Arlington County, just across the river from Washington DC, is a model for rail transit oriented development. It was not an easy journey but it was worth it, even their “slow growth-ers” agreed. It is quite the contrast from how civic leaders in South King County and Snohomish County approached Link’s alignment.

69 Replies to “Sunday Open Thread: Arlington’s Smart Growth Journey”

  1. Thanks, Oran. But what was the difference between the population of Arlington, Virginia, and the whole Washington DC area in the mid 1960’s and present populations of South King and Snohomish Counties now?

    Mark Dublin

    1. DC metro: 3M in 1960, 6M today. Arlington County: 165k in 1960, 225k today. Seattle metro: 4M today. Snohomish County: 750k today. But…Snoho pop density: 370/sq mile versus Arlington Cty pop density: 8300/sq mi (6000/sq mi in 1960) –> Central Arlington is 4 miles from the White House. That is dissimilar to Seattle-Everett distance. But…Seattle metro’s population is obviously concentrated much more than the Snohomish County pop density would suggest, and population sizes are supportive of dense TOD in South King and Snohomish.

      1. I lived in Bethesda, Maryland, an inner DC suburb in 1970. The quarry I worked for had the contract for storing a lot of the explosives for the transit project. I may have delivered the first order for the Dupont Circle station.

        The city’s street grid, twice as old as Seattle itself, was pure packed Hell. In surrounding counties, development was like those clips of the rolling destruction at the base of a mushroom cloud.

        An image that made Federal funding so generous. In those days, bombs sat on top of Russian rockets, not terrorist vests So money no object for shelters like Dupont Circle, and the miles of tubes through miles of solid rock.

        Funding motives we can be grateful for not having. Present maintenance problems more cautionary than indictable. Fifty years will wear anything out. Could be argued that the Berlin Wall came down ‘way ahead of schedule.

        With these memories in mind, I think we need to think of ST3’s very long construction time-frame as a set of opportunities, instead of just opposition quibbling. Meaning that, like in mining, build supports under the rail lines as we go. Including long-range permanent maintenance.

        And an associated network of bus systems, both as decades-long lead-ups to rail service, and as a necessary underlying service level after the project is finished. So we’ve got an example of how we can handle the work ahead of us.

        Though not a detailed map.

        Mark

      2. Arlington County is more like a small city than a typical county. It is 26 square miles (including the cemetery). Seattle is 142 square miles. It is also (as mentioned) extremely close to DC. It is essentially just part of the city. Imagine if Mercer Street was a river, and Queen Anne/Magnolia was its own county, separated from downtown by the Mercer River and Lake Union. It is kind of like that.

        Except that Arlington has a lot more density and has been that way for a long time. If you look at the census maps, it is as dense as any place in Seattle (i. e. Belltown). As mentioned, there was no huge spike in growth, either. It has grown since 1960, but not by a huge amount (the big period of growth occurred during and after the war). In other words, they didn’t build the train, and see a quiet, suburban area suddenly spring to life. It was already very urban. The big challenge for the area (like many urban areas) was avoiding flight. White flight, suburban flight and stores moving to suburban malls. The population went down in the 1970s. But it rebounded, and has since had a steady increase. The subway definitely played a big part in that, but other things occurred as well. My guess is that there were dozens of decisions made (many of them on the other side of the river) that had a positive impact in growth there. More recently, it has simply been part of the growth of the so called knowledge economy, and the movement of those centers towards the cities.

        What is interesting — the big takeaway lesson from a transit perspective — is that Arlington fought for a very urban alignment, over a cheap, freeway based one. If you jump to the 18 minute mark, it is striking. You have folks arguing that we shouldn’t have that many stops (it would take too long) while Arlington officials argued that the stops were needed because they served dense areas. The Arlington folks won. This is in great contrast to systems like BART in Southeast Oakland. Using the same logic as folks in Arlington did, you could justify another half dozen stops on one line in Oakland, each within a half mile or so of each other (instead of what was built, where there are miles and miles between stations). Unfortunately, civic leaders in our region did not learn the lesson from those two, very different systems. We have pursued cheap, freeway based light rail lines, while also ignoring vital, urban stops. From Ballston to Foggy Bottom, there are four stops. Between the UW and Westlake (a similar distance) there is one. Oops.

