Month: September 2016

Trains are now running in revenue service to and from Angle Lake Station. The party goes until 2:00 pm.

Enjoy the ride, come back check out the booths, and hear the world’s only (as far as I know) football club marching band, Sounders FC Sound Wave!

Check out Sound Transit’s webpage dedicated to the new station.

Link is running 3-car trains all day today and tomorrow, as per weekend tradition. Follow the advice of one of the ST Board members at the party, and board the third car, as it is often less full than the front two.

Tweets by @SeaTransitBlog

Thanks to Bruce, Dan, and Oran for tweeting from the event.

Wandering around Downtown Tacoma is a strange and almost eerie experience. Stately and graceful buildings adorn an intact, human scaled street grid built to serve the golden age of railways. On the east side of Pacific Avenue, the most beautiful train station in the northwest now lies in sterile use as a courthouse. Downtown is anchored on the south end by a beautifully renovated UW satellite campus, and on the north end by a derelict Italianate old city hall that is finally coming back to life. Large multifamily developments in the Stadium District speak to a more urban past, while tranquil neighborhoods such as Proctor are reminiscent of the nicest residential neighborhoods in Seattle. And its housing is the most affordable in the region.

But walking around, hardly a creature is stirring. Tacoma has roughly 1/3 the population of Seattle (200k vs 650k), but its urban core has only 5% as many jobs (14k vs 275k). Its Tacoma Link streetcar has been losing ridership steadily for a couple years now, despite being free. Pierce Transit’s service area voted against local transit service twice (in February 2011 and November 2012), leading to a contraction of the agency’s boundaries and a bloodbath of cuts that the agency is just beginning to crawl back from (Tacoma itself has repeatedly voted in favor). Its transit riders are the region’s poorest on average, and at 53%, their ORCA use is the lowest. And proving that you don’t need a War on Cars to have traffic woes, its residents suffer daily on I-5 from the Fife Curve to Joint Base Lewis McChord.So Tacoma is a scrawny city, with good bones and a solid core, just desperate to be fed. Unlike many of the more irredeemable intermediate suburbs, Tacoma is an excellent place to direct growth. You can’t really call Tacoma a suburb; it’s more like a shadow city. If it were geographically isolated like Spokane, it would stand on its own as a regional center of employment and commerce, but caught in Seattle’s gravitational pull it continuously loses by comparison. If Seattle is DC, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, or Chicago, Tacoma is Baltimore, Oakland, Fort Worth, Providence, or Milwaukee.

So when it comes to its transit future, it’s at least understandable that it would look without rather than within.

Like Federal Way, light rail to Tacoma isn’t really about Seattle. Current traffic between Seattle and Tacoma is occasionally terrible, but nothing like the consistent misery of those in Snohomish County. Express bus travel times routinely beat an hour, and during peak hours Sounder makes the trip in a reliable 55 minutes as well. Link to Tacoma would clock in at a reliable 69 minutes from Tacoma to Westlake, slower than buses on all but the worst days, and certainly slower than Sounder. So why is it worth it? Here are 6 reasons. Continue reading “Why ST3 is Worth It, Part 2: Tacoma”

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about SDOT’s efforts to improve reliability for buses leaving the International District via southbound Rainier Avenue. The idea is to move buses to an exclusive center lane queue jump, thereby avoiding a couple of particularly congested blocks of traffic.

Well, it’s been over a year, and recently reader YZ wrote in to ask what the status was.  The red paint has been there for quite a while (it’s even on Google Maps!), but the buses haven’t moved.  In the  meantime, Metro has added even more service along that stretch of Rainier, as the re-routed 106 joins the 7 and 9.

I emailed Metro’s Jeff Switzer to see what the story is.  Switzer told me that trolley wire will be installed next month, October, along with a temporary bus shelter at Rainier & King to replace the decommissioned stop at Dearborn. A permanent bus shelter will follow some time after that.   Metro expects an average savings of 30 seconds, rising to 60-90 seconds during the PM peak.

