write on red

This is an open thread

Write on Red, Mitchell Hainefield in the STB Flickr Pool

75 Replies to “News Roundup: Master Plans”

  1. There is a 6 story, 89 unit apartment building proposed on Beacon Ave on the block next to the station.
    http://www.djc.com/news/re/12114797.html

    Early design review is next Tuesday, at the Rainier Arts center. I highly encourage anyone who favors TOD and can spare an hour to attend and provide a counterbalance to the inevitable requests for bigger setbacks, more parking and every profile reduction possible to reduce shadows.

    http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/aboutus/news/events/DesignReview/Detail/default.aspx?id=6985

    1. +1

      There is also something proposed for the triangular parcel immediately south of the station – this is exciting as I’ve been hoping to see the rest of that block get built out. It is 6 stories, 40 units, no parking :-)

  2. I don’t think Seattle could go car-free for a day, certainly not during a work day – many of our routes are at capacity during peak, so suddenly adding thousands of more riders would probably just result in chaos and many people being left at their stops.

    1. You would do it on a Sunday. The best would be to shut down i5, but even if that was the only road open in Seattle, it would be enough to demonstrate how much nicer the city could be

    2. It would be more feasible to pedestrianize the multifamily areas. I was going to say the areas as dense as Paris, except maybe we don’t have any.

    3. Shut down on a Sunday and run all routes on weekday schedules. That would be an interesting experiment. It would be neat to compare ridership.

      Of course one problem would be that every route would run way early because there’s no traffic. I wonder how it would affect perception of transit if buses are so fast that that certain routes (like remaining peak 70s expresses) become competitive with light rail.

    4. If the city is car free, how are disabled people expected to get around? Maybe Paris, the transit system is so comprehensive, at least within a small are around the city center, that even the disabled can ride it everywhere. In Seattle, requiring disabled people to ride the bus would pose a real hardship, which would make it a nonstarter.

      In theory, the city could allow the disabled to drive and keep the streets almost car free, but, in practice, that’s unenforceable.

      The problem is that designing a transit system that is a viable car replacement for the disabled is really expensive. At best, you could do it for a few square miles around downtown by running frequent buses every single block. But, to pay for all those service hours would require severe service cuts elsewhere in the county, and the moment you need to step outside that tiny little bubble around downtown, you’re more car dependent than before. And, people crossing the boundary have their cars stored in garages within the car free zone, which presents another problem.

      Realistically, the best we can reasonably hope for is a small car free zone of a few blocks on Sundays. Better than nothing.

      1. Driverless shuttle busses might significantly cut down the cost of all those service hours. But if it’s just a day, esp. a Sunday, I suspect most people would just change their plans.

      2. asdf2, do you really think any conceivable car-free event would dare apply the car-absence to anyone who can’t walk?

        Mark

      4. It is, but only on select Sundays (e.g. not during Seafair). They get away with it because the number of actual destinations along the closed stretch is tiny, and, even there, the do allow cars access to the street when necessary to access a parking lot.

        But, there’s a huge difference between closing Lake Washington Blvd. to cars and trying to do it with all of downtown/Capitol Hill.

  3. Throwing this out to the horde– while the head tax is a non-starter for providing housing for homeless people, do folks think of imposing the same head tax for improved transit— CCC, speeding up ST3, etc.?

      1. There was talk in the previous mayoral campaign (by the winner) of possible speeding up construction of ST3. (Also note that in the West Seattle discussion of light rail the other day, there was discussion in the comments of somehow getting additional funding for a tunnel to the junction)

      2. A faster timeline is mostly limited by how long it takes to plan, decide, get environmental approval, buy land, compensate mitigations to nearby property owners, clear property, order steel, pour concrete, lay tracks and implement safety and communications and other systems. Even with all the money in line, that process is still about 11-13 years.

        A subway tunnel probably adds another 4-5 years.

