King County Metro, Link Light Rail, Sound Transit Express, the Tacoma Link Streetcar, the South Lake Union Streetcar, the West Seattle Water Taxi, Pierce Transit, Community Transit local buses, Intercity Transit, and Everett Transit will be running on their Sunday schedules.
Sounder, the Tacoma Link streetcar, the Vashon Water Taxi, Kitsap Transit, Community Transit commuter buses, Skagit Transit, Island Transit, Whatcom Transit, Mason Transit, Jefferson Transit, Clallam Transit, Grays Harbor Transit, and Twin Transit will not be in service.
The Seattle Center Monorail will run 8:30 am – midnight Saturday, August 5 through Labor Day, in support of the huge crowds expected for Bumbershoot.
Virginia at 8th Avenue, turning from two-way into one-way. Time for a contraflow transit lane?
Amid the general hand-wringing about growth in Seattle lately – be it from Danny Westneat, Crosscut, or innumerable KUOW radio hours – there has been no shortage of discussion about the relative lack of transit service in South Lake Union. A combination of fewer transit options, abundant parking, and an affluent workforce have yielded a drive-alone rate in SLU (46%) that is more than double that of the traditional downtown core (22%). Though no one would argue that transit has kept up with growth, our agencies are working hard to catch up, with many potential projects to address the problem:
Aside from an ST3-funded subway – a line at least 15 years away if all goes well – the good projects above still generally tinker around the margins while continuing to treat SLU as a peripheral neighborhood. But SLU deserves transit service befitting what it has become, which is the northern half of Downtown. That means a lot of peak bus service, at least until 2023.
But if you look at the current peak network operated by Metro, Sound Transit, and Community Transit, you could be forgiven for thinking that the respective agencies still view SLU primarily as layover space for buses. Aside from Route 309, the closest any I-5 buses get to SLU is the view they get from I-5 while slogging towards Stewart Street. From the south, it’s much the same, with all routes petering out in Belltown or Denny Triangle and either deadheading back to base or laying over. From the eastside, the 554’s routing is particularly disappointing, with the last stop on 4th/Lenora in Belltown, from which it then deadheads into SLU to layover. Despite all the growth, the peak network still acts as though Downtown ends at Stewart. And of course, Mercer Street has no transit at all.
A perfect storm is brewing, with massive growth in north Downtown and SLU, Convention Place likely closing a couple years early, ever fewer buses in the tunnel, too few Link vehicles to mitigate lost tunnel capacity, and progressively degraded surface transit pathways. We need more transit, and we need more surface right-of-way (ROW), especially in booming Denny Triangle and SLU. Fortunately, these two neighborhoods have two wide arterials that are not choked with traffic, have a direct connection to the I-5 express lanes, and could have a relatively uncongested pathway into Downtown: Fairview and Virginia.
A proposal:
Shift most non-SR 520 peak service away from Stewart/Olive/Howell to Fairview/Virginia, drawn from the following routes:
As supply-and-demand skeptics are fond of pointing out, real estate is not an undifferentiated commodity, but in fact is a variety of products tailored to a wide range of tastes and requirements. One of the more difficult customers to serve under current urban market conditions is large households, in the most conventional case families with multiple children. As Josh Feit argued a few years ago, failing to do so is not only a tragedy for those families, but also for the city as a whole.
The housing shortage cuts across all parts of the market, but it’s hardest to see a simple solution for large households. In multifamily zones, market-rate development scarcely builds any 2-bedroom units, and 3 bedrooms or more are rare indeed: only 2% of multifamily units in 2009. Some households will win the public housing lottery, but everyone else will bid up the existing single-family stock, a stock that is fixed by simple geometry and the urban growth boundary.
There are denser housing forms that can easily tolerate larger households, like townhomes, row homes, duplexes, and triplexes. All of these tend to larger unit sizes and often include a yard that many might consider important for children. The buildable land in multifamily zones, already inadequate to meet multifamily demand, is likely too precious for much of this construction. That’s why the HALA plan opening up single family zones was the best chance to prevent them from becoming (remaining?) economically exclusive communities.
