With over 600 articles, tens of thousands of comments, and millions of page views, you kept us busy in 2016. Here are the Top 10 Most Commented and Most Read Posts of 2016. You may notice a theme here. Was there a big ballot measure or something?
2. How to Fix ST3 So Seattle Will Vote for It (Seattle Subway): 315 Comments, March 31. A week after ST3’s release, Seattle Subway asked for the moon and ended up mostly getting it. Always good comment fodder.
Two park & rides on the Eastside will close in early 2017 for East Link construction. The South Bellevue P&R, with current capacity of 519 cars, is expected to close later in the first quarter. It will reopen in five years with an expanded capacity of 1,500 cars in a five-level garage. In the second quarter, the smaller Overlake Transit Center P&R will close for up to six years so it can be used for staging materials. Capacity at Overlake is about 220 cars. The future Redmond Technology Center Station will include a 320-stall parking garage.
Sound Transit will lease five new Park-and-Ride lots on the Eastside (in blue), and add capacity or service at several others.
Closure dates are dependent on construction scheduling and will be announced 60 days in advance. As the dates are confirmed, a more extensive public outreach effort will educate riders about alternatives.
To serve users during the closures, Sound Transit has expanded two existing leased lots and leased space at five new locations, accommodating 350 cars in total. All of the added capacity is at churches in Bellevue excepting one Renton location. The leased lots opened in December. That is less than a 1:1 replacement, but there is also unused capacity at some other Eastside locations such as South Sammamish, Houghton, Newport Hills, and Tibbetts Valley in Issaquah.
Buses will continue to serve South Bellevue during the closure. These include ST 550, 555 and 556, and Metro 241 and 249. The southbound stops will be relocated across the street. Road capacity will be reduced during some of the construction, but a reversible lane ensures two lanes can remain open in the peak direction throughout.
The closure of the P&R at Overlake Transit Center is being mitigated in part with ST Express service to nearby Overlake Village on ST 541, launched earlier in 2016. Sound Transit Express service on the SR 520 and I-90 corridors was increased in 2016, improving the frequency of service at several historically under-utilized lots.
If you’ve spent enough time walking in Columbia City, you may have noticed the faint traces of a former Metro bus stop on the east side curb of 37th Ave South between Hudson and Ferdinand Streets, just one block west of Rainier Avenue. In the late 1970s and continuing into the early 1980s, this ghost stop was once the mid-day and evening terminal of the 39 SEWARD PARK (which later became the 31 BEACON HILL/SEWARD PARK). During the peak hours, the 39 offered express service between Seward Park and downtown Seattle; but mid-day and evenings, this stop on 37th Ave. S. was the terminal of the 39 (or 31) route.
Columbia City hasn’t always been the thriving business and residential area that we see today. In the mid 1970s, Columbia City was considered a very dangerous neighborhood and most of the commercial spaces were boarded up and empty. But in 1978, Charles Royer became mayor of Seattle and he was determined to revitalize the Columbia City neighborhood. As part of the plan, route 39’s northern terminal was moved from Mt. Baker (where it connected to the 10 Mt. Baker) to Columbia City. The service to Columbia City apparently didn’t generate much ridership because by 1983 the terminal had been moved back to Rainier and Genesee. However, Metro’s curb paint has long outlasted the transit service.
Oran’s visualization of the pro-ST3 vote (go here to interrogate the results further) doesn’t teach us much that we didn’t already know from 2008’s ST2 results. In other words, the region’s most urban areas tend to vote for quality transit, with the actual locations of ST service outperforming by a few points.
To some extent, the projects that made it into the ST3 list are a result of “politics.” For some, this is a pejorative term that means “any projects supporting objectives I don’t agree with,” but here I mean to neutrally describe it as projects successful in winning votes on the Sound Transit Board or in the electorate.
It’s hard to definitively trace which projects swung a board vote, although it’s somewhat easier to see how the list affected endorsements from local politicians. Debora Juarez flipped her stance when ST brought 130th Street station, in her district, into the definitive list. More broadly, Eastside city councils with significantST3investments voted to endorse. Those without, didn’t.
There is almost certainly value in creating elite consensus. But how did that play out in the vote? To find out, I asked Oran to create a map showing how each precinct’s vote changed over the past 8 years. The original map was a sea of brown (lower yes votes), because the overall package fared 3.2% worse than ST2. The version you see below accounts for that secular change. The green precincts outperformed based on their 2008 vote and the overall downward trend. Oran also had to make various technical adjustments to reflect precinct boundary changes.
Route 107 now serves the bus stop in front of the Red Apple across from Beacon Hill Station.
I got an early Christmas present last Thursday, when I saw new route 107 pull up to the bus stop across from Beacon Hill Station, in front of the Red Apple on Beacon Ave S. Most of the waiting passengers boarded it, happy to have two routes (the other being route 60) to take them to their homes along 15th Ave S. Until recently, route 107 had been stopping and laying over a block south of Beacon Hill Station, where nobody was boarding it to head south. Now route 107 lays over on S Lander St, just north of the Red Apple. Per Metro Service Planner Doug Johnson, SDOT had to do a traffic study of the impacts of the terminal on S Lander Street and the vicinity before the layover stop could be installed there.
Newly reworked route 107 was rolled out as part of the southeast Seattle route restructure with the September service change. The route starts with the old route 107 path between Renton Transit Center and Rainier Beach Station, then takes over the portion of old route 106 from Rainier Beach Station to Georgetown, and then heads back up to Beacon Hill and up 15th Ave S to Beacon Hill Station.
2016 is the 25th year of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Holiday Train. This year, CTA added an Elves’ Workshop Train so more riders can experience the tradition. There is also a Holiday Bus.
If you’re like me and you (1. generally loathe Christmas music and (2. love cities and transit and (3. love a good Spotify playlist, here are 50 songs for your (hopefully lazy) Christmas weekend. Drawn from my personal tastes, and graciously including only one insufferable yet spot on Arcade Fire song, this loosely topical urbanist playlist ranges from Europop to Bluegrass to Hip Hop to Musical Theatre. All songs have at least something to do with reflections on land, home, movement, or urban culture. A few tidbits from each song are below.
Open gangway subway train in Toronto (photo by the author)
Zach made a compelling argument for the new Link fleet to feature open gangways throughout the length of the train. Open gangways increase capacity without costly platform extensions by turning dead space into passenger space. Extra length low floor light rail vehicles are common in European tram systems and are slowly making their way across the Atlantic to Ottawa and suburban DC. Ottawa is a good case study for Seattle given the similarities.
I am going to call this conceptual open gangway Link vehicle Double Link. Double Link carries 11.5% more people than a 2-car Link train in the same footprint. It balances increased capacity with operational flexibility, allowing Sound Transit to run the equivalent of today’s 2- or 4-car trains.
Ottawa’s light rail vehicle (OC Transpo)
Double Link is based on the 48 m (158 ft) long 4-segment vehicles from Alstom that Ottawa’s OC Transpo picked for its new Confederation Line. Their downtown subway platforms are 120 m (400 ft) long just like Link’s, while their surface platforms are 90 m with provision for future expansion. Likewise, the vehicles can be expanded to 59 m (194 ft) by inserting an additional segment. Siemens, the builder of Link’s new vehicles, offer comparable products outside North America. Link’s sister vehicles in New Jersey have been retrofitted with extra segments, opening the possibility for the current Kinkisharyo fleet to be lengthened as well.
