- Car tabs in the legislature
- Transportation bill in the legislature (5:05)
- ST3 costs (22:39) Note: after recording, Sound Transit verified that the cost estimate applies to the representative alignment.
- Next steps for housing affordability (30:50)
- Delridge, Rainier, and the state of RapidRide (37:23)
9 Replies to “Podcast #75: Scrooge McDuck Vault”
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RE RapidRide design: I would think that the value of bus lanes and signal priority is related to stop spacing. For example, if the RapidRide stops are relatively close, a bus lane is more valuable but complex signal priority beyond the next stop isn’t practical. In contrast, wide spacing like a Link line could let buses move quickly down the street and even share lanes with traffic (as long as buses could jump ahead of cars with a short bus lane at each stop) with signal priority working for a longer distance. As RapidRide matures, how each spacing is set will influence what works best.
So a good topic for a future podcast: What spacing should each specific RapidRide service segment be? Should we pursue bus priority and bus lane needs but not call them actual RapidRide? Conversely, should we look at some routes that have had priority upgrades and add RapidRide branding to them? Should we better “brand” what RapidRide generally means or keep the definition so vague that almost any frequent route could be dubbed RapidRide?
TLDR – did we find the vault???
I suggest you try Frank’s backyard.
Per the usual, I enjoyed the podcast. This one had quite a few great topics.
Frank made a side comment about the cost of an ADU being 80k which has little to do with the topic being discussed (sorry), but I thought I would offer that my experience as an architect designing a few has proven 80k to be a gross underestimate. While I would like for it to be 80k, even for a basic design, the reality is the market for labor and materials is much more expensive.
Thanks! Yeah, I pretty much made that number up (although I feel like I’ve seen it bandied about in documents somewhere). Email frank@stb if you want to talk more, I’d love to know the gory details!
Some detail on the larger road projects in the package for Puget Sound:
The US2 rebuild between Everett & Lake Stevens: 2 lanes to 3 lanes each way, so might get some multimodal goodies like a bike lane and HOV lanes; I believe it will look a lot like the SR520 floating bridge rebuild.
SR522 and SR18 widening projects will eliminate (some?) of the 2 lane sections so the highways are uniformly 4-lanes wide. Assume will be 2-GP lanes.
I would disagree that the SR522 is in an area where “no one takes the bus.” While the widening is occurring in Maltby, which is very rural & hard to serve, buses coming to/from Monroe will benefit from removing the chokepoint. To me, Monroe is an exburb worth serving with good transit; it really isn’t much further from Seattle than other cities that currently have good commuter bus/rail options like Gig Harbor or Lakewood.
Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but I do know a little about the SR18 project.
The last update I saw still had the project as pretty limited. It was mostly a rebuild of the I90-SR18 interchange with a diverging diamond, and any excess money used to widen SR18 to 4 lanes (2 each direction) as far as possible. They never had plans to go very far because the money just wasn’t there. The aspirational goal was to go as far as the bridge over the Raging River (about 2 miles or so), but the bridge was always going to be too expensive to replace.
Unfortunately, part of the project involves relocating a WSP weigh station, which is turning out to be a pretty contentious issue in North Bend (the proposed new location). That seems to be delaying things as well as eating up more of the budget than anticipated. So in the end, unless additional funding is secured I don’t think we’ll see anything much beyond the interchange.
After one of their employees and her daughter were killed in an accident on SR18 last year, the Snoqualmie Casino offered up $1 million to jump start the process. I don’t know how far that has moved along or if the money was ever accepted.
If I remember correctly, the section or SR18 from I90 to Issaquah-Hobart Road had 7 fatalities in 2018.
I think the new package under consideration would fund a new bridge over the Raging River, which is why it would be one of the larger ticket items (though still much smaller than I5 or US2)
The Connecting Washington package funded the new DD interchange at I90, which does include a bit of widening of 18 south of the interchange, but Goonda is correct it’s a small bit.
Love the podcast. Still hard to hear Frank, especially when my bus gets on the freeway. I’ve switched from ear buds to full-enclosure headphones and have the volume turned all the way up.