RapidRide G construction is closing East Madison Street between 16th and 14th westbound to extract “old cable car infrastructure located under the roadway. This closure is expected to be in place for at least a week.” (SDOT)
Interview with Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm. Among other things, “Timm explained that Sound Transit is in a transition from a building agency to an operational agency, and that takes a 180-degree shift in perspective to focus on the rider experience and communication. She knows the trains need to be clean. She understands that many people don’t feel safe on the trains. She also knows that communication is a huge challenge for the agency.” (MyNorthwest, found by Alonso.)
Various publications have summarized the March 23 decisions on the West Seattle and Ballard Link Extension (WSBLE): Publicola, Crosscut, NW Asian Weekly, and the Urbanist. Mike Lindblom even mentioned the single tunnel alternative in his Seattle Times ($) article. Most surprising were the late additions:
APPROVED: “North of CID” and “South of CID” (N/S) stations.
APPROVED: “4th Avenue Shallower” station alternative.
REJECTED: Keep Rainier Valley in DSTT1; move West Seattle to DSTT2.
The result of these is that the preferred alignment moves Midtown and CID stations south. Midtown is replaced by a “North of CID” station at the King County Administration building. CID is replaced by a “South of CID” station at 6 Ave S & Seattle Blvd S. A new alternative is added: “4th Avenue Shallower”, which is like another CID alternative at 4th & Jackson but less deep. This alternative would keep Midtown station at Madison Street. The rejected alternative would have reversed the spine split, keeping Rainier Valley in DSTT1 going to UW and Lynnwood. Ballard and West Seattle would be in DSTT2. In the current plan, Rainier Valley will be switched to Ballard when Ballard opens.
Train Daddy is Andy Byford, a British transit administrator who has gotten a lot of accolades for his work at train and subway agencies in Sydney, Toronto, New York City, and London. He’s now moving to Amtrak to become executive vice president. Sound Transit needs one of these. (RMTransit video) Streetsblog article.
USDOT gave Sound Transit a grant to improve safety at fhe level crossings along Link’s MLK Way segment. SDOT will implement it.
Cancellations and maintenance: Metro’s weekly newsletter has a bit about this. “King County Metro will operate all bus routes Monday, March 27, through Sunday, April 2, although some individual weekday bus trips will be canceled. All weekend routes and trips are expected to operate as scheduled. Fleet repairs continue and our maintenance crews are focused on returning buses to service, as well as working with vendors to stabilize the supply chain challenges affecting our industry.
This is a live discussion of Sound Transit’s monthly board meeting, which is choosing a preferred alignment for the West Seattle and Ballard Link Extension (WSBLE) environmental impact statement (EIS).
Update: The following amendment descriptions weren’t quite accurate, and they’re too complicated to explain here.
Amendment #2 is the Balducci/Millar proposal, to include the Restored Spine alternative and the 4th Avenue Shallow alternative. Amendment #3 is the Constantine/Harrell proposal, for North of CID and South of CID stations. Amendment #4 asks to activate Union Station with activities regardless of the ultimate CID station alternative. Amendment #5 seems to be choosing a WSBLE preferred alignment.
Hannah Krieg of The Stranger compares the arguments for and against the North of CID Link station. (The list is useful even if the wording is juvenile.)
In his recent article, Martin Pagel outlined why a single downtown tunnel is a win-win. I’ll emphasize mainly that transfers are crucial in a world where the suburb-to-downtown commute is no longer as common as it was. And transfers are a million times better when one only has to switch platforms in a tunnel than having to get out of a station, walk some distance, and get into another station.
But most importantly, using a single tunnel for the planned lines in ST3 is not a transit-nerd fantasy but completely feasible. Previous discussions on why a second downtown tunnel is needed have focused on capacity. According to Martin H. Duke’s 2015 interview with Marie Olson, Sound Transit’s Link Transportation Manager for Operations, the capacity of the existing tunnel should allow for 40 four-car trains per hour, or a headway of 90 seconds. Split between the three lines this results in 4.5 minute headways per line – significantly more capacity than needed for ST3 (planned 8-minute peak headways per line)! This particular interview points out that ventilation is not an issue either. Some work may still be required: ST3 project C-07: Transit Tunnel improvements enabling increases in system frequency estimates that approximately $20m will be needed to enable higher than 3-minute headways in the tunnel. That is negligible compared to the billions needed for a second tunnel.
It’s important to realize that this path — upgrades rather than completely new construction — is the path San Francisco took with the 2009 MUNI signaling upgrade. That’s an important regional precedent that cannot be dismissed as happening in vastly different conditions. MUNI achieved a 50% effective capacity increase for $104m, easily 20 times less than the cost of a new 3.5-mile tunnel. They went from 30 trains per hour to 45 trains per hour with a design capacity of 60 trains per hour. Yes, that is a system supporting 1-minute headways (!) for light rail trains. Not to mention that MUNI trains share the road with regular traffic for much of their route (like the First Hill and SLU streetcars) and arrive at the tunnel at irregular intervals, making their problem vastly more difficult than ours.
Sound Transit needs to make it their #1 alternative to leverage the existing downtown tunnel. Not just for better transfers and avoiding disruption in the CID, but because the time savings of constructing a very complicated downtown megaproject will allow for new lines and extensions to open sooner, and will help pay for any cost overruns. And if we are lucky, there may be funds available to enhance other projects.
