Today’s the day ST3 gets sent to the ballot. Follow along on Twitter (@seatransitblog), or watch above! We’ll be live tweeting from 1:30-4:00.

18 Replies to “ST3 Board Passage Liveblog”

  1. Oh yes, “driverless cars.” We should definitely plan our future transportation decisions around vaporware.

    1. Yes, someone on another blog noted that we’ll all be using driverless cars by 2030 anyway, so light rail is a waste of money. They said it would’ve been ok if we’d got it during the 1980s and 1990s like Portland.

      Where will these driverless cars drive though? Will we have to built more roads?

      2. Of course, the driverless cars can’t get around the geometry issues of SOVs, so… back to square one?

        Nope, transit to the rescue! Yay for it being more efficient at moving people! :D

  3. Oooh, amendment 3 specifically rolls out “managed parking,” and they tweaked the wording so it applies to all parking facilities. I thought they’d try to slip that in after the ST3 vote. I do appreciate the transparency, and cool they are reinvesting the money into access fund, not the general funds.

  4. What are the hours of operation going to be for ST3? I was really disappointed to learn I have to take a cab from the airport next week when my flight lands at midnight (unless I only want to go as far as Beacon Hill). It’s really not acceptable for service to end that early.

    2. Vancouver Skytrain doesn’t start until somewhere around 7 on holidays.

      With all the tunnel security and all that you wind up with a lot of staffing. Even automated systems can be too expensive to operate during low ridership periods.

      At least at Beacon Hill or Mt Baker you have a few options to transfer to a bus that goes somewhere.

    3. Hopefully there will be funding for a shadow bus during the hours when Link can’t run for maintenance…

    5. I was surprised to find the Santiago (Chile) metro – which is extremely well used, and continually expanding – shuts down before midnight (11 on Sundays). This in a country on Mediterranean time, where if you walk into a restaurant before 9pm you will likely be the only one there.

  5. “Boardmember Roberts repeating the apparently scarring experience of having Euro aviation officials scoff at Paine’s car-dependent location.”

    European officials wouldn’t scoff at a bus shuttle from the Link mainline. What they scoffed at was not having any kind of transit plan for the tens of thousands of workers in the industrial center. It was just, “Build it in any isolated location, add some surface parking lots, widen the highways, and that’s it.” When Europeans design an industrial center, it has to include a transit plan that’s realistic for most of the workers or it won’t be approved.

      1. Airbus’ Toulouse HQ has rail service fairly close (on a short branch of France’s SNCF) – but that airport is basically IN downtown Toulouse – not 30 miles out.

  6. Love that 65k is now routine, 70k common. What was the projected ridership, again?

    Back of the envelope fun:

    Compared to April numbers we’re at 5-10k more riders per weekday, which assuming maybe $1.50 in revenues per rider (not sure of number of transfers, how those are split, or number of LIFT riders), and ballparking one weekday’s worth of extra riders per weekend, gets us to somewhere in the realm of $45-90k extra per week, ~2.5m-5m/yr

    Not a ton on the scale of ST projects, but pretty cool all the same. I’d love to know how many service hours it could buy on Link.

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