Month: December 2023

This article is brought to you by the numbers 3 and 2023 and the city of Montreal.

Transit is free New Year’s Eve all day — from 3am Sunday to 3am Monday — on Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit, Everett Transit, the Seattle Streetcar, Seattle Center Monorail, King County Water Taxi, and Metro’s van services. Pierce Transit is not listed and its website has nothing about it. Link will extend its late-night service every 15 minutes until 2am, and the T Line every 20 minutes until 12:40am. ST Express will have unspecified additional service. Metro, CT, and ET buses will be on Sunday schedule. The Monorail will run northbound until 11pm, and southbound between 12:30am and 1am.

On New Year’s Day (Monday) fares will be required, and transit will run on Sunday schedule. Everett Transit will have no service Monday.

The Link reduction January 13 to February 4 is still on. I saw a sign about it at Roosevelt Station last Tuesday with a nice diagram of the service. On weekdays trains will run the full length between Northgate and Angle Lake every 26 minutes, and that will be the only downtown service. Additional trains will run Northgate-Capitol Hill and Stadium-Angle Lake for combined 13 minute service in the tails. On weekends the downtown tunnel will be closed, and shuttle buses will run between Capitol Hill and SODO (not Stadium).

Small is beautiful in train stations? Pedestrian Observations thinks the 125th Street station is oversized on New York’s Second Avenue Subway, and it’s not for grand iconic architecture but to give each department a separate staff breakroom paid by external money.

Meanwhile RMTransit got a construction tour of the Grand Paris Express metro expansion and says it’s awesome. And Lima, Peru, opened an automated line.

An in-depth look at Montreal transit and land use by Not Just Bikes. The first part of the video is the positives. The negatives start at 17:13 and go on for 30 minutes.

Canada and the US are the only two countries in the world where 4+ story narrow buildings aren’t allowed to be built anymore, and it’s because of staircases. But Seattle is an exception. (About Here video)

This is an open thread.

This article is brought to you by Colman Park.

One Saturday this month I decided to visit Colman Park by only frequent transit (so not the 27 or 14). I’d been to Colman Park a few times before, taking the 27 to the end and and using the pedestrian underpass under Lake Washington Blvd to the park. I found the park extends quite a way and has several different parts. This time I decided to see if I could get there by frequent transit. I took the 8 to the I-90 trail, which has a cluster of parks around MLK. The bus stop was at South Massachusetts Street at the south end of that cluster. Immediately I had to walk up a very steep hill from 27th to 31st. 31st is where the 14 runs, and overlooks the park, and has a park entrance. The entrance had a big stairway down. I didn’t want to go down those stairs and back up after I’d gone up a steep hill that I’d have to go back down again, so I settled with just looking down at the park. It was a sea of bare trees with whitish bark. (Birch trees?) And beyond that, beautiful Lake Washington and the Cascade foothills.

Continue reading “Open Thread 30”

It’s a Link kind of week.

ST has new West Seattle Link station area concepts, reviewed by The Urbanist and the West Seattle Blog.

The Link reduction January 12-February 4 is still on.

Othello Station will get “variable information signs” installed starting December 15th. There have been announcements about these at other stations. I assume they’re like the TV monitors installed at Westlake this year? The Westlake ones have messages about ballgame dates, tourist attractions, and pop trivia. Has anyone seen new displays at other stations in the past couple months?

The cost of car dependency. (CityNerd video)

Tracing a 1904 Stockholm streetcar map. (ASMRctica video)

This is an open thread.

Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm has announced her resignation, effective January 12th:

Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm announced today she will be leaving the agency in order to return to the East Coast to take care of family matters. Since joining Sound Transit in September 2022, Timm has overseen a renewed emphasis on the rider experience as Sound Transit approaches the opening of several new extensions, starting with East Link next spring. Her focus and leadership in centering current and future riders in the agency’s capital and operating programs will benefit the region for years to come.

Timm’s time as ST’s CEO was not long but saw its ups and downs. The Tacoma Link extension to Hilltop opened on her watch and her tenure was also characterized by working around East Link construction mishaps, Link service disruptions, and evolving fare policy. We wish her the best as she moves on and for Sound Transit to quickly find a qualified replacement.

Flat-fare Link at $3 is almost a done deal. ($)

Coincidentally, RMTransit has a new video on flat fares, zones, and distance-based fares.

An in-depth look at Bogotá’s TransMilenio BRT, which was a model for several other cities. This article outlines its history, how later politicians neglected it, and follows a woman on a five-bus commute. ($)

New York City’s congestion pricing is almost in place. $15 tolls are likely. ($)

High housing prices across the country. ($)

STB’s Martin Pagel has two articles in the World Transport Journal. Page 62 discusses gondolas that have been considered in Seattle. Page 13 has a primer on ropeways, the general term for gondolas and air trams.

King County is updating its comprehensive plan next year. Here’s the proposed draft. The EIS is taking comments through January 31. (This is separate from Seattle’s comprehensive plan update, which is also ongoing.)

A list of public gardens in Seattle and the northwest, suitable for forest bathing. ($) The Seattle Sensory Garden has things for all five senses. It’s next to the rose garden on the south end of the Woodland Park Zoo. The Highline SeaTac Botanical Garden also has a sensory garden and is worth visiting, although it’s a mile from a bus stop. (128 is closest, or A).

This is an open thread.

While traditional steel rail works well on the surface, Sound Transit and many other transit agencies favor elevated tracks in more semi-urban areas (tunnels in the urban core). To expedite construction of elevated guideways for the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle turned to Germany for trains to run on a prefabricated monorail. Now another German manufacturer is testing a prefabricated dual guideway system with integrated maglev propulsion.

Continue reading “Evolution of Urban Guideways”