        Anyway, there is no real comparison to those areas and, say, South King County or Snohomish County. Most of Snohomish County is suburban, and not very close to Seattle. The stations that are similar in the DC Metro — such as the last three stops on the Orange line (the line that goes through Arlington and the focus of the film) — are right on the freeway. In other words, civic leaders in South King County and Snohomish County are doing exactly what DC did — build their suburban stations next to the freeway. The biggest difference is that they added a lot more urban stations and urban lines before they proposed adding suburban extensions to areas much, much farther away.

      3. There’s one scene (min 33) where they interviewed the Fairfax County (located next to Arlington at the end of the Orange Line) executive at one of those freeway Metro stations and he said they should be building at the stations like Arlington did. But freeways aren’t great places to build an urban walkable community around. So I bet if they had a chance to redo it again, they’d want to follow the Arlington way.

      4. @Oran — Yeah, I could see why they would feel that way. In their defense, unlike Arlington, there just isn’t much along the way. It would have been a great experiment in urban development — more so than Arlington. The Arlington stations went from moderately dense to very dense. These stations would have to make a much bigger leap. My guess is by now they would have made the leap but it might have taken a while. It is easy to pat yourself on the back years after making zoning decisions in a city that has seen a fair amount of overall growth. But if the city had faltered, that area would have been the last to grow, and people would have wondered why they spent so much money on stations with very few riders.

        But from a proximity standpoint, the stations would have made sense. There really is a weird leap from Arlington to the west. Suddenly it gets “BART like”, with over 2 miles between each station. But unlike BART, these stations aren’t really “way out there” (at least most of them aren’t). I could easily see adding a few more stations along the way.

        Once you do get out into the suburbs, though, there is a value in what they did. All of the stations after Ballston are indeed right in the median. But they are all served really well by buses. You have to end a line somewhere. It is unrealistic to think that you can go 20 miles out with stops every half mile. So towards the end (if not simply at the end) it makes sense to add a big station, with lots of bus stations and a really big parking lot. I just don’t think you need four of them (I incorrectly said there were three). Eventually you just draw from the same riders (folks who bus and drive in). I guess they are considering extending the Orange Line farther, with similar stations (along I-66). However, a study found that the “extension would have a minimal impact on Metrorail ridership and volumes on study area roadways inside the Beltway”. So I guess the study confirms that phenomenon.

  2. Why does Sound Transit and Community Transit use double tall buses for their long distance north end routes? And why does Sound Transit use those grey house looking buses for their long distance south end routes? What are the advantages to these vehicles that make them better than articulated buses?

    1. Two reasons. First, Community Transit has the only maintenance bay that can handle the double-tall buses, so they can only be used on Community Transit – run routes unless someone else wants to get one. And, second, there’s a walkway at Tacoma Dome that double-talls can’t fit under.

      3. They don’t like people moving around the bus unless its at a stop due to the ease of being able to fall down the stairs which is one of the main reasons they are used on long distance routes.

      4. I’ve never been on a double-decker bus, so pardon my ignorance. But isn’t standing in general a bit more difficult? If so, then the general setup makes a lot of sense. Use the double-decker for a long haul with very few stops, and the articulated bus for the opposite. I would imagine the seat configuration is set up this way as well (lots of seats on a double-decker, while an articulated bus may have a lot of standing room).

      5. CT doesn’t let you stand on the upper deck except when you get up to exit the bus at the stop. Because it is higher up and the buses’ center of gravity is low, the upper deck sways more and you might fall over if you don’t hold on. If you are tall, you would have a hard time standing because the ceiling is quite low on the North American double-deckers.

        On the lower deck, standing is permitted and it’s just like any other low floor bus.

      6. Thanks Oran. That makes sense. Double-deckers make sense for the long haul, limited stop buses while articulated buses make sense for more urban areas.

      7. The upper deck is also far too short (5′ 7″) to comfortably stand for a majority of the population. What is lost in standing capacity is gained in a few more seats.

    2. Las Vegas found that the double talks are cheaper than articulateds to maintain.

      There’s also stop capacity. There’s only so much sidewalk space, and a double tall takes less curb space than an articulated.

      1. The double talls also require less footprint to store. This is a double-advantage when the whole fleet has to layover in the SODO during the day.