New proposals for a second tunnel would increase cost, but none provide a compelling rider experience. Let’s just improve our existing tunnel and use the savings to make up for lost time on other projects.
ST3 promised higher capacity transit through downtown by building a second tunnel with seamless transfers at Westlake and Chinatown/International District (CID), along with an additional Midtown station at 5th & Madison. But after looking into the details, the seamless transfers may not be achievable. The tunnel would be far more complex, time consuming and expensive to build than anticipated. It would also burden the CID, which has already seen a lot of construction-related disruption and loss of properties. Sound Transit abandoned the idea of a station on 5th Avenue South and proposed a shallower 4th Avenue South station. But this station would increase construction time and cost. Because of the additional burden to the neighborhood, there have been two recent guest editorials against it, in The Seattle Times and The Stranger. Sound Transit responded by proposing to combine the Midtown station with a North CID station close to Pioneer Square and/or a South CID station as an alternative. Unfortunately, neither station would provide easy access to the heart of the CID, nor to King Street station with Sounder, Amtrak, the streetcar, and many bus lines along Jackson Street, 2nd Avenue, and Yesler Way. Currently the 1 Line stops at 5 stations downtown (Stadium, CID, Pioneer Square, University Street, Westlake). This new line would now stop at only 2 or 3 stations, forcing a transfer at SODO which neither provides frequent service nor is well designed as a transit station, as Stephen Fesler pointed out. Residents are concerned it would break South Seattle apart when they are already suffering from frequent accidents and disruptions due to the at grade alignment.
While various alignments and station locations have been discussed, It is time to focus on an alternative which Sound Transit considered before they put the 2nd tunnel proposal before voters: to upgrade the existing tunnel to allow interlining of all lines through the existing tunnel. Capacity would increase, likely with better signaling systems and better ventilation. MUNI did this in 2010 and Frankfurt just started. This would avoid any disruption of the CID, be available much sooner, and be much better for riders. There are more stations in the existing tunnel, they are closer to the surface. Same direction transfers would be trivial. Reverse directions would be easy, and even easier if center platforms were added. The carbon footprint would be far lower (WSBLE is currently estimated to generate 3 million tons of carbon), and of course, this would be much cheaper.
Downtown Seattle work commutes continue to evolve. ($) (Mike Lindblom) 60% of 320,000 workers come to the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and above 50% on Thursdays. Mondays and Fridays are lower. This study by Commute Seattle and UW used the larger “Center City” definition of downtown, which includes Uptown, Capitol Hill, and the CID. Comparing 2019 to 2022 in the AM peak, workers using transit fell from 46% to 22%, teleworking soared to 46%, and walking fell from 7% to 3%. On a good note, driving alone didn’t increase; it fell from 26% to 21%. Volumes on the West Seattle Bridge, which had been close to 100,000 pre-pandemic, are now 60-65,000. (That leaves more room for transit lanes?)
In my last post a few weeks ago, I argued that Sound Transit is uniquely exposed to changes in regional commute trips caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, that it has yet to pivot the ST3 package of investments in a meaningful way (aside from the wrong-headed proposal to consolidate the Madison and CID stations), and that this pivot should occur sooner rather than later. I also presented some principles for what should guide this:
Respond to the new transit ridership market
Focus on frequent service, not commuter service
Less intense peak periods are an opportunity
Re-invest in existing assets that no longer match their need
In this post, I’d like to share some specific ideas of how ST3 projects could pivot guided by these principles. I understand there are political and maybe even some technical challenges to this proposal, but as I’ve looked back over my many years of writing on this site, I realize I haven’t spent enough time articulating the thing I think ought to happen. So here it is, for what it’s worth.
My goal is to deliver a regional high capacity transit system that results in a better system and more riders given changes caused by Covid-19. As I alluded to earlier, I also think some of these changes present better solutions to the construction impact and cost issues that the ST Board is currently debating for the West Seattle and Ballard Link project.
A Ballard CID Link station would connect all major transit modes in the area.
In “Every City NEEDS a Transit Hub”, Reece Martin at RMTransit explains how sticking with the originally-planned second CID Link station is a unique opportunity to create the biggest and most-used multimodal transit hub in the Pacific Northwest. It would connect all of Link lines 1, 2, and 3, Sounder, Amtrak Cascades, Greyhound, the First Hill Streetcar, the proposed City Center Connector streetcar extension to Pike Place Market and SLU, the two stadiums, the walkable Chinatown neighborhood, Union Station’s hall with potential reactivation uses, King Street Station’s hall, and potentially in-station retail.
Alternatives like a “North of CID” station at the King County Administration building would both miss this opportunity and make transfers incredibly bad.
The “Fourth Avenue Shallower” alternative is a reasonable compromise between the default Fifth Avenue station (which activists in the CID don’t want) and a station too far away. It’s more expensive, but this is an existential issue for the network. The #1 issue for a multi-line subway network is good transfers between all the lines. Over half of Link’s destinations will require a train-to-train transfer. This is key to maximizing ridership, getting the most out of our investment in it, and making the network far more useful.
