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.

151 Replies to “Free Transit New Year’s Eve”

  1. I hope on weekends, trains will run at normal frequency (at least for people not going to or through downtown)?

    1. They’ll be running every 15 minutes on weekends outside downtown, so unfortunately still a substantial reduction in service from their normal schedule of 10 minutes, especially considering that you’ll have a guaranteed extra two transfers if you’re going beyond the Northgate-UW or Stadium-Angle Lake segments.

      Of course, that’s assuming that everything goes smoothly. Given that there’s near-daily disruptions from signal and mechanical issues even without the tunnel work (not to mention the “blockage” and “police activity” delays), I’m skeptical that they’ll even be able to maintain 15-minute headways.

    2. Just as we’ve all learned to wear masks and social-distance when communicable diseases spike, we’re learning Link-reduction coping strategies.

      Mine, when the reduction is for a day or two, is to minimize trips to Link’s destinations and either stay home or go to bus destinations instead. When the reduction extends for two or more weeks, that isn’t always possible, so I end up using a parallel bus route like the 49, 62, 7, or 36. Since I live in the middle of the reduction zone, I only have to travel half of it. I haven’t had to go to the airport or southwest King County, but I’d still probably use Link for that rather than a long slow 124 trip. Fortunately there are Metro bus routes to Stadium and SODO stations, so there are other choices than just waiting for the single shuttle or a 26-minute train. But mostly I’d limit my trips to between NE 50th and Columbia City to avoid long bus journeys. Except to the Eastside, which I can’t avoid, and where Link doesn’t go anyway.

      The worst trips will be going to work, since the faster bus routes to 65th have been eliminated. It’s either 40 minutes on the 62, or something like the 49+67. I haven’t decided what to do about that; I may just work remotely as much as I can.

      1. I’ll be switching to the bus (walking to the 70 seems best for me).

        Luckily I only need to be in the office twice a week so that’s the plan for now.

      2. The 70 seems to be ultra-frequent now because I see two or three of them go by while I’m waiting for the 49.

  2. It’s a bit odd that ST has extra Sunday service but Metro doesn’t. It’s not like everybody who travels extra on New Year’s or wants to get home from bars lives exactly on an ST corridor and their destination is also on it. It may be that Metro will have unannounced extra runs like it sometimes does. And Metro also has regular night-owl routes in Seattle, South King, and Shoreline (but not in the Eastside), so it doesn’t have to do anything special about that. And in the end it comes down to ST and Metro being different agencies and making different decisions. Still, it leads to an ironic result, that ST routes have a lot of extra service, while Metro routes that serve more people and areas don’t.

    1. Instead of free service, they should add service for NYE. More service is needed to decrease drunk driving and $200 Uber fares.

      1. This is targeted to people who don’t regularly take transit, and often don’t have an ORCA card. Free fares avoids all the issues of not having cash, or being unwilling to get a card because of the fee. ($3 now? They think they’d only use it once, so it looks like a $2.75 trip costs $5.75.)

      2. Except, how many people that don’t regularly ride transit and don’t read STB would even know that fares on New Years Eve are free? If my guess of “almost none” is accurate, then the free fare isn’t actually accomplishing it’s goal.

      3. It was in the Seattle Times today. If they’re going out with other people, they might hear it by word of mouth. Ideally the companies would put it on their flyers.

  3. Vancouver, Milan, Copenhagen, Honolulu, Montreal, Paris and now even Lima is building automated lines and Sound Transit is still planning a traditional line to Ballard to be opened in 15 years from now? Should Seattle be that far behind in technology?

    1. Good point. The Monorail was forward-looking at the time, at least in the US, and the World’s Fair was largely about future transportation. Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, and the companies that became T-Mobile US and AT&T Wireless are all innovative and created new industries. So shouldn’t our 2024 transit investments be the same, or at least as good as the industrialized-world average? Instead they’re far behind, as if the past twenty years in the rest of the world doesn’t exist. We don’t even have what German cities had in the 1980s, and it’s now forty years later.

  4. >The Link reduction January 13 to February 4 is still on.

    Honestly don’t quite understand why Sound Transit doesn’t run shuttle busses on the weekdays as well. 26 minute headways is pretty awful.

    Or if the intention is for people to use the regular busses https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/changes-affect-my-ride/navigating-service-disruptions#1line at least coordinate better with those routes or outline the alternative routes at each station with a map better. It’s a bit nontrivial to figure what to use as the ends are stadium and capitol hill.

    For instance going northbound, to reach u district is one supposed to get off at mt baker and use the 48? or get off at stadium and then walk up north to CID to use the 70? I guess to reach the other downtown stations northbound from stadium isn’t too complicated with the 101, 102,150, 590 but this should be posted much more clearer.

    1. I would strongly prefer the 48 from MBS over the 70 from Stadium. Not only is it less of a walk, but the 70 gets bogged down in SLU and Eastlake.

      It’s really going to suck for the people using the 255 to get downtown, though. It seems ST should have considered boosting the 545 so there’s at least an opportunity to transfer on 520 rather than in the U-District.

  5. As a side note while checking seattletransitmap saw that they have a new updated night route map. Main difference compared with 2016 is the route 48, route 40 and route 44 that now have/better night service.

    https://seattletransitmap.com/version/night-owl/SeattleTransitMap_NightOwl.pdf

    Funded by “Special thanks to Commute Seattle for sponsoring the creation of this new layer and the update to the Night Owl mini map.”

    (For comparison 2016 https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/05/night-owl/)

    1. While there’s more night-owl frequency on the 44 (IIRC there were only a couple runs between 1 AM and 5AM, and now it’s hourly), the breaking of the 44-48 through-route makes the night owl service less useful for connecting to Link, especially for early morning flights. It used to be I could catch the 44 in Wallingford at 4AM, stay on as the 48, and then get to MBS about 10 minutes before the first southbound train left the OMF, and get to the airport by 5:30, which at least in the olden times was plenty of time for a 7AM flight.

      Now I think the 44 night owls either leave service at UWMC, or continue as the 43 to base, but don’t connect to a Link station just downstream from the OMF. I’m not terribly upset since I don’t travel as much post-COVID, but was a nice feature of the night owl network for a time.

  6. I find the elevated portion of the Paris line to be very slick! Elliptic shaped columns with a metal top and the sides are less than 10 inches thick. If they need a sound barrier, they use glass. So much less visual impact than what Sound Transit is currently building. On the Rainier line Sound Transit used similar T-shape concrete forms, but in Paris they use an inverted T-form such that instead of the base of the “T” extending below, it forms the emergency escape walk above. That provides better access to the escape route and a much cleaner look from below. I can’t wait to see how they integrate the catenary poles.
    I wish Sound Transit would consider the same! Their current approach with 3 concrete beams requires more additional poured concrete, more steps and is just as obtrusive as a highway bridge.

    1. The agency’s Six-Year TDP (Transit Development Plan). It looks like the last one they published is the 2023-2028 TDP.

      1. So, doing a little math, aapproximately 422 thousand service hours in 2023. That appears to compare poorly to CT, assuming PT serves more people. I’ll try to find those numbers.

        Another thing that jumps out is that those shuttles are an incredibly bad use of transit dollars. Almost $80 a boarding.

      2. Pierce is the one asking for ST Express reductions, and PT is the one without free service today. That sounds like they’re in a severe financial hole more than the other agencies.

        $80 shuttle cost? Even Access for the disabled is around $40. Metro Flex type service is around $10 I think. So how could PT reach $80? It must be the high sprawl there.

      3. We definitely have our share of sprawl, but not really where the runners run.

        Ruston Runner is just the east waterfront area, that would definitely be better served by a bus. The area is old, white and well to-do. Maybe the thinking is they might ride a shuttle even if they would never step foot in a bus.

        Tideflats is really just workforce, I guess. I don’t really understand it, honestly.

        JBLM runner I could see being used from downtown to the base. Dunno how efficient that is over peak bus. I’m guessing that many base jobs are not 9-5.

        They just instituted a new Spanaway runner, covering Spanaway, Parkland and Midland. That is definitely sprawlsville. Unincorporated Pierce County. It looks like Spanaway got the lion’s share of the trips in 2023. So that’s not great. Page 56 of 2023-8 TDP.

        https://www.piercetransit.org/file_viewer.php?id=6855

      4. If you look at the dash, the Shuttles accounted for 2.2 million miles traveled, compared to 4.9 million for all the buses combined. And they had only 250K boardings compared to 6 million bus boardings. There you go.

      5. If PT is in that much of a financial hole, they could raise fares. Riders who can’t afford the higher (currently $2 fare) probably qualify for the $1 low-income fare.

      6. Or better yet, float a bond and make transit useable by increasing frequency. The shuttle is clearly not the answer.

        I have no idea if they are in a financial hole, btw.

      7. Several years ago PT shrank its service area to exclude the southeast that kept bringing down service-improvement levies, but since then it has never proposed a levy to actually increase service, so what was the point? It has a good long-range plan but it refuses to implement it. Tacoma and Lakewood are ready to vote yes supposedly, but they never get the chance.

      8. “If PT is in that much of a financial hole, they could raise fares.”

        Riding the 1, I see less than half of riders even attempt to pay.

        That would probably plummet further if you start charging real money for crappy service.

        When you run a service only the desperate will use, you can’t expect much fair box recovery.

      9. Cam, “step” is not a transitive verb. One “sets foot in” [transitive verb with direct object] or one “steps into” (or “out of”, “behind”, “around”, or even “in”, etc) [intransitive verb with no object].

        The “with my/your/their foot” is implicit in “to step”.

        I know this pompous phrase is ” the thing” these days, but it makes no sense. I also know that my pointing it out is a finger in the leaking dike of correct English syntax and that you’re not the only person on the blog to use this clumsy construction. But one has to start somewhere.

        Like so many circumlocative popular phrases in vogue these days, it’s the result of semi-literate teachers trying to teach students who live in a world of fourth-grade public speech. The pols are dummies or act like they are in order not to offend the anti-education mafia. So everything spirals downhill ever more rapidly

        /end of old man rant

      11. “step foot in” is an informal expression. I’ve heard it my entire life, and said it, and when I looked back to see what “step” you were referring to, it looked right to me. It may not be something you’d write in even an informal story, but it is said. And since these messages are a written form of us all taking together, I think informal expressions are fine.

      12. Mike, you have? Your entire life? Wow. I never heard it until four or five years ago, and it has rubbed me the wrong way from the first time, for all the reasons I wrote. Of course, if Cam or anyone else wants to use it, I’m not going to say anything else about it. Once is enough, I hope, to get people to think about it. “Step foot in” really does make no sense. Some old TV movie had one shook-up character say to the hero, “don’t set foot in there!”, but someone heard “step” instead and started the spiral down the drain.

        So far as the neighbors who won’t be setting foot in a transit vehicle, Cam’s probably completely correct.

        Now that “the peak” has shrunk in the morning, broadened in the evening to the degree that transit can’t help as much as it once did, and origin-destination pairs are more widely scattered, I wouldn’t expect another “pro-transit” referendum to pass in Central Puget Sound. Seattle may be able to raise money for it, but it will have to get the Leg to agree to raise the municipal bonding limits to make it work.

      16. It’s probably something people say without realizing it. Like “I’d’ve”, which sounds all right but looks strange with two apostrophes together, so people normally expand it to “I’d have” even in colloquial writing, but not if they’re writing exactly what they say.

        Or all the hand-wringing about “nucular”. I think it’s just that two pronunciations arose in English and have coexisted for a long time. I think I grew up saying “nucular”, and it was because of studying Spanish and Russian that have only “-cle-” (and put the stress on the “ar”), that I unconsciously switched to “nuclear” in English too and didn’t realize it until later.

        The commonality in all these is people saying what they hear, or what they think they hear, without reference to the written words. Because you hear it at one time, and see it at another, and unless something occurs to bring them together, you don’t realize they’re different. It’s like how I pronounce palm/alms/psalm/caulk without the l if I’m remembering how I head it in childhood, but if I’m picturing or reading the written word I sometimes add the l.