With many more buses now trolling that corridor, the improvements are coming just in time.

• Speed limits in Seattle may come down ($).
• Shoreline station zoning.
• The down side of caps on move-in fees.
• Lid I-5 campaign moving along.
• Spokane Spokesman-Review endorses STA’s coming ballot measure.
• Seattle Subway lands an excellent troll on The Seattle Times.
• Intercity Transit seeks grant to bring better bus service to NE Lacey.
• Seattle drive-alone commute rate drops over 8 points 2005-2015, to 48.5%. Lower rate than Portland, Philadelphia, or Chicago (!)
• ST3 City Council Endorsements: Bellevue (pop. 140,000), Redmond (pop. 61,000), Issaquah (pop. 36,000) yes; Newcastle (pop. 11,000) no. Guess which one was deemed newsworthy by your local newspaper.
• Ex-ST CEO Joni Earl receives “extraordinary leadership” award.
• Seatac North Satellite terminal getting bigger.
• Better Wi-Fi now on Sounder.
• Kitsap fast ferry initiative on the way.
• A personal view of the impact of light rail.
• Westlake bikeway is open.
• Washington road deaths way up.
• Mercer Island still fighting the Feds for special I-90 privileges, formally asks to remove Mercer Island from carpool permit parking program.
• USDOT puts out driverless car regulations, reducing uncertainty and probably accelerating their arrival.

This is an open thread.

Its safety certification now complete, Sound Transit will open Angle Lake Station this Saturday at 11:00am. The 1.6 mile extension is the last station to open for the next 4+ years, when UDistrict, Roosevelt, and Northgate make their big entrance. Media were treated to a brief preview ride this afternoon, with our Bruce E. in attendance.

The station festivities will be much smaller than that of ULink, both as a result of the relative importance of the stations in the overall network and due to relentless criticism of Sound Transit’s ULink Party expenditures by the likes of the Seattle Times and KUOW. A dedication ceremony and the usual speeches will begin at 9:30am, and the first trains will begin revenue service at 11:00am. Alaska Airlines, the City of SeaTac, and a few other sponsors will host a party on the plaza from 11am-2pm.

It will be a relatively quiet day for weekend service, with the Huskies, Mariners, and Sounders all out of town, but expect the 1,600 stall parking garage to begin filling up on Sunday for the Seahawks home game against division rivals San Francisco.

https://twitter.com/EBoperator/status/778292777796853760

In preparation for ‘mega-event’ service expected to be needed on Friday, September 30th – when both UW football and Mariner baseball converge on a weekday afternoon peak  – tomorrow (Wednesday) Sound Transit will test ‘inverted peak’ service for the first time. With Friday typically being the highest ridership day of the week and Angle Lake newly open to suburban sports fans, September 30th could be a record-breaking day for Link.

A typical weekday sees a base of 2-car trains supplemented during peak by 3-car trains. Wednesday’s service level will invert that, with a base of 3-car trains supplemented during peak by 2-car trains. That’s an 8% boost in capacity for the same service frequency. Sound Transit’s Bruce Gray said that an additional two trains will be held in reserve to clear crowds if necessary.

Tomorrow is a good test run because a Wednesday Mariners matinee against Toronto will end around the beginning of the evening commute (with lots of Canadians making the trek down boosting attendance further). It’s also a good test for mid-day Sounder, with the new 10:18-11:31am train available for Mariners fans, with the regular choice of weekday evening trains home.

Enjoy the extra capacity tomorrow.

To date, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the public discussion of Sound Transit 3. Instead of discussing the transportation merits, we’ve been lost in hang-wringing over Sound Transit’s advertising expenditures (so much for “run government like a business!”), overambitious responses to public records requests, or other political minutiae. There has been the “multitasking fallacy”, in which SeattlePI’s Joel Connelly suggested halting ST3 until a single SDOT repaving project is done. There has been the forced outrage at the generous corporate contributions to the Mass Transit Now campaign, when if these businesses weren’t contributing the reciprocal headline would write itself: “Local Businesses Balking at Sound Transit Plan, Campaign Contributions Show.” And of course, there’s the always reliable process argument that if only we were slower and more deliberate, things would be better.

