The long-awaited mid-day Sounder round-trip will begin a week from Monday, on September 12. Perhaps more accurately described as “shoulder peak” than mid-day, the new trip will leave Lakewood at 10:18am for a 11:31 Seattle arrival, with a 3-hour layover before departing Seattle at 2:32pm for a 3:45 arrival in Lakewood. The service will utilize North Sounder-sized trainsets at first, beginning with just 2 traincars for a few months before new cars arrive in early 2017, after which it will run the full 7-car South Sounder consist.
The new service will open up a host of new opportunities. Non-traditional or part-time shifts will work better with a mid-day option, the trip will facilitate Sounder-Amtrak connections (imagine catching the train in Kent at 11:04 to catch a Portland-bound train from Tukwila at 11:29), etc etc. But the biggest thing it will do is make Lakewood and South Tacoma stations far more useful.
Currently, the Lakewood trips leave too early and return too late for most riders with an 8-hour workday. Those taking the earliest trains from Lakewood (4 trains arrive before 7:30am) today either have to wait until the first Lakewood train at 4:12pm, take an earlier train to Puyallup and transfer to Route 580, or fight traffic on Route 592. The 2:32pm trip will do much to accommodate those who work early morning shifts.
The new trip also facilitates use for mid-day meetings. Seattleites could take reverse Sounder to Tacoma, arriving at 8am, with 2.5 hours to conduct business before returning. Similarly, I expect to see Sound Transit Boardmembers MacArthy, Strickland, Moss, and Enslow using the new option to get to their 1:30 board meetings. ;)
Two more trips will be added a year from now in September 2017 to provide 15-minute peak service, and that will be the last of new Sounder service without a successful ST3 vote. ST3 proposes an unspecified amount of additional trains (to be negotiated with BNSF), as well as expansion to 10-car platforms.
This November we have a generational opportunity to build on Sound Transit’s recent successes, and extend a regional rapid transit network that is able to scale with a growing region. To understand why a yes vote is important, we’ll start from the beginning.
Why Transit?
Ped, Bus, Bike, Car
The reasons to favor transit investment over cars are numerous. The immediate environmental benefits are well understood: well-used rail uses less energy per passenger than driving, and that energy comes from sources cleaner than gasoline. The public health benefit of reduced car volumes and the exercise inherent in walking to transit is less familiar. People unable to drive deserve a good way to get around, not just a lifeline. A city with good transit service can devote less land to parking and more land to worthwhile things.
But most importantly, transit scales with growth far better than autos, for the simple fact that each person takes up less space on a transit vehicle than in a personal vehicle.No breakthrough in electric or self-driving cars is going to change this fact of geometry. There is no plausible car-first future. The world’s great cities are dense, and they all realize that high-capacity, traffic-separated transit is the only thing that can work at those scales. Seattle has a chance to be one of those cities, if it doesn’t tie itself to the auto. The alternatives are stagnation, or strangulation by traffic. Even the most car-friendly Western cities — L.A. and Phoenix — have realized that cars don’t scale and are furiously racing to add rail capacity.
Why Rail?
There are significant bus investments in the Sound Transit 3 package, and these are important. Rail will never go everywhere, especially in the short term, and many needs are urgent. At the same time, ST3 is fundamentally a rail package, and it’s important to understand the rationale for that.
There are a few attributes of light rail that really are superior to buses, all else being equal, in particular the number of passengers per multi-car train. But the core of high-quality transit, frequency and reliability, can come on steel wheels or rubber tires. That said, in practice our region implements light rail with the understanding that it will never operate in mixed traffic, there will never be on-board payment, and with few exceptions the trains operate on elevated or underground guideways with no traffic interactions whatsoever. Even our finest new bus-rapid-transit lines are entirely at-grade, and there are zero plans to change this. More importantly, buses’ flexibility is often a bug not a feature, as citizens and governments can much more easily dilute their quality, saying, “do we really need to have a dedicated lane here?” The path to true reliability is always to take the right-of-way, or even better to create it. In our current political climate, that means light rail.
Rail detractors will say that buses are much cheaper than rail, and can be just as good. Both are true, but they are mutually exclusive. Rail is expensive because it has its own guideways, and buses with their own guideways would be similarly expensive.
There is one exception where bus guideways already exist: our freeway system. Unfortunately, these are mostly controlled by our state legislature, which has shown no interest in holding even one freeway lane open for transit. And thus our freeway “express” buses are mired in mixed traffic just as bad as some arterials, and getting worse. Furthermore, transit tied to freeways, while valuable for some applications, can neither serve nor induce the truly dense and walkable neighborhoods the region needs, without significant investment in station areas that is inconsistent with low-cost BRT.
Why this package?
