Month: September 2015

https://twitter.com/SoundTransit/status/623908167873921025/photo/1

Sound Transit photo of the opening of the pedestrian/bike bridge over Montlake, first featured in the Seattle Bike Blog

Link Light Rail service remains something to look forward to in 2016. However, the new pedestrian/bike bridge from UW Station to the rest of campus is now open.

Also coming in 2016:

• Mid-day Saturday frequency on Metro route 48 may increase to every 10 minutes (but with the northern portion split off as route 45, and still running every 15 minutes on Saturdays);
• Routes 67 and 372 may start running on Saturdays, every 15 minutes mid-day;
• Route 75 may increase Saturday mid-day frequency to every 15 minutes;

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This is IF the county council votes to accept the proposed Metro route restructures. Take a moment to submit online testimony and encourage your county council member to say Yes to the bus restructures that will substantially increase access to Husky Stadium, and to Link Light Rail.

And now, back to our regular programming…

The University of Washington home football season starts this Saturday. There will be cash shuttles from 320th St Park & Ride in Federal Way, Eastgate P&R, Houghton P&R, Kingsgate P&R, NE 100th St near Northgate Transit Center, Shoreline P&R, South Kirkland P&R, and South Renton P&R. The shuttles are free if you hold a UW Athletics season pass, but $5 cash otherwise.

Regular bus routes serving Husky Stadium or Stevens Way on Saturdays include King County Metro routes 31, 32, 43, 44, 48, 65, 68, 75, and 271. You can also get to the SR 520 / Montlake flyer stop on Metro route 255 and ST Express 545.

Check out the map below for post-game pick-up staging areas:

Thank you for your patience. Next year will be a game-changer for getting to and from Husky Stadium quickly, assuming the county council gives the green light.

• Kiwanis Club volunteers no longer providing shuttles to Puyallup Fair; alternatives remain.
• A mathematically rigorous example of how adding a road can increase congestion and travel times.
• Metro exploring “alternative services” for Vashon Island, looking for residents to participate.
• Yesler Terrace construction moving along ($), will increase the number of units by almost nine times.
• Microsoft considering renovations to make their campus more “urban.”
• KING5 mourns the loss of Forward Thrust.
• SLU development “just getting started.”
• Stephen Fesler is right: Vancouver is awesome.
• Uber, Lyft likely to get permission to pick up passengers at Seatac.
• All that construction also creating lots of working-class jobs ($).
• New Mercer Island transportation citizen group forming, “Vision Mercer Island,” intentions unclear.
• Portland’s Orange Line opens Sept. 12th.
• WSDOT’s toll program administration has been… scattered ($).
• Washington’s text-and-drive law is toothless ($).

This is an open thread.

At a Tuesday morning press conference from the last timber-supported bridge in Seattle – a 500′ long structure that carries Fairview Ave E into South Lake Union – Mayor Murray formally kicked off the Move Seattle campaign effort. Flanked by a diverse coalition of interests including Transportation Choices Coalition, Puget Sound Sage, the Downtown Seattle Association, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber, Mayor Murray repeatedly hit themes of access, equity, Vision Zero, and investment to sell the $930m levy that would supplant the expiring Bridging the Gap Levy.

Later that evening at Spitfire Grill for the campaign kickoff, Mayor Murray, SDOT Director Scott Kubly, DSA President Jon Scholes, and TCC’s Shefali Ranganathan energized a surprisingly raucous crowd while appealing for donations of time and funds. Proving that Seattle’s penchant for lovable nerdiness knows no bounds, Peddler Brewing Company’s Haley Woods took the mic and said that reading the project list filled her with literal tears of joy, prompting Mayor Murray to quip (paraphrased), “If only I’d known when I was back in the legislature that transportation project lists could bring people to tears. That makes me want to hang out with you.”

Opposition to the levy is scattered but also relatively well funded, with names such as Eugene Wasserman and Faye Garneau leading the Keep Seattle Affordable opposition campaign, for which Garneau alone has contributed $50,000 (90% of total contributions). Prior to last night’s kickoff, the Move Seattle campaign had raised $32,750, with the Downtown Seattle Association, Urban Visions, and Urban Renaissance Group kicking in 75% of that. It’s clear that the general public has not engaged much with the proposal yet, on either side.  As with any campaign, they are seeking donations and volunteers for phonebanking and doorbelling.

So what’s in the levy and what does it mean for you? The levy is substantially the same as when we last reported on the proposal, with some tinkering around the margins. The project list is visionary and expansive, strongly investing across all modes and in all council districts. City leaders have spoken of a ‘growth dividend’ made possible by higher home values and a growing population, permitting a funding level that is nearly triple Bridging the Gap while still keeping the median additional tax burden to $12 per month. The $930m levy will be leveraged by $285m in current appropriations and an estimated $564m in external funding such as grants, leading to a $1.8B project list.

Project highlights after the jump. Continue reading “Move Seattle Kicks Off: Get Involved for Better Transit”

If you live in Seattle, I strongly encourage you to show up and listen or comment at tonight’s city council hearing on the Housing Affordability and Livability Committee’s recommendations, which have come under attack from single-family protectionists. Tonight’s public hearing will help the council decide which of the 65 recommendations to set in motion. It will take turnout, support, and continued pressure from urbanists like you and me to ensure they make the right decision and keep the most critical elements of HALA intact.

