Month: May 2016

BY DAVID SEATER

This article is cross-posted from Central Seattle Greenways.

On February 29, 2016, Central Seattle Greenways volunteers and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways staff met at Capitol Hill Station to conduct an accessibility audit of the station area. We focused on three priorities: safety of street crossings, obstructions in crosswalks and along sidewalks, and sidewalk capacity. The station is expected to serve 14,000 riders every day in 2030, making safety and accessibility of the entrances a significant priority.

The map below shows the audit area. Intersections that were assessed are circled, and station entrances are marked with stars. Specifically, the intersections were: Broadway E & E John St / E Olive Way, Broadway E & E Denny Way, Broadway Ave E & E Thomas St, Harvard Ave E & E Olive Way, and 10th Ave E & E John St.

We identified several common problems at the intersections and the sidewalks connecting them:

• Obstructions (poles, hydrants) in or very near curb ramps
• Obstructions (poles, signal cabinets, A-boards) blocking painted crosswalks
• Ramps misaligned on opposite sides of a crosswalk
• Ramps turned at an angle to the crosswalk
• Drivers making dangerous turns through occupied crosswalks
• Difficult crossings of John (at 10th) and Olive (at Harvard)
• Sidewalks narrowed by obstructions (trash cans, newspaper boxes, A-boards, shelters)

Easy Wins – Quick, low cost solutions:

Continue reading “How to Improve Access to Capitol Hill Station”

Amid the breaking news last week of the Sound Transit 3 Draft Plan Update, Sound Transit’s Q1 Ridership Report got a bit buried. The Q2 report will be far more consequential, being the first one with a full quarter of ULink ridership, but even so there are interesting (and mostly positive) trends from the Q1 data.

Link

Even with just 2 weeks of ULink service, Link ridership was up 27% from Q1 2015, with 3 million boardings and an average weekday ridership of 38,371. Subtracting the two weeks of ULink service returns a 12.5% growth rate over Q1 2015. Q2 may be the first quarter in which Link ridership exceeds all ST Express routes combined, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Sounder

Sounder set a new quarterly record, breaking the 1 million boardings mark with a weekday average of 16,292. The South Line was up 15%, and the North Line up 12%. But the South Line remains an order of magnitude larger, with nearly 11 times the ridership of the North Line.

ST Express

Total ST Express ridership grew just one percent, with 4.4 million boardings and a weekday average of 62,509. Most routes added a small number of riders, but a few lost riders, including Routes 522 and 574. Route 586 lost 19% of its riders, partially driven by UW students shifting to the 590s+Link in the final 2 weeks of March. New service on Route 541 only existed for one week of Q1, and it didn’t start quickly out of the gate, with just 2,215 riders, or 443 per weekday.

Tacoma Link

Tacoma Link lost 5% of its riders. Tacoma Link has lost ridership in 4 of the last 5 quarters, though total decline has been small.

From signal lever boxes to computerized control rooms.

Sound Transit 3 materials have not said a lot about the agency’s successful South Sounder service. Most of the attention in that subregion has gone into extending the light rail “spine” into Tacoma. Sounder will actually have a quicker running time from Tacoma to Seattle, although Link may have its advantages for somewhat spontaneous Tacoma-Seattle trips, those outside commuter rail operating hours, and trips within the South King Link corridor. That said, there is a significant (if vague) commitment to Sounder in the package. And it’s vague for a good reason.

• Facilities and train cars necessary to support 10-car trains. This is a fairly bounded set of improvements, up from 7 cars today.
• Station access improvements. This runs the usual spectrum from sidewalks to parking spaces, including speed and reliability improvements for approaching buses. As always, the exact form of these will depend on many rounds of exchange with Sounder communities, and ST will not commit to a framework for these now.
• Trains to Tillicum and Dupont. Four of the six round trips to Lakewood would start in Dupont instead, with no need for additional trainsets. The 8-mile extension would cost about $300m for 1,000-1,500 riders per day.
• “Elements to expand service levels.” More trains!

Monday, May 30 is Memorial Day, which is the traditional final day of Northwest Folklife Festival, at the Seattle Center, wherein you will likely find hired petitioners gathering signatures for lots of state ballot initiatives, including possibly one or two initiatives designed to kick the legs out from under transit funding. If someone has a stack of several initiatives they are asking you to sign, feel free to politely ask lots of questions, but please don’t sign and give them a signature they can copy onto the other initiatives. (They are paid by the signature.)