Council Candidate Lisa Herbold argues that flexibility in single family zones will threaten displacement from affordable single family homes. But current law doesn’t prevent a landlord from renovating or rebuilding a single-family home to be more valuable and displacing the tenant. When this redevelopment occurs, the only difference between the law allowing a triplex and demanding a single home is that it forces two additional households out of Seattle. Whatever compassion we feel for displaced households should also extend to those who never get to live in our city in the first place, solely due to arbitrary regulations.
The HALA plan, if enacted, will do a lot to meet some (but not nearly all) of the demand for housing in Seattle. But the missing HALA upzone creates a hole that tomorrow’s large families will slip through.
Last week, after residents in his new council district protested a new live-work development in Ballard, city council member Mike O’Brien took the unusual step of slipping a new design review mandate into an otherwise standard-issue omnibus cleanup bill. The change O’Brien made would require design review–a process that can add more than a year to a project timeline–when the combined development proposals on two adjacent lots exceed the maximum for a single lot according to the city’s design review standards. In low-rise zones, which is where the change is targeted, that means that two adjacent lots under development can’t exceed eight units total. That design-review trigger applies even if two adjacent lots are being developed by different builders; more than eight, and you’re looking at an automatic, time-consuming design review.
The amendment, which O’Brien acknowledges was unorthodox, was intended to address developments like the controversial townhouses going in at 71st and Division in Ballard, where six live/work units will replace a single-family home that sat astride two historic lots; in that case, the developer took advantage of an old lot line that hadn’t been used in decades to build three units per lot.
But the change will have sweeping implications for development potential on smaller lots across the city. O’Brien says the new requirement is “intended to address instances where a developer in a low-rise or neighborhood commercial zone will break a project up into a couple of different projects to avoid going through design review.” O’Brien acknowledges that the city already has plans to overhaul the design review process next year, but says that in the meantime, “we’re going to continue to set rules that are going to allow more and more people to live in Seattle, but there’s got to be an expectation that when we set those rules, they are going to be followed.”
Bruce Harrell, who proposed an unsuccessful amendment stripping the design review changes from the omnibus bill, said at last week’s meeting that although “Council Member O’Brien and the [Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability] committee had some good intentions in mind to protect neighbors from developers circumventing the system and using what could be called loopholes and that kind of thing … I just think it’s a little dangerous to do a one-off in the omnibus legislation,” especially when the HALA committee already plans to take up design review next year.
If all goes well, by 4:30pm today we’ll know what will be considered for an ST3 package. The Board will be deliberating the Priority Projects List that, if approved, would direct ST staff to study each project for cost, ridership, etc for inclusion in the System Plan and the eventual ballot measure. Like a cut in a round of golf, today’s motion will be exclusionary, eliminating non-listed projects from further consideration, while not revealing much about the eventual projects that will make it all the way through to ST3. With specific projects in each subarea, this list is what will kickoff what’s sure to be a an intense and earnest 1.5 years of debate, compromise, and horse trading.
Though the Priority Projects List is one of the last items on the Board’s agenda, we’ll be liveblogging throughout the meeting as other items of interest arise, including ST’s Transit Development Plan, a Tacoma Trestle Project update, approval of a small ($1.5M) cost increase for Capitol Hill Station work, and authorizing the construction contract for the Point Defiance Bypass.
Watch the video above beginning at 1:30pm, or follow along on Twitter. As soon as the meeting begins, we’ll post the Priority Project List for your perusal.
Kirkland Councilmember Jay Arnold (King County photo)
Later this afternoon, the Sound Transit Board will begin to define the ST3 package by determining their priority project list (PPL). As the project list gets narrowed, Sound Transit board members have an opportunity to be responsive to feedback from open houses and community outreach, provide meaningful transportation options for areas of dramatic growth, and create an ST3 package that has the best chance to be successful at the ballot in 2016.
Kirkland is in the middle of this dramatic growth. With over 82,000 residents, we are a smart-growth city that has already planned for transit-oriented development. Over the past decade, we have zoned for dense commercial and residential development, and are now seeing explosive growth with thousands of new multi-family units in the pipeline and thousands of new high-tech jobs in our downtown and Totem Lake urban center. Now, we need the transit.
