- Sound Transit has a new plan to get rid of Rainier Valley surplus property, and wants your input.
- Free waterfront shuttle extended through October 31st.
- Yellow school buses also have a driver shortage, and a reliability problem ($). Bus lanes would help!
- ST officially finding a new name for University Street Station.
- Bill making bike lanes the default passes Council unanimously ($); Mayor promises to sign. Our story here.
- Ill-timed fare enforcement ($) from Sound Transit.
- Does Sodo zoning need a revision?
- Car tab lawsuit headed to the Supreme Court.
- New ST station art.
- A superblock on Capitol Hill?
- Here come the Amtrak derailment lawsuits.
- Clallam Transit considers eliminating ads to avoid lawsuits.
- Spokane developer blames downtown crime on transit, wants to move transit center underground.
- Portland makes walking harder.
- How transportation is biased against women.
- Study: moving from at-large to district council seats — as Seattle did a few years ago — results in less housing. Locally, our remaining at-large members are the most forceful advocates for more housing.
- The NYT looks at scooters in San Diego
This is an open thread.
āSound Transit is still working out the details of a name change, according to spokesperson David Jackson.
But sorry, you can’t submit your own monikers.ā
Sound Transit continues to operate like the Peopleās Republic of China, ignoring direct public feedback and behaving with the suspense of palace intrigue.
Are we ok with this? Even zoos have contests to name animals.
“Next stop, Stationy McStationFace, doors to my right”
ngl I’d love to hear that announcement every day
Generally naming contests pre-choose a list of names that are acceptable and then hold a show vote (doesn’t really matter which name is chosen). Opening up a free for all is how you get names like Boaty McBoatface, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface
If we left it up to the public to decided names, we could have ended up with “The Station That Only Mercer Islanders Are Allowed to Use”.
lol I *wish* Sound Transit operated like the PRC. We’d have 500 stations by now.
Not sure why it’s even needing a change. If people get confused, then there’s more issues than just getting confused about which station to get off at. Maps are even visible while on the train.
There’s no cure for stupid, anyone with customer service experience can tell you people don’t read signs.
You design wayfinding for tourists and people who don’t know the system, not transit wonks.
@Brad. I would agree but I believe tourists are a little brighter than what people who are proposing the name change believe. Being a tourist on many systems around the world, they are very easy to figure out if you just do a little planning. Most systems operate very similarly. There are those exception but Seattle wouldn’t fall into an exception by any stretch of the imagination.
GK the very nature of the fact that you’re reading and commenting on Seattle Transit Blog indicates you’re one of the transit wonks Brad was talking about. I’m sure you can travel to most non-English speaking places and figure things out (nevermind that most places do a better job than we do) because you’re interested in public transit. Most people don’t give transit a second thought beyond how they get from A-to-B and many, in the US especially, never use it at all except when they travel.
And itās a mistake a person will only make once. Great learning opportunity. Heck, even put a sign in the station explaining why the street is called āUniversity Streetā.
To those saying that readers of this blog are more transit savvy and we canāt expect others to be as capable at navigating a system: donāt you think at this point we can expect the general population to use google? I have traveled in various foreign countries and just used google maps to give me transit directions. Pretty darn easy.
People will use Google, and Google will tell them to get of at University station (remember, normal human beings drop what seems to be unnecessary), and then they’ll see University St, and think “there’s that University station that Google was talking about”
It baffles me how people are so strongly opposed to little things that make the system easier to use and basically cost nothing.
Renaming the station has been a persistent public request ever since the station opened in 1990. Not everybody wants it changed but some people do. King County’s attitude was that it wouldn’t rename the station, so the protests eventually tired out to an occasional whimper. Now ST owns the DSTT and it has two other stations with University in the name, and some passengers assume “University” means the biggest university in the region, namely UW. As it happens, the original UW was located there a hundred years ago and the university still owns a few blocks there, thus “University” Street. But people expect a station named university to be the current university’s location, not a historical ghost of a university while the real university is somewhere else.
You may think the renaming is unnecessary, but others think it is necessary, and in the end it’s a judgment call. ST is siding with avoiding any possible confusion. Considering the other usability mistakes it makes, this is one good thing it’s doing. “Seneca Station” would be a simple, low-controversy solution, since the neighborhood doesn’t have a well-known consensus name. (The closest is “Financial District”.)
