been a supporter.
Our analysis suggests that the proposed $15 billion ST3 package won’t really be enough to get to Everett via I-5, much less via Paine Field. What compromises do you support to resolve this dilemma?
First, it’s too early yet to know what those pieces look like. But we still have to do system- and project-level studies. We don’t yet know what those costs will be.
Second, we have to think as a region. We have significant manufacturing capacity that drives the State of Washington. The real priority we have to look at is completing the spine to Tacoma, Everett, and Redmond. We have other providers — CT, ET, KCM — that have to be part of the integrated system.
Third, we also need to look at how to right-size the system to bias building more miles of track as opposed to larger stations or some of the other infrastructure pieces that can more easily be added later. The stations don’t have to be overbuilt to have impact. But they do have to function properly! There’s a difference between spending huge amounts of money on the station and spending the right amount of money to make that station work in terms of access. And those are relatively low-tech urban design solutions! Sound Transit shouldn’t dictate that design, but I do think we should work with the communities. Communities have to take the lead and frankly, the responsibility. In other words, Sound Transit can’t be funding a lot of that, but we should be supportive of it.
I’m on the record as advocating different funding mechanisms. Tax-increment financing (TIF) is used in almost every other state and captures some of the value created by the line. It’s a concept that’s overdue [Washington law does not allow TIF].
Your second point sounds like a swipe at subarea equity. If the emphasis is building out the spine, there’s taxing capacity in North and East King that is presumably going to very high-ridership but non-spine lines. Are you suggesting that those projects should be subordinated to completing the spine?
There are a lot of opinions about what Sound Transit should do in Snohomish County, and (in our comment threads) precious few of those opinions actually come from there. To rectify that, I chatted with Sound Transit Boardmember, and Everett Councilmember, Paul Roberts for his perspective of what is desirable and feasible in that subarea. This is Part 1 of 2. (Part II)
Mr. Roberts is a self-described “recovering planner” who has served in numerous transportation and environmental advisory positions, and almost two decades as Director of Everett’s Department of Planning and Community Development, before “failing at retirement” by doing some consulting and serving in elected office.
Thanks for taking the time to chat. What drew you to the Sound Transit Board?
I’m very drawn to infrastructure. I’ve been long involved in transportation planning, including the Governor’s Connecting Washington Task Force. My roots are deep in this stuff. But also, I look forward into the future and see the bigger arc of this urban area. In lots of other urban areas like ours across the nation and globe, transit capacity is something they’ve developed or are trying to develop. A lot of people wish we’d done this earlier, but we didn’t; we’re here. Last but not least, I chair the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency and a lot of my technical background is in environmental planning. I can’t think of anything more significant to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions than building systems to give people alternatives to driving.
What do you think is the right vision for high-capacity transit in Snohomish County beyond Sound Transit 2? Why?
I’ve been on record for a long time as favoring Light Rail via I-5 to Paine Field (Option A), which I call the “Southwest Everett Industrial Area.” That’s an important distinction. We often talk about Paine Field, which is a big piece. But the zoning and infrastructure capacity of this area is roughly 100,000 jobs. Today there are about 55,000 manufacturing jobs. Boeing is of course the biggest, but there are over 200 companies there, and not all of them are aerospace.
This is the largest manufacturing center in the state, the economic driver of the state. It has a higher economic output than Seatac. It’s not about Boeing, but it’s about manufacturing capacity. If we are going to build a system, we have to build it to connect the job base. To do otherwise would be foolish.
How would any other nation build this system? Would they build one that did not connect their primary manufacturing capacity? I think the answer is no. I don’t think the Sound Transit study [which showed the same ridership for Paine Field and SR-99 alignments] reflected the job capacity of Southwest Everett. The real growth capacity is at Southwest Everett, not I-5. [On I-5] you get nothing that drives ridership in the future.
Lastly, we’ve already talked about integration of the Operations and Maintenance Facility in Southwest Everett. It should be integrated into the system to be cost-effective.
What are you hearing from constituents and stakeholders?
In keeping with STB’s generally technocratic ethos, I think tolling I-90 is good policy, not to fund more megaprojects but because it will improve travel times both for people who choose to pay the toll and (more importantly) for transit riders that will no longer have to deal with chronic congestion. Olympia’s tolling rhetoric never seemed to grasp this and viewed it as a purely revenue-generating measure.
However, the Times reported ($) last month that the governor’s transportation package, by funding the new 520 bridge with other revenues, would also “abandon the idea of tolling the I-90 Mercer Island floating bridge.” While I still think this is a bad policy, I surprised myself by not being particularly concerned about it.
That’s not just because of skepticism about the package’s chances. A toll on I-90 a few years ago, now, and for the next few years would indeed alleviate the suffering of transit riders. Processes being what they are, however, any plausible toll would probably begin about when two-way HOV operations start on the bridge in 2017. At that point general-purpose lane congestion becomes theoretically irrelevant to bus riders; six years after that, and East Link will make it entirely irrelevant.
Stepping beyond transit for a moment, it would be great for freight to flow freely and for people to choose between an inexpensive but fast transit ride and a more expensive, even faster drive. But I can also accept a cheap, fast transit ride vs. a cheap slog through traffic. If freight and SOV interests can’t, they certainly have the platform to demand what they need without transit advocates concerning themselves with it.
Pioneer Square streetcar terminus– Sounder Bruce (Flickr)
While it may be fair to look at 2015 as the final Year in Waiting™ for University Link to open, 2015 will bring about plenty of changes in its own right, and transit riders, people on bikes, and people walking have much to anticipate. Here’s a look at the upcoming year.
New Openings & Service Changes
Assuming that the already-delayed vehicles start arriving soon, the First Hill Streetcar will finally launch sometime this spring.
I-405 opens express toll lanes between Bellevue and Lynnwood.
Mukilteo Station’s south platform project will be complete early this year.
Metro’s new trolleys will begin entering service.
The Mercer West project will be mostly complete by summer, with some North Portal work obviously delayed pending Bertha repairs.
Sound Transit introduces ST Express route 580, with 20 daily one-way trips, between Lakewood Station and Puyallup Station, connecting with Sounder. (June)
Seattle Pacific University gets its layover, with Metro routes 3 and 4 extending to SPU and losing their vestigial terminal loops.
Metro will unveil its ULink Connections plan (June)
Prop 1 funded service hits the streets. (June)
As part of ULink testing, Link will go to 6-minute peak headways,the DSTT will be able to accommodate 4-car trains, and some tunnel buses (yet unnamed) will be surfaced to make room. (September)
Various anecdotes coming in this morning suggest that OneBusAway is finally fixed, after over a month without real-time data on many key routes. Furthermore, the software will accurately reflect holiday schedules in the future. Spokesman Bruce Gray explains:
I’ve been on record for a long time as favoring Light Rail via I-5 to Paine Field (