Even if we need transit, and need rail transit, is this the right set of projects? The “right” project is, of course, subjective. But with a few exceptions, we believe the Sounder and light rail lines planned serve their respective cities, corridors, and neighborhoods as well as a rapid transit line can. Most of all, a new downtown tunnel serving Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, the downtown core, and possibly First Hill, is needed today, and any unnecessary delay is unacceptable.
Other segments — notably the stretch from Lynnwood to Everett — are not as well-executed, but they are also not doomed to be failures. The pull of rapid transit is strong, and if cities get out of the way and allow development, in most cases it will come. STB will keep busy for years fighting for good station implementations that allow this to happen as much as possible, even when freeways and parking garages constrict what can be done.
Moreover, although we most value projects that maximize ridership and support growth, there are many other valid interests. Projects that don’t maximize ridership aren’t there because of agency ignorance, but because they serve other goals, whether they avoid construction impacts, spread benefits around the region, or avoid hostile neighborhoods. We don’t have to fully support each of those goals to understand why they are there, and we acknowledge that their inclusion helps consolidate support for the must-haves.
Vote Yes
The package reflects the desires of the 3-county electorate and its representatives. Sound Transit critics are fond of fixating on 1996-2001, which were indeed so troubled that the agency barely survived. But after a period of intense reform, ST consistently meets its schedule commitments. This includes election-year promises made in 2008’s ST2.
Clearly burned by its initial experience, if anything ST is being too conservative, and leaving votes on the table by under-promising. The timelines are long, but worthwhile infrastructure projects take a long time. Voting no will simply make delivery slower. Voting no will likely kill the second Downtown tunnel, as a second try at ST3 would undoubtedly be less ambitious and offer lower-quality projects.
If you’re young, vote yes for a carbon-neutral future in which you can live oblivious to traffic. If you’re old, vote yes to leave behind a better region for the next generation. But vote yes.
The STB Editorial Board currently consists of Martin H. Duke, Zach Shaner, Dan Ryan, and Erica C. Barnett.
With the confluence of Mariner and Husky season looming, Mike Lindblom reports that Sound Transit is looking to beef up “mega event” service beyond it’s already-boosted weekend standard of 3 cars every 10 minutes. Sound Transit would do this by running weekday peak frequency but inverting the baseline, with twelve 3-car trains joining seven 2-car trains. During regular peak service today, twelve 2-car trains are the baseline, supplemented during peak by seven 3-car trains.
Much has been made of Link’s railcar shortage and ability to run longer trains for events. Though the opening of Angle Lake Station on September 24th will not change schedules or frequency for existing stations, it will add one new trainset to the rotation, reducing Sound Transit’s flexibility further. Prior to the delivery of next generation railcars in 2018-2019, Link has only 62 railcars, and Sound Transit is wisely being conservative about lifecycle maintenance. A Board report last month showed that while Link is sometimes uncomfortably crowded, the current service provision is running well within capacity limits.
In a fleet of 62 cars, our current peak service uses roughly 77% of our railcar capacity (48/62), weekends use 58% (36/62), and weekday off-peak uses 39% (24/62). Sound Transit’s “mega-event” proposal would stretch utilization to its furthest yet, or 84% (52/62). And this is just my calculation based on active service needs. Allowing for layover, padding, and operator breaks further reduces flexibility.
What’s the most Sound Transit could possibly do? Before the 2018-2019 delivery of new rail cars, Link’s maximum capacity would likely be 3-car trains every 6 minutes for 97% utilization (60/62). So at 84% utilization, it’s clear that with this weekend ‘mega-event’ proposal, Sound Transit is taking the issue seriously and will stretch its fleet within reasonable maintenance limitations.
When these big event days are on weekends, Sound Transit has more flexibility due to the availability of bus-rail tunnel slots in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Were a massive convergence of events to happen on a weekday, when tunnel bus commuters still need reliable service, I’d suggest that Sound Transit look into a different “tunnel maximizing” level of service. Because every Link train takes up one tunnel slot – buses and trains are prohibited from sharing a platform – maximizing weekday tunnel capacity would involve running longer trains at lower frequencies. 4-car trains running every 10 minutes would provide the same capacity as our current peak service, while using 33% fewer tunnel slots.
What do you think? When large events occur on a weekday, would you rather have higher frequency, even if it meant more tunnel delays? Or would you rather have more reliability, but a longer wait?
In the discussions of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) at Shoreline’s future 145th Street Station, Charles Bond at The Urbanist broke the news that Sound Transit, Metro, and WSDOT have agreed to move the station north by roughly 400′, to the vicinity of NE 148th Street. As we discussed last week, the station already has much going against it in terms of access: the walkshed is bifurcated by I-5 and the accompanying interchange, the adjacent Jackson Park golf course is the epitome of transit-hostile land use, and little commercial development currently exists. If all that weren’t enough, a massive parking garage is planned. The station’s saving grace at this point is a progressive Shoreline government that is trying very hard (and may succeed) at making TOD lemonade from the lemon Sound Transit chose when it passed over superior options at 130th and/or 155th. So from this low baseline, will a move to 148th help or hurt? Well, it depends.