Iterations of the term “urbanist” have been hotly debated recently (I prefer “reality-based urbanist” myself), but the bottom line is that we all want to ensure that everyone in Seattle–not just wealthy single-family homeowners, not just Amazonian imports, not just those who got here first, but everyone–can live in safe, affordable housing in the city.

This fight is critical, because the council is under tremendous pressure to abandon the very recommendations that will have the most positive impact on affordability. Mayor Ed Murray and several key council members have already abandoned a major, symbolically important HALA recommendation, which would have allowed a greater diversity of housing types (such as duplexes and townhomes) in the 65 percent of Seattle’s land mass that’s currently reserved exclusively for detached single-family homes. Murray, along with council president Tim Burgess and council land-use committee chair Mike O’Brien, walked back their support for that recommendation after angry property owners and neighborhood activists flooded city inboxes with letters of protest and crowded council meetings to voice their complaints about the changes.

I believe that most of the city supports the principles behind the HALA proposals, even if they aren’t familiar with the details, for one simple reason: they provide more affordable housing. Mandatory inclusionary zoning, which would require developers to build affordable housing on site in exchange for the right to build more densely, combined with a new linkage fee on commercial development, would provide 6,000 units of set-aside affordable housing. Other key measures in HALA would expand the boundaries of urban villages to reflect current and future walkability and transit access, increasing supply and limiting the growth of housing costs (which is true no matter how much some progressives insist that supply and demand does not exist).

The opposition to HALA, which has described population growth as a cancer and have suggested single-family homeowners and neighborhood activists should “take back Seattle,” is organized, motivated, and can turn out plenty of people with the means and time to attend midday hearings when most of us are working. Nighttime meetings like this are an ideal opportunity for HALA supporters to show that we, too, deserve a voice at City Hall and in the future of our city.

King Street Station’s much needed $55m restoration did much to heal the decades of architectural and functional neglect that had turned the 1906 landmark into a 60s-era eyesore. The expansive waiting room is now beautiful and grandiose in an austere sort of way, the white and beige palette imposing a coldness nicely balanced by the warmth of yellow light.

But aesthetics alone don’t make a good train station. Its primary function is as a transportation facility, to efficiently facilitate human travel while comfortably providing basic human needs such as restrooms, food, drink, and safety. On these counts, there remains much work to be done.

Here are my Top 6 ways to improve King Street.

Continue reading “Top 6 Ways to Improve King Street Station”

Mark Professor loves the London bus system, and his Oyster Card.

(Thanks for finding this, Andrew!)

It is almost time for the State Fair. The Fair runs Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 25.

Sounder service will once again be limited to the second and third Saturdays of the Fair (September 19 and 26), and will feature two round-trips from Everett each of those days, with longer trains due to high demand. On those two days, the Fair and Sound Transit are reprising the package deal of Everett, Mukilteo, Edmonds, and Seattle round-trip / gate admission tickets for $17 / $12 for youth ages 6-18, and Tukwila, Kent, Auburn, and Sumner / admission tickets for $15.50 / $11.25 for youth 6-18.

North Sounder trains will leave Everett Station at 8:40 am and 9:40 am. Passengers will transfer to South Sounder at King Street Station, where trains will depart 9:50 am, 10:50 am, and 11:50 am. All stations from Everett to Puyallup will be served. The stations west of Puyallup (Tacoma Dome, South Tacoma, and Lakewood) will not be.

Return trains will depart Puyallup Station 5:50 pm, 6:50 pm, and 7:50 pm, with the first two trains having North Sounder trains awaiting transferring passengers.

Pierce Transit will be running shuttles between Puyallup Station and the fairgrounds, as well as express shuttles between South Hill Mall, Tacoma Mall, Lakewood Towne Center, and the fairgrounds.

Regular bus routes serving Puyallup Station include ST Express 578, and Pierce Transit routes 400, 402, 409, 425, and 495. Regular Pierce Transit bus routes serving the fairgrounds include 400, 402, 425, and 495.

Many years ago, when I had more free time than money, a friend and I mused about a scheme to charge people commuting across the 520 bridge $20 to sit in their car from Redmond to Montlake in the afternoon.  This way they’d get access to the HOV 3+ lane, and we’d make some cash on the side.  This turned out to be wildly impractical, and we never made it work.

I was reminded of this old scheme recently while reading about a new service from Uber.  For a while now, Uber has had a feature called “UberPool,” where they let you carpool with someone else to save money.  Recently, the company began testing “smart routes” which let you save even more money if you get on and get off on a major arterial street.  Many people snarked that this was essentially describing… a bus.

Snark aside for the moment, UberPool seems to work best when there are lots of people headed roughly in the same direction at the same time, like a traditional carpool.  One reason I suspect carpooling is on the decline in America is that it reduces flexibility.  If you have a job that’s a guaranteed 9-5, carpooling can work, but if you need the flexibility to stay late or come in early once in a while, carpooling starts to break down.  UberPool could offer the best of both worlds: an on-demand carpool that leaves when you need it to.

Taking it one step farther, the writer Ben Thompson has argued that the driver of the UberPool might one day be another commuter headed to work, and not a “professional” Uber driver. This person is going to work anyway, so they probably don’t need to be paid that much to pick up a couple of other close-by riders.  That could make the service far cheaper than any current Uber offering – perhaps even cheaper than a bus pass.

I actually wonder if they would need to be paid at all.  If it gave them access to the HOV lane, they might offer to pay the rider instead.  This would also create a much larger and more vocal constituency for free-flowing HOV lanes.

Who knows, maybe someday my dream of getting paid to sit in a car while crossing 520 will come true.