Devin Silvernail was Council Member Morales’ Policy Director from January 2022 to February 2024.
This is an Open Thread.
135 Replies to “Sunday Movie: Moving from Seattle to Nantes, France”
Today is a perfect example of why I often wish I could drive. I have to e somewhere today at 2pm. I checked the schedule planner. It said leave my home at 12:22. I left at noon instead. When I was across the street from my first stop, the bus was there, four minutes early. The next one was 8 minutes late. I finally traveled the 2 miles to the station and it took 20 minutes to start the Trek to Seattle. It took over an hour just to begin the Seattle trip.
I see it as a perfect example of how a more frequent bus would have served you that much better. You could have spent less time waiting for the next bus, and less time waiting at the train station.
Mathew, you don’t check One Bus Away before heading out to the bus stop?
Metro’s reliability got bad in the early 2010s. Several routes were regularly late every day. Then with the booming economy and Seattle’s Transit Benefit District and strategic restructures, Metro fixed most of the reliability problems. Since 2022 it has gotten bad again.
The reason is increasing congestion, which throws the buses off-schedule. What Metro did in the late 2010s was to add standby buses to swoop in when regular runs got caught in bottlenecks or breakdowns. It doesn’t have the resources for that now, with the driver shortage, maintenance-worker shortage, and supply-chain bottlenecks for parts. Whenever it does get more service hours someday and a full staff, the first chunk of service hours will go to restoring reliability, before frequency additions are made. So when we’re thinking about various levies to increase Metro service, we have to include enough for reliability improvements too. Otherwise the reliability improvements would swallow any frequency increases.
Seattle and the other cities could also get better with transit-priority lanes, to get buses out the bottlenecks that make them unpredictable.
I take the 131, 132, and 62 several times a month. They’re all notoriously late almost every day from 10am to 7pm. They’re supposed to be 15-minute corridors, but the buses usually show up 5-15 minutes late. When they’re 15 minutes late, the next bus catches up to it, so two come at the same time or almost at the same time. The second one is naturally empty, unless the first one is so crowded that people spill over to the second one. I’ve heard the E is also pretty unreliable. And the 10, 11, and 49 on Pine Street are regularly 5-10 minutes late too now. That doesn’t make sense because the routes are so short, and the 10 and 11 have no congestion points like freeway entrances or bridges. I don’t know which other routes are the worst; what have people seen?
It’s not just increasing congestion. I have many times observed buses 5-10 minutes late, even in situations where the bus is practically the only vehicle on the road. The reasons include a combination of the bus driver starting the run late and poorly times traffic lights that leave the bus sitting at red lights for long periods of time. 15th and Pacific is one such example. The buses just sit there for over a minute, every time, with no other cars around. You’d think with all that space, SDOT could create a roundabout or something.
In Denver, the 15 and 15L (Limited Skip Stop Bus) are notorious for this too with bus bunching. They come 6x ph for the 15 and 5-8x ph on the 15L during peak hours. So you may end up with 3 busses (one standard, two articulated) at one stop if one of the 15Ls gets mildly to moderately delayed to any degree anywhere in the system.
It’s supposed to get better with the shift to BRT on East Colfax as construction is supposed to start this year or next year. So the 15L will have its own dedicated Bus Lane to itself.
The 67 isn’t great, but the biggest irritant for me is the lack of useful realtime arrival data. I catch it southbound at Roosevelt and 80th, right outside of Don Lucho’s, which is ~10 minutes into its run. OBA shows ‘scheduled’ time >50% of the time, and when it has a ‘realtime’, it is often wrong by several minutes in either direction, to the point of being useless.
They might be moving forward with the route 40 bus lanes, though I’ve noticed they’ve made quite a large change at the last second.
“Construction on the Route 40 Transit-Plus Multimodal Corridor project set to begin as soon as early June!”