First, the positives. A move to the north does make the station a bit more central in any TOD plans, rather than primarily being TOD’s southwestern flank. The non-arterial grid, such as it exists, can be better prioritized for non-motorized access at 148th (especially if it meant a a new pedestrian bridge over I-5). And the three agencies seem to have agreed that the move will make the interchange rebuild easier and eliminate or reduce the complications over changes to a state drainage facility.
But the primary impetus seems to be facilitating bus-rail transfers, and here the benefits are more debatable. On one hand, if agencies are basically giving up on a people-friendly arterial on 145th, then a more separated facility with direct bus transfers may be preferable to in-line stops on NE 145th ST and 5th Ave NE. The familiar result would be a loop-de-loop transit center similar to Mt Baker or Tukwila International Boulevard, in which all through-routed buses would incur a permanent 2-3 minute time penalty on every run.
According to Metro Deputy General Manager Victor Obeso in a statement to STB, the agency believes that increased bus volumes as outlined in Sound Transit 3 and Metro’s (soon to be adopted) Long Range Plan (LRP) necessitate the move:
At a press conference this morning, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff and Sound Transit Board Chair/King County Executive Dow Constantine announced that Angle Lake Station will open on Saturday, September 24th. Alaska Airlines is sponsoring the opening ceremonies to the tune of $25,000, with total costs for Opening Day expected to be just north of $50,000, more than an order of magnitude cheaper than ULink’s festivities.
At the risk of stating the obvious, no one would claim that the area around S. 200th Street in SeaTac is a booming regional destination. It is surrounded by highly regulated/inaccessible uses such as prisons and airport operations facilities, on the west by a wooded ravine, and on the east by the sort of mid-century sprawl so familiar to SR 99. Its inclusion in the transit network is minor enough that it didn’t merit any restructures or bus deviations to the station, and transfer activity there will be minimal. Those coming from the south on RapidRide A may want to switch to Link at Angle Lake instead of SeaTac for the guarantee of a seat, but access will mean crossing two signalized intersections rather than the direct access to SeaTac/Airport at 176th.
But with Angle Lake Station set to be Link’s southern terminus for the next 7-8 years, what is there to do there? Who are those likeliest to use the station? Here are 6 reasons to use the new station.
I’ve just returned from a weeklong vacation in Glacier National Park, and though I didn’t intend to think much about transit while there, I was more than pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of the park’s bike, bus, and rail options. Glacier draws 2.3m visitors per year despite its remoteness – the nearest large cities (Calgary and Spokane) being 175 miles away – a feat that makes its carfree options all the more impressive. For reference, despite being a full hour closer to its nearest major city, Glacier draws nearly twice as many people as Mt Rainier.
Unlike Rainier or Olympic, which are primarily wilderness parks with few roads or services, Glacier stands out for a more European Alps feel: staffed backcountry chalets, multiple ferry services, 3 intercity rail stations, and a major road (Going to the Sun) bisecting the park from west to east. In the spirit of our Transit Report Card series, here are a few of my anecdotal observations.
Segments ridden
Horizon Air outbound to Kalispell, Amtrak inbound to Seattle
National Park Shuttle between Apgar Transit Center, Lake MacDonald Lodge, Avalanche Creek, The Loop, Logan Pass, and Siyeh Bend
Cycling from West Glacier all the way to Logan Pass via Going to the Sun Road
If you commute on Link between Westlake and UW, you may notice something a little different beginning this afternoon: cell service. Sound Transit has announced that the long-awaited addition begins today and will be rolled out over the coming months in (many) phases. For various administrative reasons and because each carrier has to sign a license agreement with the contractor (Mobilitie), the service will roll out carrier by carrier and tunnel segment by tunnel segment. The vendor also has an option to extend service from UW to the Maple Leaf Portal in 2021.
T-Mobile customers are the lucky ones, as they now have service between Westlake-UW. Verizon is expected to be added in a couple weeks, and then AT&T. (As of press time Sprint has not yet signed a contract.) Later this fall, the 3 carriers will be added to the Metro-owned segment from Westlake-International District, and finally Beacon Hill will get service sometime in 2017. For now, riders between Westlake-IDS will need to continue using WiFi on the ends of each platform to send and receive data.
Though a new etiquette campaign will surely be needed to dissuade loud phone talkers from spoiling commutes, cell service has been needed for a long time, and it’s good to see it finally happening. Enduring service disruptions and planning bus transfers depends on data, and underground will no longer be the worst place to be when trying to plan your day. Yay!