The article may be overstating it. ST asked for names for the ST2 stations. The issue is it can’t be something like “Amazon Prime Station” or “SuperLong Really Long Station Name” or “F*** U Station”. When ST asks for feedback on its initial suggestions it may have a write-in line for others, and you can always email suggestions to ST even if it doesn’t.
There’s nothing wrong with Boaty McBoatface. The sad thing is that Brits thought of it before Americans did.
Poor STA. It’s a shame that such a well run agency has to deal with dunderhead property developers who don’t understand transit.
Not taking public comment on the name change of University Street Station!?!? Terrible form, ST!
Anyway, I’ve always wanted that station name to be changed to Angeline Station or Princess Angeline Station. Daughter of Chief Sealth, our city’s namesake, used to live at the foot of the hill near there. It would be a great tribute to the city’s history, honor females in history, and create strong connection to place.
Yeah, if by “at the foot of the hill” you mean in a shack on the beach while the rest of her family was forced onto reservations so their resources could be exhumed and sold for someone else’s profit.
I’ll take whatever name they want to use. Just give me a center platfrom at ID/CS and same-grade platform-to-platform transfers between the two ID/CS stations.
Want to be careful, J. Read somewhere that among the Chief’s and Angeline’s people, it was considered impolite to disturb the resting place of one’s ancestors by over-mention of their names.
But as a matter of architecture, why not simply say “Benaroya Hall?” The concert hall and the station already share at least one building with each other.
Mark Dublin
Most people from out of state would not know what Benaroya Hall, much less where. Downtown or Business District would be much better. The standard is landmarks and neighborhoods. Benaroya Hall is no landmark. Not even close. University Street is better than Benaroya Hall.
And Seneca Street is just as notable and has the additional benefit of not being potentially confusing with two other stations.
“Symphony Station” is my favorite name. Such a relaxing, artsy name would soothe the stresses of harried commuters even if they never go to the symphony. But it and Benaroya would probably run afoul of the “no private commercial name” rule.
“Most people from out of state would not know what Benaroya Hall, much less where.”
That’s OK, it would eventually become the name of the neighborhood, as Othello Station has partly done. If people don’t know where Benaroya Station is, they’ll look on a map and see it’s downtown. Or they won’t care because it’s not their station. But they won’t confuse it with something else, because there’s nothing else that sounds similar to Benaroya. The problem with “University Street Station” is it sounds like the name of a large institution that has a turnover of thirty thousand new students every four years, and thousands of visiting scholars, and people coming for conferences and football games.
“it would eventually become the name of the neighborhood”
That was my reason for favoring Brooklyn over U District station. Brooklyn was actually the neighborhood’s name in the streetcar days. How many U stations do we need in close succession?
U-District is such a strong name now it won’t be superceded, and the presence of a large university will make people spontaneously recreate it. In contrast, Hillman City and Brighton have been practically forgotten, and even people who know the names don’t know where their boundaries and centers are. So Othello is the fringe between Columbia City and Rainier Beach, and with the new station and growing urban village it needs a distinct name, and Othello is an easy name to choose.
I have the same problem with Chicago because as a visitor I don’t know where the boundaries of Lakewood, Wreigleyville, Boys’ Town, Uptown, Lincoln Park, etc, are, and none of them seem to have a denser center to say “Here I am”, so I tend to call them by their L station names: Fullerton, Belmont, Lawrence, Diversey.
I’m surprised ST still has surplus property from the Rainier Valley, the line that opened 10 years ago! Why sit on it so long? They’ve even sold the surplus Capitol Hill Station property before this (and they sat on that for 2 years).
Lack of interest from developers in the area? Which is unlike Capitol Hill, which I believe they consider it to be a real estate gold mine.
They had to wait a few years to get appropriate upzones, weak as those upzones are.
And this only resolves the develop-able parcels. There are at least a few little stubs where they tried to minimize the takings to expand MLK but then ended up with oddball slivers leftover. That for some reason have chain link fence around them, even as trains whiz by 30 feet away in a wide open median.
Oh interesting. For really small parcels, I would think that they might be able to find a use for it (e.g., a parking space for a light rail operations supervisor). But if any of them are near S. Graham street, it might make sense to make as much use of them as they can, and use them as staging areas for the Graham Street infill station construction. We’re already almost halfway from Link opening to the infill stations opening in 2031.
