A Pierce Transit employee was killed Tuesday evening after being run over by a bus at the headquarters, located in Lakewood. Names of the victim and the driver of the bus were not released Tuesday night.
KOMO is updating its coverage frequently, for the latest details.
Our condolences go to family of the deceased, and to the brothers and sisters of Pierce Transit who have a job to keep doing today as their hearts weigh heavy.
[Update 2: A reader sent in the scanner traffic reporting the incident. Listen below.]
[Update: Sound Transit worked through the night to fix track and signal damage, and service returned to normal Wednesday morning.]
Around 8:30pm Tuesday a person driving a white Chevy Tahoe SUV collided at high speed with Link at Holgate Street in Sodo. Reports from the scene indicate the driver drove around the crossing gates. The vehicle caused significant damage to LRV #136, collapsing doors and exposing insulation. A heavy police and fire response indicated that there were passenger injuries, but fortunately the vehicle seems to have collided with the luggage/bicycle storage area, minimizing injuries. As far as we know this is the first time a vehicle has penetrated the passenger areas of a Link train in regular service.
Photos from the scene are harrowing, but details are sparse at this hour. We hope to have more info in the morning.
Until further notice, likely through the end of service Tuesday, service is suspended between Beacon Hill and Stadium, with a bus bridge in place.
https://twitter.com/staceyhanson/status/834272556852981760
Continue reading “SUV Driver T-Bones Link Train. Service Disrupted in Sodo.”
After a year of process in 2015 and extensive (and often heated) public participation, Metro and Sound Transit mostly bit the bullet and forged ahead with aggressive bus restructures to feed the University Link extension. Storied routes such as the 71/72/73 were deleted or shortened, the once-highest ridership line in the city (Route 48) was split into Routes 45 and 48 at UW Station, and Capitol Hill workhorse Route 43 was mostly deleted, kept alive with a handful of vestigial peak runs.
County Council members understood the theoretical benefits of restructures, but also felt the heat from their constituents, who were apoplectic that Metro would “cut” some of the best-ridden routes in the city. Most notably, Councilmember Rod Dembowski’s demanded (and won) partial restoration of Route 71 between Wedgwood, Ravenna, The Ave, and UW Station. In return for sticking their necks out to vote Yes on the restructure, the Council also required a comprehensive report on the ridership changes caused by the restructure. Though that report will be released next month, this morning Metro released the first batch of systemwide ridership data.*
Though there is a ton of data to analyze, the system trends are unmistakable and encouraging:
Neighborhood trends after the jump. Continue reading “The ULink Restructure Was a Bold Gamble. It Has (Mostly) Paid Off.”
It’s time to make Third Avenue into Seattle’s first transit mall. Tomorrow. Or, at least, late next year, once the remaining buses have to leave the downtown tunnel. The City of Seattle should ban all* non-transit motor vehicles from Third, 24/7. Banning cars completely would:
The ban has been warranted for several years, but will become far more important with the brave new world of no tunnel buses.
While Link light rail gets all the glory and gaudy annual ridership increases, Third remains the city’s busiest transit corridor in both trips per day (3,000) and ridership (likely about 125,000). Yet, as Zach reported last month, Metro, Sound Transit, and the City are not yet considering improvements to Third in the One Center City plan. Instead, they are proposing improvements to less-used corridors, along with major bus restructures that would force transfers — in some cases, with no return benefit. Improving Third by banning cars could allow Metro and Sound Transit to avoid the worst of these forced-transfer plans, while also improving the commute for a large majority of the 47 percent. (No, Mitt, not that 47 percent — the 47 percent of downtown commuters that use transit.)
The agencies should include a transit-only Third as a core piece of One Center City, and should take advantage of it by running as many buses there as it can possibly handle. More details about why, after the jump.
*With very narrow exceptions, described below.
I was as happy as anyone when SDOT installed OneBusAway kiosks at major downtown bus stops. Although getting real-time data on one’s phone is a huge advance, there is no substitute for an easy-to-read sign present at the stop.