        The past few years I’ve realized that there are some informal words or utterances that are impossible to write because English spelling is so ambiguous. People don’t notice this because they never write them — they substitute more formal words — but if you’re writing exactly what you speak then it occasionally comes up. The word has no official spelling, and there’s no way to write the vowels that a reader would recognize the right pronunciation, so they’d think it’s a different word. I can’t remember any examples offhand but I have encountered it.

      17. If PT is in that much of a financial hole, they could raise fares.

        The problem is that PT gets only 3% of their revenue from fares. Raise the fares and you get a bit more money, but not that much. As Cam wrote, you also run the risk of more people just not paying. That isn’t much of a solution.

        Unfortunately, Pierce County is a fairly sprawling county — the kind where transit typically struggles. So is Snohomish County, but it has a few advantages:

        1) Snohomish County has sprawled towards Seattle, whereas Pierce County has sprawled the opposite direction.

        2) Pierce County is farther away from Seattle than Snohomish County.

        3) Sound Transit is extremely well funded, and provides regional service crossing counties.

        4) Metro is better funded than Community Transit or Pierce Transit.

        These all go together. Since Seattle is not that far away (and much of the county sprawls towards it) commuter service from Snohomish County to Seattle has always been important. The agency spends a considerable amount of money on that service. With the extension of Link, they will soon be able to shift all that money to other service.

        Meanwhile the ST projects in Pierce County haven’t helped much. The streetcar is OK, but really doesn’t add that much value, and certainly doesn’t replace any existing bus service (unlike the Link extension to Lynnwood). The BRT plans had a lot of promise, but are now a fiasco. As with so much in Pierce County, I don’t know what will happen. Will Sound Transit be able to contribute a significant amount of service in Pierce County (thus saving Pierce Transit a lot of money which they can spend elsewhere) or will be largely independent, like Amtrak? I guess time will tell.

      18. I had a friend of mine correct my English in a similar manner. After a brief pause, I replied “Well, irregardless, it is a mute point”. I always keep that one in the back pocket for just such occasions. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, “irregardless” is not a word, and the correct phrase is “moot point”.)

        Anyway, English evolves, and it wouldn’t surprise me if “step foot” becomes OK fairly soon. My personal pet peeve is “conversate”. Why not just say “converse”? But Merriam-Webster says it is a word — just informal: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conversate. I guess the real test is whether it is legal in scrabble.

      19. Ross is finally wrong about something.

        “4) Metro is better funded than Community Transit or Pierce Transit.”

        True for PT, but not CT. CT and KCM collect sales tax at the same rate: 1.2%, thanks to a successful ballot measure in 2015 aimed at funding Swift expansion. To wit, the bulk of the increase in hours for 2024 are due to Swift Orange Line start-up.

        See charts in linked article:
        https://www.heraldnet.com/news/3-snohomish-county-cities-have-highest-sales-tax-rate-in-state/

      20. Ross is finally wrong about something.

        “4) Metro is better funded than Community Transit or Pierce Transit.”

        Oops. Time to update the sign:

        Zero days since a mistake.

        I am surprised that CT matches Metro in terms of sales tax. Metro does raise a lot more money in fares. But CT does well when it comes to grants (at least it did this year). It isn’t clear who has more money per person, which is not at all what I assumed.

        It also isn’t what I was trying to say. It isn’t just funding, it is what you do with it. Seattle itself does spend extra, but the main advantage is just that it is a lot more compact. My claim is that Seattle just has better transit than anywhere else in the region, and Snohomish County residents are far more likely to leverage that than Pierce County residents (simply because they are closer). Link is a huge part of it, but Metro service in Seattle is as well.

      21. Understood about the broader point. And maybe PT could make different/better choices, but they are really just bumping along at half the sales tax rate of KCM & CT (.6%). That really limits their ability to invest in growth strategies like more frequency, span of service and better customer amenities.

      22. > Another thing that jumps out is that those shuttles are an incredibly bad use of transit dollars. Almost $80 a boarding.

        I’ve kinda wondered if there could be another kind of middle ground between fixed busses and micro transit.

        For instance on many bus routes in the suburbs they have to decide between staying on the arterial for speed/(implicit frequency) or detouring to say a grocery store/hospital etc… if it could be requested on an app the shuttle could follow the main arterial most of the time and only detour when requested, same for drop offs.

        But still limit the number of detour points so it’s not going around in circles and can maintain relative speed/frequency by going in a straight line.

        For a specific example like how the 255 detours to the Kirkland park and ride or for a bigger example like how the 105 detours to the canyon park and ride station rather than traveling straight on

      23. Understood about the broader point. And maybe PT could make different/better choices, but they are really just bumping along at half the sales tax rate of KCM & CT (.6%). That really limits their ability to invest in growth strategies like more frequency, span of service and better customer amenities.

        Yes, that is probably the biggest issue. I would say that Community Transit was in better shape before the pandemic than Pierce Transit, so it should be no surprise that they are in better shape now.

        But I do think Sound Transit spending is having a major influence. They are spending a bunch of money in every region, and Pierce Transit is getting the least out of it. Some of it is bad planning, but some it is just the geography. In 2019, the “Commuter” type bus service made up almost a third of all ridership for Community Transit. This was the 400 and 800 series buses to Seattle. These will be completely eliminated soon, with the savings put back into the system. I can’t figure out how much they were spending, but given that peak-only service tends to be expensive, the cost was bound to be substantial. Truncating service will inconvenience some, but it will greatly improve the transit experience for others. Sound Transit’s massive investment will not only save Community Transit a lot of money, it will enable them to build a better network.

        In some ways, Federal Way Link is quite similar. In both cases you have a station that is well outside the urban core, but has outstanding bus connections. Express buses can connect to the train and either terminate there (saving the agency a lot of money) or continue as an express downtown (being the best of both worlds from a rider standpoint). The difference is where the county lines are, as well as how Pierce Transit spends its money. Pierce Transit doesn’t run any express buses to Seattle. They save absolutely nothing from the Link extension. Federal Way is in King County, which means that Pierce County residents will probably benefit from the extension, but not a lot. Overall Pierce Transit ridership probably goes up a little bit, but relatively few people will ride Link, and many of those riders just park and ride. The vast majority of people in Pierce County ride within Pierce County. The major destination is not Seattle, but Tacoma.

        Furthermore, consider the major suburban highway corridors for both counties. Swift Blue runs from Everett to the outskirts of King County along SR 99. That one bus route carries a very high proportion of the overall ridership in Community Transit. The 1 in Pierce Transit is similar. It too runs along a highway — SR 7 — and carries a very high proportion of the overall transit riders (roughly double the next most-popular bus). But there are differences. From a corridor standpoint, the logical terminus of Swift Blue is actually Downtown Seattle (and would be, if not for the difference in jurisdiction). State Route 7, ends in Tacoma, and while technically it ends before downtown Tacoma, that is the natural terminus (the bus runs through downtown). Thus Swift Blue is moving people along a major corridor towards Seattle, while Pierce Transit 1 is moving people along a major corridor towards Tacoma. In the first case, the extension of Link makes for a major improvement — riders will save a considerable amount of time getting to various Seattle destination, including downtown. In the second case, the Link extension is largely meaningless. A handful of riders will have a three-seat ride to SeaTac, Tukwila and Rainier Valley (whoopee).

        Meanwhile, the capital spending in Pierce County has resulted in projects that have been largely meaningless (the streetcar) or a failure (the BRT). The former saves the agency very little money, and results in minor overall transit improvement. The latter could have made a real impact for the agency (and riders) but has collapsed. Overall, Pierce County is just getting a lot less out of Sound Transit than Community Transit, and this just amplifies the funding difference.

      24. In the context of ST’s spending life to date, Pierce has put almost nothing into Link. Ross makes an important point on Link being orthogonal to most PT intra-county routes, but that’s irrelevant to how PT has been operating and will continue to be irrelevant for the rest of this decade.

        Pierce’s most important ST investment has been Sounder; pre-Covid South Sounder was clearly a successful project and Pierce (& South King) were going to pump another $1B into it with ST3. The 2nd most important investment is ST Express, which is an essential & expense part of Pierce’s bus network. The 3rd is the streetcar, which I agree has been a dud from a ridership standpoint, while Link is a distant 4th in terms of impact on how PT has chosen to invest capital and operating dollars.

        “They are spending a bunch of money in every region, and Pierce Transit is getting the least out of it.” I disagree. Pierce riders may not be getting as much out of ST1 & ST2 b/c there is no project as productive as the core of Link, but Pierce Transit as an operating agency benefits immensely from ST’s operating budget. ST Express spend account for >40% of PT’s service hours, while STX is <10% of KCM. KCM will simply repurpose bus fleet & bus base capacity to other routes as STX is replaced by Link; PT would be literally a shadow of itself without STX operations.

        Pierce's commuter bus network is less productive than Snohomish's due to greater distance to Seattle & Bel/Red job centers. "Pierce Transit doesn’t run any express buses to Seattle" because ST has been operating a full commuter bus network since the 90s. If ST didn't exist, PT would likely be spending some of its scarce resources on commuter routes into King.

      25. “Pierce has put almost nothing into Link.”

        It can’t until Link reaches Federal Way. Pierce put its ST1 and 2 Link money into a savings account waiting for that milestone. If Federal Way opens in 2026, Pierce will have been waiting thirty years.

        Pierce’s geography makes it hard to serve from a Seattle-oriented network, and ST’s plans do little to address intra-Pierce trips. The major travel patterns within Pierce are between Tacoma, Lakewood, Parkland, Puyallup, JBLM, and to adjacent cities in Thurston and King Counties (Olympia, Federal Way, Auburn, Kent). ST Express connects Tacoma, Lakewood, and Federal Way in a minimal way. Sounder connects Lakewood, Tacoma, Puyallup, Auburn, and Kent, but not on a schedule that can serve many trips between these cities. Ross outlined how Snohomish County is geographically more favorable to Seattle-oriented transit, and how both ST and CT leveraged this to provide a more useful all-day and all-trip transit network. In Pierce County ST and PT have done little.

        “Pierce Transit doesn’t run any express buses to Seattle” because ST has been operating a full commuter bus network since the 90s. If ST didn’t exist, PT would likely be spending some of its scarce resources on commuter routes into King.”

        That’s not what it did before ST. The 4xx Snohomish-Seattle expresses started in the 1970s when the Community Transit transit-benefit district was created. At first Metro operated them, then CT took them over. Lynnwood then was already part of the outer periphery of the Seattle/Eastside job market. Tacoma and Auburn were a SEPARATE job market, with little interaction with Seattle. The exception was Boeing workers, who drove from everywhere to all the plants, and often got reassigned to different plants arbitrarily against their will.

        Tacoma had NO express routes to downtown Seattle in the 80s or early 90s. When Sound Transit started, the 594 was created, first as an ST-funded PT route, then when ST Express was ready to launch it got folded into it. So Pierce expresses have ALWAYS been funded by ST, and for the past twenty-five years they’ve all been ST Express. Pierce Transit’s network is like it was in the 80s, only slightly more frequent, and with sub-RapidRide routes 1-4. In the 80s it functioned and was perceived as mostly a network for the poor, and it still is. That’s in sharp contrast to Metro where a lot of middle-class people ride it, and CT is in between. But PT’s infrequency means choice riders won’t put up with it.

        PT has languished with a low sales-tax rate (half of Metro’s), and an anti-tax constituency that kept vetoing attempts to raise it for more service. In the early 2010s the PT district shrank to exclude the “No”-voting Bonney Lake, Sumner, Buckley, and south of Spanaway. Tacoma and Lakewood kept voting Yes but kept getting outvoted. So the shrunken district should have more success with levies, but it has never tried to. PT published a good long-range plan in the late 2010s or 2020s, but it hasn’t done anything to fund it.

        So with that anemic amount of service hours, and an unwillingness to use half the tax authority the Legislature has given it, it’s impossible for PT to add Seattle expresses without decimating its already-minimal local service.