        The only projects that appear to have delays primarily from funding streams are the Paine Field and Everett time-consuming deviation (the other option to skip Paine Field and save 5 years to get to either Ash Way or Mariner earlier was not chosen), the Issaquah-Eastgate-Factorial-Downtown Bellevue-Kirkland line and some Tacoma projects.

      3. Money would allow additional staff, which would speed up their work.

        Ballard is being held back physically by the second tunnel and financially by the West Seattle stub. Build downtown and Ballard first, then come back to West Seattle.

    2. A simple requirement for businesses over a certain size to buy free transit passes for their employees would be tantamount to a head tax to fund transit, but would likely play better politically.

      2. Martin made this exact point on a recent podcast. He proposed it in the context of making local transit free, so that transit is free for the users but transit agencies don’t suffer from lost revenue.

    3. STB in the past has said we don’t want to tax things we want to encourage. Example, we don’t want to tax/license bicyclists because we don’t want to discourage that activity. So if the more we tax something, the less of it we get, doesn’t that apply to jobs, as well? BTW, there already is a defacto transit head tax. It’s called the sales/MVET, and property tax. 90% of transit funding comes from these taxes, and the more jobs there are, the higher the tax revenue from these sources.

      Sam. Commenter of the Year, 2013, 2015, 2016.

    5. I think it would go over like a lead balloon. The main objection to the head tax was that it was a head tax. Yeah, there were concerns about spending the money wisely (since there was little evidence that we’ve done that in the past) but mainly it was about the tax. A head tax for the CCC would probably be horribly unpopular (personally I think any tax for the CCC would lose at the ballot box) while a head tax for speeding up ST3 projects would do better. But folks would also question why is it OK to have a head tax on transit projects, but not the homeless. I really think head taxes are dead in this city — for good reason. They are one of the most regressive taxes imaginable. The city got away with them in the past because they were small and practically unnoticeable. But as a way to raise a substantial amount of money, they are a terrible idea. (I know we have few alternatives, but still).

      1. the city of Redmond imposes an employer tax and uses it for transportation. TriMet is funded partly by an employer tax. yes, it would be very difficult. ST may have latent authority for a low rate.

      2. ST’s potential revenues include a head tax, which it doesn’t want to use, for the same reason. A head tax is seen as a tax on jobs and a bad climate for business.

  4. Off topic but huge news. Vancouver BC city council last night voted to allow duplexes in all single family neighborhoods.

    1. And Portland is on its way to doing the same.

      Why can’t we have nice things like that in Seattle? I don’t see any reason to think our NIMBYs are more militant than those in Portland and Vancouver.

      2. HALA is not nearly ambitious enough, as it leaves the majority of the single family zones alone. It is a total cop-out to wealthy reactionary homeowners.

        I’m talking about straight-up abolishing single family zoning like our Cascadia neighbors are.

      3. If I remember correctly, allowing duplexes/triplexes in SF zones was an original HALA recommendation during the Murray administration, but the Lesser Seattle jerkoffs who live in the Seattle Times comment section collectively soiled themselves and the recommendation was withdrawn.

      4. I have to say that single-family-only zones are the basic bane of mostly post-WWII land use regulation.

        1. In the days before zoning, it was common to have at least two units on a lot. Whether it’s the triples in Boston or servant/slave quarters in New Orleans, it’s common historically to have this.

        2. Other cultures encourage extended family communal housing. It’s very typical in India and found in many countries around the world. The denial of this option could actually be considered discriminatory to residents from other cultures.

        3. Housing independent elderly relatives or single adult children is a major challenge for many, and denying families the option of an additional unit is a major societal financial burden.

        4. Regulating illegal extra units is time-consuming and cumbersome, and the easy availability of microwaves, hot plates, refrigerators and door locks means that many de facto extra units exist — and may be a hazard because so many of these illegal units are not properly meeting other building codes because the owners can’t have an extra unit. Legalizing them would seem to make our housing stock more up-to-code and put neighbors less at risk.

        It’s time to remove this zoning restriction anywhere. It’s genesis is the “we don’t want THOSE people” living near us prejudices of 100 years ago and it’s as naive as prohibition was.