      3. The limited stop capacity issue is why we in Victoria have the double-deckers. They are deployed on the high ridership routes, both long and short haul. Riding upstairs is nice: there’s a great view and much less engine noise. I find it a bit terrifying to use the stairs when the bus is in motion, but by making your move while the bus is stopped at a traffic light you can avoid most of the drama. It IS surprising to step from a lightly-occupied upper deck to the jam-packed lower.

        They don’t let you stand on the upper deck, but unless you’re short this would be pretty uncomfortable anyway – I think the headroom is 5’8″.

    3. Part of it might be that they take up less room on the freeway, though they are harder to re-route. When WSDOT screwed up the express lane reversal earlier in the week, I encountered a stranded north-bound ST510 double-tall just east of the University Bridge. Presumably ST/CT had forgotten to redo their express lane reroute contingency plans, but fortunately the driver was awake enough to realize that the bus was ~1.5′ too tall for the bridge:

      https://goo.gl/photos/3zNmZsZPBdmztCA2A

    1. Thanks for the picture! Maybe the Metro Heritage Organization could give people a ride in one of those sometime soon!

      1. Would be great to use social media’s superb mechanism for lies and panic to convince SDOT that if they don’t deliver on transit’s needs, we’ll retrench. Literally.

        Prospect of street clearance situation will make them bring certain BART official back here at shot-gun as justice for handling of snow nowhere near as deep as new road covering. Though Teamsters’ Union has undoubtedly had a secret contingency plan for at least a hundred years.

        Crash course in veterinary medicine for whole Metro Maintenance division. Though first Frank Sprague streetcars will have to come back for the Tunnel, since pre-motor driven buses…too close to breakfast to continue.

        One good side, Sam. Blog-commenting quality will swiftly improve as knowledge of pedestrian clearance distance spreads so fewer transit-related people go on sick call with loop-shaped indentations in their heads.

        Word to whole work-force, though: Light duty will use a shovel.

        Mark

  4. Did STB do a post on the very recent Kubly ethics fine? They just did a post an industrial district overpass. But hey, I get it, you can’t sit on info that an overpass that is going to open sometime in the next decade.

    – Sam. The most important person in the history of the internet.

    1. That overpass could serve several bus routes if built, so not especially irrelevant.

    2. They’re waiting for your article. One of your typing assistants must have forgotten to send it.

  5. I was poking around in street view when I saw this. They have locks on their parking spots. I’m just used to people getting territorial and making passive aggressive signs, like my neighbor. Maybe the issue in the US just being bad at sharing. We have an individualist culture but somehow we have a legacy of parking being a shared resource. People get cranky because they have a hard time dealing with the idea that other people are allowed to use the parking in front of their house. It almost reminds me of how dogs freak when someone uses the sidewalk in front of the house. Bark bark, I can see this from my place! Invasion! It mine! One of the nice things about no one biking is I can park my bike wherever I please and on one cares.

    1. Oh, the funniest part about that neighbor is they don’t park there. They told me it is so guests can park their car directly in front of the house. I did see a car there once, but I don’t know if it was a guest or just someone ignoring the sign.

      1. At some point beyond the asphalt it’s going to be their property, so no sharing required. The marked-out space seems to go pretty deep. A lot of streets without sidewalks seem to work this way, though I imagine the street ROW extends at least a little past the edge of the paved street, particularly along arterials.

        The ones in Odessa have to be reserved spaces, right? So whether they’re on public or private land, they’d be managed and rented out to particular people by the land owner? In Seattle many parking lots with reserved residential spaces have gated entry (many are garages), and in places with enough parking demand for paid parking to prevail that’s probably necessary to keep the spaces truly reserved in practice. The Odessa solution is a lower-infrastructure way to do this, and looks pretty space-efficient for a small collection of parking spaces.

      2. Yeah, my neighbor’s spot is entirely off the street. Though the street is as wide as a regular street, so parking on the side happens in the places that don’t have those off the side spots. I assume they can legally claim that spot, but it serves to highlight how silly some of the off street parking is, where it takes up as much as it makes. My block is actually unusual in that most off street spots are perpendicular. I guess I was being a little negative about parking attitudes. My housemates and most of my neighbors all park in each others spots and have no problem. Of course our neighborhood has a ludicrous amount of parking, so fighting over it is strictly territorial, with no tangible benefit.