But back to the matter at hand: Transit agencies traditionally reduce service on Memorial Day, even while large crowds throng festivals like Folklife. Some rural transit agencies shut down for the day. So, plan ahead, and always have a designated driver if you are going to partake and don’t have transit to get you home. And then, drivers, hang up and drive.

The big improvement in Memorial Day service, year over year, is in Snohomish County, where Community Transit will be providing service the day before and the day of Memorial Day for the first time in several years. And, of course, you can now take various bus routes to UW Station, take Link to Westlake Station, and walk, bikeshare, ride the bus, or take the monorail (which still does not accept ORCA, otherwise, I would just be saying take the monorail) to the Seattle Center.

Any companies offering free or reduced-fare rides on Memorial Day weekend are encouraged to mention your service in the Comments.

The full list of Sunday and Memorial Day service levels for transit agencies around the region is below the fold. Continue reading “Memorial Day Service Reductions”

Today’s the big day. At today’s Sound Transit (ST) Board Meeting, the Board will offer amendments to the Draft Plan released in March. Today is the single most consequential day in shaping what will be the final plan adopted in June. Will timelines change? Will new projects be added or projects cut? We’ll be tweeting at @seatransitblog, and the feed will be embedded here. Follow along from 1:30pm-4:00pm!

Tweets by @SeaTransitBlog

• Pierce Transit asking really fundamental questions before service expansion.
• Data show I-405 HOT lanes are working, despite the complaining.
• Toby Nixon pushing a Willows Road Link routing ($) to keep rail off the CKC; somehow, the ideas keep getting goofier.
• Councilmember Lisa Herbold travels to U-District in solidarity with dedicated anti-density advocates like John Fox’s Seattle Displacement Coalition.
• Backyard cottages back on the agenda.
• Shoreline Mayor talks 145th.
• Sound Transit hiring a bunch.
• Metro driver stabbed, attacker arrested.
• U-Pass costs will not increase next year.
• Montlake Triangle wins award.
• Bertha at 2,000 feet out of 9,300.
• Portland introduces bus to Multnomah Falls.

This is an open thread.

Backyard cottages are popular in theory, yet few homeowners end up building them.  Just 221 have been built in the nine years that they’ve been legal(far fewer than Vancouver), despite the fact that 75,000 lots in the city are eligible to have one. Councilmember Mike O’Brien, whose been on the cottage beat for several years now., is looking to increase production with a slate of reforms that would streamline the construction of backyard cottages or DADUs (that’s Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit).  You can read more from Stephen at the Urbanist here or Erica on her site.  Even Knute Berger’s on board.

Along with some simplifications to the code (like normalizing height limits and where front doors are allowed to be placed), there are two headline changes.  The first would remove the off-street parking requirement for DADUs inside urban villages. Requiring two off-street spaces for car storage drastically reduces the available space for a cottage.  Furthermore, under current law, one can currently build an apartment building or townhouse development inside an urban village without parking, but a DADU property in the same urban village must have 2 off-street spaces.  Fixing this imbalance is common sense. Lest anyone worry about an impending parking crisis, the report notes that, in Portland, 2/3 of cottage dwellers don’t park cars on the street, even though there’s no requirement to provide them with parking.

The second big change would lower the owner-occupancy requirement to 12 months.  After that, the owner  would be free to rent out both units.  This would remove some economic uncertainty around resale and possibly make banks more willing to finance DADU construction.

The original owner-occupancy requirement comes from homeowners fearing hordes of renters descending on their neighborhoods.  But this fear seems overblown, even if you set aside the ugly “renters are less-than” rhetoric that undergirds some of these conversations.  It may shock many of these folks to learn that it’s currently legal to rent a house in a single family neighborhood. Believe it or not, its a popular option for groups of young (and not-so-young) people. They have chore wheels and everything.

At any rate, managing detached home rentals turns out to be quite labor-intensive and generally unappealing to large institutional investors. It’s unlikely we’ll see a rush of big developers looking to flood the city with backyard cottages.

Nonetheless, this package of reforms makes a ton of sense, and even though it’s incredibly mild and a huge walk-down from the original HALA proposal, it will likely still generate lots of anger from a few loud homeowners.  It’s worth emailing city council and letting them know you support it.