Starting with the positives:
* Three miles total of business access and transit (BAT) or “Freight and Bus only” (FAB) lanes
* 6,000+ feet of upgraded sidewalks. Three new or upgraded crosswalks
* Upgraded watermain in Fremont
* 47 upgraded curb ramps; Eight new bus bulbs
* 5–10% transit travel time reductions
Based on feedback we heard from the Fremont business community, we are starting a process to move the proposed northbound bus stop on the northwest corner of Fremont Ave N and Fremont Pl N to approximately 250 ft west of it, next to the Lenin statue. As part of this new design change, we will be assessing what changes could be needed to other nearby bus zones along the new proposed bus stop. (This was posted May 24, 2024)
This is going to make the transfer from route 40 to the other bus routes of 62, 32, 31 much more painful with having to walk the full block in addition to crossing the two crosswalks.
For a bit of history and context for everyone not following, originally the 31, 32, 40 and 62 were going to continue using the existing northbound bus stop on Fremont Ave / 34th (1) back in 2021. This was changed to a protected bike lane instead of a shared bus/bike lane which moved the 31, 32, and 60 onto a N 35th St heading east and the 40 by itself heading west on Fremont Pl N (2), but it was at least still close to the intersection. They’ve now moved the 40 bus stop further to the west.
Though I guess the bus lanes are probably worth more than the increased transfer time and hopefully most aren’t transferring between the two buses but it is definitely quite annoying to see such a change.
Well, well, well, from the linked community comments, it looks like Fremont and Ballard is filled with small business owners who want to push transit and transit stops further away from their businesses. The comment section had me believe that only happens in Bellevue.
Sam, I’m not sure where you got the impression that no Seattle businesses ever oppose bus lanes and transit prioritization. It’s certainly a well-documented phenomenon, even if the vocal minority is just that.
OMG, the whole “buses bring violent people and criminals”.
These are literally within a block or two of the existing stops with the same bus routes. Do they think those routes are bringing violent people and criminals now? What about all the customers who come by bus?
Which businesses? Walking through their this weekend, that block is oddly full of empty storefronts.
It’s really weird, actually. When I lived there, that was the busiest part of Fremont, and still mostly is. But the premier intersection, at 34th and Fremont, every corner is a vacant storefront. I don’t know what to make of it.
There’s a “fix the 40” website that has a bunch of signed-on businesses. Northwest Greenways organized a “save the 40” campaign and found that many businesses were supportive but didn’t want to get in trouble with their landlords for supporting street use changes.
There’s a “fix the 40” website that has a bunch of signed-on businesses.
A small bunch. Some of the companies are listed twice (with different names) like Nautical Landing Marina. This is a company that offers “yacht and superyacht moorage” according to their website. The company called “Signature Yachts” is also listed twice. Or Suzie Burke, who is a major commercial landlord in the area (a lot of the small businesses in Fremont hate Suzie). If you look at the number of businesses that are served by the 40 bus (dozens in Fremont and Ballard alone) it is a very tiny portion of them, and mostly those that cater to the very wealthy. If you moor your superyacht and are “just 15 minutes from Boeing Field’s private jet terminal” then you aren’t taking the 40.
> Walking through their this weekend, that block is oddly full of empty storefronts.
I assume the problem is high rents demanded by commercial landlords for the intersection, and a relatively poor pedestrian environment. Fremont & 34th should be a scramble crossing.
I have a question about Sounder North. If ST were to suspend service on the route due to low ridership after Lynnwood Link opens, could they sell/transfer the easements to WSDOT to enable additional Cascades runs to Vancouver BC?
That would depend on the terms of the agreement with BNSF, but it is an interesting proposition.
WSDOT is planning to increase frequencies on Cascades at some point – taking over the Sounder North runs might be one way to enable that. It would also be interesting if those runs of Cascades could also make the same stop at Mukilteo, if only for the same few runs that Sounder makes that stop.
1. Mukilteo is a state ferry terminal, and could very easily be part of an overall state transportation plan.
2. Station stops can be quite quick if done right, even on Cascades. I’ve been on trains that stop for less than a minute at Olympia and Kelso. There’s no ability to handle checked luggage at Mukilteo, so 3/4 the delay problem can’t happen there.
I’m not sure about how hardball BNSF would play for the segment north of Everett.
According to various state rail plans, there are 24 trains a day on the line with 10 going all the way to Vancouver. And there’s just one track mostly so it’s used in both directions.
It’s a unique situation where the most strategic action would probably be negotiations done behind closed doors. Double tracking or frequent sidings would help lots (both passenger and freight/ economic development benefits) but it’s not cheap and there are environmentally sensitive areas on the route. So the various entities would need to bring their best cards to play (needs and money) to get a deal that would pencil out.