        I think spots in US comparable to those in Odessa usually have tow signs. That is probably more convenient than locking and unlocking your spot. I think the benefit of locks is it is direct. You simply and cheaply made it so it is not possible to park there. Towing on the other hand is risky. What if you don’t see the sign? Maybe I could just park there for a minute. But then when people do get towed, it’s punishment well beyond the crime.

      3. So someone probably couldn’t park /in/ that spot, but it’s not a driveway (actually, it’s illegal to park in your yard like that), so there’s nothing to stop someone from parking in the street in front of that spot, right?

    2. This reminds me of winters when I was in Chicago. During a fresh snow, you would shovel out your spot, and put out a plastic lawn chair to reserve it. If someone wanted to park on the street, they’d have to shovel out their own spot.

    3. Odessa has such different laws and land use that I wouldn’t try to compare. The locks look all the same and old, so they must have all been installed at the same time. Perhaps in the immediate post-Soviet era when only a few people had cars. The land “belongs” to the building (or was commandeered in a tragedy of the commons). What’s surprising is that the parking spaces look so old; I wouldn’t have expected parking in that era. My first instinct is it must have been a street lane, but the raised cobblestones and position of the monument suggest it couldn’t have been. So maybe this was an ex-streetcar street that had more space than they knew what to do with when the streetcars were removed? But eastern Europe didn’t remove their streetcars.

      In St Petersburg and Moscow I didn’t see locks like this or even parking rows. St Petersburg has archways that lead to interior courtyards, and those had a few cars. The large apartment buildings on the street sometimes had a yard in front of them with a few cars parked in it. Sometimes the cars had vinyl covers in lieu of a garage. There were only a few cars per building so there was room for more, but it was clear it would be absolutely impossible if all the hundreds of units wanted a car in front. Most people lived in public housing but they “owned” the unit, meaning nobody could kick them out, so I assume that extended to the yard in front of the building and this Odessa parking row. But some of the units were “privatized” (bought from the government) and a lot of the new buildings are private, so they have even more control over their yards. This Odessa building could be privatized and its parking row along with it.

  6. When Arlington’s transit line was proposed to run down I-66, people complained about it not being able to serve any real population.

    When Sound Transit proposes running Link Light Rail south along I-5, they tell us that it is the best alignment by every metric?

      1. You probably skipped the movie. Long story short, they approved I-66, then wanted to run the metro next to it (to save money). Arlington officials fought them on it, saying it should serve dense areas (which is what it was supposed to do). They won, and growth occurred next to the stations (turning moderately dense areas into very dense ones).

    2. I think that more serves to highlight just how poor Everett alignments are. The freeway one is performing as well as the industrial park.

      1. Yeah, I agree. The alignment is probably about as good as you are going to get north of Lynnwood. But the lack of stations is really bad. What passes for density in that neck of the woods occurs right along that very corridor, but they skip over it. To be fair, they could always add a few stations (just adding one on Airport Road and SR 99 would be very helpful). My guess is you still wouldn’t get very high ridership, just a bit more than what they have planned (proximity matter, and it is just a very long ways from popular destinations).

      2. Everett refused to consider upzoning Evergreen Way or allowing Link on it, so that kneecapped the alignment’s potential. Is a highway lined with car dealerships and no possibility of change much better than a freeway?

    3. No: it wins by the only metric that matters: it’s where the local elected leaders want it.

      1. And the public, in the sense that Snohomans want “light rail to Everett”, and nobody spoke up against the Paine Field detour except a few out-of-county transit fans. The only people in the county visibly objecting to the Link extension and detour are the ones who want no transit expansion or taxes at all, or throw out BRT to oppose a train but then won’t invest in BRT either (and either want GP lanes or nothing).

  7. Density advocates are fighting against this? Here’s a 1969 pic of Albertsons grocery store located just north of Bellevue Square. There’s a Cost Plus World Market there now. Notice every car in the parking lot is a piece of junk. Notice the low prices. Notice the lack of pretense. So how will bringing more building and taller building and more tech jobs make Bellevue more affordable than this, when their wasn’t any density? The answer is, it won’t. You can’t build your way into affordability. You can only build your way out of it.

    http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/imlseastside/id/406/rec/45

    – Sam. Dean of College of Density Studies, Trump University.