        If ST1 hadn’t passed and ST Express didn’t exist, then maybe PT might have passed a levy to add Seattle expresses while keeping 30-60 minute local service, but that’s a hypothetical out of thin air and contrary to all of PT’s history.

        In the update to ST’s long-range plan in 2014, some Pierce residents asked for ST Express from Tacoma Dome to Bellevue to access Eastside jobs. That never got into the plan. On existing transit it takes almost two hours each way, so transit is not really a viable choice.

      26. Just to correct the record here, King County’s sales tax rate for transit, i.e., Metro, is .9%, the maximum allowed by statute currently for a county jurisdiction.
        Snohomish County’s PTBA, i e., Community Transit, falls under a different statute and has a sales tax rate of 1.2% as stated earlier. This is also at the maximum currently allowed by statute, a statute that was modified in 2015 for the explicit purpose of the local ballot measure that passed in Nov 2015.

        As I have indicated on this forum a few times in the past, folks who live or shop in the part of SnoCo that is within both the RTA and PTBA districts pay a combined 2.6% additional sales tax dedicated to transit funding on their taxable purchases/services.

        Fwiw. Imho, Pierce Transit needs to put a ballot measure in front of voters in that PTBA asking for an increase in the current sales tax rate to .9%. 2024 being a Presidential cycle would be an ideal time to do just that.

      27. Finally, and just for a laugh or two at no one’s expense….

        RossB’s comment above about English speakers sometimes messing up commonly used idioms, particularly when in written form, reminded me of this piece a fellow attorney friend had texted me at one point after a colleague of hers had fallen victim to such an error in an email to her:

        https://medium.com/countdown-education/22-misused-idioms-that-make-you-sound-like-an-idiot-856bd3655859

        In my experience, a friendly suggestion to correct the mistake usually suffices. Of course it really depends on the situation and context as well as the relationship between “sender and receiver” whether such a correction is even warranted. Just my two cents on that matter.

      29. In the context of ST’s spending life to date, Pierce has put almost nothing into Link.

        That is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

        It is quite reasonable to wonder why Community Transit is clearly getting better, while Pierce Transit continues to struggle. The simple answer is: Sound Transit. Sound Transit’s investments replace a huge portion of Community Transit service, while they do basically nothing for Pierce Transit. Federal Way Link will be an important improvement for some Pierce Transit riders, but it won’t save the agency a dime. In contrast, Lynnwood Link will not only be a bigger improvement (for more Pierce County riders) but it will save the agency a lot of money.

        Pierce’s most important ST investment has been Sounder;

        Fair enough, but that really hasn’t helped Pierce Transit. What buses has Pierce County been able to cancel because of Sounder? What buses have had a substantial increase in ridership because of Sounder? I think the answer in both case is “none”. It is like a big improvement to Amtrak. Very nice, but largely irrelevant to the local transit agency.

        The 2nd most important investment is ST Express, which is an essential & expense part of Pierce’s bus network.

        Same situation as Sounder. Nice thing to have, certainly, but it hasn’t helped the agency.

        The 3rd is the streetcar, which I agree has been a dud from a ridership standpoint

        And the effect it has had on the local network has been minimal as well. As I mentioned, this would not be the case if ST could complete the BRT line. That would replace a very big portion of the 1, freeing the agency to spend money elsewhere, while also substantially improving travel along the most popular corridor in the county. This is by far the most important project for Pierce Transit, and yet ST has failed so far.

        I don’t think you really get it. I’m not talking about whether residents are getting their money’s worth. That is a very different question. I’m talking about whether the local transit agency has benefited by the various changes. Consider UW Link. On the one hand, it was wanting. It only touched the edges of the U-District. It only had one station between there and downtown. But Metro decided it was good enough to warrant a major restructure.

        And what a restructure it was! Instead of half-hour buses, we had fifteen minute buses. Yes, it meant a transfer to get downtown, but the UW is a major destination, and the headway improvements were dramatic.

        Similar things are happening in Snohomish County. Not to the same degree, obviously, but still dramatic. For example, getting from Whidbey Island to anywhere on Link will suddenly be much, much easier. Catch a ferry and there will be a bus waiting for you. The bus won’t dither around (like the current 113) but take a straight shot towards Lynnwood. From there you’ll be able to take Link to the UW, Downtown and a bunch of other places. All because Snohomish County has more money to spend on things *other* than all of those express buses to Seattle.

        It is not the only reason that Snohomish County has better transit, but it does explain why Community Transit is able to improve service in these tough times, while Pierce Transit is not.

      30. “Sound Transit’s investments replace a huge portion of Community Transit service”

        That hasn’t happened yet; it’s mostly in the future. There are four periods:

        1970s-1999: ST service didn’t exist. Several 4xx routes served downtown Seattle peak hours. A few 8xx routes served the U-District during “university peak”. One UW-Edmonds route and one downtown route offered partial midday service. There may have been a Bellevue-Lynnwood route at some point.

        1999-2022: ST Express was an overlay over the CT express routes; it didn’t replace them or save service hours. The 510/511/512 offered new all-day/7-day service to downtown. [1] The 4xx and 8xx continued as before.

        2022-2024 (current service): ST’s 511-513 are truncated at Northgate. CT’s 4xx continue to downtown, as does ST’s 510. CT’s 8xx to the U-District are deleted. That’s a small number of service hours, because it’s only a few routes and they didn’t go all the way downtown.

        2024-future: All CT and ST routes will be truncated at Lynnwood or Mountlake Terrace. This changes the nature of some of the routes, to the point that they lose their identity and merge with local routes and new intra-Snohomish expresses.

        [1] Orginally the 510 and 511 provided parallel half-hourly service for downtown-Ash Way and downtown-Everett (the latter nonstop as now). After budget cuts, the 512 was created to replace them on Sundays, and ran only Sunday. Several years later, the 510 and 511 were reduced to peak-only, and the 512 was extended to off-peak and reverse-peak weekdays and Saturdays.

      31. “Pierce put its ST1 and 2 Link money into a savings account waiting for that milestone.” No. Pierce has invested no ST1 or ST2 money into Link. ST1 and ST2 were individually balanced by sub-area, which meant that Pierce ends with no money “left over,” same as the other sub-areas. It is only after the ST3 taxes started has Pierce been banking money to be spent on Link capital spending.

        That was the point I was trying to make above in this thread. It’s fine to lament how Pierce has chosen to invest PT & ST monies in recent decades, but the TDLE project and C-Link spending broadly is irrelevant. Pierce has invested in buses, a streetcar, and Sounder, and it’s those investments that merit review & critique.

        Looking forward, Pierce has ~$2B of FUTURE spending tied up in Link (remember, South King is paying for ~1/3 of TDLE), but very little of that money has been collected or spent to date.

  8. I’d love it if some Board member (or member of the public) dared to ask for a show of hands on who amongst which them rode transit for free today.

    I bet it would be just one or two unless there were liars in the mix.

    1. They opened the first part of REM this year, and the Pols there are determined to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

      They did this through blatant sandbagging of REM est, by not having it serve downtown and loading it up with underground alignments to make it way more expensive than it needs to be.

      Now while this sounds like conspiracy theory rambling, Reece himself got just as heated when he and Transit youtuber broke the news last year.

      1. To put stuff into context REM A (the one that just opened) has strong parallels with Los Angeleses Regional Connector. It’s a long planned project that finally got its break, and is going to absolutely change the city in a positive way.

        REM B (the one that’s getting sandbagged) was supposed to be Montreals answer to the Ontario Line getting built in Toronto. It was intended to both be a relief and express to Montreals Green Line (Line 1).

    1. Saw their shuttle bus map and riders to/from PDX will be forced to transfer between shuttle buses to reach downtown. This is an awful customer experience.

      I wish ST would set up express shuttle buses between the last station served and the airport. For example, in the upcoming disruption, express shuttles should be split into two routes: Route A would shuttle between all closed station and route B would provide express service to the airport from all closed stations.

  11. Trimet fares increased today after the board approved it earlier last year.
    https://trimet.org/fareincrease/index.htm

    Adult 2 1/2 Hour Ticket
    – Old fare: $2.50
    – New fare: $2.80
    Adult Day Pass
    – Old fare: $5
    – New fare: $5.80
    Adult Monthly Pass is still $100

    Honored Citizen/ Youth 2 1/2 Hour Ticket
    – Old fare: $1.25
    – New fare: $1.40
    Honored Citizen/ Youth Day Pass
    – Old fare: $2.50
    – New fare: $2.80
    Honored Citizen/ Youth Monthly Pass is still $28

    Lift Paratransit Ticket
    – Old fare: $2.50
    – New fare: $2.80

    30 & 15 cent increases for timed tickets and day passes while keeping the monthly & annual pass more or less the same amount.

    The last change to fares was in 2012 when Trimet reformed their fares to be a single fare from the previous zoned based fares alongside discontinuing fareless square in Downtown Portland.

    1. 1. The “Honored Citizen” category includes those who qualify by income (household 200% of the federal poverty level, or less, same as ORCA LIFT). Applications can be made through the TriMet website.

      2. Smartphones and contactless debit/credit cards can be used to tap to pay the regular fare. The Honored Citizen fare requires use of a Hop Card.

      3. Cash payment is still accepted at the front of the bus for a 2.5-hour ticket or day pass.

      4. Using a Hop Card or Virtual Hop Card on your phone is still required to take advantage of the day and month caps.

  12. I was at Climate Pledge on NYE working an event and saw the D & 8 stuck in traffic for -not an exaggeration – an hour. It moved 3 blocks in 60 minutes along 1st Ave N.

    What a joke..

    1. My wife and I watched the drone show/fireworks at Seattle Center on NYE. When we left shortly after Midnight, we hopped on the Southbound D at Mercer and Queen Anne. The bus moved only 2 blocks in a half an hour. We got frustrated with the lack of progress asked the driver to let us out. We ended up walking to 3rd and Virginia to catch the C back to West Seattle. I kept saying this is where Ballard Link would have come in very handy!

      1. The Ballard monorail extension we could have been riding for the last 13 years would have been even more handy!

    2. Comment section, tell Jordan what you said when I asked which is better transit-wise for a Sonics arena, Climate Pledge or SODO.

    3. This always happens after 4th of July or New Year’s; it’s like getting out of a ballgame. The highways and streets are designed for ordinary traffic; not events like this. If you look at what’s causing most of the congestion, it’s probably cars queuing up to get to the I-5 entrances at Mercer Street and Denny Way. Nothing short of full transit-priority lanes can get through it. People just expect it as part of the experience of going to these events. It’s doubtless part of the reason why the Monorail had extra night service, and Link because it connected to the Monorail.

      When I’ve gone to 4th of July at Lake Union Park; there was an hour’s wait for the streetcar. I didn’t have to take it because I could have done a long walk, but I wasn’t in a hurry so I stood in line and listened to what others said about the streetcar.; Another time, at the Women’s March at Seattle Center, both the Monorail and the 8 had a huge long lines, so I went into a restaurant for an hour and then took the 8.

    4. If Seattle wants to think of itself as a world-class city, SDOT needs to do better special events circulation planning with both Metro and ST.

      Making transit free is nice — but the main benefit to bus speed is not having to take time to collect fares (and of course to discourage drunk driving accidents making things worse). I get concerned when leaders think that free fares and more vehicles are all that is needed.

      SDOT appears to require that third parties request lane or street closures — although they accommodate temporary closures often. That appears to me to be the core problem: establishing who is responsible for developing and implementing (including funding of) the flow management. SDOT is reactive. Metro and ST are reactive mostly. Seattle has a Special Events office — but that too appears to be reactive.

      So there clearly needs to be Council action to make special events like this better managed — including determining how to fund the staff needed to ensure that a transit corridor remains open. Then Metro needs to implement rerouting to use the open corridor somehow — and widely publicize the system that will be in place so users won’t drive to these special events.

