Month: June 2019

Overview of the current state of high speed rail in the United States.

This is an open thread.

The congestion pricing study attempted to apply objective criteria to various options. Regardless of the policy merits, it’s a good bet that the choice will be the one with a political coalition to pass it. Who wins and who loses from such a plan?

For bus riders, pricing is overwhelmingly positive. Fewer cars means buses will be faster, and usually the fee is used to add transit. Perhaps the only downside is more crowded vehicles.

For bicyclists and pedestrians, it’s unclear. The zone would have lower car volumes but higher speeds. But if many people are diverted to bikes, numbers increase safety.

That’s a good chunk of who’s going downtown, but the attitudes of drivers are going to be important. For pricing to work, someone has to be deterred off the road, and those people aren’t going to be happy with the deterrence.

• Lynnwood to improve trail access to its station.
• Assurances that Seattle decisions will not affect ST3 delivery ($) in Everett.
• Up to 900 bike lockers coming to Sound Transit stations.
• Statewide pedestrian and bike fatalities going in the wrong direction.
• Pierce Transit thinking about 3 additional BRT lines ($) to add to the one under construction to Spanaway.
• Interview with Sam Zimbabwe.
• Anti-MVET lawsuit grinds on.
• Improve your commute ($).
• Paris’s RER A carries 1.4m riders a day(!) With a tourist’s perspective, it’s easy to miss that the main workhorse there isn’t the Metro at all.

This is an open thread.

David Cole has a largely correct takedown of Sound Transit’s traditional pound-foolish approach to escalators:

Wherever long escalators are required to travel between the train platform and street level, redundant escalators should be provided. This could have been accomplished with a single bank of at least four escalators, or two banks of at least three escalators, etc. With a bank of four escalators, one escalator being out of service would be a minor inconvenience at worst. Even with half the escalators out of service, access to and from the station could be maintained …

Beyond the number of escalators at each station, there is also the issue of the escalators themselves. Broken escalators have been a near-constant bane to riders using the Capitol Hill and UW stations since their opening in 2016, to the point that Sound Transit is already planning to replace all 13 escalators at UW less than four years after that station’s completion.

But Sound Transit apparently felt differently back when planning the Capitol Hill and UW stations. According to a source familiar with the design process who declined to be named for this article, Sound Transit insisted on specifying medium-duty “better” escalators at these stations as a cost-saving measure, and then cobbled together a myriad series of customizations to bring them up to heavy-duty standards. As we now know, the reliability of these Frankenstein escalators hasn’t exactly been stellar, and Sound Transit will soon spend a fortune to replace them with more robust, off-the-shelf models. Some old adage comes to mind about how it’s better to do something right the first time than to do it over again.

If you’re like me, you’ve lost track of all the near-term projects that were supposed to get downtown through a period with multiple disruptive construction projects. It doesn’t help that there’s a near-term set of improvements and other longer-range plans that one can confuse.

Luckily, the City Council mandated that SDOT provide a quarterly report on how the near-term OCC stuff is doing. Here’s a summary of the bus stuff:

• 5th/6th bus lanes: two blocks on 5th and eight on 6th, done and on-budget.
• Montlake Triangle: shorter walking distances, a short bus lane, and better turns for buses: on schedule for September. UPDATE: Metro says they’re not going to have buses using these till March 2020.
• a one-block 4th bus lane and one queue jump: delayed from March to June due to building construction; added savings will get us another queue jump.
• 2nd/4th signal improvements to speed up buses: done and on-budget.
• 3rd Ave ORCA Readers/All-door boarding: a year late (to March 2020) and $3m overbudget. “Metro and the design consultant were not familiar with SDOT’s sidewalk restoration standards.” They’re using hand-scanners for now, and savings elsewhere will cover the budget gap.
• Bigger bus stops and rider environment improvements in Chinatown and Pioneer Square: on track for this September.

On the bike front, all three of the big downtown projects — PBLs on Pike/Pine and 4th, plus the 2nd Ave Extension bike lane — are either behind schedule or threatening to become so.

There are plenty of pedestrian and other programs as well, which you can read about in the report.

This is an open thread.