Month: December 2015

2015 has been a terrific year for us at STB.  We made Zach Shaner (previously a longtime staff writer) our first-ever paid part-time reporter, and the move has tremendously improved our range of coverage.  We added two fantastic volunteer writers to our team, Seattle’s Erica C. Barnett and Kirkland’s Dan Ryan.  You, our readership, have grown in number–and continued to provide one of the most substantive and interesting comment sections to be found anywhere on the internet.  We’ve had plenty of news to cover, between University Link restructures, Move Seattle, landmark legislative elections, increases to Metro bus service, and Sound Transit’s preparations for next year’s big vote.

Even in such a news-packed year, one topic clearly dominated the conversation: Sound Transit 3.  In order, these are our most-read and most-commented posts of 2015.

Most Read

1.  A Transportation Solution for Today and Tomorrow, by guest poster Seattle Subway (July 14).  This is an exhortation to Sound Transit to think big for ST3, in terms of both dollars and years.  It appears to have worked, with ST expanding its preliminary 15-year time horizon to 25 or even 30 years in some scenarios put forth in the latest ST3 planning materials.

2. Dear Mercer Island: Public Space is for Public Use (Sept. 29).  Zach’s on-the-scene report covering Mercer Islanders’ numerous requests for special treatment by Sound Transit — in exchange for locating the south Eastside’s best transit facility in a non-residential area of the island — struck a huge nerve.  The report was cited in several local news outlets, and sparked a fascinating debate regionwide.

3. Seattle Subway’s Recommendations for the Sound Transit 3 Survey, by Seattle Subway (June 8).  This feedback was reflected in a number of Sound Transit’s proposed options for ST3.

4. ST3 – Once in a Lifetime, by Seattle Subway (Dec. 1).  Following up on the #1 post above, this post introduced Seattle Subway’s “STComplete” vision for a large ST3 proposal, with lines connecting essentially every transit-favorable community in the region.

5. Westside Seattle Transit Tunnel, by Seattle Subway (Feb. 18).  This February post presented Seattle Subway’s vision for a two-headed downtown tunnel serving both Uptown and South Lake Union.  Sound Transit ultimately did propose a second downtown tunnel as a core element of their ST3 vision, although the concept is somewhat different.

6. Sound Transit’s Conceptual Study: Should You Be Worried? (Apr. 24)  Martin’s careful look at Sound Transit’s tentative, suburban-heavy batch of initial ST3 concepts triggered an outpouring of angst and of support for bigger, bolder, more urban projects.  The agency’s later ST3 concepts turned out to be much closer to what we and many of our readers would like to see.

7. New Metro Buses Coming, by guest poster Ricky Courtney (June 22).  A quick update on Metro’s fleet plans, as the agency scrambled to convert options and get more buses quickly in light of Seattle Prop 1 and a strong economy.

8. Seattle’s ST3 Input (July 28).  Martin’s exposition, updated by another, later post, of SDOT’s input into ST3 station locations, focusing particularly on the Uptown-Ballard line.

9. Seattle Should Demand High-Quality Rail (Aug. 18), by Seattle Subway.  Following up on Martin’s post above, Seattle Subway also covered SDOT’s input.  The group continued to argue for a two-headed WSTT and, less controversially, complete grade separation.

10. The Full $15 Billion (June 29).  In this post Martin celebrated the successful inclusion of the full amount of requested taxing authority for ST3 in the state Legislature’s final transportation bill.

Most Commented

Continue reading “Top 10 Read and Commented Posts of 2015”

Sound Transit has announced the closing times for Link Light Rail and Tacoma Link for getting home from New Year’s Eve festivities.

• Link Light Rail’s last train out of SeaTac Airport Station will depart at 12:10 a.m., a half hour earlier than on a typical weekday.
• Link Light Rail’s last train out of Westlake Station will depart at 1:13 a.m., a half hour later than usual.
• Tacoma Link’s last streetcar will depart Tacoma Dome Station at 12:36 a.m., two and a half hours later than usual.

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Additionally, the Seattle Center Monorail will run until 1 a.m., with a fire-department-required break from 11:15 p.m. to 12:20 a.m. If you want to ride the monorail, remember to bring cash, as it still hasn’t joined the ORCA pod.