      Finally, the City needs to somehow threaten to cancel events if they can’t manage better bus flow. It’s not fair for Metro to pay for the extra buses stuck in traffic because the City isn’t on top of ensuring that buses don’t get stuck.

      This problem will happen again for New Years a year from now unless things change from all these agencies being reactive rather than proactive.

      1. At huge events in Seattle Center, southbound Third should become transit and right turns only between Clay and Union. The right turns would allow people to access parking lots and parking along the street, but ensure that buses can run freely.

        Then establish a very low headway shuttle system between a loop at Union and a loop at Vine, Fourth and Clay by coning off the northbound lane on Fourth between Vine and Clay. Nobody in their right mind would be going north on Fourth at the end of a Seattle Center event anyway, so no harm, no foul.

        Buses would load in the western half of the block between Fourth and Third on the north curb on Clay. No stops until Third and Pine, one block from Link. Buses could deadhead up Fourth in that left lane; maybe the coning stretches all the way down to Virginia or something.

        I expect that six or seven buses could give four minute headways.

        Obviously, the Monorail would be much better than buses if it ran a dogbone with no reversing, but it is crippled by the one-train-at-a-time Westlake station. It can help, though.

      2. If Seattle wants to think of itself as a world-class city, SDOT needs to do better special events circulation planning with both Metro and ST.

        Part of the problem is that the SPD Union insists on uniformed officers doing traffic control (cops get overtime). The problem now is that we just don’t have enough cops. As a result, we don’t have enough people controlling traffic, which can cause gridlock. By “gridlock” I don’t mean “bad traffic”, I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock.

      3. For the Seattle center, for southbound travel wouldn’t it be better for focus as many riders as possible onto the monorail and then transfer to buses/link at Westlake? That at least pulls the buses away from the peak congestion in QA.

      4. AJ, sure, if the Monorail had the capacity for extreme peaks. But it doesn’t, because it’s just two short trains that have a poor station with slow egress at the south end.

        It’s not clear how that might be improved. If BLE is abandoned because of cost and political bickering maybe it could be turned into a “dogbone layout” some way, but it would be difficult with the Link station so wide under Pine there at Fifth and the cut and cover tunnel east of there. I doubt the tunnel roof would support even a single guide beam, much less a pair, and anyway, two couldn’t make the curve.

        I’d love it to continue south, but the retailers on Fifth would object.

        It was a big mistake not to build Westlake Center around the Monorail station and keep the two platform configuration at a minimum or better, splay the guide beams and have a single center platform.

        Of course, those options are long gone.

        That’s why having a bus loop between Third and Clay and Third and Pine is a good way to handle the problem. The D and the ETB lines can be stuck in traffic, but people using transit can still get to Link and bus connections in the transit core at Westlake.

        Cone off a bus lane southbound on Third and one northbound on Fourth during the event and then when the traffic rush starts the busses have a reliable path to move quickly for an hour.

        Most Center events don’t have such a severe “inbound” peak before they begin. People drift in more slowly than they leave, so ordinary transit is more able to deliver them.

      5. I could just see our friend on Mercer Island’s neighbors taking the Monorail or a shuttle bus downtown and waiting for a bus on 2nd, 3rd, or 4th at midnight.

      7. I haven’t taken the Monorail since the Westlake Station upgrade. It seems to me that the best way to improve that station’s efficiency is to have two more elevators that go from the Monorail platform level to the Westlake Station Mezzanine level. On game days I imagine that would be a choke point. If efficient transfers between modes are important, that would help.

      8. AJ, that plan was proposed in 2018, six years ago, and if there is any movement to implement it, it isn’t obvious. I grant that it would improve egress from the east guide beam train somewhat, and would greatly improve ingress for all riders. The current set up seems designed to deter rather than serve high volumes of ridership.

        But the removal of the east side platform at Westlake has limited potential headways ever since it was undertaken. It takes time to place and remove the “bridges” over the west guide beam, and that can never be improved unless the east guide beam has a platform of its own above Fifth Avenue. It would probably be OK to have the pinched clearance, since the trains basically run “opposite” each other. When both trains are running and one train is in Westlake occupying the overhang region between the guide beams, the other train is at Seattle Center, so there’s no need to squeeze them together. If they get out of synch the other train has to wait at the curve just north of Westlake.

        One would hope that there is a signal there, but even if there isn’t, “line-of-sight” operation would behoove an arriving train’s operator to stop at the curve.

      9. After the 2005 collision a few years ago, didn’t they add some sort of positive train stop at the curve?

    5. “Comment section, tell Jordan what you said when I asked which is better transit-wise for a Sonics arena, Climate Pledge or SODO.”

      Yes, Emperor. SODO is clearly better access-wise: the roads are designed for large trucks; the I-5 entrances are right there; there are existing bus routes going north and south; and the main Link corridor is already there. Climate Pledge Arena and Seattle Center are hemmed in between hills and small roads. I don’t remember what Comment Section said several years ago in response to your question, or if you even asked it.

      1. My original assumptions was that SoDo would be better. I’ve changed my mind. Partly it was due to analysis by the Seattle Times. They pointed out how far someone would need to walk to get to the game. The monorail just gets people a lot closer.

        A lot more people are likely to walk to the game as well. This may be happening with hockey (I don’t know). Meanwhile, the traffic problems are merely one of many that SDOT needs to solve. It is slowly getting better, but not as fast as we want. Making matters worse is the insistence by the SPD that uniformed officers be responsible for traffic control. Given the overall shortage of cops, you end up with fewer people controlling things, and gridlock is more common.

      2. Would be interesting to see the mode share of Mariners vs Kraken games, particularly when transit is free with a game ticket. I would imagine the numbers are different on weekday vs weekend traffic.

  13. Checked the stp unfortunately there aren’t any improvements planned for that segment on Queen Anne/1st Ave. there are future improvements on 15th.

    On a different note did see that Kirkland is moving forward with the 108th Ave Ne transit lane so that’s exciting. Currently a bit delayed and final design fall 2024 with construction beginning 2025.

    > This section design depicts a northbound, bus-only lane, called a queue-jump, planned for 108th Avenue Northeast, between Northeast 53rd and 68th streets.

    https://www.kirklandwa.gov/Government/Departments/Public-Works-Department/Construction-Projects/108th-Avenue-Northeast-transit-queue-jump

    1. Buses definitely get frequently backed up here, so this project will help bus riders a lot. The new Montlake ramp should also be opening pretty soon true, helping the 255 on the Seattle end.

    2. 108th is narrow, I wonder if they are widening the street or think they can squeeze it all in the existing ROW.

      1. https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/public-works/kirkland-transit-implementation-plan-final.pdf#page=27

        Shows it in more detail. They are lengthening the ‘right turn’ section (and widening the road for that section). To be honest that’s probably why this project got approved as it’s also implicitly for cars letting them make a right turn with more space for them to wait there.

        The bike lane for that section is then moved behind right turn lane onto the sidewalk.

      2. That plan is great. Thanks for the link WL. It is long, but you can skim through a lot of it. The real nitty-gritty starts on page 19 of the document (which is page 23 of the PDF). That is where they list the projects. They break it down quite well in terms of benefits and what is involved. Both the plans as well as the report seem very well thought out.

        These are the types of things that can provide a tremendous amount of benefit, for very little cost. They tend to be ignored — they aren’t “splashy”. But bit by bit, they add up, and save riders and the transit agency a lot of money.

        My only quibble is that Kirkland — like so many cities — is following the micromobility fad (they are calling it “Flexible Transit Program”). These are bound to fail, just like every other attempt has failed. How they fail depends on the particulars — here is a good flowchart: https://humantransit.org/wp-content/uploads/Mircrotransit-Flow-Chart-02092018.png. Locally, we’ve basically followed the leftmost route (a nicer experience for fewer customers, less service for many).

    3. Since I’m already talking about kirkland there are some other future transit plans (these up in the air, not in design phase yet):

      Market street bat lanes:
      > This project would convert the existing parking and bicycle lanes in the northbound direction into a Business-and-Transit (BAT) Lane from NE 18th Street to NE 116th Street along Market Street/98th Avenue NE. The BAT lane would be in effect during peak travel periods, and during non-peak travel, parking would be allowed and bicycles would use the area marked with sharrows. Beyond the direct travel time improvements for riders on the bus, this project would improve on-time reliability for the substantial number of riders that board at stops further south along the route.

      NE 85th street:
      > The recently approved Sound Transit 3 (ST3) funding package plans for bus only lanes on NE 85th
      Street between I-405 and 6th Street to improve the connection between these two key transit hubs

      1. Interesting. During peak hours, the plan seems fine, and I think, considering that northbound market street is downhill there, a wide bike/bus lane would actually be safer for bikes than the existing bike lane, right in the door zone of parked cars.

        But, during off peak, I think they should just keep the bike/bus lane and ban parking all the time. For the bus, it doesn’t really matter, as market street is uncongested, but the proposed design essentially limits bike separation from cars to peak hours only, which I think is unacceptable for such a major bike route that is part of the Lake Washington loop. It’s also not like the area has a shortage of parking. It’s nothing but houses there, and the houses all have driveways, and there’s still parking on the other side of Market. So, the off peak plan is essentially trading bike safety for two or three parked cars who could easily park somewhere else.

      2. > But, during off peak, I think they should just keep the bike/bus lane and ban parking all the time. For the bus, it doesn’t really matter, as market street is uncongested, but the proposed design essentially limits bike separation from cars to peak hours only

        Yeah I was originally going to praise Kirkland a bit more for these transit projects but then realize a lot of these are more street widening projects for dedicated right turn lanes for cars.

  14. I recently rolled my eyes at the Urbanist touting Overlake Village as transit oriented development in their article’s cover picture (https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/01/02/state-must-pass-transit-oriented-development-rules-that-prioritize-equity-and-affordability/).

    At the time this building was built, their idea of “transit oriented development” was to build a building wherever you could find the land, then detour some existing transit route with crappy frequency (in this case, the 253, a predecessor to today’s B-line) right into the building’s parking lot. The result: almost no riders in the building that the bus was detouring for and big service delays for everyone else riding that bus.

    Bottom line: real transit oriented development needs to have multiple bus routes nearby running frequent service and in multiple directions, and it is way better to have good service 1/4 mile away than to have crappy service detouring to the building’s front door. You also need good amenities within walking distance – a routine trip to the grocery store should be walk, not a bus ride (South Kirkland park ride is another a good example of transit oriented development done wrong, for this reason).

    And also, of course, whether a building counts as transit oriented development has nothing to do with whether a government agency is involved in development the property specifically as transit oriented development. What matters is how much stuff you can walk to or bus to within a reasonable amount of time.

    1. > At the time this building was built, their idea of “transit oriented development” was to build a building wherever you could find the land, then detour some existing transit route with crappy frequency

      I was under the impression the detour was to reach the park and ride? But yeah agreed the bus detours for these park and rides are kind of absurd. The kirkland one is kind egregious as well.

      1. According to your pdf link in a prior comment (*), the city of Kirkland has also expressed interesting in eliminating some unnecessary detours of bus routes at Totem Lake. Nice to hear them acknowledge that Totem Lake Transit Center only makes for bus routes that end there and that buses that continue onward should just stop in the street. However, the proposed improvement came with a price tag of nearly $1 million, which seems very high for just a few poles on the ground for new bus stops on the street.

        (*) reposting: https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/public-works/kirkland-transit-implementation-plan-final.pdf#page=27

      2. Yeah there’s some interesting idea. I’ll outline them a bit for others since I know reading a 90 page pdf is understandably not too enticing.

        1) south kirkland park and ride left turn signal, they are keeping the detour but adding a left turn signal (currently no traffic signal) so busses don’t have to wait for lull in traffic to make the left turn continuing north.