Here’s a second thought: would there be any way to “save” Sounder North by turning them to through-running with Sounder South? Essentially the current Sounder North runs would become reverse peak trips for Sounder South and continue all the way from Everett to Tacoma or vice-versa.
That is basically Amtrak. I’m not sure if Amtrak is cheaper to run than Sounder. The big problem is not the operations but the leasing of the lines. They go up as you add more service. So six trips a day costs more than twice what three trips a day costs (etc.).
Amtrak only has to pay the incremental costs the trains impose. That’s a special privilege in the railroad laws, and is one reason why Washington and other states have Amtrak operate state-funded regional rail rather than doing it themselves.
Yeah I guess I’m thinking through Sounder North and trying to figure out how to mitigate the high operational cost. By making those trips into Sounder South trips I thought it would make the equipment more productive and amortize the cost per rider a bit more. It maybe this should be left to Amtrak, perhaps expanding RailPlus program to be all Amtrak stops between Tacoma and Everett.
By making those trips into Sounder South trips I thought it would make the equipment more productive and amortize the cost per rider a bit more.
I’m sure it would. I think the biggest problem with Sounder is the money we pay BNSF, not the cost of operating the trains. If we owned the tracks it is quite likely we would run (smaller) trains every hour along South Sounder (at the very least). Some of those would keep going to Everett. We might spend money on electrifying the route instead of building giant park and ride lots. Alas, that isn’t the world we live in.
The Devin Silvernail video made me laugh. Funny he releases that on the eve of Rightwing parties election gains across France. The France Mr. Slivernail thinks he knows is likely going away….. I’m guessing in the next election.
I’ve been to France a few times. Never had any trouble crossing the boarder. Until traveling with my African American nephew. That time I was questioned for 45 minutes.
Doesn’t surprise me Mr. Silvernail loves France. He’s White with money and connections. Life was pretty easy for him in Seattle and that White Privilege carries over into Europe, no problem. I’d love to see this dude banished to Aubervilliers for a year. Live life with the “Great Unwashed” in France. Learn that most of Europe is even more economically divided and racist than the USA.
What was the point of this comment?
To point out the toxic mix of urbanism, socialism and White privilege that’s infected Seattle and currently is dying off in Europe.
France has these quasi-Socialist policies that serve the upper income urban population… and give the rural population and minorities the short end of the stick. Incoming French President La Pen is going to make big changes in 2027…
The USA and Greater Seattle need to avoid the political road France is headed down at all costs. That starts with a vision of urbanism that doesn’t just serve a small slice of the White affluent population.
Want a local example? Millions spent a 3 mile light rail line in Tacoma… while the rest of Pierce County has subpar bus service. As a true urbanist and believer in social justice, there is no excuse for this.
neat.
Tacomee, isn’t the rise of the political right in Europe mostly driven by anti-immigration sentiment, and let’s face it, often involving their version of white supremacy? So, similar to the US and not a “road that we can avoid” at this point? Pretty ironic that you would suggest that the surge of the Right in France means racism/white privilege is “likely going away” there! And Urbanism/transport? A culture war issue for sure, but likely more of a niche one, more the stuff of Conservative talk radio and cheap shots by pundits than national election polling.
Is France getting rid of its transit, bike lanes, pedestrianized downtowns, and universal healthcare in its rightward turn? Will Nantes soon look like a California suburb?
Brandon,
The “Mouvement des gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests Movement in English). Started because of high fuel taxes.. France has an unfair tax code that cheats rural residents. … as well as a lot of Brown and Black ones. Like America, France is a good place to be college educated and White.
Rich White urbanists live in desirable, walkable neighborhoods with good transit. I’m highly supportive of this sort of thing. The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism.
Let’s go back to Devin Silvernail for a minute. This guy was part of the Seattle City government… a City looking at a huge budget deficit….. A city whose transit system is addicted to Federal money….. a City with a crap public education system that’s closing 20+ schools. What’s Mr. Slivernail’s answer? More Federal Money! More State Money! In a City where 1 out of every 14 people is millionaire…. the Seattle City government wants a never ending stream of Federal money.