    1. Um, er, ah, Scam: the cars pictured weren’t “pieces of junk” in 1969 when the photo was taken. They were contemporary automobiles of the day. Or were you making some sort of meta-allusion to Detroit Iron being sub-par through the ’60’s, 70’s, and 80’s?

  8. Arlington and Seattle are interesting comparisons because they are both known as places that put a high premium on public deliberation that sometimes annoys every stakeholder in the long, drawn-out process. (“The Arlington Way” vs. “The Seattle Process.”) Arlington still gets a lot of high praise (as it should) for the decisions it made in the early stages of the Metrorail planning process regarding the routing of the Orange Line and the subsequent higher-density clusters built around Metrorail stations. But Arlington County’s progressive planning idealism has hit some roadblocks in recent years, most notably with the Columbia Pike streetcar project getting canceled amid ongoing anger about the so-called “million dollar bus stops.” The problem is that now that the plans to increase transit capacity along Columbia Pike have been shelved, there’s no Plan B. The existing Orange Line corridor in Arlington is becoming maxed out, too: Underground (Metrorail trains, when they aren’t catching on fire or breaking down during rush hour, are packed to the gills) and aboveground (there aren’t that many more car dealership parking lots and single-family homes left to build multi-family and mixed-used development). So it’s important to look to Arlington as a good case study of what was done previously, but it’s equally important to judge the county regarding some of its recent planning missteps (canceling the streetcar without a Plan B to increase capacity along Northern Virginia’s busiest bus corridor) and lost opportunities, too. There’s not much enthusiasm to expand transit right now in Arlington politically. (The new Metroway bus rapid transit lanes in Crystal City are a great help during the SafeTrack maintenance shutdowns when rail service between Arlington and Alexandria is shut down.)

    1. >> The existing Orange Line corridor in Arlington is becoming maxed out, too: Underground (Metrorail trains, when they aren’t catching on fire or breaking down during rush hour, are packed to the gills)

      I am guessing that the problem is due to the Blue line and Orange line sharing the tunnel under the Potomac. That would explain why some have proposed creating a new tunnel or bridge for the Blue line. That would allow (I assume) much better headways for the Orange (and soon to be Silver) line. I like the idea of pairing that Blue Line with Georgetown (as proposed). That would mean the Silver line and Orange line are fine (they both share a common middle, then branch at the ends), while the Blue Line is completely independent, crossing those lines at Rosslyn.

      Of course, like maintenance, that is a tougher sell. For Arlington, it would mean a much better connection to Georgetown, along with better headways. But that isn’t the same as a new line. I think such a project would make a lot of sense (more sense that a lot of the suburban extensions). I don’t know where they would extend the new blue line (after Georgetown) but you really can’t go wrong. At a minimum you would connect to the red line (presumably at Dupont Circle). You might be able to squeeze in two stops between Dupont and Rosslyn. You could then keep going and connect to the Green/Yellow line and onto the Red line again if you felt like making more connections and adding some stations in the gaps (e. g. Logan Circle area). Even if you just ended at Dupont Circle I think it would be a big winner.

    2. One of the problems they have is that MARC and VRE are entirely oriented around peak period commuter services. They are state operations that don’t readily cross the state borders that well, so through trains that go deep into the other territory are limited to either Amtrak or Washington Metro.

      Extending the electrified track further south and operating a regional train system from Baltimore into Virginia would help solve that.

  9. Good observation from another perspective, Ross. While my driving time covered distance between Dupont Circle and Baltimore south suburbs, it was only a year’s personal observation of something I considered extremely unwelcome. So for me, just out of college near Detroit, quality of change from farms and quarries to suburbs was worse than the quantity. And still is.

    Google search showed that the quarry where I worked- one of the greatest jobs of my life- is scheduled to be underground parking space for every ugly and oversized structure in the world all riveted together. If nobody got hurt, would be theologically-ironclad Divine Justice if the old truckload full of pure nitroglycerine my crew found got missed by the coring drills. Or hit by one of them.