Sound Transit’s draft priority project list (updated 6/9) includes bus rapid transit (BRT) from Lynnwood to SeaTac along the I-405 corridor. This recognizes the need to connect cities among the Eastside and provides nearby access to East Link rail in Bellevue. The BRT leverages expansion of HOV/managed access lanes on I-405, direct access ramps in Renton, Bellevue and Kirkland, and existing park and rides adjacent to I-405. In Kirkland, Sound Transit envisions park & ride expansion and potential garage construction at Houghton Park & Ride, Kirkland downtown and Totem Lake.
The I-405 BRT line can be vastly improved by taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate the car-dependent focus for the last mile. Instead of just connecting cities on a map, Sound Transit should connect places using the Eastside Rail Corridor and allow more riders to get directly to their destinations.
In Kirkland, Bus Rapid Transit along the corridor would:
Late yesterday afternoon, Metro transmitted to the King County Council a proposed ordinance including a final U-Link restructure proposal, along with a few other changes also scheduled for March 2016. Executive Constantine issued a press release summarizing the proposed changes. UPDATE: Councilmember Larry Phillips has introduced the changes as two separate ordinances. 2015-0350 covers the changes related to U-Link, while 2015-0349 covers the RapidRide C/D split and other miscellaneous changes.
There are some important differences between the final proposal and Metro’s last proposal, which we covered in March. But the basic idea is the same. In Northeast Seattle, Metro is proposing a major restructuring that would double frequency on almost all of the area’s all-day routes, and add some new coverage, in exchange for requiring some off-peak riders to transfer to Link or another bus to go downtown. In Capitol Hill, Metro is proposing a less extensive set of changes mainly intended to improve frequency and reliability on busy routes and connect more areas to Capitol Hill Station. As with the March proposal, there are almost no changes to SR 520 service, although Metro’s Victor Obeso said yesterday that proposals for SR 520 are likely to be reintroduced later in an Eastside-specific process.
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Photo by SounderBruce.
I and the STB staff I’ve talked to are extremely happy about the Northeast Seattle proposals in particular, because they would profoundly improve all-direction mobility in a part of the city where the bus network is decades old and built around infrequent rides to just two destinations. I see this ordinance as the best opportunity the Council has had in years to improve the usability of Seattle’s transit network, and urge the Council as strongly as I can to pass it.
The Sound Transit Board is poised to finalize the ST3 Priority Project List (PPL) on Thursday. When creating a ballot measure in 2016, the Board will draw from the PPL, and only from the PPL. While alignment and station details are not final at this stage, the importance of this list is obvious.
The Seattle Transit Blog Board recommends that Sound Transit make the following changes to the draft PPL. We understand that many tough choices are ahead, but Sound Transit should work from the best project list it can. We believe the changes below will help get there.
Add BRT along the ERC from Totem Lake to Bellevue/Seattle: The PPL includes a range of investment for most corridors, including at-grade, elevated, or tunneled alignments. Oddly, BRT along the Eastside Rail Corridor (ERC) is not in the PPL despite clear requests for its addition by the City of Kirkland. ST’s study shows that BRT has the same ridership as Link in the same corridor for less cost. Moreover, buses will have an easier time leaving the ERC where it misses key population centers. This project should include both the purple and blue lines from BRISK.
Add Bellevue College Connector and NE 6th Street Projects: These projects provide critical building blocks for a more efficient and integrated transit system. Sound Transit shouldn’t be the sole financier of these projects — the City of Bellevue and Metro need to share responsibility — but Sound Transit has a role in access to HCT, and ought to contribute.
Add a Center Platform at International District-Chinatown Station: Adding a center platform will allow for easy “cross-platform” transfers between Central Link and East Link. It may even increase the LRT system’s eventual maximum peak throughput capacity. Now is the time to fix this issue. ST engineers insist they need a turnback track there. We believe that is the poorest use of that valuable space, and that wyes would be both faster and avoid single points of failure for the system.
Expand the Scope of the Northern Lake HCT Study: While this study will provide valuable information for a possible ST4/5, we believe it should expand to look at near- and mid-term improvements to cross-lake travel. This would include UW Station bus-rail integration, SR 520 HOV improvements, and an SR 520-to-SLU transit pathway. These additions will go a long way to ensure this study provides near-term benefits.