Seattle’s government is playing right into Trump’s reelection plans.
With Trump and Le Pen coming into power…. there’s no more Federal money headed towards Seattle. Now what?
What’s the way forward here? How does urbanism get off the tit of other people’s money? The rich coastal cities in America need to move forward without Federal handouts.
“The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism. ”
The point in France, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Germany, etc, is it’s not just a few neighborhoods for affluent whites. It’s entire cities, suburbs, and rural villages for everybody. It’s not uniform throughout the country, but the average is more practical, convenient, and shared space than in US cities, and more available to a wider cross-section of the population.
Japan and China are like this too. In fact, it’s telling which parts of China AREN’T like this. It’s new affluent suburbs that are aping the American stereotype. In other words, the richest Chinese can CHOOSE to live in car-dependent areas, while the majority of less-affluent people get the walkable default. In the US it’s the opposite: the top 10% can choose to live in a few highly-walkable areas, while the bottom 50% has to live in the car-dependent default, and often in far suburbs or exurbs that don’t have good transit options. This is insane.
Another striking thing is that in the US, several different things get polarized together: opposition to walkable designs, to comprehensive transit, to immigrants, to most minorities, to universal healthcare, to housing policies that would work for more people and lower costs, to being open to dictators, to accepting/encouraging misinformation, to denying that Russia is acting like a psychopathic bully. The same people tend to support all of them, or at least there’s a lot of overlap.
In Europe, they’re less together. Walkable design, transit, universal healthcare, etc, are less political; they’re just common sense. So even as some turn against immigrants or toward dictators and Putin, they aren’t arguing to reverse their urban layout or drop universal healthcare. When they hear about Americans getting unexpected $30K medical bills, or not able to see a doctor or get prescriptions due to cost, or going bankrupt or homeless due to medical needs, they react in horror and say, “We don’t want that.” Some of this may have weakened slightly here and there, like more people buying cars or getting some doubts about the rapid green transition, but it’s not a total reversal, like it would have to be if they were to become like the US.
“Seattle’s government is playing right into Trump’s reelection plans.”
You mean the new moderate mayor and councilmembers who have reversed some of the previous progressive policies? This is causing more people to vote for Trump? How?
Mike Orr,
Ah, Le Pen is about the run the table in France. Macron knows he’s toast at this point. We’ll know more after the election later this Summer.
I have friends in Hamburg Germany. Nice part town. My friend works at a big import/export business, in the big office downtown. We drove down to their warehouse one day to meet the guys who work there… mostly Turkish. These guys live in a cramped Turkish getto with bad bus service. They’ll never be German even though most of them were born in Hamburg. The healthcare they have access to is substandard. How would you like to a “guest worker” for your entire life? And your German speaking kids? Also “guest workers”. Europe deals Black and Brown people off the bottom of the deck even worse than the USA.
If this Socialist paradise in Europe is so great, why is the Right winning election after election? Things change Mike. The Europe you idolize is already dying. Because it’s been so currently Leftwing and hard Right are coming into power…. they’ll meet somewhere in the Middle I guess?
The reason every Seattle pol is unwilling working for the Trump campaign is the Liberal addiction to Federal and State money. Every problem…. transit, education, housing, requires at pile of “other people’s money”. Listen to KUOW over the Summer and you’ll hear constant sniveling about the need for the State and Feds to bail out the Seattle Public Schools. Same shit with housing…. and everything else. We need Federal money!!!!!!
We have the richest places in America…. all completely Liberal….. crying for Federal money. It’s bad look and it’s the gift that keeps on giving for the GOP.
It’s not that the GOP doesn’t spend Federal money on stupid local projects… they do. But they don’t cry about it in the media.
On a local note, who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma that’s a complete disaster? The City of Tacoma? The County? WDOT? Sound Transit? It’s horseshit like this that holds transit back.
We’ll see when/if France turns away from transit and walkability.
Germany changed its citizenship laws a couple decades ago to allow descendants of guest workers to get citizenship. I don’t know what the situation is with that particular family.
“The Europe you idolize is already dying.”
Again, our interest is transit and walkability in Europe vs the US, not all these other social/political issues.
“The reason every Seattle pol is unwilling working for the Trump campaign is the Liberal addiction to Federal and State money.”