        4)The Totem Lake Transit Center’s location is difficult to serve and duplicates the access provided by the stops near the Totem Lake Freeway Station and the Kingsgate Park & Ride. Buses stopping at the Transit Center must divert from a more direct alignment in order to serve the Transit Center loop. This project would identify potential route restructures to consolidate the Totem Lake Transit Center stops to locate on street or to use existing stops on NE 128th Street. (Part of this already happened with the North Eastside Mobility restructures) Other parts didn’t happen yet like:
        * Potential for on-street northbound stop for routes that continue north of Kingsgate Park & R
        * Potential for new on-street stops at 120th Ave NE and NE 128th St to serve routes that no longer loop through the Totem Lake Transit Center

        8) Buses traveling westbound along NE 70th Place must divert into the Houghton Park & Ride in order to serve stop on the east side of 116th Avenue NE. The diversion adds approximately 60 seconds of delay because the bus must make two left-turns to access and exit the Park & Ride. Therefore, this project reroutes buses so they do not circulate through Houghton Park & Ride by adding an on-street bus stop on NE 70th Place at 116th Avenue NE for westbound buses.

        There’s actually some other interesting stuff in the other cities’ transit master plans that I haven’t seen anyone discuss nor say the urbanist bring it up. Probably discuss the next open thread maybe bellevue or redmonds transit/transportation plan

      3. “Buses traveling westbound along NE 70th Place must divert into the Houghton Park & Ride”

        Houghton P&R that is closing?

      4. @mike

        good call out, I guess should have first noted this is a 2019 transit plan.

        I guess after covid it’s honestly a lot lower priority for these park and ride improvements and probably why most of these haven’t been implemented/focused on.

  16. Seattle councilmembers sworn in. More importantly the committee chairs have assigned as well.

    > Transportation committee Rob Saka (chair), Joy Hollingsworth (D3) as vice-chair, Bob Kettle (D7), and Dan Strauss (D6), along with the soon-to-be-appointed citywide councilmember. Notably Morales, who had been arguably the most outspoken member of the transportation committee (1)

    Honestly kind of surprising that Rob Saka was assigned the transportation commitee, he didn’t really seem to talk about it that much. Checking their website https://www.voterobsaka.com/priorities and what the urbanist said it seems he’ll probably “focus on the basics” I assume focusing more of the transportation money on road maintenance and probably bridge maintenance (key thing on the mind for west seattle residents as part of district.

    https://westseattleblog.com/2024/01/video-seattle-city-councils-new-lineup-with-district-1-councilmember-rob-saka-officially-starts-this/ Calls out fixing bridges and roads and fixing potholes.

    He does reference,
    > Create a network of pedestrian and biker friendly infrastructure that actually allows residents to get from where they are to where they need to be quickly and safely.
    on the other hand notably does not say “bus lanes” anywhere. I have a feeling we’re going to get a very road maintenance focused transportation plan with some few bike lanes and very few new bus lanes.

    Did decide to look at a brief overview of the rest of the committee, honestly transportation was not the highlight of the election so there’s only a couple passing remarks to read the tea leaves and scouring their websites but enough caveats:
    * Joy Hollingsworth relatively pro transit, explicitly calls out bus lanes “Coordinate with Seattle Department of Transportation + King County Metro to identify priorities for bus lanes in main arterials to increase transit times and prioritize busses.”
    * Bob Kettle, literally doesn’t say anything about transportation on their website, looked around a bit more and couldn’t find anything (feel free to correct me here) https://www.kettleforseattle.com/issues
    * Dan Strauss, doesn’t list about transporation here https://d6danstrauss.org/dans-plan/ but elsewhere says “create dedicated bus lanes that freight can use, and connect our protected bike lanes so everyone is safe and separated.” and in general is on other transportation boards

    > Land Use Commitee, Tammy Morales (chair) Other members of the land use committee will be Strauss as vice-chair, and Councilmembers Cathy Moore (D5), Maritza Rivera (D4), and the as-yet-unknown member that will soon be appointed to fill citywide Councilmember Mosqueda’s seat (1)

    Tammy Morales was pretty ardent supporter of Alternative 6 adding much more housing. Additionally Bob Kettle the most anti-housing councilmember is not part of this committee so I’d imagine this land use committee will pass a relatively pro-housing plan.

    Other chair committees (2):
    * Joy Hollingsworth – Parks, Public Utilities & Technology
    * Rivera – Libraries, Education, & Neighborhoods
    * Moore – Housing and Human Services
    * Strauss – Finance, Native Communities, and Tribal Governments
    * Kettle – Public Safety
    * Vacant, Position 8 – Sustainability, City Light, and Arts and Culture
    * Nelson – Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development

    Note, normally it wouldn’t be too important who’s the chair committee in the long term as it is rotated, but in this case 2024 they will have outsized importance in approving the seattle transportation plan / one seattle plan (land use/zoning). There’s some other interesting stuff for the rest of the committees such as apparently all of them were clamoring for the public safety chair, but I’ll just leave the focus on the first two.

    (1) https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/01/03/tammy-morales-rob-saka-to-chair-key-council-committees-during-pivotal-year/
    (2) https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/newly-elected-seattle-city-council-members-sworn-in/281-10ec1c89-7a68-4b39-bad2-bb4c372b8d0e

  17. I took three buses today (250, 271, B Line), and needed to pay the fare in cash. On the 250 and 271, the drivers told me not to pay. One gave me a transfer, which I saved in case I needed it for FEO’s on RapidRide, although I haven’t seen them on the B Line in years. Not sure if those drivers always wave riders off from paying a cash fare, or they are just extending the NYE free fare policy.

    1. It’s a driver-specific thing. Metro drivers are supposed to waive the fare if you say you have no money and ask for a free ride. Some drivers extend that to even if you don’t ask. If you go in the back door, some drivers will ask you to go out and come in the front door and pay, others ask you to come up and pay, and others just drive on. I’ve sometimes gone in the back door when I was afraid the bus would pull away before I got to the front door or I didn’t want to make all the passengers wait, and sometimes I want to go up front and tap but the driver has already turned the plastic screen toward the aisle.

      1. I thought it was kinda odd because it wasn’t like I was searching my pockets, fumbling for the fare. Both times I had the bills already out and was about to put them in the farebox, and the drivers said something like “keep it,” or “don’t worry about it,” and waved me off. I’ve paid with cash before, and it’s very rare when a driver stops me from paying.

      2. “I had the bills already out”

        Well, now we can exclude people above a certain age and below a certain age from your secret identity.

      3. Some drivers don’t even seem to want to wait for you to tap. They wave you on to just come in. I usually tap anyway but I get the feeling they’d rather I didn’t because it takes a moment to get the reader to register the card.

        I wonder if Metro has calculated what percent of “fare evasion” or fare loss are cases like Sam and me.

      4. A larger question would be has Metro actually calculated net fare revenue, which accounts for all collection costs, including the cost of fare enforcement and the value of added dwell time.

        In the case of known monthly passholders, Transit as a whole gains nothing after your first tap of the month. After that, it becomes an exercise in which agency gets how much. Maybe with fewer taps, the ORCA vendor gets a smaller cut, but I don’t know what their formula is.

        I do hope ST and Metro can right-size their Ambassador forces to be large enough to incentivize everyone who does not have a free-category ORCA to pay, but not get in an arms-holding-ORCA-readers race to get more than their share of pass revenue split.

        I also hope, for the love of everyone else on Sam’s bus, that Sam discovers the auto-reload feature.

      5. A larger question would be has Metro actually calculated net fare revenue, which accounts for all collection costs, including the cost of fare enforcement and the value of added dwell time.

        I believe that is all considered when they state their net farebox recovery (which was around 30% before the pandemic — I don’t know what it is now). I’m pretty sure all of it gets lumped together (and includes processing the cash, dealing with ORCA cards, etc.). Some routes are quite efficient, others aren’t. I don’t think they list the farebox recovery on each route (or the subsidy for each route) but they list the ridership per service hour, which is a proxy. Things like the cost to process all the cash has been calculated before, as they consider ways of discouraging cash payments.

        In San Fransisco, off-board payment saved money, because fare compliance went up. This was enough to offset the additional cost of enforcement. This meant that they basically got extra security on the buses for free (and then some). I don’t think they calculated the extra savings from the reduced dwell time, but I’m sure that added a bit to the savings as well. It has certainly made for a better system. I got that from page 12 of this document: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/agendaitems/2014/12-2-14%20Item%2014%20All%20Door%20Boarding%20Report.pdf

      6. I’ve felt impatience observing riders who stand next to the farebox and check every clothing and backpack pocket trying to find their card/transfer/cash, but never with someone because they are putting three one dollar bills into the farebox.

      7. Pierce Transit really has no idea how many people are riding their buses with the high rate a fare evasion. A big part of it is Tacoma has gotten a lot meaner. There’s not a lot of respect for bus drivers or PT in general now. The other part is this wacky idea that people who can’t “afford” to pay shouldn’t have to. Maybe half of all riders have decided that they can’t “afford” bus fare now. The more you raise fares, the bigger percentage of people won’t pay.

        This is the reason that Sound Transit should just have a low flat fare to ride. Asking people for 2 bucks doesn’t seem out of line. I’ll gladly pay that. But this horseshit about fares over $6 to ride multiple “zones” on Sound Transit? That’s just never going to happen. I won’t pay it… I’ll just ride the damn train for nothing, fuck Sound Transit. I’d even put up fliers asking everybody to just not pay the fare as an act of civil disobedience. It’s not like Pierce Country supports Sound Transit anyway.

        A smart sustainable transit system should have zero reliance on “fare box recovery”, because it’s a recipe for failure. Just set fares at $1 or $2 and stash all fare box money in a rainy day fund. Otherwise the economy goes South and the transit spokesman calls a press conference to explain that “fare box recovery” hasn’t been good and it’s time to cut service. Stability is more importantly than anything else in transit.

        Washington State’s failure is the lack of a State income tax…. and property taxes are already maxed out on things they shouldn’t pay for. In reality, every resident in Seattle needs to pay some sort of transit tax just for living in the City. We all pay for water, right? and electricity. Add transit as a utility with some sort of stable funding source. The big lie is people believing they don’t need to pay for things they “don’t use”. I don’t care if you own a car or not, if you don’t pay taxes for roads, how is the Amazon truck supposed to get to your house? Transit is the same way. The City needs it regardless of your transportation choices.

      8. Agree with you almost totally, Tacomee. Maybe not the meaner thing, but you have a better perspective than me.

        I’d like to correct what I said earlier about fare avoidance. Talking to a buddy who drives for PT, he says overall about 85-90% do pay. He tends to request the ST routes, so his perspective may be a little skewed, but he also said even Route 1 gets something like 75%.

        That said, he also hands out all-day passes like candy. Someone very upset and confused as to how to get someplace? Hand them a pass and some directions. Defuse and placate. Gets him through the day.

      9. Cam Solomon,

        As a guy who’s watched local politics in Tacoma for decades, I really believe the voters might make transit an “utility” and vote in a new property tax if the bus system actually functioned like it should. The trick is to show value right out of the gate. A $1 fare and expanded service might fit the bill.

        Pierce Transit also serves other communities that aren’t Tacoma…and the Hell the with ’em. Puyallup NIMBYs can’t hold back the City of Destiny forever.

      10. When the economy goes south, tax revenue drops (actually more so than fare revenue), so service ends up being cut anyway.

      11. asdf2,

        Ahh, that’s not true. Transit fare recovery is less reliable than sales tax which is less reliable than income tax which is less reliable than property tax.

        US transit is funded through iffy Federal grants and the absolute most unstable revenue sources. That’s a big reason why it doesn’t work well. Because like or not, transit is sort of an after thought for 90% of all elected officials. Seattle City Council and Mayor have lots and lots of big ideas… transit isn’t one of them.

        In Tacoma, we pay the City a monthly payment for trash collection, recycling pick up and City water. It’s a good system because the local dipshits who win elections can’t spend more money on god-know-what what skimp on picking up the trash. Believe me, they would if they could.

        I’m not sure about the math here, maybe you could help me out. Take the total number of King Country households…. what’s the KC Metro budget? Divide these two numbers… divide again by 12 and add that number into the trash collection bill. That’s realistic recession proof funding for transit.

