Beginning this coming Monday, September 25, the Sounder South Line will have two new roundtrips, bringing the total number of daily roundtrips to 13. The trips will bring Sounder frequencies down to every 20 minutes during peak hours and 40 minutes during the early afternoon peak.
Continue reading “Sounder South Line Gets New Trains and New Trips”
Minimum Salary: $12.51 per hour
Maximum Salary: $21.77 per hour
Posted Date: 09/14/2017 – open until filled
Preference will be given to applications received by September 27th.
This Transportation Planning Intern will assist staff in the City of Redmond’s Transportation Planning & Engineering Division (TP&E) to plan and deliver multimodal transportation projects and programs in this growing community and regional jobs center. Major projects underway light rail station area planning, long-range transportation project list development, and the development of Downtown Redmond into a mixed use urban center.
TP&E is in particular need of assistance in two skill areas:
Depending on the pool of applicants, TP&E may hire more than one intern to ensure that these areas of expertise are covered. It is not necessary to be proficient in both areas to be considered for employment.
Continue reading “SPONSOR: Transportation Planning Internship at City of Redmond”
Community Transit will add 68 new bus trips on Saturday, September 23, with new and extended routes and additional commuter trips. The service change, the first of a two-part service proposal that extends to March 2018, focuses on improving connections between routes in the county. Community Transit accomplished this with short extensions to existing dead-end routes in Lynnwood and Marysville, along with new service to Boeing/Paine Field in Everett, that will prove to be effective for the little investment in hours they require.
Continue reading “Community Transit Fills Network Gaps and Adds More Trips”
Sound Transit’s route to Federal Way is no longer just a vague line extending south from the Angle Lake Light Rail Station to residents attending an open house as the extension project moves into the pre-construction phase.
With design plans still developing for the stations, residents had little to react to during open houses hosted by Sound Transit last week. However, residents expressed concern about the accessibility of the stations and what they say is a lack of parking planned at each station. Comments included providing better bus service to the station and the need to build future parking adequate for the next 30 years.
Sound Transit plans to build parking at each station. At the Kent/Des Moines station, a 500-space garage is planned directly east of the station. A 1,100-space garage will replace a 600-space surface parking lot at the 272nd Street Station, and at the Federal Way Transit Center, Sound Transit is planning a second garage adding 400-spaces to the existing garage which currently holds roughly 1,200 cars.
Despite that the future Federal Way Station planned near the downtown area of the city, several residents doubted Federal Way could become a walkable city with the rainy weather.
With one resident commenting, “Sound Transit hasn’t planned for the people. They want us to be a walking city, but it’s the Pacific Northwest.” Another resident chimed in suggesting Sound Transit should make it easier for commuters to be dropped off at the station.
Continue reading “Parking Remains Concern at Future Link Stations”
The Northgate Link Extension is on schedule and on-budget, but without a $1.17 billion grant from the federal government the continuation of the light rail north toward Lynnwood will likely be delayed, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff said Tuesday.
Touring the construction site of the future Northgate Station with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, Rogoff said, “In 2016, the administration made a commitment of $1.17 billion for this project (Lynnwood Link); our plan and work now is about getting the current administration to keep to that commitment.”
Rogoff added the agency was “dumbfounded and disappointed” earlier this year when the new administration sought to zero out funding for light rail to Lynnwood.
Jayapal promised to do everything she can to “ensure that the Federal Transit Administration follows through on funding the Lynnwood Link.”
“Our entire delegation understands the need to protect transit dollars here, and we are going to continue to make sure that we deliver as a federal government,” Jayapal said. “We understand we have a rough road to hoe to make sure we get these federal dollars, but I’ll tell you, I think our region has an enormous case to make for why this is a bipartisan necessity for transit in our region.”
Rogoff credited Jayapal, Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Congressman Rick Larsen for securing $100 million in 2017 for the Lynnwood project. Congress has yet to approve a second installment of $100 million for 2018.
According to Sound Transit, the agency is in the final stage of the process of securing a $1.17 billion Full Funding Grant Agreement through the Federal Transit Administration for the Lynnwood Link extension under the Capital Investment Grant Program, also known as the New Starts program. A Full Funding Grant Agreement, scheduled to be executed in 2018, would guarantee the entire $1.17 billion grant for the Lynnwood extension.
Continue reading “Federal Dollars Critical to Delivering Lynnwood Link on Time”
A few weeks ago, Lizz reported that the union representing Metro bus drivers, mechanics, and service supervisors (among others) approved a new collective bargaining agreement with significant changes to work rules. The most notable of these changes is that part-time Metro drivers can work on weekends. In exchange, union negotiators secured two big concessions from Metro. First, Metro accepted a lower ceiling on the number of part-time drivers, with the limit changing from 45 percent to 33 percent of all drivers. Second, Metro agreed that no drivers, either full- or part-time, will have to work split shifts on weekends. The changes will be effective in September 2018.