When the MLK segment was built in the mid 2000s ST’s philosophy was to have as small construction footprint as possible to take the fewest properties. The net result was several small, oddly-shaped, discontinuous parcels that were difficult to build on. Also, Link opened during the first year of the Great Recession, when all housing construction had halted for several years. Then there’s the lingering perception of Rainier Valley as unsafe so it wasn’t developers’ first choice. Then on top of all that was the zoning uncertainty. Would it be upzoned? How much?
sounds like the scooter companies in San Diego are showing their true colors. No resposibility to the communities they are ruining. Time to kill the pilot but the council is too busy banning natural gas and caving to the lycra pants special interest groups. Bye bye obrien!
“No resposibility to the communities they are ruining.”
Sounds like every automaker! Let’s kill that pilot too.
I think this 100-year experiment allowing human-operated motor vehicles in dense cities has gone on long enough.
“caving to the lycra pants special interest groups”
Considering how much carbon emissions it saves , this is a good thing.
Wrong. Many of these street redesigns lead to massively more idling of cars stuck in traffic, creating more carbon emissions, while having, at very best, an extremely minor impact on the number of people biking.
Also, the folks clad in Lycra (Iām one of them) donāt really care about bike paths. Many of us are more than happy (and even prefer) to ride in traffic. The bike lanes are for everyone else.
“an extremely minor impact on the number of people biking”
That’s because there are so few of them and they don’t connect major trip pairs completely. The Burke-Gilman Trail is highly successful because it connects southeast Ballard, Fremont, Northlake, and UW, and is a popular way to get to Children’s, Sand Point, and Kenmore.
The Netherlands has an abundance of complete corridors like that, and as a result a third of the population bikes. It wasn’t always that way. In the 1970s it was headed in the same car-oriented direction as the US, but a public outcry over children being killed by cars caused it to prioritize bike lanes instead, and eventually it became convenient enough for grandmothers to ride to the store so they started doing so. We need to move in the right direction, and every increment helps.
The “lycra lobby” is a shorthand for vehicular cyclists who poo-poo protected bike lanes because they’re macho (the equivalent of a raised-up truck), but that completely leaves out the grandparents and children and timid riders; i.e., most of the population. That’s who we need to support and who the Netherlands are supporting.
The Elliott Bay trail through the Port property from Magnolia to the north end of Elliott Bay Park has also been popular in the past. The bad news is that the north end closes as sunset which is 4:30 pm in the winter. I was impressed that a trail that is so inaccessible (eg, it’s a 10 minute detour on two bridges to get from the Magnolia bridge to the trail. leaving the southern end of Magnolia with only limited access) was so popular.
With the construction at Expedia blocking the Elliott Bay segment of the trail and causing a detour that is slightly shorter, I’m not sure if this has impacted the amount of use. I’ve not been able to get over to that area of Seattle for quite a while.
I know my points aren’t popular on here, but it’s good to have a variety of opinions, especially in the sound chamber that people tend to live in today. :) So if you don’t want to read it, please skip it!! :-D
“How Our Transport System is Biased Against Women”
Trying to make an issue about everything.
“In her book Invisible Women, published earlier this year, Caroline Craido Perez uncovers the way designing essentially everything with the default user being an averaged size man puts women at risk.”
If you really want to find issue with something, then don’t leave out anyone who is not an average sized man. I wonder if she realized there are women who are the same size as the “average sized man.” Or if she realized that there are men who are not the “average sized man.” There will always be room for complaining about something. Should every house be made custom for the occupants? What if they move? I grew up with a family of 7-footers. They had to build their own house with doors higher, ceilings higher, find bigger chairs, etc. If we made everything fit everyone it would be unrealistic. We can always find a group who doesn’t fit something correctly. If we made cars as the average sized woman, then what? Should companies be make average sized women cars, average sized men cars, short women cars, short men cars, tall woman cars, tall men cars, skinny women cars, skinny men cars, etc, etc. She can choose a car that has better safety ratings for her size. While I think cars should be safe for all occupants, I do think that strictly harping on what side diminishes her argument since there’s far more at stake. I’m not even average sized.
She states that young men are 2.2 times more likely to have a fatality than young women. So if the rate is currently 2.2 times more with the car safety measures being for average sized men, then how much higher would it be if the safety measures are for average sized women? Maybe she thinks that would be better, wouldn’t doubt it.