    Will admit, though, that most people who left those farms, especially at college age or younger, would rather eat at McDonald’s for the rest of their lives than go back to the real situation. And are very glad for more choices.

    But comparing Seattle to anywhere else, I’m very wary of measuring lines on maps. And keep insisting on section views. Like with Swedish Hospital, we have sand where Arlington has solid rock.

    Before discussing station placement, I like to see possibilities in person. Did walk those neighborhoods overlooking Montlake from near the end of the Route 10 during Tunnel planning. Between Arlington and Seattle, same distance underground has different things both above and under it.

    Between Capitol Hill and UW Station, where would four stations make sense even if they physically could be built? Cemeteries aren’t just a problem for Night Stalker, even though in real life, The Times would never refuse to believe a reporter who found something negative for transit.

    For mainline transit north of Northgate and south of Sea-Tac Airport, the real problem is that the integrated system we need requires two separate railroads. Same, incidentally, as BN is starting to face south of Tacoma Dome Station. Which one do we want to build with ST-3? Or build first?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Karlsruhe

    My own choice- and possibly ST-3’s only chance at the polls, is to build effectively interconnected parts of each, operable by same equipment as both lines extend. Few details identical, but this approach illustrates pretty much what I mean. Essentially- though details like route-miles and section-views are beside the point, this is what one or two interurbans died “with their hands on the throttle”. OK, the controller.

    And an even greater advantage if ST-3 does pass. The last 25 years gave us a small depression in early ’90’s, a capital “D” one in 2008, and daily evidence that year was half-time. Any plan that can’t handle same time and unpredictables had better not pass!

    Reason I think above link’s got a lot to tell our own future LINK. Which could we please name something that will never give our descendants a Jimmy Dean Trail to remember us by? Go to websites of every locality and agency involved, and look at the officeholders’ birthdates and pictures.

    And their kids’ class pics could predict land use and routing demands approaching 2040 better than any stat yet generated.

    Mark Dublin

    1. >> Between Capitol Hill and UW Station, where would four stations make sense even if they physically could be built?

      I think you are confused. I was talking about the area between Westlake and the UW, not between Capitol Hill and the UW. For example, the Forward Thrust plan had four (http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Articles/Mullins/1985transit.html) and it didn’t even have a station at SR 520. I would probably have one towards the north end of First Hill, the Capitol Hill station, 23rd and Madison and SR 520. With a new 520 bridge and proper planning you could avoid the need for the last one. Madison BRT would allow you to get away with maybe just the stop along Madison to the east of I-5. But having only one stop between Westlake and the UW (the same number of stops we started with — just Capitol Hill replacing Convention Place) is very poor stop spacing for the most urban tunnel Link will ever dig (they didn’t build the downtown tunnel).

  10. Another “Special to The Times”: Bryan Mistele worres that ST3 will be obsolete when it’s built because self-driving cars will drive closer together, and Uber and Lyft and Car2Go are “transformng how people navigate the city” and will reduce the number of cars coming into the city.

    Who’s Bryan Mistele? He’s the CEO of INRIX, “a traffic-information and connected-car company based in Kirkland”. Oh.

    1. I was not that impressed and don’t buy most of his argument. Heck, Uber and Lyft are simply modern versions of taxis.

    2. Is this the best the opposition can come up with? He should have waited a little longer after the first driverless-car-on-autopilot road fatality, so people would forget.

      Yes, transit will be obsolete because cars will be designed like sardine cans so the 80 riders on a double tall will now fit into 80 personal cars in the same space. (Maybe the cars will be self-stacking?)

      We’ll all be able to afford these cars because everyone living in Seattle will be millionaires.

      The cars will be designed to follow each other at the safe distance which, oh wait, is more space than drivers do right now.

      The car computers will be designed to talk to each other, just like Apple and Microsoft. They’ll never have fatal bugs that cause the computer to crash.

      The auto-pilot cars of the future will solve congestion by … um … getting everyone off of transit and into SOVs?

      1. Nah.

        Just wait till the first equivalent of patch Tuesday, when everyone has to wait an hour for all their cars to simultaneously download, install, and reboot with the latest update.

        That should solve congestion pretty well by making everyone walk.

    3. I think this argument is ridiculous. As Brent said, even if we do have self driving cars, it doesn’t change the equation at all. It is like arguing a few years ago that roll down windows will soon become obsolete, so we don’t need to invest in transit. Just wait until all the cars have power windows — oh my, that will change everything!

