Yesterday, the Council passed the alley vacation for the Washington State Convention Center (WSCC) that the Transportation and Sustainability Committee approved last week, as we reported. The O’Brien amendment that would have gotten more money for transit from the WSCC in the event of serious service degradation failed 6-3, with only O’Brien, Sawant, and Herbold voting for it. The other Councilmembers chose not to reopen the negotiated benefits deal.
The overall measure passed. The official record has six votes in favor, Herbold abstaining, and doesn’t record anything for Juarez or Harrell; the video (1:03:45) is quite clear that all nine raised their hands in favor.
The legislation allows the DSTT to close to buses as early as March 2019. Whether it actually happens in March, or in in September instead, depends on the Master Use Permit process with a different city department, discussions between Metro and the WSCC, and actual construction progress. The race is now on for SDOT to complete its downtown transit improvements by March.
The next RapidRide H, which will replace King County Metro route 120 from downtown Seattle to Burien in 2020, could reduce travel times by almost five minutes between Burien and the West Seattle Bridge, assuming the transit agency and its partner DOTs make the recommended upgrades to the route, which is among the 10 busiest in the county.
Seattle DOT has settled on improvements for the Seattle portion, and Metro is consolidating stops and considering moving the route’s tail two blocks south to SW 150th St, closer to the commercial heart of the city while maintaining access to the transit center.
On May 1st, Seattle’s Transportation and Sustainability Committee reviewed the alley vacation for the Washington State Convention Center expansion, which will close the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel to buses. The core measure passed unanimously, but the most interesting discussion centered around exactly when buses would have to leave the tunnel.
The question has come down to the tunnel closing in March or September 2019. Either date would coincide with the regular Metro service change. If the WSCC gets its master use permit from SDOT by July 1st, it can start in March. However, SDOT cannot guarantee that the remaining street improvements meant to mitigate the bus congestion will be ready in time. Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s legislation would have attached the condition that the developer could not kick buses out prior to September. Councilmember Rob Johnson introduced an amendment that would strike this language, making the city’s position neutral in discussions between King County and the developer. The amendment passed committee 4-3*, so it will go before full council on Monday without any timing conditions attached.
Prior to Council deliberation, SDOT staff presented the state of affairs and answered clarifying questions. The One Center City process is intended to address the “period of maximum constraint” — making sure people and buses can still flow through downtown when buses leave the tunnel, the viaduct comes down, and SR99 tunnel tolls divert traffic. This period would end as they haul away the viaduct debris and light rail gets to Northgate in 2021.
Of many ambitious ideas, the short-term SDOT plan has whittled down to three main things (see 54:00 in the video):
Signal improvements on 2nd and 4th Avenues for greater transit priority and pedestrian safety. SDOT Interim Director Goran Sparrman and his staff felt confident this would be done by March.
On 3rd Avenue, more ORCA readers, and possibly longer hours of car restrictions and/or the zone stretching further into Belltown. SDOT said this might be complete by March but thought September was a safer deadline.
Extending the 5th Avenue contraflow bus lane from Cherry Street to Marion St, and then continuing further North on 6th Avenue. This has interactions with the reversible I-5 on-ramp at Cherry, which requires coordination with WSDOT and FHWA. While not a huge project that digs up the street, staff were less than certain this could be done by March.
Motivate, operator of Seattle’s defunct Pronto bikeshare (as well as successful systems in NYC, Chicago and elsewhere), is looking for a buyer ($) amid dockless competition
SDOT will have a better idea of what it can deliver with Move Seattle Levy “in a month or two“
Sound Transit has released a list of design changes for Lynnwood Link, requested by WSDOT and local governments following the 2015 EIS, with some major changes for stations at NE 185th Street and Lynnwood Transit Center, along with other minor tweaks. The changes, which are separate from Sound Transit’s quest to fill the $500 million budget shortfall that the project faces, should bring modest improvements to vehicular access at both stations, while scraping away at the property acquisition costs that have dogged the project over the last few months.
While many cities nationwide are seeing declines in bus ridership, a few transit agencies – including ours here in Seattle – are bucking the trend by restructuring their routes to focus on frequency and span-of-service, beyond just 1-seat rush hour rides into downtown. With a major restructure on the books for a year now, you can add Pierce Transit to that trend.
PT, was one of the agencies hardest hit by the Great Recession, has been climbing out of a hole. A broad restructure (the first in the system’s 40 year history), which brought a sensible grid network and increased frequency to the Tacoma-area bus network, was proposed in the fall of 2016 and went into effect in the spring of 2017. With a restructured network and 59,000 additional service hours, PT announced this week that ridership is up 3.8% in 2018 versus the same (pre-restructure) first quarter of 2017.
Last spring, a Regional Fare Forum called for the end of zone resets, a feature on ORCA readers that allows riders to request a one-zone fare on a route that crosses into another zone, but requires the operator to push a series of buttons to allow the one-zone charge, and then another series of buttons to reset the default to two zones. The main reason the forum sought to end zone resets was to reduce programming costs for Next Generation ORCA. Getting rid of zone resets will also save some dwell time on buses by making boarding a little faster.
The King County Council voted to eliminate zone resets on King County Metro by implementing a flat regular fare of $2.75, while leaving reduced fares as are.
Community Transit is getting ready to raise each of its local fares 25 cents, while implementing flat commuter fares.
Sound Transit’s staff proposal played off a $3.25 flat fare proposal for ST Express regular fares against a straw Option 2 that would have charged $2.75 on all intra-county routes and $3.75 on all inter-county routes. Option 2 would have produced weird results like charging $2.75 on route 577 and $3.75 on route 578, even though the overwhelming majority of riders on those routes travel between Seattle and Federal Way. Other more intuitive options, like a premium $3.75 fare for routes that run express over a certain distance, were not considered. In the end, the flat fare proposal won out over the straw Option 2 by just 59%-41% in the survey responses.
Sound Transit Board Member Claudia Balducci
Board Member Claudia Balducci, a King County Councilmember who participated in last year’s Regional Fare Forum, sponsored an amendment to delay the change in the adult fares. She said the reason the simplification to a flat fare was being made was for simplifying programming for NextGeneration ORCA, pointing out that it was disconcerting that NextGen ORCA would need such a programming simplification.
Disconcertingly, nobody mentioned the time delays caused by zone resets while boarding. In an email from Balducci’s office, she said that ST staff had told her only 7% of riders would be impacted by the elimination of zone resets, and that bus speed was not one of the elements being studied in the fare options.
Clearly, since there were no options that would have kept zone resets, there was no need to study that aspect. But that 7% figure for the percent of riders using zone resets indicates that most riders on 2-county routes’ travel time is actually being impacted.
