Month: May 2017

Community Transit has begun construction of the Seaway Transit Center in Everett, the northern terminus of the planned Swift Green Line bus rapid transit project. The $11 million transit center, funded primarily by WSDOT grants and federal funds, will serve the massive Boeing Everett plant and part of the Paine Field industrial area.

The transit center will be laid out on a triangular plot of land on the southeastern side of Seaway Boulevard and 75th Street SW, at the main entrance to the Boeing plant. It is also near Community Transit’s Merrill Creek operating base and headquarters, as well as other major employers like the Fluke Corporation, though the area isn’t exactly the most walkable or bikeable. Initially, Seaway Transit Center will be built with two bus bays for Swift and five for other buses; the site plan allows for up to a total of thirteen bus bays. After Link light rail is extended to Everett in 2036, Seaway Transit Center could become a major connection between feeder buses to Mukilteo and southern Everett.

Beginning in September of this year, Route 105 will be extended to the Paine Field area from Mariner Park and Ride during peak hours. This will form the basis of a future local, frequent-stopping route that will “shadow” the Green Line much like Route 101 and the Blue Line today. Route 107 will also begin service between Lynnwood Transit Center and the Boeing plant in the same service change, restoring a more convenient link to the South County area.

When the new transit center opens in the summer of 2018, it will be served by Route 105, in addition to other Community Transit, Everett Transit and King County Metro routes that already head to the Boeing plant. The site plan also has spaces for private shuttles, and may become a hub for Boeing’s internal shuttle system much like how Microsoft uses Overlake Transit Center in Redmond.

The rest of the Green Line, which will travel through southern Everett and Mill Creek, won’t begin construction for a few more months. Service is scheduled to begin in early 2019.

The wet winter and spring have taken a toll on our railroads. Since the beginning of this year, nineteen (19) landslides have cancelled more than fifty (50) Amtrak Cascades trains. However, unlike the famous problem areas near Mukilteo that have plagued Cascades and Sounder alike, these mudslides are in a new trouble spot. Two-thirds of the total mudslides in the corridor this year have occurred in Clark County, just north of Vancouver in the Felida/Ridgefield area. Given BNSF’s mandatory 48-hour moratorium on passenger service following a mudslide, every slide can knock out as many as 20 trains. Compounding the problem, the Coast Starlight has been quietly out of service for more than two weeks now due to bridge damage in Northern California.

Mudslide mitigation in the Everett/Mukilteo area has been a great success, with millions spent on slope stabilization, homeowner education, and more. Cancellations have been sharply reduced in the northern corridor this year. But officials are scrambling to coordinate and plan a response to these new trouble spots. In an email to WSDOT, officials would only say that, “Representatives from WSDOT’s Rail, Freight and Ports Division are talking with Clark County representatives to determine how we can apply this same approach in this new area of concern.”

Fortunately, the legislature has provided ongoing funding for landslide mitigation to the tune of $33 million through 2030, a clip of roughly $2.50 million per year. Unfortunately, however, like everything else it is subject to politics and the need for biennial renewal of its funding. And though the annual outlay is generous, the current biennium only doled out $1m total, leaving agencies strapped for mitigation funds just as they finish up nearly $800m in 2009-era rail improvement projects in the corridor. So this problem may persist for a year or two.

Sometime this autumn, Cascades will add two new roundups to Portland, shuffle schedules to permit same-day business travel, and shift trains to the Point Defiance Bypass between Tacoma and Nisqually. Another wet winter and widespread cancellations could significantly hobble the new services just when they need to attract passengers most. Let’s hope the legislature will recognize the problem and approve mitigation funds in a timely and bipartisan way.

While Link’s numbers were all up, Sounder was down (mostly due to the Tacoma Trestle Cutover where service was reduced for 3 days) as well as ST Express down slightly and Tacoma Link also down.

Average daily ridership for Link in February was:

• Weekday: 65,125 (+81.5%)
• Saturday: 39,409 (+67.6%)
• Sunday: 29,184 (+68.7%)

Other weekday modal ridership stats:

• Sounder: 16,088  (-3.0%)
• Tacoma Link: 3,364 (-7.1%)
• ST Express: 61,829 (-1.1%)
• Sound Transit Systemwide, +23.4% Weekday, +18.9% Total Boardings

My charts after the break.

Continue reading “February 2017 Ridership for Sound Transit”

(SounderBruce / flickr)

On April 26, 2007, Andrew Smith wrote a blog post launching Seattle Transit Blog.  At the time, Link hadn’t opened, there was no RapidRide, and the earthquake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct was still standing.  Ten years later, we have 16 Link stations and dozens more in the construction and planning phases, 6 RapidRide lines and counting and the Viaduct, well… let’s move on, shall we? :)

Thanks to the support of our readers we’ve been able to continually invest new resources in reporting on the stories you care about; stories about transit, transportation, and land use in the Puget Sound that don’t get the attention they deserve in the media.  Even though we’ve been at this for over a decade now, we’re nowhere near ready to quit.

If you value what we do, please consider making a donation to support us.  Over 100 new donors stepped up last year.  Nothing would please me more than to have 100 more new folks join in.  To those of you who signed up for a monthly subscription, thank you for your continued support!