As the picture at right attests, however, the flat-panel TVs in these kiosks have significant maintenance challenges. SDOT’s Sue Romero:
The original displays were chosen for the amount of arrival information that could be displayed on them. Many routes can be displayed simultaneously for busy bus stops serving multiple routes, compared to the LED readers that only display a few lines of text and therefore can only display a few routes at a time. However, the screens proved to be poorly manufactured and unreliable. We had an opportunity to apply that and other lessons learned to the C-Line design, and we’ve come up with a much more reliable and less expensive solution.
Last fall, SDOT began a project to replace the equipment with hardier televisions and new computers. SDOT’s Sue Romero says that $23,000 replacements should arrive “before the end of spring” and installation should be done “before the end of summer.”
But I can’t help but think of those Metro LED readers, like the one depicted from 3rd & Virginia. These signs range from 2-line, 1-sided ($8,000) to 4-line, 2-sided (as pictured) at $21,000, according to Metro’s Jeff Switzer. And they work: anecdotally, they are almost never broken. Moreover, 3rd and Virginia is the first stop outside the skip-stop pattern and serves about as many routes (29) as the kiosk stops in the core (24 at 3rd & Pine),* so they can certainly handle high-volume stops.
In terms of functional differences, reasonable people might disagree. Personally, I find the scrolling rate of the LED signs to be vastly superior to the TVs in the kiosks, and listing later arrivals of the same route in the kiosks to be redundant clutter. On the other hand, OBA’s color-coding of the time lets you know when the time reflects the schedule and is therefore not trustworthy.
Usually functioning signage is clearly superior to usually broken signage, but I have to say I slightly prefer the LED signs to even fully reliable kiosks. But both are vastly superior to the ongoing signage fiasco directly below in the tunnel.
At Friday’s regular board meeting, the Sound Transit Board heard a report about the state of elevators and escalators on the Link light rail system. Some stations, like University of Washington, are not meeting the escalator availability standard because of frequent and long-term outages that is being blamed on premature component failure, among other issues.
This is an open thread.
On Monday, the City of Mercer Island City Council voted to sue Sound Transit and the Washington State Department of Transportation.
On Friday, the Sound Transit Board of Directors returned the favor.
MOTION NO. M2017-20
A motion of the Board of the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority authorizing legal action against the City of Mercer Island, the Washington State Department of Transportation (a potential non-adverse defendant), and other governmental entities deemed necessary or appropriate, to confirm Sound Transit’s and the Washington State Department of Transportation‘s authority to take all lawful actions to construct and operate light rail on Interstate 90 or on Mercer Island between Seattle and Bellevue as approved by voters; and to enforce the 1976 Memorandum of Agreement and 2004 Amendment governing Interstate 90 between Seattle and Bellevue. Continue reading “Sound Transit to Sue Mercer Island”
Looking to foster greater ties with our Canadian neighbor, last fall Microsoft sponsored the Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Vancouver. Many of the issues discussed were as you’d expect: the flow of skilled labor between the U.S. and Canada, easing of trade restrictions, and pre-emptive fear of the then-ridiculous prospect of a Trump presidency.
Seemingly out of nowhere, however, one of the most prominent topics was high speed rail between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. The mood was optimistic, with Governor Inslee, Premier Clark, and Executive Constantine joining regional tech leaders in a roundtable to lay out the vision. To say the least, the discussion was high-level; you couldn’t make out a single tree in their visionary forest, and the working paper Parsons Brinckerhoff prepared for the conference similarly lacked much technical substance. Many of us shrugged it off as loose boilerplate from our regional governments.
Then last month, Governor Inslee requested $1 million from the Legislature for an initial feasibility study, with the report due this December. The budget request is making its way through committee, with a lukewarm reception. When Microsoft testified their willingness to chip in for the study, Senate Transportation Chair Curtis King (R-Yakima) quipped, “We’d like your contribution to be $1 million.”
Vancouver in an hour would transform the region, but the prospect of building it faces enormous technical and political challenges. Besides the assent of Olympia, Victoria, Washington, Ottawa, and every other micro jurisdiction along the way, you’d need funding mechanisms for tens of billions of dollars that currently don’t exist and expertise that is weak on both sides of the border.