And about car seats. Just having a baby, there are many resources to ensure there are no mistakes. In fact, your local fire department will give you lessons for free. You can go multiple times…for free. The article / book seems to think that parents / caregivers are unintelligent and can’t figure it out on their own. Parents should be responsible. We can’t always pass the buck to someone else, which people fall in love with doing. What? I need to be responsible?
About strollers. Strollers aren’t the only way to transport an infant or baby. There are other more practical ways, such as an ergonomic carrier. Not everything has to be easy. If we focused on “easy” for everyone, it would be chaos. “European buses have spaces automatically to accommodate something as common and practical for bus riders as a stroller with special areas near the front.” I wonder where she rode a bus in Europe. Very much an assumption and a broad statement as I’ve been on countless busses that don’t have such a space. For one thing, they don’t have as many people using wheelchairs which take up a lot of space here.
Parking lots are not child friendly. Again, parents need to have some responsibility and if children were well disciplined there would be less “overwhelmed moms” as she says. But as we know, discipline is frowned upon. Kids shouldn’t be running around a parking lot, period. She didn’t mention, at least in this article (maybe in the book she did), back-up cameras are required on cars to prevent accidents with children when backing up, even in parking lots.
We know that walking can be dangerous at night for a woman. No doubt. But there are ways to help improve safety, but our state, like others, try to make it harder for a crucial protective measure. Another is that our state, and especially our city, likes to let criminals get off easy and back on the streets. This makes it even more dangerous for everyone, not just women and not just at night.
I could go on and on, but it seems she has a problem with men….and I’m sure I’ve got a few people’s feathers ruffled. haha :) Happy Thursday!
I wonder if she would also complain that the world is made for right handed people? No, probably not because there are about 23% more left handed men than left handed women.
“But what about men!!!!11” – completely missing the point
I don’t think I missed her point. Her point she tries to make is that women get the short end of the stick in everything from buying a house to driving a car. A “what about men!!!” comment shows what I motioned about a sound chamber, perfect example. Unfortunately, any critic of her statements would get accused of that, which is a dangerous place to be in as a society when someone can’t be critiqued.
My points were:
1) There will always be a group, whether a small group or large group, that will not fit perfectly into the parameters of what is being produced. It’s a fact of life. Ask anyone, there will always be something, whether it’s the stick shift being on the right side (in right-side driving countries) to spiral bound notebooks having the spiral on the left side to the shoes I really like don’t fit me well, and on and on. Everyone can’t be pleased and we shouldn’t try. And I made it clear that cars should be safe for everyone, without exception. This would include tall men, short women and everything in between.
2) People need to accept more responsibility instead of always finding someone else to pass it to, which has become a pastime to many. When people don’t take responsibility, especially for their own actions, is when we start seeing a”crisis” we see now. The moment we remove personal responsibility is when things go downhill.
3) Because of poor decisions by elected officials to reduce the penalties for those who commit crimes, everyone is at greater risk, especially women.
This is an unfortunately common All Genders Matter response to exposƩs regarding details of institutional sexism that are not typically seen by the still-dominant gender of society.
Maybe someone else will try to hold your hand through every point of the article, but I’m not going to. I’m not sure you have interest in seeing the point yourself, and dismissing them as you have done simply acts to maintain the status quo of inequality and inequity.
The “if you don’t agree with me, don’t read my post!!” is a sad admission that you’re not actually willing engage on this topic, but I appreciate the honesty.
I am willing, but I said that because generally people start calling out things like Barman did, which adds to the one-sided conversation. So I say that to avoid those types of responses, but wasn’t successful this time.
Maybe you would have a solution to the issue? One would be to ensure all sizes are tested. Big, small, wide, thin, aged, young, infant, etc. That’s what I would propose and would be surprised if it’s not already in place. I know they started testing other sizes in cars around 10 years ago, I think it was. What I don’t agree with is that it’s a man’s problem, which was the premise of the whole write-up. Maybe she should have provided some solutions instead. Which comes back to personal responsibility, let’s just yell about it and someone else can do it. I wonder what she would say about airplane seats.
Other points I made were about personal responsibility, or wanting a lack thereof, and poor governing decisions. We can discuss those too.
But I’d honestly like to hear some solutions you have. Being a parent of a baby and husband to a wonderful wife, I would want them both as safe as possible. So ideas and solution to how to make them safer are always welcome. Developing solutions are the only way to get things done.
@GK, I wrote a longer response but I’m not sure it’s worth continuing the walls of text.