Make a one-time donation

Subscribe
Bus : $5.00 USD – monthlyStreetcar : $10.00 USD – monthlyLight Rail : $15.00 USD – monthlySubway : $20.00 USD – monthly

Heading south into U-District Station:

SeaTac Station by edgeplot

[UPDATE: Mr. DeRoy corrected his original statement of when the plexiglass was installed. January, not March.]

When last we’d heard from the Port of Seattle, six years of experience with Link service to the airport had inspired the Port (and Commissioner Stephanie Bowman) to come up with a $3.5m, four-step plan to improve the experience of connecting to the station:

• enclosing the walkway to block the wind
• installing heaters
• electric carts to transport people that need it between the station and the airport skybridge
• adding a moving walkway to the airport master plan, which was expected by April 2017. The $28m project would presumably happen years in the future.

Over six months later, two of these are done, one is dead, and one hasn’t happened — yet.

The port installed the plexiglass in January March, with decorations and other details finished in March, about 3 months after originally planned. Port Spokesman Brian DeRoy simply says that the original 3-week estimate was overoptimistic: “it took a little longer than we’d hoped.”

The four carts also started running in March. Two operate at any given time between the Sound Transit bridge and the second airport skybridge, from about 6am to midnight. Your correspondent got to ride one of these carts when travelling with small children in April, and “it was a relief,” in the words of my companion.

The heaters proved to be too difficult to install easily. There wasn’t adequate electric power, so they looked at natural gas. But, as Mr. DeRoy notes, the gas required would have exceeded the Greenhouse Gas emissions of the entire rental car shuttle fleet. The Port rejected this as inconsistent with its sustainability goals, so it shelved this plan.

People have asked for a moving walkway since the station opened in December 2009. Unfortunately, the concrete parking garage doesn’t have sufficient clearance to simply install a walkway on its surface. A mooted hotel immediately north of the garage was a potential vessel for a walkway, but that project did not materialize. In keeping with Ms. Bowman’s expectations, Mr DeRoy says the moving walkway is “likely” to be in the Sustainable Airport Master Plan. However, we will not see this plan until the end of 2017. Even then, any such project will likely occur years after release of the plan.

Critics often exaggerate the inconvenience of walking to the airport, particularly in the context of peer airports elsewhere in the world. But that’s no reason to ignore creative ways to make the experience better. It’s good of the Port to put some organizational energy into making transit to the airport work better.

From time to time, we’ve posted job openings of interest to the many professionals that read our articles. But today, there’s a somewhat different — and more personal — opportunity.

For almost two years, the generosity of our donors has allowed us to hire Zach Shaner on a part-time basis. You’ve all read the output of that arrangement, which exceeded my wildest expectations. But Zach is now moving on to a better opportunity than we can give him, and we have an opening.

Media news: Zach Shaner, the clear & strategic writer @SeaTransitBlog, is hired @soundtransit communications team. https://t.co/gCgDZFyvqe

— Michael C. Lindblom (@MikeLindblom) May 4, 2017

We’re looking for a skilled writer with an interest in transit and land use issues open to a part-time position. He or she would be responsible for several pieces a week, although hours (and therefore output) are negotiable. Reporting skills are more important than domain expertise. However, knowledge of the local political terrain, transit operations, and land use issues are assets. Outside of the land use and transit beats, you’d be free to use the remainder of your time to pursue other writing opportunities.

Responsibilities:

• Pitch unique stories and follow up on leads
• Take assignments from designated officers
• Cover breaking news
• Establish and maintain relationships/sources
• Manage social media channels as needed
• Perform other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

• At least 1 year of reporting, blogging or similar experience
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Flexible schedule
• Able to succeed with light supervision
• Knowledge of relevant local politics, transit, and land use issues a huge plus

Salary depends on experience, but we’re competitive with many other media outlets. If you’d like to give it a shot, send an email with a resume and three writing samples to contact@seattletransitblog.wpcomstaging.com by May 22nd.

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) meeting started in Seattle yesterday. For coverage, you can see the liveblog here. For those visiting the city this week, our guide to urbanist sightseeing in Seattle, written for Rail~Volution in 2013, has been kept up to date.

• The legislature is back at work, and still going after Sound Transit.
• Erica interviews mayoral candidate Cary Moon on topics of interest to us.
• Transportation strategies ($) for the dueling Key Arena proposals.
• Move Seattle will bring forward SPU work, raising rates in the short term.
• Legislature scales back $1m high speed rail study to $300,000; scope is Portland to Vancouver, results are due Dec. 15th.
• Comparing bicycling in Cascadia’s three largest cities.
• This Times op-ed ($) conforms to all my existing policy analyses, and is therefore good.
• Pronto’s death may clear space for private bike-share to arrive in force. In which case, I say good riddance.
• Concerns about displacing businesses ($) in Little Saigon; but specific rules about business leases seem preferable to limiting overall size.
• Reviewing zoning for Issaquah Olde Town.
• A retrospective on January’s Vine BRT launch.
• What to do with obsolete parking garages ($).
• Finally, studying autonomous buses.

This is an open thread.