      5. >mostly post-WWII land use regulation.

        Nah. The stench goes way further back than that.

        After the Supreme Court struck down racially-based zoning restrictions in *1916* (in Buchanan v Warley), planners invented single-family zoning to essentially continue racially-based zoning while seeming ostensibly race-neutral. Seattle’s major downzoning, for instance, happened in 1923.

        And today, Seattle’s “progressive” homeowners are trying their best to make sure that a racist zoning code written by racists for racist purposes continues to be the law of the land.

      6. Pat: Thanks for the local history lesson that I didn’t know — and for being more directly blunt than I dared to be.

      7. Al. S: if you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading The Color of Law. I’m reading it right now and it’s making me mad as hell.

      8. It is because Murray had no balls. Sorry for the bawdy language, but the guy obviously was a creep who wilted under the slightest push back. He completely ignored the fact that the projects we all wanted for MoveSeattle (projects that would dramatically speed up transit in this city) would cost way more than what they budgeted. Rather than increase the size of the measure, or cut something else, he simply faked it. He never pushed for a more urban light rail system, preferring instead to kowtow to Constantine and the rest of the board as they continued their love affair with West Seattle (and future Burien) rail.

        With HALA he immediately removed the (D)ADU provision that would have liberalized housing in single family areas. This was from his own committee, that had spent months working out a compromise. This happened despite the fact that every politician who ran against increased density got destroyed in the election (with the possible exception of Herbold, who was running against someone with a similar approach). Murray just didn’t want the controversy, even though it is highly likely that the vast majority of the city wanted those provisions and then some. While technically not quite the same as allowing duplexes, I think from a practical standpoint it would have been very similar.

        The problem isn’t the voters, it is the politicians. As with other issues (e. g. marijuana legalization) they are simply too conservative. They are behind the times — way behind.

      9. It seems like the only politician who cares about this stuff at all is O’Brien. Maybe an organized campaign to get other city council members to care could work, but I’m finding it difficult to know what to advocate for and how.

      10. Excellent discussion. I read Rothstein’s book (“The Color of Law”) earlier this year and highly recommend it to all who are interested into taking a deep dive into the subject matter. As Pat pointed out above, the roots of these racially motivated policies go back a long way and are directly connected to the SF zoning landscape we have all over this country still to this day.

      11. “Dead End” by Benjamin Ross also gets into the racist history of zoning. It started in the 1880s with private covenants that disallowed useful animals (chickens, pigs) and only allowed useless animals (dogs, cats). They built the developments on the edge of town with curving roads so that only people with cars could access them. And they disallowed apartments, to exclude lower-income people. But covenants didn’t have the force of law so zoning was invented. At first the courts were suspicious of it because it limited landowers’ rights, but finally they accepted it as long as every use was allowed somewhere and it appeared on its face to be balanced (accommodating all demographics somewhere). This dovetailed with FHA loans after WWII, which areas with more than a quarter of minorities were excluded from (=redlining). Ellis says zoning has a weak constitutional footing and cities are afraid to bring it to court in case it gets struck down. But for now it exists. Also in the postwar era, cities became enamored with Le Cornusier’s idea of every activity in a different zone: housing and schools, retail, industry, and government. Under the guise of keeping polluting factories away from residential areas (which they could already do under public-health law), they zoned not only industrial districts but also single-family and multi-family districts. And those single-family districts bear a remarkable resemblance to the exclusive developments in the 1880s.

    1. https://q13fox.com/2018/09/19/man-cited-for-not-paying-link-fare-makes-scene-gets-trampled-as-he-hops-on-another-train/

      1. Who eve heard of this website?

      2. How do we know the guy behind the camera is really even there, let alone yelling in real-time?

      3. Since we can barely see the guy who’s the subject of this whole event, how do we know he wasn’t getting taken down for interfering with somebody else’s rights, like right to not get fired for being late to work?