    4. So sorry officer. My car got the software patch for the UK for some reason, so it decided to drive on the wrong side of the road.

  11. Move Seattle has a stated goal of increasing King County’s transit commute share from 14% to 24%. This is an extremely ambitious goal. To achieve this goal, I think it is necessary but not sufficient to fill in the glaring “gaps in the grid” in the city of Seattle. I suggest all day, 7 day a week bus routes be established on the following corridors (they need not all be frequent, but they need to exist, even if some only run once every 30 minutes):\

    -An east-west route running from the future Expedia HQ along Mercer to Eastlake, up Eastlake to Belmont Ave., to Bellevue Pl., to Boylston Ave., to Aloha Street, all the way east to 29th Avenue.

    -A route running straight along Market Street and 45th from Ballard to Childrens Hospital. This is the only one of these suggestions that is actually planned, and it is absolutly absurd that it doesn’t already exist.

    -A route running from 85th Street and 32nd Avenue, east along 85th to Holman Road, up to 105th Street, to Northgate Way to the 522. From there it could continue east on 110th or 115th to Sand Point Way, or go up to Lake City. The fact that someone wanting to go from Greenwood and 105th to Northgate Way and 15th Avenue has to not only make the tedious detour to NTC, but has to transfer once there is insane. A simple grid is better.

    -A route running from 130th and Greenwood east to 125th and Sand Point Way. This is another stupid gap in the grid. This route will especially be needed once LINK opens at 130th. But is should not wait until then.

    -A route running from 145th/Greenwood to 145th/522. Most of the routes along 145th don’t even run at all on the weekends. Use Google Maps to get the suggested transit trip between these two points on the weekend. It’s ridiculous: involving going way up into Shoreline, transfers, and a very long total travel time. Why can’t there just be a single route running straight across? There’s a single road that goes straight across.

    This should be required reading for everyone at KC Metro. Because just looking at Oran’s Seattle Transit Map, it’s obvious they do not get it: http://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-grids.html

    Miway (Mississauga Transit) is currently in the midst of a 5-year plan to improve service. One of the things they are doing is moving towards a simpler grid system:

    http://www.mississauga.ca/portal/miway/miwayfive

    One of the things they’ve already implemented is a simplification to Route 26 (https://www7.mississauga.ca/Documents/miway/routemaps/NAV_26.pdf). It used to loop around Square One Mall to the Mississauga Transit Centre 7 days a week, much the way all the transit routes that run near Northgate Transit Center divert to it. From Monday to Friday, Route 26 now runs straight down Burnhamthorpe Road, cutting nearly 10 minutes off end-to-end travel times. Were there a single route running along 105th and Northgate Way, it would save significant travel time for those just wanting to go across the city. Not to mention saving a transfer.

    1. See Metro’s long-term plan.

      #1 (Mercer Street): similar to #3028 (2025): 6th & Raye – Galer – QA – Mercer/5N/Harrison – Yale/Belmont – Aloha – 23rd & Madison. The west part replaces the 2 to QA & Mercer; the east part is new.

      #2 (Market/45th Street from 32nd NW to Children’s): is in planning as a RapidRide corridor.

      #3 (85th/105th from 32nd NW to Lake City Way): #40 (2025), #1010 (2040). David Lawson suggested moving the 40/75 transfer from Northgate to Lake City a year or so ago. (And rerouting the 75 to 130th Station and Bitter Lake, which made it to Metro’s LRP as #1996 (2025) and #1007 (2040).)

      #4 (125th/130th from Greenwood to Sand Point Way): see #3.

      #5 (145th from Greenwood to Lake City Way): nothing does that completely. Metro’s 2025 plan has nothing west of 145th Station. #1512 (2040) goes on 145th from Elliott Ave/central Magnolia to 145th Station, but it would be separate from 522 BRT east of the station. Now if Sound Transit and Shoreline would prioritize extending 522 BRT to Aurora or Shoreline CC, that would solve that, but neither of them consider west of the station important. There is a through route on 130th if that’s close enough (see #3).