I’m absolutely stunned that you just dismiss the concerns about having the freedom to choose your leaders that we fought a revolutionary war to get, into just a question of federal subsidies. If we lose democracy, we lose everything. Whether the policies are conservative or liberal, whether cities get subsidies, whether the economy is capitalist, whether laws are consistent, it will all depend on the leader’s whim. And they’ll be taking the country’s resources for themself, and taking over all the media channels, and maybe filling them with misinformation.
“who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma that’s a complete disaster? ”
I care more about getting good transit than about punishing and getting revenge on people for bad transit.
“…who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma…”
I think, at the time, WSDOT was unwilling to give up a general-purpose lane, setting up a spiral of takings and costs. I don’t know that the planning was a disaster, but maybe you know more than me.
I’m hopeful that this can be revisited, and different decisions made in the future. WSDOT is now much more flexible on road-use, with the recently passed complete streets legislation.
“How does urbanism get off the tit of other people’s money? The rich coastal cities in America need to move forward without Federal handouts.”
Those rich coastal cities and states are the ones subsidizing the rest of the country. They’re not asking for anything for themselves that they don’t think everyone should have.
On a local level, liberals aren’t asking to take other people’s money for themselves. They’re asking everybody to agree to do something collectively, to benefit everybody. It’s their money too, since they’ll also be paying the taxes.
> Rich White urbanists live in desirable, walkable neighborhoods with good transit. I’m highly supportive of this sort of thing. The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism.
It’s been proven over and over again that it is the other way around. The urban areas subsidize the suburbs just like how the blue states mostly subsidize the red states. Also do you really think the rural/suburbs do not receive any subsidies?
“These guys live in a cramped Turkish getto with bad bus service.”
How bad is it? What kind of transit do they have? Is it like Pierce County for instance? What financial/social/legal limitations prevent them from moving out of the ghetto if they want to?
Mike Orr,
The reason urbanism doesn’t stand much of a chance in the USA is guys like Devin Silvernail are constantly tying it to Socialism. The USA is built on the nuclear family and home ownership. Because many urbanists insist on Leftwing politics and goofy ideas like social housing and way too much low income housing into the mix, it makes building walkable neighborhoods with transit much, much harder.
Let’s say Washington State planned a whole new community of 100,000 people. (Much of Europe was built this way after WWII BTW). It might be possible to pre-sell 25,000 (or more!) at $400k each for $1,000,0000,000. That’s a lot of money to start off with.
Measure that against the “House Our Neighbors” group pushing social housing in Seattle. Last thing I read was they’re looking at a tax increase for adding maybe 200 units of social housing a year?
The difference is people would be on the hook for home mortgages in the first proposal. Traditionally housing in America is financed on the buyer’s personal credit. The other model that’s gaining traction is housing owned by corporate interests for profit. I think most of America doesn’t want that. I know most of America wants nothing to do with social housing. America needs its own brand of urbanism that respects the past.
In full honesty I’ve met many people like Devin Silvernail and I’ve hated most of them. The guy never held elected office. There’s this “master class” of political staff, NGO employees, and self proclaimed “activists” of every stripe and hue who “know” all the answers. I mean Mr. Silvernail falls out of political power in Seattle and runs off to France, makes a video about how great France is…. and begs Lefties to run for political office. He’s not running for office however. Fuck, he’s running away from America. Good thing he has is White Privilege card handy!
“The USA is built on the nuclear family and home ownership.”
Says you, and the 1950s ideal.
Urbanism is compatible with home ownership. E.g., townhouses and condos.
“way too much low income housing into the mix”
Why are people low-income? Why are housing prices so out of proportion with income? Why don’t we spend our energy reducing inequality rather than making people suffer more?
I am not sure what to make of Silvernail’s video, or the point of it on this blog. There are many better travel videos for Nantes. In part just another burned-out American expat falling in love with France, for a while.
He states he “immigrated” to France but I think he has a tourist visa. It isn’t clear whether he has a work visa. I have gone through customs in Paris many times and other than Charles De Gaulle airport being a nightmare and dysfunctional (an overlooked part of “socialism”) it isn’t much of a process for a U.S. citizen, and is no process for a European citizen. What did he expect. Had he never been to Europe before (if he had he would know everyone knows to fly through Iceland to avoid customs at Charles De Gaulle airport). Now if he was coming from Africa that would be different. France knows Silvernail will be going home one day. They all do.