Add BRT from UW to Redmond: Route 545 is Sound Transit’s second-highest-ridership express route, yet there are no improvements to it in the PPL. The PPL includes improvements to other high ridership routes like routes 512, 522 and 554. Sound Transit needs to do right by the riders that pack route 545 (542 in the future) and identify BRT-level improvements, especially since route 542 will continue to be time competitive with East Link during non-peak periods.
Remove LRT from Lynnwood TC to Everett Station via Southwest Everett Industrial Center: While the Board has different priorities than us when it comes to Link’s routing, and the City of Everett’s input is not helpful, the Paine Field alignment has self-evident critical flaws. Paine Field produces no net gain in riders over an I-5/SR99 alignment, for $200m-300m in added cost, while even the SR99 alignment will challenge Snohomish County’s fiscal capacity. Although there are many jobs at Paine Field both today and in the future, for many different employers, they will be scattered over a wide area and will require connecting buses to serve them anyway. Those connecting buses may as well come from an SR99 station as one on- site. We believe that Swift II would be an appropriate alternate investment, with CT participation, for a quality connection between Paine Field employers and the Link system.
The STB Editorial Board currently consists of Martin H. Duke, Frank Chiachiere, and Brent White.
Today we wrap up our roundup of institutional comment on ST3 projects by looking at Pierce County cities. Many Pierce County cities within Sound Transit’s taxing district did not submit letters, including Bonney Lake, DuPont, Ruston, Fircrest, Steilacoom, Milton, Edgewood, and believe it or not, Tacoma. ST did receive letters from Fife, Lakewood, Orting, Puyallup, Sumner, and University Place, and their responses are briefly detailed below.
Fife: Fife’s brief letter asked for an extension of Link from Federal Way to Tacoma along an SR 99 alignment, with a station in the vicinity of 15th Street E and 54th Avenue E, a block north of SR 99 in the heart of the planned Fife City Center. “Our preference for this alignment is for a light rail station to maximize ridership and benefit the City. (A light rail station located along the I-5 corridor would minimize the station’s ridership.)”
Lakewood: Lakewood began their letter by noting their opinion that, “The initial work of the Seattle and King County Corridor has been completed. It is now time to expand transportation projects elsewhere.” (I guess I missed the memo where we finished all of Seattle and King County’s transit needs?) Mayor Don Anderson then goes on to request 4 specific projects for Lakewood:
Sounder extension to Dupont, with an additional station in Tillicum.
Greater span of service on Sounder in Lakewood, which currently only operates unidirectionally with 4:41-6:46am departures to Seattle, and 5:25pm-7:25pm arrivals from Seattle.
BRT in lieu of Link from Tacoma to the Tillicum Sounder Station along South Tacoma Way and Pacific Highway South.
Use ST3 funds to transfer maintenance and security costs at Lakewood Station from the city to Sound Transit.
Orting: Orting’s one-paragraph letter asked for a Sounder spur line from either Puyallup or Sumner to the McMillin Industrial Park just north of Orting, along existing but abandoned trackage adjacent to the Foothills Trail.
Puyallup: Perhaps surprisingly, Puyallup’s letter never mentions the word ‘parking’, perhaps because so much of that work will have been completed under ST2 Station Access funds. Instead, Puyallup requested inclusion of 8-car Sounder trains, more Sounder service, and BRT from both Puyallup to Graham (via SR 161 and South Hill) and Orting to Sumner (via SR 162).
Sumner: Like Orting, Sumner asked for a Sounder spur to the McMillin area of Orting and for development of “satellite options to take the strain off Sumner.” The letter had a folksy, hyperbolic tone, “Families come here on a Saturday or Sunday, fall in love with the beautiful area, buy an affordable home, and intend to keep their jobs in Seattle…not realizing the traffic chokehold on SR 162 and all our highways… SR162 is already a parking lot with more houses being built off it every day…please include a plan to use existing…operational track to use train service. The highway is already so far beyond capacity that a bus would only get stuck.”
University Place: UP’s straightforward letter supported Link as far as Tacoma Dome (but not Tacoma Mall), as well as a Tacoma Link extension to Tacoma Community College.
