Fifteen months after the DSTT, ST announced T-Mobile had service in the Beacon Hill Tunnel, though as of Tuesday evening Bruce Englehardt was unable to use it there. AT&T was supposed to launch Monday, but as of Tuesday had run “into technical issues” and was targeting later in the week for data. A voice signal was available Tuesday morning. Verizon should also follow later this week. Though delayed from its original target of late 2017, this meets the mid-2018 target set last November.
As someone who has done most of his transit travel in the internet age, it can be hard to fathom the uncertainty and monotony of riding without an internet connection. While reading a book is a decent substitute for swiping on your phone, the inability to communicate with your appointments, check on the timeliness of transfers, and plan trips on the fly seems hard to live without. Those things were all possible even with an interruption at the Beacon Hill tunnel, but now they require a little less anticipation.
A map of the site from the original RFP’s fact sheet. Courtesy Metro.
In a surprise move earlier this month, King County officials decided to restart the process that could eventually construct hundreds of affordable housing units within walking distance of the Northgate Station.
The decision will likely delay construction of an eventual dense, mixed-use transit oriented development project. The revamped process could yield hundreds more units of housing, including additional affordable housing.
Why King County cancelled the RFP
Metro, which owns the parcel that will eventually become the site of the TOD project, cancelled a request for proposals on June 5. Two companies, Lake Union Partners and Stellar Holdings, answered the original RFP. The developers did not respond to requests for comment.
In a notice sent to the bidders, and in subsequent public comments, county officials explained that they cancelled the RFP to incorporate new and anticipated changes to laws governing the RFP process.
A new state law, which came into effect June 7, allows local governments to give surplus property to developers for free, as long as the property will be used to house families who earn 80 percent or less of the locally adjusted area median income.
Meanwhile, the Seattle City Council is considering whether to upzone the Northgate TOD plot. As Bruce pointed out, an upzone could make Northgate a major urban center.
Northgate Station under construction from the TOD site. Courtesy Sound Transit.
Diane Carlson, Metro’s Director of Capital Projects, was involved in the decision to cancel the initial RFP. Carlson says that the county wants to take advantage of the statutory changes because of the site’s potential.
“We’ve given [ourselves] an opportunity to potentially create more housing on that site, and we want to take advantage of that,” Carlson says.
This past week I was contacted out of the blue by someone who’d newly returned to Seattle, found an old post of mine here on the blog, and wanted to meet to learn more about the history of transit and land use in the city and how she could help make things better.
It reminded me that there are tens of thousands of people moving to the Puget Sound region right now and many of them immediately get curious about our transit system, how it came to be, and why the city is built and designed the way it is. They find their way to STB, where we try to tell the story of Seattle transit and give the context for why things are the way they are and how they could be better We don’t try to be the first to report on a transit story, but we do try to be the best. We strive to show the real impact of transit and land use decisions on every day lives, and to cover what actually matters in the fast-changing world of urban mobility.
Thanks to the support of our readers, the past few years we’ve been able to open a paid staff position to augment our volunteers and improve our coverage. We’ve been very happy with he results and are proud to welcome our third staff reporter, Peter Johnson.
With your support, we intend to continue this work for years to come. Today we’re kicking off our annual fundraising campaign. Each year hundreds of donors have stepped up with a generous one-time donation or a monthly subscription to support our work. While advertising does contribute to our bottom line, it is the donations from the small percentage of our readers who provide the lion’s share of our operating budget. This year we hope you’ll consider joining them.
In the next year, we will have more than enough to keep us busy: scoping and analysis for the next round of Link extensions, a new SDOT director, the fate of the Move Seattle Levy and the Streetcar, and much more.
If your contribution has lapsed, now is a great time to start up again. We have lots to do!
Earlier this month, VIA architecture released its study of the potential for higher capacity and usage of the Seattle Center Monorail. Though activists had been asking for years for ORCA integration to bring the independent line into the fare system, it was the commitment to bring big-time sports back to Key Arena that finally made Seattle serious. Mike Lindblom summarized the key figures ($) in the study.
VIA identified a series of improvements that could double the monorail’s capacity to 6,000 people per hour per direction. Each train can hold 300, but 250 is the maximum for timely boarding and deboarding. More than 6,000 would have diminishing returns: at off-peak times today Link can comfortably carry about 2,700 people/hour, expanding as Link goes to higher frequencies and 4-car trains in the 2020s.
