Buses will operate separately from cars on a new middle level of the interchange. (Image: WSDOT)
At an open house on Thursday evening, WSDOT and Sound Transit shared design concepts for the I-405 BRT station at NE 85th St in Kirkland. The station is an ST3 project opening in 2024. The latest design features better connections to local transit and an improved pedestrian environment. None of these make up for the poor location choice. The station will serve just a few hundred riders daily after a capital outlay planned to exceed $300 million.
The NE 85th/I-405 interchange is located one mile northeast of the downtown Kirkland transit center. Today, it is a large cloverleaf with 85th St passing below the freeway. From the west, sidewalks end a half-mile before the station at 6th St, from which there is a 180 feet elevation gain to the freeway. To the east is a low-density commercial strip with modest prospects for redevelopment. This is an unpromising starting point, but the design makes a strong effort to create a station that is as accessible as possible. Continue reading “Kirkland’s NE 85th BRT station”
Seattle Parks and Recreation presented details to the City Council April 17th of a pilot program to allow electric bikes on Seattle’s multi-use trails, like the Burke-Gilman (video of council hearing). This follows on the heels of state legislation classifying various kinds of e-bike.
The pilot, which runs through Summer of 2019, will allow for Class 1 and 2 e-bikes to ride the trails at speeds of up to 15mph.
Electric bicycles represent a truly revolutionary change in the way we get around the city. LimeBike’s e-bikes have been in service in Seattle for months and will soon be coming to Bellevue. You can now purchase an electric bike for around $500 on Amazon. Cargo models have room for kids and groceries (and the insinuation that e-bikes are only for rich tech bros is frankly insulting to all the families who save money by using an e-bike to get around town).
Around the world, e-bike use is growing astonishingly quickly. Germans bought 720,000 e-bikes last year (and just 25,000 electric cars). 45% of all bikes sold in Belgium are now e-bikes. The CEO of Bosch (maker of electric drivetrains), estimated that 65% of all bikes sold will soon be e-bikes.
Sound Transit’s rider-hostile escalator policy is under scrutiny right now, but there are similar problems with escalators in the Metro-run Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT), extensively renovated for light rail in 2008.
To take one example, the up escalator at the 3rd & University tunnel entrance was inoperative from March 14th to April 3rd “due to a problem with the handrail drive system,” in the words of Metro’s Scott Gutierrez. “Repairs were completed as soon as Kone had a crew available.”
Given that this is a rather long climb, I asked Gutierrez why they didn’t simply switch the down escalator to go up. He provided this very detailed response:
In some cases, we can reverse the adjacent escalator to go up instead of down while the up escalator is out of service. We did not do so in this situation because it requires safety adjustments that are very time-intensive. This is because the step chains wear differently when running in an opposite direction (most people tend to stand to the right, which causes the right side of the chain to stretch more than the left). This difference can cause the escalator to malfunction when running in the opposite direction unless the step chains are adjusted so that the treads will align correctly with the combs at the opposing end. Sometimes it can take as long to complete that process as it does to repair the escalator that is out of service. If there are complications, that can lead to both escalators being out of service. So we consider several other factors, such as: How long will it take to repair the other escalator? What other conveyance options are nearby? Are any public events scheduled during the forecasted down time? In this case, we considered these factors and decided the best option was to stay on track with the original plan and repair schedule.
The moral of the story, I guess, is that even seemingly simple fixes turn out to be really complicated. It’s actually easier to fix the escalator than reverse the other one. What’s apparent is that the contract with Kone doesn’t require a particularly high level of service, and we can expect long outages in the future.
$930 million Move Seattle levy falling behind ($) on project promises, review finds.
Washington State Ferries looks ahead to 2040. It’s not currently proposed, but Seattle-Port Townsend strikes me as the last untapped market where ferries offer real travel advantage over driving.
First Hill is an area in the city where SDOT is actively moving forward to add transit priority lanes, and they want your feedback.
As we wrote about last spring, the agency would like to create a transit-only lane on southbound Broadway between Union and Madison. This is often a point of congestion in the PM peak, so transit priority would be welcome, boosting not just the First Hill Streetcar but Route 9 and 60 as well.
Creating a transit lane means eliminating the center turn lane, so SDOT is also proposing restricting left turns at Pike, Union and Madison. The net effect would be a substantial decrease in travel time for all modes. Transit could see a 2+ minute time saving, while travel time for cars would also decrease slightly.
Our final installment in the ST3 Level 1 alternatives commentary takes us through SODO. The industrial area south of downtown is notable in our series in that it is currently served by light rail, which runs along the E-3 busway between 4th and 6th avenues.
The new alignment, like the current one, would have a station at S Royal Brougham Way and another at S Lander St. Sodo is also where the N-S “spine” from Everett to Tacoma is split in two. A new line would be constructed in parallel, allowing for West Seattle trains to connect to the existing downtown Metro tunnel while trains coming north from the Rainier Valley (and eventually Tacoma) are re-routed into a new tunnel to continue on to South Lake Union and Ballard.