      4. And since the first links in the text take you nowhere…any chance we’re looking at the latest animal cruelty: Fox Faking!

      The giant chicken conglomerate led by Tyson Foods has joined forces with the fur industry to turn our population into fox-haters by gluing fake fur red onto rats, dunking them vats of live rabies bacteria, blow-drying them and hiring them to the newsroom at …

      RIGHT! The Seattle Times! OK, Sam, prove it’s not true. The giant red creature that just wiggled loose from its hook on the mirror in a certain Chief of State’s bedroom is heading for you, foaming like it swallowed a can of shave cream. You’ve got fifteen seconds left to set us straight!

      This time…hope the link works!

      That Famous Mark Imitator Mark

      ,

  6. I can’t help but scratch my head why — after getting two light rail stations given to them by us voters in the northwest and southeast quadrants, UW puts out a plan to focus more density in the southwest and northeast quadrants. Of course, the plan also avoids better connectivity to the two Link stations in addition to building more buildings further from Link stations.

    Will any UW alums in office ever question the suburban office park design of their alma mater beyond bragging about reducing the number of unused parking spaces?

    1. That’s where the space is, and historical buildings and open space aren’t. It has been the UW’s intention for years to build in south campus and the Montlake parking lot. The UW master plan was discussed here a couple years ago. And the stations are both out of the way from a university standpoint, in the farthest corners. And the Burke Museum, the closest part of campus to U-District Station, is getting a big renovation.

    2. I actually think the major growth proposed around South campus actually does a good job justifying the UW Husky stadium station as more than just a stadium station.

      The U-District location is in an excellent location for serving the dense areas of the U District neighborhood, of which west and central campus are only a part of the station walkshed.

      Northeast campus is indeed not well served by Link, but given that’s mostly parking lots right now I htink that’s reasonable.

    3. My criticism is just as much about unimproved Link access as it is building new buildings. A pedestrian circulation component to get anyone to and from Link is badly needed to make this plan whole.

      As it is, the unaddressed assumption is that waiting at crosswalks at intersections and having to walk up to 20 minutes is true and good. UW only has shuttles for mobility-restricted students or to off-campus partnering facilities. Contrast that with the comparably-sized universities in the Big 10, most of which have had large, free campus shuttles available to everyone for decades.

      1. It’s a 10 minute walk from 15th and Pacific to either UW or U-District station, with most of the proposed West and South campus areas closer to one or the other. Expanded bike/scooter share would cut that time down by a lot. That’s not so bad. The CTA Purple Line was 10 minutes west of campus where I went to school, and no one ever complained about it being too far.

      2. >> It’s a 10 minute walk from 15th and Pacific to either UW or U-District station …

        In downtown Seattle, it is less than a ten minute walk from one station to the other, let alone a spot half way in between. The UW, like downtown, should have urban stop spacing. Yes, students (and faculty) will probably walk, but they shouldn’t have to walk so far when it is one of the most popular areas in the state, and certainly one of the most popular that Link will serve.

      3. FWIW: “The University shall upgrade the campus gateway at 15th Ave NE/NE 43rd Street as
        adjacent sites redevelop to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and, without undertaking an obligation to act, consult with SDOT to identify opportunities to implement the U District Urban Design Framework streetscape concept plan connection between this campus entrance and the new U District light rail station.” The 43rd Ave. gateway is a 3 minute walk and Red Square is a 10 minute walk from where it looks like the U District station Brooklyn Ave exit will be. The walk back in the evening is slightly uphill, though. The entire “Innovation District” where I work will be within a ten minute walk. My walk will get even shorter if we get the new building;).

      4. UW had disability-only shuttles when I attended but I thought it had omnibus shuttles now. When I interviewed for a job that was split between two parts of campus, they mentioned that I could take the shuttle between them. There are evening student shuttles to the northern U-District. And there’s the Harborview shuttle which anyone can use.

      5. “It’s a 10 minute walk from 15th and Pacific to either UW or U-District station”

        There are buses every few minutes.