      12. Any PWN income tax is presumably highly progressive, which is therefore more volatile than a sales tax. Look at CA’s volatile tax receipts vs TX or FL.

        For basic service that should have the same cost (aside from inflation) every year, whether is fire & safety or transit operations, a property tax (or better a land tax) is best.

      13. AJ,

        I don’t disagree with that. I think Washington State would be well served with a smaller flat income tax, (4-5%) with a high deductible. That means King County would pay more than Eastern Washington (the high deductible) and makes the rest of State support it. Money isn’t leaving the State because of a 4% tax. California killed off the golden goose in so many ways. I frankly don’t see how Seattle can have some sort of funky “wealth” tax that actually works for more than a few years before wealthy people avoid it.

        It wasn’t that many years ago that Tacoma City councilpersons didn’t get paid ! I actually brought that in a Council meeting once and suggested we go back to Council not getting paid and locked up percentages of revenue into the City charter (public safety and roads would get the same percentage year after year, no exceptions). This way Council could be more like care keepers and let the City manager and accountants run most of the Tacoma.

        Needless to say the idea wasn’t popular with my elected officials… The mayor at the time, Ms. Strickland, (now in the U.S. house) then preposed a tax increase to fix Tacoma’s failing streets… that the government hadn’t bothered to fully fund for decades. If the City charter would have mandated a percentage of the budget going to street repair… I doubt this would have happened.

      15. “US transit is funded through iffy Federal grants”

        No it’s not. There are no federal grants for regular bus operations. Most grants are for one-time capital projects like new track or new buses. There’s an ongoing “fixed guideway” supplement or tax break for rail and trolleybus routes, but that alone is not enough to fund operations. There may be incentives for paratransit or rural routes, but again that doesn’t help regular city bus service.

        There were short-term covid funds to keep up operations during the pandemic, but those are now ending and aren’t being replaced.

      16. @tacomee What the hell are you talking about with a $6 / two-zone fare? Link is right now $3.50 max, based on distance and will be a $3 flat-fare in fall 2024. (You know you can look up that information, right? This stuff isn’t hidden.)

        https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/how-to-pay/fares

        Also, do you have any evidence to cite your claim that “half of all riders have decided ‘I can’t afford to pay now'”?

        And you’re going to put up flyers telling people not to pay? Sure you will.

        You seem angry.

  18. Watched an interesting video about how suburban office parks will be the next to fall in property values.

    5 minute mark includes some statistics about how office space in downtowns went from 74% in 1974 to 58% in 1999. Also talks about a specific town Eagan, Minnesota that had Blue cross and reuters leave.

    https://youtu.be/KqJhevn2AOY?si=hMzazlRuce85dYFS&t=290

    I peaked around and it seems there’s a couple different initiatives with all the empty land a) hanging onto it as a suburban office park but adding some retail amenities b) retrofitting with apartments c) even larger changes to say industrial

    Doral office park conversion supposedly to a downtown. https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2023/07/26/downtown-built-former-office-park

    Others discuss converting office parks into warehouses/industrial land (many have vast parking lots and wide avenues already)
    https://www.commercialsearch.com/news/are-suburban-office-to-industrial-conversions-feasible/

    Definitely unpopular with residents, but at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised if smaller cities accept it for the property tax if they are unable to find an alternative.

      1. How about the old and sleepy Bellefield Office Park? If done right, it could be quite impactful. It has a very large footprint, much larger than all of Bellevue Square. It’s fairly close to East Main. Perhaps one day if the area becomes dense enough, it could even warrant an infill station. I’m visualizing a Village at Totem Lake-type development, but larger. I’m not saying I’d want to see the old office park redeveloped, but being located in between two light rail stations, I think its days are numbered.

        https://www.google.com/maps/@47.598147,-122.1915299,3009m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

      2. The Bellefields office park is a grandfathered development in a nature reserve. It can’t be expanded.

      3. I don’t think that’s quite accurate, Mike. A quick look at some zoning maps show it as just being zoned office. I don’t think it has any kind of nature reserve status or protection. You may say, “But, Sam, it’s only zoned for office! Residential cannot be built there!! What do you have to say about that, huh?!?” First, I would say calm down. Then I would say that zoning designations change over time. What’s office-only today maybe be changed into something else a few decades from now. But, I’m open to being proven wrong about the nature reserve status part of this.

        – Sam. Donkey Kong Grandmaster.

      4. I did a quick google search it seems the occupancy levels are at 90% as of 2022 though on 5 year leases. So it’s highly used as of now (whether people are actually going to the office I have no clue)

        Regarding redevelopment Mike is correct
        https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/cleanupsearch/site/2760
        There’s restrictions notably “prohibit new buildings”

      5. @Al

        Unfortunately searching around most of the suburban type office parks are situated on cheaper land which means they’d be far from where the train or even frequent bus lines would be.

        The best areas; Federal way (south) probably has the best opportunity. Around bel red has a lot of opportunity (idk how much counts as industrial/office). Northgate executive center

        Lesser ones:
        South of the Kirkland park and ride there’s lots of office parks. Maybe canyon park as well (with the i405 brt)

        In lynnwood along 99 there’s a couple business parks

        Up around alderwood I see alderwood business campus, but probably much easier to redevelop the other parking lots first.

        Places like say the new Renton development are full of empty offices or the east gate offices but are too large/waste to demolish and rebuild.

        (I couldn’t check each one for occupancy as that’d take too long to research)

      6. Thoughts on office parks that would be most impactful to transit if they were redeveloped?

        I think the office parks that have good transit are the ones most likely to remain office parks. If Microsoft collapsed tomorrow, someone would find use for all those offices, just as they would for Amazon offices if they moved. They are very convenient, making them more attractive. It is the places that are inconvenient that largely define the doomed office park. If they are converted to housing, they would have a fairly minor impact on transit, by their very nature.

      7. I am disappointed with the responses (except mine) to AJ’s question. They show a lack of vision and imagination.

      8. “the office parks that have good transit are the ones most likely to remain office parks”

        Another factor is price. Close-in locations will tend to fill up, but if there’s a ton of them to fill with the telework revolution, landlords will also have to lower the price to match the alternatives and what companies can pay. If the landlords can’t break even doing that, then they’ll go bankrupt and the buildings will be sold at a lower price, and the new owner will offer lower rates.

        Also, housing is not the only possible use for excess office space. Manufacturing, light industry, labs, and other kinds of businesses could use the space. We’re used to thinking of industry as in sprawling one-story buildings in Kent or SODO, but in New York and Europe it also occurs in multistory buildings in walkable neighborhoods with a subway station nearby. Jane Jacobs cited a building with several different companes, like a metalworker, theatrical set or costume builder, and others, and the companies were able to buy from each other or get custom products made by each other for their own missions. Some kinds of heavy industry are neighborhood-incompatible, but many kinds are compatible, it’s just that zoning regulations or cultural traditions keep them separate.

    2. Thanks WL. That was fantastic. It was exactly what I was talking about the other day. They managed to capture the subject far more eloquently (and in a much more entertaining way) than I ever could, while filling in some details I left out. One of the big things to remember is that suburban office space was always cheaper. That was one of its big selling points. If you need less office space, then prices drop across the board, which means that the places most likely to be abandoned are in the suburbs, not the (more attractive) inner city.

      I don’t think it will have a huge impact in this region. Some of it just the way we are structured. The counties — and even the cities — are huge for as many offices as we have here. A lot of the growth was east (not north or south) — all within the same county, and sometimes within the same (fairly big) city. When it comes to office space, Downtown Seattle still dominates (we aren’t Detroit). I do expect the suburban office spaces to shrink, but I don’t expect it to have a major impact on any of the cities or counties in the region, simply because it is a tiny portion of the overall economy in those areas. Other parts of the country will get hammered.

      2. Since I’ve known people who take Metro to those Kent industrial jobs, I can say something about that. Metro service has greatly improved in the past twenty years. The 150 (Seattle-Kent) and 161 (Burien-SeaTac-Kent) serve many of those jobsites. The 160 (future RapidRide I) doesn’t reach those directly, but it connects Renton and Auburn to them, and serves jobs in Auburn.

        Some companies have night shifts, and night owl service has increased to accommodate them. The 150 runs until 2:15am southbound, and starts at 4:45am northbound and 5:15am southbound. That coincided with my roommate’s shifts starting at 3am or ending at 4 or 5am. The 160 has practically 24-hour service in the Auburn-Kent segment, and RapidRide I will presumably have more. The 161 has 24-hour service southbound and a 1-5am gap northbound. The 574 has a very odd span: 2am to 10am northbound. The A runs 24 hours. The latter four routes are especially for early-morning airport shifts, and to continue the morning service provided by the previous 181 (Auburn-Kent-SeaTac(-Burien)). My roommate usually took the 150. He sometimes took Link+181, although the transfer and Link’s travel time made that often unfavorable.

        His brother who was living here in 2022 came up with a solution I’d have never thought of. His Amazon shift ended around 3am. It was on the 161 or 181 (I forget whether the restructure had happened), and a mile away from the 150. So he bought a used folding bike for the last mile to the 150. I suggested he look into 181+124 to get home. But he found a surprising better option: the 120 started earlier than the 124 or 150. So he took the 181 to Burien and the 120 to downtown. I’d never think of taking the 120 (now H) to south-central King County because it’s so time-consuming just to get to Burien. But in the early morning all that congestion and time sink goes away, so it was competitive.

        The flaw in this network structure is you can get to northern Kent industrial jobs in a reasonable time only from certain areas: Kent, Auburn, Burien, central Seattle, and southeast Seattle. It would take a long time from Pierce County or the Eastside. Renton is marginal: I don’t think it’s travel time or night owls are that good. But the I will doubtless improve it.

        One caveat is that the bulk of Renton’s, Kent’s, and Auburn’s populations live east of their downtowns. These routes only reach the western half of those cities. Transfers can be long or there’s no night service in the eastern half. The 160 reaches Kent East Hill but doesn’t go to the western industrial area. Renton doesn’t even have something like that: the 160, F, 106, 101, and 107 all terminate downtown. The future KDM-Kent-East Hill-164th-GRCC RapidRide could help with this, but it’s still unfunded.

      3. Yeah for suburban job density last mile is much more important because of the greater distance between a transit stop to job site, so it makes sense that metro is much more compelling for someone who is comfortable biking.

        RE: the population up on the ridge east of the Green River valley (Renton’s highlands, Kent’s east hill, etc.), that built environment is what it is, and the region shouldn’t be directing any more growth there; I consider that equivalent to a Sammamish – aside from a few arterial corridors, KCM is never going to be able to provide compelling transit to those neighborhoods, and instead this is where the focus should be on station access like small P&Rs and good biking/walking infrastructure.

    3. Looked a bit more and honestly as AJ/ross noticed this Seattle area doesn’t have many suburban office sprawl most instead centralized east-west along 520/i90

      Instead I see a lot of industrial land that has potential. In Seattle with Ballard, sodo, and even rainier has the Lowe’s/former Pepsi site. Eastside with the spring district/ bel red area.

      Lynnwood transit center to the southwest there’s some industrial land not super close but not that far either. Kent Des Moines right to the east there’s parcels of industrial land as well.

      Of course on the other hand currently the industrial land is relatively valuable, though I’m not well versed enough to know if there’s some major distinction between the light industrial/heavy industrial property values and if it matters being closer to the city center.

      Aka for example Amazon originally wanted the Lowe’s site for being near Seattle for a warehouse. Though for those lynnwood plots I don’t think it’d matter so much to relocate the towing service. Sodo district heavily fought against the residential expansion.