Far from being the arcane, inside-baseball news you might think, this is a major win-win for Metro and the union, and a big deal for Metro riders. If implemented well by Metro, it could result in more service on the road for the same amount of money. Depending on how drivers ultimately choose to pick their work under the new rules, it could also make driver recruitment easier—important in an era where Metro has been struggling to keep enough drivers to operate current service, let alone add significant service hours as funded by the City of Seattle and contemplated by Metro’s own Long-Range Plan.
To explain why this is such good news, we’ll have to dive into the murk of bus-driver work rules a bit, below the jump.
Continue reading “Will Metro’s New Union Contract Bring More Service?”
The south half of downtown, set on a steep hill, has always presented accessibility problems. With elevation changes of as much as 50 feet per block, people with impaired mobility frequently have difficulty traveling even one block in the east-west direction. For the transit network, this results in an intermodal transfer challenge: there is more than 100 feet of elevation gain in the four blocks between the Colman Dock ferry terminal and Metro’s Third Avenue transit spine.
Historically, Metro handled this challenge by having one or two north-end routes serve Colman Dock directly, laying over on Alaskan Way. The routes climbed to Third Avenue via Yesler, providing accessible transfers to other service, before heading north. But when waterfront construction began in earnest in 2012, Metro had to leave Alaskan Way. Instead, it began using First Avenue, which is at nearly the same elevation as the upper level of Colman Dock and accessible from the dock via a safe, flat pedestrian bridge. First route 16, and then route 62 starting last year, picked up on First and used Seneca to bridge the elevation gap between First and Third.
But now, Metro is again getting displaced, this time by Center City Connector construction along First. On September 23, route 62 will begin using Third exclusively. And this presents a significant problem for users who have difficulty making it up the hill. During the day on weekdays, there is an accessible route from First to Third, using public elevators or escalators inside two downtown buildings. But the accessible route is not available nights or weekends. The only meaningful transit service that will now serve the vicinity of Colman Dock is route 12, a frequent east-west route using Madison and Marion Streets.
And it gets worse. Route 12 doesn’t make the trip to Third easy, because it has no stop near Third. Uphill stops are located on Marion at First, near the end of the Colman Dock bridge; at Second; and then on the far side of Fourth. Given that the vast majority of transfer connections are on or under Third, this stop placement is perverse. Mobility-impaired users making connections from Colman Dock benefit very little from having the 12 available, and other users transferring from buses on Third to the 12 have to walk unnecessarily far.
Fortunately, the problem should be easy to fix. There is no physical obstacle to locating a stop on Marion at Third, next to the north side of the Central Building. To maintain schedule and reasonable stop spacing, the stop at Second (which is actually less than a block from the stop at First) could be removed.
Metro and SDOT may be reluctant to fund this fix, despite its simplicity, because bus service on Marion is going away. RapidRide G, the “Madison BRT” route on which SDOT will soon begin construction, will run eastbound along Spring rather than Marion. From Spring, the new route will provide easy access to Third. But RapidRide G will not begin service for two more years. Mobility-impaired users are losing route 62 now, and deserve this easy, inexpensive accommodation in the meantime.
Mayoral candidates Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon debate how Seattle’s next mayor would address our city’s most pressing issues: growth, affordable housing, and homelessness (via Seattle Channel).
This is an open thread.
The latest iteration of the One Center City plan considers 3rd Ave transit-only all day, a cycle track on 4th, and some 4th Avenue buses moved to 5th and 6th.
A delay in the convention center project gave bus riders a reprieve, as buses can use the Downtown Transit Tunnel until 2019. But as the “period of maximum constraint” rapidly approaches, the list of near-term projects to ease congestion is not yet final.
“We need to move on this fast,” said Tom Brennan, a consultant with Nelson Nygaard working with SDOT, King County Metro Transit, Sound Transit and the Downtown Seattle Association on the One Center City plan.
During the One Center City advisory group’s monthly meeting Thursday, Brennan presented the latest recommendations to ensure the city keeps moving when a handful of large construction projects begin.
To speed up bus travel times and improve reliability, Brennan said an all-day car ban was being considered for Third Avenue. Currently, during the week the street is reserved only for buses between 6 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6:30 p.m. The proposed recommendations for Third Avenue would also extend the transit-only lanes north to Virginia Avenue and enable off-board fare payment at all stops between Jackson and Stewart Streets to allow for all-door boarding and lower dwell time.
After the group previously debating several options for a north/south bike lane, the latest recommendation places a protected two-way bike lane along the west side of Fourth Avenue between Main and Vine Street. SDOT anticipates the section between Seneca and Pine Street will be finished by the end of October. The segment from Pine to Vine Street would open in 2018, and the last portion between Main and Seneca Street by 2020.
Continue reading “All-day Transit Lanes Considered for 3rd Ave”
Taking questions from the reader mailbag.