      Metro is moving toward a grid, that’s what the 62 restructure and UW Station restructure was all about. It tried to do the same on Capitol Hill but got insufficient support. It made West Seattle more grid-like in 2012, and tried to do so in Queen Anne, the CD, and Fremont but failed due again to public opposition. It tried again during the cuts but those were canceled. Now it’s focusing on the long-term plan.

      Seattle’s low density and residential-only zones make grids more difficult than San Francisco, Vancouver, or Toronto. For instance, a 15th Avenue NE route from UW Station to Mountlake Terrace Station looks good on paper, but it mostly goes through single-family areas and misses the ridership-generating destinations of Northgate, Greenlake, and the Crest Cinemas. People can transfer in a grid system, but Seattle’s 15-minute and 30-minute routes aren’t sufficient to facilitate that, as anyone can attest who’s tried to transfer from a northbound 45/71/73/372 to an eastbound 62 and watched it pass before their first bus crossed the street to its stop or while they were walking back across the street to the 62 stop. Capitol Hill is just very difficult because the dense development and commercial destinations are in a stick-shift pattern, a bus can’t go anywhere in a straight line for more than a mile without hitting a barrier, and those aforementioned low-density single-family areas sap the ridership.

      1. Haven’t gone through all your suggestions, but the future #40 would still do the long, stupid detour to NTC that just increases travel times for people not transferring there. So no, it’s not what I suggested at all. There needs to be a direct route that just runs straight along Northgate Way/105th.

  12. Also, the example I gave was for Mississauga, a suburb with a lower population density than Mississauga. If Mississauga can implement a grid without a lot of glaring gaps, surely Seattle can. The Weekday reroute of Miway Route 26 to run straight down Burnhathorpe is almost identical to having a bus run straight down Northgate Way/105th. In both cases you’re running in a straight line instead of looping around a mall to serve a transit center.

  13. That #3028 in 2025 for instance. Why not have it just go straight along Mercer instead of using Harrison. Harrison is only 3 short blocks to Denny Way anyways. That diversion is just adding travel time for people going through that section. Keep it simple and run straight down Mercer.

  14. Any opinions on the Redmond Loop shuttle that’s currently in soft launch? It’s a nice plan, but it seems to me far too infrequent to make a real difference. If they’d run it bidirectionally every fifteen minutes or better, things would be a lot different.

    1. It may be useful to seniors, like the North Bend/Snoqualmie loop.Three of the red numbered points are of interest to seniors. I don’t know what “Friendly Village” is but it could be a fourth. But if the goal is to increase Redmond’s general transit use, then it would have to be up around every ten minutes and have weekends and a longer afternoon span.

  15. It’s escalator reversal day. The escalators at Capitol Hill and UW Stations are running on the left instead of the right, and passengers are walking to the wrong ones. At least the north entrance at Capitol Hill is like that, and the north entrance (from street level) at UW.

    Another funny thing happened at least twice last week and may still be happening: the single escalator from the street to the bridge at UW has been going down instead of up. The only thing worse than an up escalator with no down escalator is a down escalator with no up escalator. I finally figured out which platform escalator leads to that escalator, and then I get to it and it’s going the wrong direction! After two times of that I stopped using that entrance.

    1. I noticed the escalator switch at CHS today as well, as I almost tried to walk on to the bottom of the down escalator. It seems very strange, especially as the up escalator is now on the left, not the right where you’d more naturally expect it in this country. Does anyone have a clue, or even an educated speculation, about what’s behind this switcheroo????

      1. @Ken,

        My first speculation would be that ST wants to balance the wear on the equipment. It might be that the wear is directional so they can get more life out of it this way.

  16. This blog loves to take pot shots at the civic leaders in South King County. What you guys do not seem to understand is our civic leaders are doing something they are supposed to do, reflect the will of the people they represent.

  17. I’ve heard that although New York City has a couple peripheral freeways, it mostly has parkways leading out of the city, and that these parkways have intentionally low clearances so that trucks and buses can’t use them. This forces freight trucks onto city streets. My question is, where are the parkways and which areas are heavily impacted by trucks? Does it cause freight congestion throughout the city or only in a few corridors. Since the parkways were designed for recreational drives, do they really go where most drivers want to (i.e., straight to the largest nearby suburbs and cities)? Or do drivers even use the parkways that much?

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