So what are we getting in Sound Transit 3? In what ways is it superior or inferior to existing options? And how does what’s proposed fit into the range of plausible political options? Let’s start with Everett. Continue reading “Why ST3 is Worth It, Part 1: Everett”

The City Council’s Planning, Land Use, and Zoning (PLUZ) committee meets Tuesday morning at 9:30 am. Towards the end of the agenda will be the first committee briefing on the big UDistrict Rezone announced last week after more than 5 years of planning. With the Comprehensive Plan entering its final stages, the meeting being held on a mid-week morning, and the neighborhood in question being home to the Seattle Displacement Coalition, it’s safe to say that public comment is likely to be highly oppositional to new housing and development in the UDistrict.

But this proposal deserves support from anyone who supports more housing near transit. The proposed plan isn’t just about height, but even more about urban form. It permits tall and skinny residential towers up to 320′ while capping office uses at 160′, a sensible framework for a neighborhood long on jobs (20,000+ at UW) and short on housing. The rezone design includes generous pedestrian amenities and bike lanes, 3 parks, preserves much of the Ave, incentivizes community retail uses such as daycare, breaks up long facades, requires ground-level parking to be “fully wrapped in other uses”, places stricter limits on commercial parking, and supports Vision Zero with raised crossings and other traffic calming measures. As an opening volley before the Council, this is pretty good work.

The PLUZ Committee is composed of Chair Rob Johnson (who also represents the UDistrict via District 4), Mike O’Brien, and Lisa Herbold. The latter two have already signaled their intent to push for additional regulations on development “because this upzone increases zoning capacity beyond what was anticipated” and to require one-to-one replacement of any affordable units at risk of demolition. It should be noted that existing zoning doesn’t protect any of these units currently, and adding additional restrictions immediately after passing the Mandatory Housing Affordability legislation could be seen as a bait-and-switch for HALA-supportive developers. The most important thing is for the additional units to be constructed, and for that to happen the projects have to pencil out. Even if the units are built but the developer passes the costs of mandatory subsidy onto the market-rate units, this would only exacerbate economic inequality. But we’ll have to see the substance of these amendments before making a final judgment.

But a common refrain in opposing development is that we shouldn’t grow until we build the infrastructure to support it. Well, a high-capacity subway station to serve our state’s largest institution is just the ticket, isn’t it? If you have the privilege of taking a Tuesday morning off, please attend the meeting and speak in support of housing near transit. If not, please email Councilmembers Johnson, Herbold, O’Brien, and (alternate) Gonzalez with your thoughts.

Although it hasn’t gained any support at all among regional decisionmakers, a longtime favorite in the STB commentariat has been the “peanut butter” plan. It would build rail and bus tunnels where surface buses are hopeless, namely the Ballard/UW corridor and in downtown Seattle, and try to address the worst bus bottlenecks on Elliott Avenue and West Seattle, where Sound Transit 3 will build light rail. It’s a great plan for which I wouldn’t hesitate to vote.

This plan would undoubtedly serve more areas of Seattle than the existing ST3 proposal, although it would do so with buses somewhat less reliable than light rail. Whether that tradeoff is worth it is comprehensively addressed in dueling articles by Ross Bleakney and me, and readers can read those and draw their own conclusions.

Though the ST3 decision process is over, peanut-butter advocates might comfort themselves with the idea that ST3 failure might result in a smaller retry, where a cheaper BRT-heavy option is the only alternative. Unfortunately, the latest cost estimates suggest that the peanut-butter plan is actually more expensive than the existing ST3 plan, unless Sound Transit strips out the features that give it the advantage of geographic breadth.

Throughout this article, I will use high-end cost estimates, as is my custom, and 2014 dollars because all corridor studies use them.

Continue reading “Whatever Its Merits, “Peanut Butter” Doesn’t Save Any Money”