    4. The problem is the Link stops, not the growth at the UW. As Mike said, that is where they can grow, and the result will be a more urban campus. It is just too bad that there are only three stops. As AJ said, some of the growth is actually relatively close to the existing station, making one of the worst possible UW locations for a stop a little bit better.

      The original plan was better, or course, but got shot down because of concerns with physics research (if I remember right). Then ST got cheap. There should be three stations, with the third at around 40th and University Way (the Ave.). Both the university and ST are to blame, although I put more of the blame on ST. The university operates like a business (which I know is difficult to fathom, but it does). When you start thinking of it as a self interested business with its own CEO and large divisions (such as hospitals) and not a noble institution dedicated to the advanced of human knowledge, then their motivations become clearer. Like any business, at some point the government has to apply a little muscle, and force them to do things they are uncomfortable with in the short run, but make them happy in the long run. That means using all your resources (especially the press) to add good stations there.

      That didn’t happen in the past, but it sounds like the city council is doing that now.

      1. With Link as a fixed assumption, shouldn’t this new UW Master Plan be designing explicitly for it? It’s the biggest circulation system change ever to happen to UW. It really warrants a deliberate, new approach to reaching the stations. There are many things that UW could have looked at:

        1. A free driverless shuttle track on Montlake to the NW campus area with mini-driverless shuttles.

        2. A pedestrian capital plan that includes covered moving sidewalks, either at the surface or in a cut-and-cover corridor.

        3. A pedestrian capital underground plan that connects with the Link mezzanines at U-District and UW Stations. It could include hourly restrictions to make sure that they stay safe.

        4. An early N 45th subway bore between U-District and a portal at the hill just west of Montlake near 45th.

        5. A basic free campus bus loop that circulates around the campus in both a clockwise and counter-clockwise connection. If we can put a bus shuttle on the Waterfront, why not UW?

        6. New exclusive bus lanes to the UW station for use by UW shuttles and Metro buses.

        The plan’s silence is deafening.

      3. The Transportation Management Plan is nice — but it’s not a capital project. It’s not even a commitment to fund any capital project. It reads like a list of platitudes that “add” Link in places in a very generalized way. Even the new pedestrian “strategy” commits to only streetscapes, and even lumps Link access in with ADA improvements rather than separate them as two distinct strategies (which they clearly are); that combining shows how little UW seems to think about pedestrian access to Link.

      4. Yeah, definitely, which is why the city (as well as other groups) are pressuring the UW. But that doesn’t mean the development is bad, or in the wrong place. It only means that the city and the UW need to improve transit in the area (because the Link stops aren’t as good as they should be). To be clear, the U-District stop is just fine. But the Husky Stadium stop is terrible, and the lack of a stop between them is just as bad.

        I think it is quite likely that we won’t see anything as fancy as you suggest, but a continuation of what we have now. I expect as Link gets to Northgate, there will still be overlapping buses in the area (since terminating there makes sense, and like downtown, you want to go through to the other side). That means SR 520 buses, for example could start down by Husky Stadium, and end up at U-District Station. Likewise, buses from the north will go by the station, then swing through campus. There already are some bus only lanes, and that could increase.

        The one big improvement I could see is more off board payment in the area. Once you issue all students a free ORCA card (which is long overdue) they can tap them outside, and hop on any bus (which would be more effective than a circulator). I could even see a modern equivalent to a “free zone”. Just make the area all off board payment, and don’t enforce the rules in the zone. That way anyone could hop on a bus and ride through campus for free. Just make sure you get off as the bus leaves the area, or the fare enforcers will wrestle you to the ground and stomp on your glasses (sorry, bad joke — to be fair to the fair enforcers, they wrestled a screaming, belligerent rider and accidentally stepped on one of the enforcer’s glasses).

      5. @Al S
        I like idea #5. We had such a service at the university I attended in NY back in the 70s. Many students used it to get from one area of campus to another as well as to get to off-campus housing and jobs that were along the route.