A year-long ridership study is expected to begin early next year, funded jointly by SDOT and the Seattle Center. Since the point of the ridership study is to protect the profits for the Seattle Center and Seattle Monorail Services (not accounting for the City’s role in paying for all the maintenance), hopefully the study will consider how many more people would spend more money at the Seattle Center if riding the monorail involved a free transfer from the public transit system, and what impact a nearby Ballard Link Station would have on existing monorail ridership, especially when taking Ballard Link would be a free transfer for many.

Holiday schedule changes for transit throughout the region were covered earlier this month.

This is part of a series of posts looking at Sound Transit’s candidate projects for ST3.

At every opportunity, STB has pushed to run Link on SR 99 instead of I-5.   SR 99 offers a better walkshed from the station, more transit-oriented development (TOD) potential, and better interfaces with local bus routes.  All of the things that are associated with all-day frequent service.

Alas, we lost all those battles in Shoreline, Lynnwood, and Des Moines, where local politicians and business interests were determined to keep light rail away from as many existing business as possible.

Once again I-5 and SR 99 are pitted against one another in Sound Transit’s proposal for light rail along the Southern section of the spine from Federal Way to Tacoma.  Unlike the situation further North, however, SR 99 and I-5 are very close to one another, and as you approach Tacoma they essentially become the same road.  As a result the tradeoff is not nearly as stark as in Snohomish County or even South King, and the I-5 alignment may actually be superior.  Here’s why.

Continue reading “ST3: Link to Tacoma”

After WSDOT closed both Snoqualmie Pass and Stevens Passes on Christmas Eve due to ten feet (3 meters) of snow, I watched on social media as my friends trying to head east for a Spokane Christmas either despondently stayed home or pressed on by driving to Spokane via Portland. 

With bus service also shut down and flights packed, the Seattle Times coverage of the closures noted that one Amtrak ticket across the Cascades was available at the time of publication, a $750 bedroom on the Empire Builder. Which is a shame, because Amtrak’s Empire Builder ran flawlessly through the storms.

We need more and better options across the Cascades, not just redundancy during rare road closures, but plausible and convenient options that knit the state together without requiring a personal car. 

Consider a simple trip to Spokane. By my rough estimates, personal vehicles account for 89% of average weekday trips across the chokepoint of the major passes, with Snoqualmie (15,000) and Stevens Pass (2,000) averaging 17,000 vehicles per day (of course, only a fraction are headed to Spokane, but it’s a rough proxy). An order of magnitude smaller, the 15 daily flights between Seattle-Spokane on Alaska and Delta provide another 1,700 seats. Nearly a further order of magnitude smaller, 4 daily buses provide 200 seats, and the Empire Builder averages just 73 daily Spokane passengers from all stations between Seattle/Portland and Chicago. 

Are we stuck with cars for the vast majority and niche options for the rest? Though WSDOT has shown a significant interest in intercity bus service, its initial lines have been rural lifeline service connecting Spokane-Kettle Falls, Seattle-Port Angeles, Omak-Ellensburg, and Pasco-Walla Walla. But perhaps nowhere is WSDOT’s involvement in public transportation more appropriate than with intercity bus and train service.

So where should we start? What kinds of services would you like to see? In the short term, I’d love WSDOT to either subsidize additional frequencies on Northwest Trailways or Greyhound, or better yet entice Bolt Bus to offer nonstop Seattle-Spokane service. Medium to long term, we need state-operated rail services untied to Amtrak’s oscillating fates. The list of projects needed would be long, including a crown-cut tunnel and new welded rail over Stampede Pass, capacity improvements over Stevens Pass, and maybe new rail from Ellensburg to Lind. But no matter the specifics or mode, we need to live in a state where traveling between our major cities is easier than, “Good luck, I hope you have chains and all-wheel drive.”

Stations from Snowday on Vimeo.

Like channel surfing but for subway stations.

I-732 is a statewide initiative planned for next fall that would impose a statewide carbon tax and use the proceeds to reduce the sales tax by 1 point, essentially eliminate the B&O tax on manufacturing, and provide a tax credit for low-income households. Many liberal groups, including Governor Inslee, would instead like to use the money on climate programs and other political priorities, and are backing an alternative, much less mature, initiative that does that.

If you believe that climate change is an emergency, as I do, you shouldn’t allow your political beliefs about size of government distract you from supporting both initiatives. Neither will solve the world’s problems alone, but every little bit helps: for any amount of warming, a little less warming will have somewhat less dire consequences. It also serves as a model proving that carbon taxes won’t destroy the economy, and collective action always requires contributions that in isolation don’t solve the problem. More to the point of Seattle Transit Blog, taxes on fossil fuels naturally capture their externalities and encourage less energy-intensive modes of living and transport.