The solutions are obvious; they’re all “listen to women”. What would make your wife and child feel safer in the situations examined by Angie Schmitt and Caroline Craido? Have you asked them?
There are real issues of accessibility and equity in being perpetuated in urban design, and you conflating them with handedness makes it really hard to believe that you have ever tried to understand these issues at all.
+1000 to Nathan Dickey
On average, men are more likely to be the size of an average man than a woman is.
Or maybe I just can’t understand math with my silly woman brain.
Your math is pretty good! :-) But keep in mind that it’s an average, so theoretically, there could be no man that fits the average, while there could be women that do. Average doesn’t necessarily that it fits most of that one group.
Ultra-simplified example: Two men, one 6’0 and one 5’0. The average is 5’6. Making something that would fit the average may not work for either person.
Oh, Good God, GK, you’ve lost the argument. Let me break out the puppets. The average person is female. I know, it is close, but really, look it up. So why are things based on the average male? Merely because the average person *in charge* is male. Split the difference — no one would mind. Base it on the average human being. But basing things *that everyone uses* on an average male is just assuming that the only person that matters is male. Historically speaking, sadly enough, this has been true. Men were in charge, and women endured shit for centuries. But now, oddly enough, they’ve had enough of that bullshit. Go figure. Next thing you know those ladies will want to do crazy shit, like vote.
If anyone is interested in the ways that product safety and design decisions are systematically biased against women, there is a good interview with the author, Caroline Criado Perez (her book is the basis of the Streetsblog article) on the 99% Invisible podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/invisible-women/
Thank you. The interview was far better than the written article. Very good listen. Guess that’s the problem of having a middle person writing an article and through what they hear. Although the swearing diminished the credibility! Very interesting that she pictured men in those jobs (lawyers, doctors, etc). Maybe that’s a British view?
I do think that this applies to more than just women, especially in the cases or cars. It applies to everyone who isn’t being factored into the data, and even if they are, nothing has been done with it.
The swearing diminished the credibility? How the fuck does swearing diminish credibility? I can understand why your sensitive ears couldn’t handle it (“Oh, I declare, such language”) but it sure as fuck doesn’t mean they aren’t tell the truth.
My online research is that a significantly higher percentage of women have arthritis. 1 in 4 adult women have an arthritis issue. That means more reliance on elevators and escalators. The standard ST practice of skimping on enough elevators and escalators (especially down escalators because walking down stairs is much more difficult and painful for more women than men) this has a gender bias.
As a woman sometimes standing near the front with the 6+ ft metal bar, it would be nice to have strap handles low enough so that using them doesn’t make me feel like I’m hanging from a cliff.
The last Page 2 post was in May. I’m disappointed in the lack of participation from many of you. Not many blogs allow you to write your own post. I’d like to see a new Page 2 post every month, and written by a wider variety of people.
Shoot me an email, Sam! Happy to set you up with an account.
Wait, there’s a waterfront shuttle? How long has that been there?
It sure would have been useful to know about that when I took a cruise a couple weeks ago, instead of trudging up to the 4th Ave bus stops 200 feet above the water.
And I looked at the KC metro service map, not there, I looked at Google transit, not there.
It’s a parking shuttle:
https://downtownseattle.org/parking/#!/shuttle
We’ve written about it previously:
https://seattletransitblog.wpcomstaging.com/2018/08/15/new-shuttle-pilot-serving-waterfront/
https://seattletransitblog.wpcomstaging.com/2018/10/06/waterfront-shuttle-restructures-grows-lives-on/
It’s a privately funded (not run by the city or county) temporary line. So it doesn’t show up on any transit maps. There are street signs for it, but they are very easy to miss (even more so with the Viaduct coming down over the summer) and the bus itself is just a short bus, so very easy to overlook.
3rd Avenue stops?
No, because I live in Tacoma, and non-Seattle buses run north on 4th and south on 2nd.
I took it once and wound up bailing and walking to King Street Station instead. Itās stuck in the same traffic mess as everything else is in that part of town.
The new station name is Seneca Station. Just saved you a million dollars. Problem solved. Move on.
Really good Roundup today, everybody. Good thing the lethal mass-pesticide industry doesn’t have the term patented out of existence. Or maybe they’re just waiting for the likes of us all to die of their star product.