All three alternatives under consideration run in parallel to the current tracks. Some of the relevant issues include:
Take the E-3 busway or try to leave it for buses
Whether to serve Stadium station
What impact to Metro’s Ryerson bus base is acceptable
Unspecified construction risks to the old INS building in Chinatown
Road bridges over Lander and Holgate to reduce grade crossing conflicts (for both the new line and the existing line)
Overall, the exercise seems to be about connecting West Seattle and Downtown with as little impact as possible.
What’s notable is what’s absent: any discussion of using an alternate N-S right-of-way, such as 1st Ave S. A 1st Ave S alignment would better serve the emerging nightlife and office space on 1st Ave, not to mention Safeco’s front door. Perhaps it was thrown out for technical difficulties or objections from the Port, but it’s unfortunate it wasn’t even considered as a Level 1 alternative.
Metro 255 at the Montlake Flyer stop (Image by author)
The once ambitious restructure of bus service between Seattle and the Eastside over SR 520 has been reduced in scope and is expected only to include a truncation of Metro 255 service at UW.
At last Thursday’s King County Regional Transit Committee meeting, Metro staff confirmed that Sound Transit no longer intends to propose any changes to their routes on the corridor. Peak-only Metro routes from the Eastside will also continue to serve downtown. The original restructure proposal had included ten routes, of which the greatest ridership is on Metro 255 from Kirkland and Sound Transit 545 from Redmond.
The reduced scope of the restructure comes against the background of increased optimism about downtown bus movements during the ‘period of maximum constraint’. The removal of more than 800 daily trips from the downtown transit tunnel and construction elsewhere in downtown would strain street capacity and slow transit service without mitigating measures.
The One Center City partners plan several changes to improve downtown capacity without removing so many buses from downtown. On 5th and 6th Avenues, a new northbound transit pathway can serve up to 40 buses an hour (though more likely 25-30 buses). Likely routes on this pathway are peak routes including 74, 76, 77, 301, 308, 316, 311, 252, 257.
On 4th and 2nd Avenues, signal and priority changes will speed bus movements and give pedestrians leading signals improving safety when crossing. On 3rd Ave, all door boarding and all-day bus operations will speed operations there. Through travel for cars will be prohibited during day time hours, but cars will still be permitted to turn right on to the street and must turn right off the street after one block. SDOT, Metro and Sound Transit are sharing in the $30 million cost of street improvements downtown and in Montlake.
Together, these steps allow buses to operate more effectively than they do today through downtown, with up to 25% better travel times on 4th Ave. The added pathway on 5th and 6th alleviates pressure on all avenues. Bus passenger capacity across downtown would increase by 3700 in the PM peak hour, and overall people-moving capacity by all modes would grow by 7500 per hour.
With greater downtown capacity, early proposals to truncate ST 550 at International District station, to route West Seattle buses to First Hill, and to loop route 41 on Pike/Pine, have all been shelved.
The West Seattle Junction, By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
When voters approved Sound Transit 3 in 2016, they consented to a “provisional alignment” to take trains from roughly 15th & Market to the West Seattle Junction via South Lake Union and Downtown. A long line with a long tunnel through downtown required compromises. Although many felt at the time that ST’s budget estimates were exceedingly conservative, 18 months of Trump tweets and assaults in Olympia have soured the mood for adventurous budgets. Still, neighborhoods have understandable desires to undo some of those compromises.
Most of these ideas would create measureable improvements to the usefulness of the system. Moving the Ballard station west of 15th is a debate about what will bring the most riders. Improving the ship canal crossing would make trains more reliable. Stations in South Lake Union and/or First Hill would add some of the densest neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest into the system’s walkshed, inevitably boosting ridership.
Among these ideas, one stands out as being primarily aesthetic: burying the elevated track around the West Seattle junction in a tunnel. Although elevated track has hardly turned Chicago and Tokyo into dystopias, one shouldn’t single out tunnel advocates as especially unreasonable: as a region, we’ve never built elevated track through densely populated areas, opting for tunnels or surface lines instead. Advocates are asking for the same things as other neighborhoods.
Still, it is hard to identify a clear way in which burying the track would improve mobility in Seattle. People broadly accept that we have a transportation crisis. The fixed budget for grade-separated transit should be focused on solutions to that crisis, not subjective concerns about appearances. And what’s good for West Seattle is good for other places: it would be a better outcome for transit if other segments that follow the street grid, and can therefore run elevated, were lifted to fund better station placements elsewhere. However, the status quo has great power. The easiest place to elevate track is where the plan already calls for it. If there is any flexibility to increase scope at all, there are higher priorities.
The STB Editorial Board currently consists of Martin H. Duke, Brent White, and Dan Ryan.