      But yeah I might look into this a bit more

      1. Good point about the industrial jobs. Similar dynamic, in that if a company moves — or there is a general shift in employment from one area to another, the local area is hosed. Boeing is the obvious example. If they closed the Everett Plant, it would send shock waves through the entire region, but it would devastate Everett and Snohomish County. That seems unlikely. But similar places could get hit hard with a manufacturing downturn, or a shift towards making things in other places. Consider Skagit County. According to the stateManufacturing accounted for 30.0 percent of total GDP for the Mount Vernon – Anacortes MSA. I have no idea what they make, and how likely it is for those jobs to take a downturn, but job sprawl followed by a downtown is exactly how Detroit collapsed. Some place like SoDo would quickly be retrofitted into other industrial uses, or converted into apartments. This is more or less what has happened in Ballard (brewpubs and townhouses in the former industrial areas). Same thing happened in Brooklyn. But the far flung industrial parks are far more likely to sit vacant for decades.

        For example, consider the Cascade Manufacturing Industrial Center. This has all of the elements of classic job-sprawl. The government helps subsidize it (in this case blatantly). It touts the benefits for local residents, of which there are few (not many live in north Snohomish Country). It will likely be just fine until there is a downtown. For example, imagine if Boeing cuts Everett production permanently, and sells off half their plants. Devastating for the county and city, but consider those shock waves to the region. Industrial land would suddenly get a lot cheaper in the region (in the same way that office space suddenly got a lot cheaper with the pandemic). Just as downtown office space is a lot more attractive than distant office parks, Everett/Mukilteo industrial facilities are more attractive than the ones in north Snohomish County. If you are an aerospace company, you would much rather be close to the main Everett Boeing plant, even if the plant is shrinking. Thus in the long term Everett would recover, while Marysville/Arlington would struggle. They would have a big boom (spurred on by the Puget Sound Regional Council) followed by a big bust.

        It wouldn’t have to be Boeing, either. The Detroit area collapsed because jobs moved overseas, and manufacturing became less labor intensive. The main problem though — the reason it hasn’t rebounded — is because of job sprawl (and sprawl in general). The same thing could easily happen in this area. I don’t see it taking down Seattle (or King County) simply because those areas aren’t as dependent on manufacturing. But it could really hurt the suburban areas.

      2. Urban growth makes any industrial land around it worth much, much more. Any industrial land in Seattle City limits is just crazy expensive… because it’s in demand for distribution centers and construction staging. Construction takes a whole lot warehousing and staging space.

        As far industrial workers not using transit… that’s somewhat because of cultural reasons (high truck ownership among workers) and because transit doesn’t bother to try to serve industrial employers.

        Anybody want to take a guess at home many employees Joint Base Lewis-McChord has? I’ll give you a hint… for every one employee in downtown Tacoma there’s 10 workers at the base.

        You would have think that Sound Transit would be working on a transportation plan for the second biggest employer in the State.

      3. @Ross

        It’s a bit more complicated than that, there’s a bit of difference between light industrial plots of land and heavy industrial. I was more thinking whether how the easiest ones would be ‘light industrial’ ones first, as there are actually plots of industrial land that are near transit/future and relatively empty. On the other hand the ‘light industrial’ ones are also kind of worth more.

        > Urban growth makes any industrial land around it worth much, much more. Any industrial land in Seattle City limits is just crazy expensive…

        Well kinda agree, it’s why the lowes/pepsi sites in mt rainier probably don’t want to sell and be redeveloped as apartments as it’s worth more as industrial. In sodo it’s the other way around and the north-most sites are worth more as apartments. Though I haven’t researched enough yet with hard numbers.

        (map of available industrial/flex notably around lynnwood, mt baker, rainier beach)
        https://www.loopnet.com/search/industrial-space/for-lease/?sk=a2900fe4664977f7784404120b897b04&bb=k02u78n4wQrr-pltU

        The heavy industrial plots of land more depend on national market factors if they will close down, as while they could get cheaper land elsewhere, rebuilding a factory is very very expensive. plus still requires heavy chemical cleanup before building new housing. Aka like nucor in west seattle. Same for the other safeway factories around the spring district station.

        Anyways of course the other easiest route is to upzone single family housing near stations.

      5. Tlsgwm,

        Thanks for the link! Boeing, Microsoft and JBLM have been running neck and neck for a bit…. JBLM is the biggest single site employer in the State by a wide margin. It’s literally 50k working at the same place. The other big employers spread the love around more to more communities. Not that I don’t think ST, WDOT, and local government don’t need to come up with a separate transportation plan for all the top 5 employers, they do… it’s really important planning.

        To give you some idea of how uneducated and tone deaf Seattle is about Pierce County, the idea that JBLM could somehow be moved to Eastern Washington so Greater Seattle could use the land as another civilian airport has been talked about by The Washington Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission, even though the Governor told them not to. Like the Air Force, U.S. Army and Pierce County would just sign off on this.

        Yet Sound Transit spends billions on Downtown Tacoma… a place with less than 5,000 jobs (and shrinking) and nothing on JBLM… a place with 55,000 jobs (and growing).

        The problem with most transit advocates is they refuse to see the world as it is… a world that needs transit more than ever… and instead try to plan some transit nirvana that’s never going to be.

      6. “You would have think that Sound Transit would be working on a transportation plan for the second biggest employer in the State [JBLM].”

        You’d think that the Pierce boardmembers like the Mayors of Tacoma, the Pierce County Executive, and the University Place councilmember would champion this. Who can best do it but those who live in and represent the subarea? But for thirty years they’ve ignored intra-Pierce regional transit needs, connecting JBLM to the surrounding cities and businesses, and Thurston-Pierce trips. Instead they’ve focused practically everything on Tacoma Dome’s access to Seattle. Even though Tacoma Dome just barely gets into Pierce County, and ends short of downtown Tacoma or the bulk of Tacoma’s population, and does nothing for Lakewood or Puyallup and little for Parkland/Spanaway. None of those regional centers are on the way between Tacoma Dome and the King County border. Unlike the situation in Snohomish County, where in between Everett and Seattle are Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, Shoreline, and the major North Seattle job/activity centers. Pierce’s ST delegation should have worked to mitigate the geographical disadvantages Pierce and Tacoma Dome have, but instead they ignore them to focus almost solely on Tacoma Dome-Seattle service.

      7. “how uneducated and tone deaf Seattle is about Pierce County, the idea that JBLM could somehow be moved to Eastern Washington so Greater Seattle could use the land as another civilian airport has been talked about by The Washington Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission, even though the Governor told them not to.”

        How do you equate Seattle with the Washington CACC? Surely they have more than Seattle urban members. Like, the areas in southwest Washington that would actually use this airport? Seattle doesn’t think much about or care much about Pierce County, especially southern Pierce where JBLM is. That’s very far away, and peripheral to most of Seattle’s concerns in Seattle, the Eastside, up toward Lynnwood, and the near South King industrial area. It’s up to Pierce to identify and champion what it needs.

      8. “Yet Sound Transit spends billions on Downtown Tacoma… and nothing on JBLM”

        You speak as if Sound Transit forced this on Pierce County when it was the other way around. ST primarily defers to what the counties and cities want. This is what Pierce County and its cities wanted.

        “try to plan some transit nirvana”

        A Tacoma Dome-based network was never even remotely a transit nirvana. It would be like if north Link terminated at UW station forever, or east Link terminated at South Bellevue. Do you see the point? UW Station is short of the U-District, Northgate, and Lynnwood. South Bellevue Station is short of downtown Bellevue and Redmond. Tacoma Dome Station is short of downtown Tacoma, practically all of Tacoma, other Pierce County cities, JBLM — short of everything except the megacity of Fife.

        There are debates about how well the Snohomish County freeway-based stations actually serve those cities’ walk-up riders — i.e., how much of a nirvana the alignment is. There are similar debates about whether Bellevue Downtown Station is close enough to the bus bays or Bellevue Square, or whether Overlake Village is close enough to 24th & 156th. Or how south Link serves the 99 corridor but not the center of the population (Renton, Kent, Auburn). But all of this pales in comparison to how little Tacoma Dome Station serves Pierce County’s transit needs. It’s all predicated on people driving to that one P&R at the edge of the county, because fast/frequent transit from Pierce’s cities to that station is precisely what ST, PT, and Pierce’s governments are neglecting.

        There’s one bright spot: the Pacific Avenue Stream line. ST failed to make it reach its potential. They’ve downgraded it from frequent BRT with lane priority to a peak-only express route. So why aren’t Pierce’s city and county politicians stepping in to save the full BRT corridor and find other funding for it? Instead they’re just, “Oh well, it will happen someday”, and throwing all its potential riders under the bus in the meantime.

      9. transit doesn’t bother to try to serve industrial employers.

        That’s not true. Various transit agencies have long focused on serving Boeing workers. It really gets down to density. Various industries have become labor efficient. At the same time, they often needs lots of space. It is often impractical to grow up (unlike office, medical or retail work). As a result, density — especially density compared to the rest of the city — goes down. Throw in the fact that manufacturing is often outside the urban core, and it becomes costly an inefficient to serve by transit.

      10. You speak as if Sound Transit forced this on Pierce County when it was the other way around. ST primarily defers to what the counties and cities want. This is what Pierce County and its cities wanted.

        I’m not sure that is accurate. The representatives were limited in their options. For example, “the spine” is baked into the system. If all the Pierce County representatives said “just send all our money to Pierce Transit”, I don’t think they could. Remember how Kirkland wanted to build BRT on the CKC? The larger board rejected their proposal. There is a limit to how much particular representatives can do.

        In any event, the voters in Pierce County rejected ST3. So in that sense, it was forced upon them.

      11. It’s a bit more complicated than that, there’s a bit of difference between light industrial plots of land and heavy industrial.

        I agree, but there is plenty of overlap. I like to think of it in terms of sectors. Primary industries involve the production of raw material. Secondary industries (saw mills, steel plants, aluminum smelters, oil refineries) tend to be heavy industry. But tertiary industries (e. g. building airplanes or airplane parts) runs the gamut. Aerospace is generally considered “heavy industry”, but only a subset of the work should really be considered that. Various parts can be produced from goods that come in by truck and leave by truck (instead of by train). They don’t involve huge smokestacks, or even a major investment in equipment. Some do, but that varies depending on the company and state of the market.

        For example, my brother used to work for Travis Industries. They make wood stoves and gas fireplaces. They used to be in Kirkland, but moved up to Mukilteo, in land surrounded by Boeing property (my guess is the land used to be owned by Boeing). Is it light industry or heavy industry? Hard to say. They have welders who put together the stoves, along with machines that bend it, stamp it, and the like. When they left, they were gradually transitioning to buying more labor-saving equipment (machines that were very expensive, but could do the work of several people). From a public management standpoint, I would call it light industry. They don’t need to be by a railroad line, nor do they have a steady stream of trucks going by day and night. To be clear, they definitely have trucks, just not hundreds a day.

        If Boeing had a major long term downturn, a lot of this type of land that would be available for fairly cheap, and just about any manufacturer would find the area appealing. Not a steel mill, of course, but those are a different beast. If the West Seattle Steel Mill closes, they can’t easily move.

      12. JBLM is the biggest single site employer in the State by a wide margin. It’s literally 50k working at the same place.

        Yes, but they work at a huge base. The main JBLM base (the one in Western Washington) is 142 square miles. Tacoma is 62 square miles. Obviously there is a lot of land at JBLM that contains no one, but so far as I can tell, the jobs are really spread out. An exception is Madigan (the hospital). I don’t think it is a coincidence that Pierce Transit serves the hospital (as well as the nearby VA hospital at American Lake).

        JBLM is basically a city, or really more like a county. It has a total active population of nearly 210,000 inhabitants (according to Wikipedia). This means a substantial portion of the workers live on the base itself. This begs the question: should Pierce County provide transit for the base, or should the base — operated by the federal government — provide its own transit? Right now it is a bit of both, but I think it is telling that inside the base the only official “transit” is microtransit and vanpools (which suggests relatively low density). It is quite possible that Pierce Transit already serves the main, high-density places in JBLM.

        I get why you think Sound Transit has a role here. Part of the problem is one of jurisdiction. If JBLM was simply an ordinary part of Pierce County, it is possible they would have better transit. ST is supposed to ease the boundaries between different transit agencies. But in this case, it is at the edge of things. Sound Transit doesn’t include Thurston County, which is very close to the base as well. ST was really designed to tie together the particular areas that are part of its region. For this area, that means service heading north (express bus service from DuPont, and Sounder service from Lakewood). Whether this service is a good value or not (compared to more local service) is a different issue. JBLM has very little to do with it.