But the real challenges lie in designing and engineering the corridor itself. The current Amtrak Cascades service (157 miles, 4 hours, average speed 39mph) traverses BNSF’s legacy track, which hugs the shoreline wherever possible and never gets above 130′ in elevation (even Pike Place Market is higher). The result is predictable and unfixable: 14 additional miles compared to I-5, meandering curves, reduced speed, limited right of way to build parallel HSR track, and a corridor not at all future-proofed against rising seas.
So any HSR solution clearly lies inland, but that comes with its own challenges. Do you serve Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, and Vancouver? All of those lie at sea level along the coast. Do you weave back and forth? If not, which cities do you bypass and how? Even if you figure that out, do you access the central cities of Seattle and Vancouver or do you build peripheral stations and force transfers to Link or SkyTrain? Even California High Speed Rail is able to use existing right-of-way between Burbank and Anaheim, a luxury neither Seattle or Vancouver would have. As Mark Hallenbeck rightly quipped to the Globe and Mail, “The kicker in all of this is not the 100 miles in the middle; it’s the 30 miles on either end.”
So is it hopeless? No, but it’s damn hard. Here are a few ways it could happen. Let’s start in Seattle and move north. #long read Continue reading “The Technical Challenges of Seattle-Vancouver High Speed Rail: Part 1”
This is an open thread.
A bill to give wheelchair-accessible taxis access to HOV lanes and a bill to give motorcycles access to some transit lanes are moving forward in the State Senate.
WSDOT and local authorities are currently allowed to grant HOV lane access to:
* public transportation vehicles;
* motorcycles;
* private motor vehicles carrying a minimum of a specified number of passengers; and
* certain private transportation provider vehicles with the capacity to carry eight or more passengers if such use does not interfere with the efficiency, reliability, and safety of public transportation operations.
There are currently 53 private wheelchair-accessible taxis operating in the state, and none of them can carry eight or more passengers.
At the request of Toby Olson from the Governor’s Committee on Disability Issues and Employment, the phrase “wheelchair-bound” was removed.
The committee substitute bill passed out of committee 12-0 January 31, and is now in the Senate Rules Committee, waiting to be placed on the second reading calendar.
We previously covered this bill back when it was introduced.
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For the duration of the pilot project, the operator of a motorcycle would be allowed to overtake and pass in the same lane as the vehicle being overtaken, but only on the left-hand side of the vehicle, on divided highways with at least two general lanes each way. The motorcyclist would only be allowed to pass on the left hand side when the motorcycle is traveling at a speed of 25 miles per hour or less and not more than 10 miles per hour over the speed of traffic flow. It would become a traffic infraction for an operator of a motor vehicle to intentionally impede or attempt to prevent a motorcyclist from passing on the left-hand side as allowed in the pilot project.
Both proponents and opponents came armed with non sequiturs. Proponents pointed to a UC Berkeley study showing lower motorcyclist fatality rates among those sharing lanes, which is already allowed here. In what seemed more like a rebuke of the status quo, representatives from the Washington State Patrol and the Traffic Safety Commission testified against the bill with statistics that (quite intuitively) pointed out that motorcyclists die at a higher rate than their percent of traffic, and (not helpfully) 75% of motorcycle fatalities are found to be the motorcyclist’s fault.
Proponents also touted the bill as a way to ease congestion.
The committee amendment removed the restriction of a motorcycle having to pass on the left-hand side of a vehicle traveling in the left-most lane of traffic, after testimony that this is the part of a highway with the most debris.
The committee substitute bill passed out of committee 9-2-1 February 8.
Voting Yes were:
Curtis King (R – Yakima, Committee Chair)
Sheldon (Vice Chair)
Fortunato
Brad Hawkins (R – East Wenatchee)
Steve O’Ban (R – Tacoma)
Dean Takko (D – Longview)
Kevin Van de Wege (D – Sequim)
Maureen Walsh (R – College Place)
Lynda Wilson (R – Vancouver)
Voting No were:
Marko Liias (D – Everett, Assistant Ranking Minority Member)
Annette Cleveland (D – Vancouver)
Steve Hobbs (D – Lake Stevens, Ranking Minority Member) voted for “no recommendation.”
The bill was moved out of the Senate Rules Committee by floor motion Tuesday, so it is now on the second reading floor calendar.