Mistreatment from women? Throughout my life, individually and collectively, only unmixed unhappiness they’ve ever brought my way has had to do with the men whose company they were always choosing over mine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu8bsrP761s. Really wish the those guys’ “degree” had been half as high as the song said.
Also, the 1990’s were twenty years’ memory ago, but I don’t recall that mandatory ten year to life prison sentences for a couple grams’ cocaine possession made my command seat aboard the Route 7 feel any safer. May have been an accident of pharmaceutical color and not race prejudice that the powdered version, which was also white, drew so much lighter sentence.
But however much embarrassed Sound Transit deserves for taking kids’ ID after failing to send them their ORCA cards pales in comparison to the humiliation owed by current fare policy’s real passenger mistreatment:
Every one of those “free” passes exposes its user to a fine of $125, identical penalty to the most blatant willful evasion for attempting to “tap” the card “on” for next boarding after forgetting to “tap it off!” A mistake rendered long-term unavoidable by the pressure of trying to execute the right sequence under stressed rush-hour conditions.
Easy fix? If I buy a pass and don’t take a single ride on it, nobody has any problem dividing the money the system certainly does get to keep. How ’bout just doing the same for a card reader mistake? Should be a fare inspector’s dream: my possession of the pass being proof I don’t owe anything.
‘Nother little note. Rules give me, I think, an hour and a half LINK travel IF I DON’T TAP AGAIN AT ALL for ninety minutes! All I have to do is watch my watch and card will read good until the time it carries runs out.
And worst of all is reason given for a theft charge leveled by an agency with a month’s worth of my money in its pocket: Need to apportion my fare between the separate sub-agencies that Sound Transit’s whole presence was supposed to get out of the world’s own way.
For simplicity and fairness, a fare inspector’s dream. So for their sake more than mine, just make a pass a pass and be done with it. Any legal case history so far?
Mark Dublin
University Street Station is not a confusing name. It just isnāt. And if you are confused by it – then itās a great opportunity to learn something about Seattle. Should we rename Massachusetts St. because people might think they are in New England? What about Alaska Street? The list goes on and on.
So far all the proposed names are patently ridiculous. Waterfront station? Odd name for a station that isnāt on the waterfront and is essentially the same distance from the waterfront as the stations before and after it. Pike Place Station? I donāt know about you, but I get off at Westlake when I want to go to Pike Place Market.
This reminds me of the WASL. Rather than teach people something, just lower the standards and change the test.
I know people who have been told to get off at the University of Washington Station and left the station at University street to call and say “I think I’m here?” It’s a real problem; there is a lot to take in when new tourists arrive and having two (and soon three) stations with similar names on the same line is unnecessarily confusing.
Either change the name of the UW station to Husky Stadium or change University Street to Metropolitan or Seneca. I understand the desire to check the boxes to say “we went through public review to make this change” but it sure seems like a waste of time and money.
The results are in for Sound Transit’s ST3-funded $100 million System Access awards for 2019-2025 (i.e., the first round).
The agency received 53 applications from 33 jurisdictions requesting more than $86M. In the end, the Executive Committee moved forward with staff recommendations that will give awards to 27 jurisdictions related to 30 applications that will be fully or partially funded for a total amount of $40.6M across the Sound Transit District.
“Sound Transit Motion No. M2019-97
System Access Fund 2019 Awards
“This attachment identifies by subarea the jurisdictions, projects, amounts, and phases to be funded via the System Access Fund 2019 Call for Projects.