        It really comes down to mode fetish (light rail) and the failed BRT plan. ST is not *only* tasked with connecting the various areas. If they were, they would be much smaller (and in my opinion, we would be much better off as a region). ST has decided it will be the one building rail, whether in places where it really makes sense (Seattle) or places where it doesn’t (Issaquah). The Tacoma streetcar (or Tacoma Link) can be considered part of that. But ST, with so much money to spend, has also taken upon itself to spend some of it on local projects. The failed BRT was a worthy project, that would have made a huge difference to Pierce Transit, as well as transit riders in Pierce County. They simply failed to deliver the goods.

      13. “You speak as if Sound Transit forced this on Pierce County when it was the other way around. ST primarily defers to what the counties and cities want. This is what Pierce County and its cities wanted.”

        “The representatives were limited in their options. For example, “the spine” is baked into the system.”

        The representatives are the ones who baked the spine into the system.

        “If all the Pierce County representatives said “just send all our money to Pierce Transit”, I don’t think they could.”

        There are plenty of regional transit corridors within Pierce County that ST could have addressed but didn’t, or has done did little for. Tacoma-Lakewood, Tacoma-Tacoma Mall, Tacoma-TCC, Tacoma-Puyallup, Puyallup-South Hill, JBLM. Routes 2, 3, 4, and 202. That six-line full Tacoma Link plan throughout the city of Tacoma. Bus alternatives to that six-line plan. Those are what ST has neglected. All of those would “help PT” and replace PT service hours that could be redeployed to other routes, like ST is doing in Snohomish.

      14. “the voters in Pierce County rejected ST3. So in that sense, it was forced upon them.”

        Those same voters are the ones who elected their city/county officials who sit on the ST board, and who advocated for ST’s current plans. If they had elected different officials, or convinced them to advocate for something different, then the ST 1/2/3 network in Pierce County would have been different.

      15. “ST has decided it will be the one building rail”

        The public and legislature are the ones who created ST for that purpose, and denied the county-based transit agencies sufficient capital to do it, and gave Seattle only limited tax authority ($1 billion) for one small monorail line that wasn’t enough for even that and now certainly isn’t.


      16. “the voters in Pierce County rejected ST3. So in that sense, it was forced upon them.”

        Those same voters are the ones who elected their city/county officials who sit on the ST board, and who advocated for ST’s current plans. If they had elected different officials, or convinced them to advocate for something different, then the ST 1/2/3 network in Pierce County would have been different.

        Sure, but again, it isn’t clear they could. First of all, few, if any of the voters in Pierce County (or anywhere) considered the role that the representative could play in Sound Transit before voting for them. For one thing, we don’t even know who will serve on the board. For example, Zahilay, Birney, and Strauss were just added to the board. Do you really think anyone considered that issue as they voted for them? Of course not. I’m not saying it doesn’t come up in some cases, but for Pierce County — I really doubt it.

        Secondly, even if you elect someone who is opposed to the spine, they are likely to be outvoted. It is easy to claim that “the board lets the area decide how to spend their money”, but that clearly wasn’t the case in Kirkland. After hiring their own transit expert, and going with that recommendation (BRT) the board shot down what Kirkland wanted. Remember, this wasn’t even the spine. For Pierce County representatives to reject the spine and push for something completely different would be an ever more radical departure from ST policies (and thus even less likely to be successful).

        In some sense, the ballot measures are Sound Transit. It is right there, in the state legislation that created the organization:

        The authority shall place on the ballot within two years of the authority’s formation, a single ballot proposition to authorize the imposition of taxes to support the implementation of an appropriate phase of the plan within its service area.

        If voters keep rejecting the plans, there is little for them to do (but come up with a new plan). Pierce County voters rejected ST3 which means that they basically did all they could to try and find a different path forward, but were outvoted by the other counties. The agency allows this (and does not require a majority in each county) which brings us back to the original state legislation.

        You could blame the state voters for creating the agency in the first place, but again, that seems like a stretch. That is like blaming state voters for the Columbia River Interstate Bridge Replacement. After all, we elected the representatives that will likely go forward with this fiasco. But what choice did we have? The person who has the most power to stop it is the governor. He had no serious opposition in the primary, and there is no way I’m going to vote for a nutty Republican instead.

        In both cases a lot of the blame rests on the people in charge, but also the system. In a more advanced democracy you would have several parties (including Greens, center-right conservatives, nationalists) in the state legislature (all elected in proportion to the votes they got statewide). A rare Green/Conservative coalition would oppose the bridge, and tell everyone to build something a lot smaller.

        Same goes with South Transit. Simply put, the board has no idea what they are doing. Voters can try and elect people with more knowledge of transit issues, but that would be very difficult, and at best you would likely throw the baby out with the bathwater. Someone who is a transit expert is unlikely to know much about running a city — which means voting for them for mayor would be foolish. But again, it is likely that voters really don’t have that chance — rarely is a representative’s vote on Sound Transit issues ever considered.

        Which brings us back to the state, and the design of the board. The biggest problem with Sound Transit — the fundamental issue — is that the board has a combination of ignorance and arrogance when it comes to transit issues. They know very little about transit, and yet think they do. Voters largely ignore their role when it comes to transit issues, since it is usually a very small part of their job. A board made up of elected officials or non-political appointees would be much better.

      17. ST has decided it will be the one building rail”

        The public and legislature are the ones who created ST for that purpose, and denied the county-based transit agencies sufficient capital to do it, and gave Seattle only limited tax authority ($1 billion) for one small monorail line that wasn’t enough for even that and now certainly isn’t.

        Good point. But ST didn’t have to build rail. They could have basically said “Yeah, we looked at it, and the best thing to do is add a bunch of bus service”.

        They easily could have decided to build what most people would build: Rail mostly in the city, and buses outside it. In my opinion, this would be ideal. In my opinion, King County should have built the rail system. But the flaw with that is that they they could (at least theoretically) just ignore the other counties. No need to worry about connecting regional buses to the rail system. In contrast, the board has a very big incentive to work together and build a system that works for everyone. But that doesn’t mean that every county should have rail.

        For example, imagine rail from 185th to Federal Way (entirely within King County). Work with WSDOT to connect the HOV lanes to the 185th Station (or a station to the south). You are still running express buses along I-5 — they are just terminating a little bit farther south. Pierce and Snohomish County then spend a lot more money on bus service (both local and regional). I’m not saying this is ideal (maybe Lynnwood is a better terminus; maybe the southern terminus should be Kent/Des Moines) but this would be a much better value than running trains all the way to Everett and Tacoma.

        It isn’t just the makeup of the agency that is the problem, it is this whole concept of a spine. The idea that we should build a mass transit system (from scratch, largely grade-separated) from Everett to Tacoma. I don’t think you can blame the legislature for that — that is the fault of the board itself.

      18. “even if you elect someone who is opposed to the spine, they are likely to be outvoted”

        That’s democracy.

        “It is easy to claim that “the board lets the area decide how to spend their money”, but that clearly wasn’t the case in Kirkland”

        That’s an unusual case; there were factional complications in Kirkland; ST didn’t reject serving downtown Kirkland entirely; and a bus alternative on 108th one block away wasn’t ruled out.

        There were two reasons ST deferred the segment: (1) A loud activist group in southwest Kirkland opposed the city’s proposal and favored a third option (no service, or treating Stride 2 on 405 as Kirkland’s service). This group showed up in numbers at ST board meetings with signs “Save Our Trail”. ST didn’t want to step into a factional fight like had happened in south Bellevue, or get sued by them for putting Link on the trail.

        Another issue was that the line coming from Issaquah and South Kirkland was light rail, not BRT. It was potentially going to be extended to downtown Kirkland, and later Totem Lake and possibly Bothell. It would make no sense to force a transfer to BRT at South Kirkland.

        So ST just decided to postpone the issue for another decade, when Kirkland might be more unified. It did NOT override Kirkland’s wishes and install light rail on the trail.

        Both asdf2 and I have walked that trail, and we think it’s an important north-south pedestrian/bike corridor, and an important woodsy oasis in Kirkland, that would be destroyed by either light rail or BRT on the trail. It would be like the part of the trail down in Bellevue at NE 12th Street: asphalt sidewalks next to almost completely asphalt and concrete, with hardly any trees left.

      19. “I don’t think you can blame the legislature for [the spine] — that is the fault of the board itself.”

        The spine is what justified Sound Transit in the eyes of the legislature. Urbanists wanted a two-level system with more Seattle lines and stations like MUNI and BART or the NYC subway and LIRR, but Seattle has only a fifth of the region’s population and representatives. The loudest public voices — and what the counties and cities were asking for — was an alternative to freeway congestion between the cities. That means Seattle, Everett, Tacoma, Bellevue, Redmond, Lynnwood, and Federal Way — i.e., the spine.

      20. I still think that Kirkland’s requests didn’t get much consideration at Sound Transit. Kirkland also hired their own consultants for a feasibility study for a gondola connection between the 85th/I-405 intersection and their TC. Sound Transit told them that they would only provide funding for a shuttle bus.

      21. there were factional complications in Kirkland

        Yes, of course, but so what? That still refutes your point. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say “It is your fault for voting for those representatives” when those representatives in Kirkland were rendered powerless! There is no reason to assume that the same thing wouldn’t happen to Tacoma representatives, had they dared question the sanctity of “The Spine”.

        It is a complicated situation, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Consider the various culprits:

        1) The legislature for creating Sound Transit in the way that they did.
        2) The board, for proposing bad plans.
        3) The voters, for electing the legislature and the board.
        4) The voters who approved ST3.

        Let me go through them, one by one. As much as I feel like the root problem is the way that Sound Transit is constructed, I don’t think the spine was inevitable. It is like saying WWI was inevitable. Not really, as it could have have stopped at various points had leadership been different. Same with Sound Transit. Different board members could have taken a different approach, and asked whether a really long light rail line actually makes sense to build. I believe the board bears more responsibility.

        Which leads us to the voters. The voters are ultimately responsible for choosing the leader (at the state and local level) that came up with these proposals. But the voters had little choice! That is my point. We have a very limited democracy. In 2020, we ranked 36th in terms of the quality of our democracy (https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking). We even slipped to “Deficient Democracy” instead of “Working Democracy”. In this case, the leaders responsible were not focused on this job. I would bet a majority of people had no idea that it was part of their responsibility. In some cases, it wasn’t, until after the election! So not only do you have a limited choice in terms of the representatives (basically only two) but you have no idea whether they will influence Sound Transit or not, or what that influence will be! There is nothing in their general platform that would give you a clue as to how they feel about transit projects. It is a huge stretch to say that Pierce County voters are responsible for Sound Transit projects in their county.

        There is one place, however, where voters definitely have an influence. It is not ideal. They are not presented with several options. They only have an up and down vote. But in this case, they voted “No!”. A whopping 55% of the voters voted against it. This was a clear message: Pierce County voters don’t like the plans. But instead of changing them, they went forward
        with them, unaltered.

        Oh, and politics is the art of the possible. There were many in the transit community who supported ST3, even though they were well aware of the various warts. Better a flawed plan, than no investment at all, was the thinking. It is quite possible that Pierce County representatives felt the same way. They felt like the streetcar is silly, Tacoma Link is not worth the money, but that the real high quality project is the BRT, replacing the 1. This improves what is by far the most ridden bus route in Pierce County. It sets the stage for future BRT, and thus a progressive transition towards a good bus system for the City of Destiny and the surrounding area. They accepted the rest of it, just to get this one, worthy project (in much the way that Seattle voters accepted the rest of ST3 to get Ballard Link). Now, after all of that, they are left with basically nothing. So somehow this is the fault of the voter?

        No way. Blame the system. Blame the representatives. But don’t blame the voter.

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