      6. It’s not promoted as well as it could be, but the UW does run a free shuttle every 15 minutes between the main hospital and Harborview, with stops in the “innovation district”, at UW Tower, and the Roosevelt Clinic. It’s geared more to medical staff and patients, but all they’d really need to do is add more busses to it and add a stop at UW station. I’m not as familiar with the north and northeast part of campus, though.

    1. Sam giggles with delight at the moment in the film when the wheels run over the elitist librul biker.

  8. The King5 story on viaduct closure traffic isn’t nearly as informative as the Kiro710 one. The KIRO story actually has real data on what happened regionally during the 2016 viaduct closure:

    https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/during-the-last-viaduct-closure-travel-times-soared-and-bus-ridership-dipped/837754284

    The interesting thing is that during the last closure bus ridership actually fell 5-9% while congestion increased. The Metro spokesman attempted to explain this by saying that fewer people decided to come downtown during this period and thus bus ridership was lower.

    However, during the same period Sounder and Link LR saw ridership INCREASE by 5-10%. So clearly the argument that fewer people are heading downtown didn’t apply to people riding the rails.

    I postulate that the increase in rail ridership was due to a realization by the citizenry that the rail mode is independent of road congestion and thus not affected by the viaduct closure the same way that a bus stuck in traffic would be. Effectively they choose the unaffected mode, which is rail.

    This is good news for the January viaduct closure. Sound Transit and Metro can both help alleviate congestion during the closure by starting a PR campaign to stress to the affected population that rail will remain relatively unaffected by the closure and is thus a better commute choice.

    Additionally, Metro can further help by running special buses that intercept Link and Sounder outside the urban core and facilitate transfers to rail.

    1. I expect we’ll see a permanent increase in ridership on the water taxi, which is West Seattle’s only transit route currently unaffected by vehicle traffic.

      I’m curious if they had enough buses available to run all the normal RapidRide runs during the January viaduct closure? The detour is much, much slower, and since the buses basically circulate back from their terminus, it would naturally take several more buses running the route to maintain the same frequency at rush hour. If even 1 or 2 of the runs “disappeared” due to the slower run time, that would register as a 5% ridership decline.

      They’ve mentioned ramping up the number of buses after the viaduct closure but it’s hard to imagine they have enough trained operators and coaches to actually maintain current frequency on routes like C and 120. Their own schedules predict about 11-15 extra minutes traversing the distance from WSB to downtown, almost doubling it (and this is just a forecast). Most buses leaving the peninsula at rush hour now are overcapacity, so any decrease in total buses per hour leaving WS in the mornings will mean commuters getting bumped, again registering as a decrease in ridership just due to the supply side, as on the demand side we’ll still be filling every square inch of bus space Metro can give us.

      1. They’ll just pull drivers from lower-volume routes. These days the 131 southbound only shows up half of the time at the end of the line in Burien, the rest are ‘scheduled’ trips that just never show up.

  9. Well, thanks to Sea-Tac Airport for one thing: for project management, it makes Sound Transit look pretty stellar. Real standard “template”, though, especially some or world’s best paid managers in a fight that’d embarrass angry third-grade boys.

    But unless I missed it, one crown jewel for this kind of thing. Who’s project Leader? Amount of time since I’ve heard that term even mentioned is probably same as the years our country’s been falling apart at exactly this level. Whatever their salary, would be much lower than average consulting fee.

    Ayn Rand may have been an ideological wingnut as writer, but her formula for character description was powerful. Character Sea-Tac needed would have a cleft chin and be named “Hank Rearden.” People in charge now would have been weak with a wrinkled suit and named “Wesley Mouch.”

    Early on, during a presentation of the Regional Transit Project that became Sound Transit, someone in the audience at question and answer time asked the group: “Who is the leader of this project?” Answer: “Well, instead of putting this burden on one person…a committee of officials will manage the project.”

    Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, alongside my friends Ayn, Hank, and Wesley, I let my case rest. In peace.