“Snohomish Subarea:
(Jurisdiction, Project Amount, Phase(s))
āŖCity of Edmonds, Citywide Bicycle Improvements, $1,850,000, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Everett, Everett Station Nonmotorized Access Improvements, $1,900,000, Construction
āŖCity of Lynnwood, Scriber Creek Trail Redevelopment, $2,500,000, Construction
āŖCity of Mountlake Terrace, Veteranās Memorial Park Light Rail Connector, $500,000, Construction
āŖCity of Mukilteo, 5th Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements, $764,000, Design
āŖSnohomish County, Ash Way Corridor Pedestrian and Bicycle
Improvements (partial award), $1,000,000, Design
“North King Subarea:
(Jurisdiction Project Amount Phase(s))
āŖKing County Metro, Secure Bicycle Parking Expansion and Related
Improvements, $100,000, Construction
āŖCity of Seattle, Judkins Park Station Access (for sidewalk upgrades, Hiawatha Place S staircase, and trail lighting), $2,400,000, Design, Construction
āŖCity of Seattle, Southeast Seattle High Priority Sidewalks and
Walkways (for S Henderson Street staircase), $900,000, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Shoreline, 148th Street Nonmotorized Bridge, $3,700,000 Design, Construction
“East King Subarea:
(Jurisdiction Project Amount Phase(s))
āŖCity of Bellevue, Eastgate Nonmotorized Access to Transit
Improvements (partial award), $1,000,000, Construction
āŖCity of Bothell, Downtown Bothell Nonmotorized Access Improvements (for 102nd Avenue NE improvements), $825,000, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Kenmore, Juanita Drive NE Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety
Improvements, $1,500,000, Construction
āŖKing County Parks, Eastrail: NE 8th Street Crossing (partial award), $3,000,000, Construction
āŖKing County Metro, Secure Bicycle Parking Expansion and Related
Improvements, $250,000, Construction
āŖCity of Redmond, 156th Avenue Cycle Track l, $1,165,242, Construction
āŖCity of Renton, S 7th Street Corridor Improvements (for multi-
use trail), $1,000,000, Design,
Construction
“South King Subarea:
(Jurisdiction Project Amount Phase(s))
āŖCity of Auburn, Regional Growth Center Access Improvements, $1,625,000, Design, Construction
āŖCity of Des Moines, Barnes Creek Trail South Segment, $1,985,000, Construction
āŖCity of Federal Way, 21st Avenue S/S 320th Street Signalization and
Pedestrian Improvements, $730,000, Construction
āŖCity of Kent, W James Street at 2nd Avenue N Pedestrian Crossing, $273,683, Design, Construction
āŖKing County Metro, Secure Bicycle Parking Expansion and Related
Improvements, $50,000, Construction
āŖCity of SeaTac, Station Intersection Pedestrian Safety Improvements (for SeaTac/Airport Station only; for pedestrian improvements connecting east), $500,000, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Tukwila, Nonmotorized Connections and Wayfinding for
Tukwila International Boulevard Station (for design phase), $369,000, Design
āŖCity of Tukwila, Tukwila Station Nonmotorized Connectivity and
Safety (for pedestrian signal on SR 181, improvements on Longacres Way, and Longacres Way/trail crossing), $2,064,000, Construction
“Pierce Subarea:
(Jurisdiction Project Amount Phase(s))
āŖCity of Bonney Lake, Elhi Hill Trail Staircase, $661,936, Design, Construction
āŖCity of Lakewood, 111th Street SW/112th Street SW Improvements, $1,040,000, Design, Construction
āŖPierce County, 112th Street Pedestrian Improvements, $2,000,000, Design, Construction
āŖCity of Puyallup, Bike Lane Expansions on W Stewart Avenue &
4th Street NW (for bike lanes on 4th Street NW), $155,995, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Sumner, Rivergrove Community Pedestrian Bridge, $452,000, Design
āŖCity of Sumner, Sounder Safe Sidewalk/Bike Programmatic
Enhancements (for bike lanes on Academy Street), $875,000, Design,
Construction
āŖCity of Tacoma, Hilltop Tacoma Link Extension Streetscape
Access Improvements, $3,500,000, Construction”
The full board will take a final vote later this month.
Lines could be built faster and cheaper if they just spent the money on trains, tracks and stations first. That’s the cake. The leftover money should be used for the icing but not until the cake is done.
Political buy in ain’t free.
This isn’t leftover money; the funding was provided for in the ST3 measure’s financial plan. With that being said, I understand and agree with your larger point about ST’s core mission.
In your bullet about the Study resulting in less housing – you missed the most important result of the study – that the housing that was built was more affordable. This tells me that the path to affordability is thru neighborhood representation!
Thanks for using my photo with credit. I’m rather happy with this one. Was able to capture one of the 2018 KCM NewFlyer buses with LED lights while a lot of moisture was in the night sky to show the rays of light.
I used a Nikon D7500 + Sigma 18-35mm ART lens to pull this off. But also a lot of experience. Really encourage other transit photographers to take art and calculate your photos before pushing the shutter button, not just a snapshot.
Regarding the University Street Station naming, my lord, just rename it Seneca Street and move on. The amount of time and money Sound Transit spends on these relatively small matters is ridiculous. We don’t need another staff work group or a communications team to do a whole bunch of community outreach in order to come up with a decision. Just make the damn change.