To get there, the monorail has to fix the cluttered station arrangement at Westlake and make it faster for people to get on and off the trains. Faster loading and unloading (a ponderous process today) can get headways down from 5 minutes to 2.5. The trip itself only takes 90 seconds.
Back in 2014, Seattle voters approved a $60 license fee and 0.1% sales tax for a Transportation Business District (TBD) that would fund bus service through 2021. Originally conceived as a way to avoid bus cuts after a countywide measure failed earlier that year, before the election this was re-framed as an opportunity to increase bus service on overcrowded and/or unreliable corridors that mostly lie within the City of Seattle.
So far, so good. But Metro doesn’t have the bus base capacity or drivers to run all the service Seattle wants to pay for:
Today, the STBD buys about 270,000 annual service hours, equivalent to 41 buses running 18 hours per day, every day. Non-service expenditures include fare discounts, equity programs, the low-income rebate on the VLF, planning and administration, etc.
Given this problem, or opportunity, the Council’s Sustainability and Transportation Committee on June 5th endorsed some amendments to the STBD to allow several new initiatives:
Reduce the threshold for the definition of a “Seattle” route from 80% to 65% of stops. This makes the 106, 120, 124, 345, 372, 373, and E Line eligible for funding by Seattle voters. While these routes have significant suburban tails, most reasonable observers would agree that they are important to Seattle residents. Some of these routes use different Metro bus bases and are therefore not as constrained.
Extend free ORCA passes from 61% to 100% of Public High School students, plus “Seattle Promise” college students.
Funding capital transit improvements, both correcting the worst deficiency in the original measure and shoring up troubled projects from Move Seattle.
Most controversially, fund “contract pilot transit services” — small, privately-operated transit vehicles to serve markets with unusually high SOV shares (read: Uptown and First Hill) and solve last-mile problems in the Rainier Valley and Alki.
The changes sailed through the committee with only minor amendments, but Committee Chair O’Brien postponed the scheduled June 11th review by the Full Council. Kevin Schofield reports that the two-week delay is because labor has some concerns about the fourth provision.
It’s probably not surprising that a town like Seattle would have second thoughts about partially privatizing transit services using non-union vendors, even when there is no alternative. However, one might also wonder how effective these services will actually be. It’s hard to scrutinize a concept with essentially no details, but there’s a reason Metro doesn’t send many smallish vans buzzing around second-order demand lines: it’s a very expensive way to serve a small number of people, however much it improves the lot of a handful of riders. Indeed, some of discussion in June 5th’s meeting cast doubt as to whether the new routes would even make up the 3,000 car trips the city is looking to eliminate during the period of maximum construction through 2021. One hopes that this program would provide reasonably direct and frequent routes while remaining extremely well-integrated with the network of Metro buses. If it does, it would be a worthy augmentation to our transit system.
Either way, you are a beneficiary of the most effective transit pass program in the system. In 2017, King County brought in $76 million in revenue from the ORCA Passport programs for approximately 35 million boardings.
The ORCA Passport Program is both effective in getting people on transit and popular, but unfortunately, it doesn’t serve most low-income people. In 2016, Capitol Hill Housing (CHH), a city-wide affordable housing developer and community development organization, surveyed people living in apartments along Pike Street. We found that in market rate buildings, 68 percent had an ORCA pass subsidized by their employer. In contrast, only 22 percent of the residents in affordable housing buildings had Passports.
Vancouver looking at up zoning single family neighborhoods, correctly realizing that small-scale development will lead to greater variety and affordability
Nice to see some pushback against the “millennials fleeing the cities” narrative
Elliot Bay Trail getting improvements courtesy of Expedia
ST says Beacon Hill Station cell service coming in the next few weeks
Sightline helps you have “the talk” about housing with friends and family
Geolocation around Westlake station. Courtesy of Todd Kelsay.
The latest update to Lyft’s app will include a trip planning feature designed to encourage passengers to consider combining rideshare or carpool with transit, walking, and bikeshare. The move comes as part of a large push by the ride hailing company and its arch-rival, Uber, to try and capture a share of the first mile/last mile market. The service will go live by the end of June.
Lyft has won contracts with agencies around the country to provide final mile service, and recently launched pilot final mile programs on Mercer Island and in Pierce County. Eventually, ride hailing services could reduce the need for park and ride spaces.
“If we can get more people to solve the first and last mile problem with rideshare, that’s good for us. Ultimately, if that gets more people on light rail, or taking buses, that’s good for the environment, and that’s what we’re about,” says Todd Kelsay, Lyft’s general manager for the Pacific Northwest.