    Mark

  10. I really hope nobody blames the CCC and the Downtown Seattle Association for each other’s position on the streetcar. Maybe it’s guilt about sitting in front of the radio in 1951 being indignant about what the Chamber of Commerce used to do to the heroic sheriff.

    Fact was that chambers of commerce were some of the main heroes of the land (First Nation murderer) Gene Autry represented in hot cereal commercials. They didn’t think the Founding Fathers would’ve had any trouble with Marshal Wyatt Earp making cow-hands in town for the weekend leave their Colts and Remingtons in return for a claim check.

    Anybody remember “Cat Ballou?” (Wow! Jane Fonda looked beautiful on a horse.)Lee Marvin played a great alcoholic hired guard. But showed why Wyatt Earp’s bosses had no trouble with limited no-carry firearms. They’d all had at least one investor shot and killed in the name of being drunk and having their civil-war percussion revolver fall out of their pants and kill their most promising investor.

    They were always behind streetcars too, the newer-fangled the better.

    Mark Dublin

    Which also held for the First Nations’ clans that lost the war to European-descended aggression. Every tribe had one too.

  11. This article goes into more detail about the UW plans for growth: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-could-push-uw-to-slash-car-commutes-build-staff-housing-as-part-of-high-rise-growth-plan/

    It isn’t just the city council that is pressuring the UW, but public interests groups as well.

    They are talking about a lot of growth. This is why it is nuts that ST still insists on an outdated “everyone is just heading downtown” approach to transit. Lots of people from Ballard will go to school or work at the UW as well as Northgate (assuming it adds office towers). Similarly, lots of people from the U-District and places north (Roosevelt, Northgate, etc.) will work in Ballard and Fremont (they are building an office building at 15th and Market as I write this). It is really a bad idea to depend on the slow 44, or a major detour to connect those areas.

    1. The larger truth is that we really should be asking why UW is planning so much growth at its Seattle campus, as opposed to UW Tacoma (with Tacoma Link and a Link extension to nearby Tacoma Dome in the works). It would also be connected to Link. It would provide that part of the state with a larger four-year campus (like Evergreen State was originally intended to be). Nearby housing for students would be much cheaper. There are about 2 million residents who live in South King, Pierce, Thurston and Kitsap that could really benefit from making UW-Tacoma a school with 25,000 students. Even Link would benefit, as those students that would use Link would generally be traveling in the non-peak direction. Keep in mind that many of these new UW-Seattle buildings are about the same distance from a Link station as UW-Tacoma is from a future Tacoma Dome Station — and they have Tacoma Link streetcar already in place to connect them!

  12. Since this is an open thread…

    Well, it’s now Sep 20th and I decided to check today to see if Sound Transit has published its Q2 2018 financial statement.

    Nope.

    The second quarter ended on June 30.

    The agency’s quarterly financial reports are sorely lacking (that’s another matter entirely) as it is, so the long delay in getting them published is pretty pathetic.

  13. Can they just tear that viaduct down now? Just visited from Portland with my family last weekend, and trying to walk from King St. Station to the ferry was a bit of an ordeal with all of the closures. When can I expect the waterfront to have pedestrian access from points south again? We’d like to come back at some point next year. According to the schedule, they show the first half of 2019 as teardown time, followed by almost two years of “connections”. What does that even mean?

      1. It looked like it was. Google didn’t recommend that in its walking directions, as it was not the most direct. Will the walkway even be open while they are tearing down the viaduct?

      2. Doubtful, but with the several thousand people that use it at peak period you would hope they would come up with something. We can hope they will have the waterfront shuttle operating while that is going on, but I’m not too optimistic.

        When the seawall thing was going on just about the only way to get there was by taxi. Supposedly there was some sort of pedestrian route but I never found it. A bicycle taxi guy offered to get me there for $10 instead (he told me $20 but I only had $10 cash on hand).

      3. I’m assuming they will tear down the walkway with the viaduct and build a new one. There is a walkway in the waterfront renderings.

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