I chided progressives for slamming I-732, partly because of the above, and partly because I thought I-732 had a more realistic chance of appealing to the median voter. Perhaps it does, but part of the implied mechanism is that conservative groups would recognize a tax cut when they see it, and the business community would fulfill their fiduciary duty to shareholders rather than express class solidarity with the fossil fuel industry. But (ha ha) of course they didn’t:
Continue reading “I-732 Moving Ahead, Conservatives Passing Up A Good Deal”

The two new U Link stations will introduce a new way of delivering information to passengers but the design needs to be more user-friendly. Unlike the LED signs at Link stations today, the new stations use flat panel screens. When I went by UW Station last month, I was not impressed with the test screens I saw. Sound Transit told me and a few other concerned people on Twitter stating that the screens I saw were not the final look. While I await their final design, I would like to critique the test screen and suggest improvements.

The test screen’s layout is divided in three parts: an area for images like a distorted Sound Transit logo; an area for showing train arrival times; and an area below the two spanning the width of the screen showing the familiar text seen on signs at other Link stations, “Welcome to [station name] / Sound Transit Link Light Rail / [current time]”.

The biggest problem with the design is it attempts to cram too much information on a single screen, resulting in text much smaller than the signs they replaced. The most important information on the screen, the train times, is given a third of the space with very small text that is difficult to read from a distance or while walking. Two-thirds of the screen is dedicated to irrelevant information like the Sound Transit logo and the welcome message. Such information belongs on permanent station signage, not a dynamic screen like this.

By breaking that information into multiple screens each focused on a single message, readability would be greatly improved. An example of this are LA Metro’s station information displays. Prior to their redesign a few years ago, LA’s signs tried to do what ST did with a three section layout. There was a running ticker in the bottom for service alerts, a large area for more alerts, graphical marketing & public service announcements, and a small column to the left for next train times.

The new design gives each element its own screen for a few seconds at a time. This allows the layout of each screen to be tailored for the message. Service alerts are given a bright yellow and bold text to call attention. Eye catching, full-screen graphics can be used for marketing and public service announcements. Train times can be shown in large text that can be seen from afar. Even the date and time has its own screen. Each screen can be given a different weight so some screens stay up longer or show more frequently than others or in the case of an emergency, normal programming can be overridden to give important messages.

The other design aspect I like about LA’s screens is they fit in with the LA Metro look. The typography, colors, and symbology match those used in Metro’s branding and wayfinding system to make it a consistent experience across all mediums, static and dynamic. While the approach shown is not the only way to design a passenger information screen it is clearly better than the test screens I saw.

• How federal law makes trains too expensive.
• High altitudes may get snow over the holiday. Check Metro route status here.
• ST approves $1.2 billion 2016 budget; biggest items are North Link ($165m) and East Link ($203m) construction.
• New ST Board chairs same as the old chairs: Dow Constantine in charge, Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland and Everett Councilmember Paul Roberts as vice-chairs.
• Tacoma Link wins $75m Small Starts grant for 2.4 mile extension to Hilltop. Tacoma needs $7m more to complete the funding picture.
• No one could have predicted: growth in the housing supply has caused rent growth to stall ($).  And for all the weaknesses of our attitude to growth, we’re doing much better than some other prosperous cities.
• Josh Feit says the ST3 plan looks to have a lot of parking; ST clarifies a bit.
• BNSF starting to sue people responsible for new development that threatens mudslides along the North Sounder line. Good for them.
• Private transit routes launching in Seattle, apparently point-to-point peak trips between high-demand neighborhoods.
• Pierce Transit still five years away from returning to 2008 service levels.
• Seattle DPD adopts U District Comprehensive Plan changes.
• The first 30 minutes of this The Weeds podcast provides some clear thinking about gentrification. Skip up to 29:00 for a succinct summary of the key point.
• SDOT tightens up rules about pedestrian closures.
• Houghton Community Council opposes BRT on Cross Kirkland Corridor, prefers it on I-405.
• Angle Lake Station $40m under budget.
• Community Transit offers a rebate on ORCA Passport passes for business.
• More Metro stop announcements on the way.
• Does a crackdown on fare evasion actually pay?

This is an open thread.