Silvernail is upfront his video is about “socialism” with a big S, but I think he overstates France’s “socialism”. Who doesn’t go to the east coast of France for a vacation or extended vacation and not fall in love, for a while. France isn’t Xanadu. It certainly makes biking easy when the town is flat. I think some on this blog tend to romanticize other countries.
I think Silvernail is a bit bitter because the reason he is in France is because his socialist polices working for Morales led Seattle voters to throw out the baby with the bath water. So he really didn’t “leave” a job he loved. The job left him.
One thing he notes and is true is how easy it is to travel by air in Europe. He flew to Vienna for 60 Euros. Europe is quite dense in areas and easy to travel by train or air to completely different cultures, unlike saying flying from Seattle to Wyoming. The low-cost airlines are just as cheap as rail, and the lack of coordination between countries can make train travel impossible. For example, recently I was in Barcelona (my favorite city and country in Europe by far) and I could either take 24 hours to go to Portugal by train or fly for 30 minutes for the same price. My guess is he Ubered to the airports on both ends which most do in Europe. FYI I wouldn’t recommend Vienna. Big stick up their Austrian right wing arse.
Tacomee is correct that politics in Europe are swinging right, really far right, mostly due to immigration which has put a tremendous strain on a lot of countries. Fortunately for Silvernail he chose a part of France with few immigrants. Other than the Japanese I don’t think I have met more xenophobic people than the French. Try becoming a French citizen, even as an American. Silvernail is the only person I have heard state the French are welcoming to strange Americans.
So what did we learn from the video? Nantes is a lovely place for a holiday, or extended holiday. Americans have travelled to France to regroup forever (beginning in the 1920’s to Henry Miller in the 1930’s) and think they are the first Americans to discover France and “become French” which they naturally think makes them more sophisticated despite not speaking the language, and of course their first video living there for a few weeks “taking the scenic route” is lovely and extolls the virtues of their vacation, and how the French are so much more sophisticated than the ugly Americans.
Not too many Americans travel to Africa to regroup.
But is France or any European country a model for the U.S.? Hard to say. If you like fascists you can’t beat Austria. Wealth disparity in Switzerland is terrible.
Youth unemployment is awful in France due to coagulation of employment by the state, and innovation is weak for such a wealthy country which is why U.S. technology and culture dominates. . Education is as segregated as in the U.S. Healthcare is universal like Medicare and pretty good and that is something to consider, except it isn’t working well in Great Britain (France is not nearly as obese as the U.S. which is straining our health system).
The French are some of the most xenophobic and have treated immigrants deplorably and never allow them to actually Integrate into French society or become citizens. This is especially acute in the countryside where Silvernail is. The young feel stifled by the sclerotic state civil servant structure, and lack of employment opportunities. The subsidies to the rural areas to maintain the lovely countryside are enormous (the U.S. does the same just by owning the land, or the sheer size of the U.S. in which 3% is actually urbanized or suburbanized).
I like France. Some parts. Not Paris anymore, and certainly not the outer ring where the immigrants live. Spain is probably my favorite country in Europe. The people are happier than in the north. Germany is not my cup of tea. Too “verbotten”. Same with Great Britain: the countryside is lovely to visit but London has become overwhelming and terribly expensive. I hate that kind of urbanism on steroids. I don’t think any of these countries are “socialist”, and some like Germany are seeing serious economic issues with its bad energy policy and is really going right.
So I didn’t learn much from the video except what I already knew: biking around Nantes in the summer and visiting the sites and markets is lovely, until the vacation ends or the visa expires and it is time to return to the real world. Plus as Tacomee notes Europeans including France are moving way further right than the Seattle Council.
And I wish I could afford to drop out and move to someplace exotic like Nantes to bike the countryside.
The inherent freedom of the US lies in the evolution of democracy by people who lived for centuries under royalty. A generic king or queen can’t remain in power without having designs on keeping if not growing the empire — and the way to get that is for the king or queen to get their subjects to hate people from outside the kingdom. And the kernel of wealth in a kingdom was always property ownership.
One thing the system did do is to concentrate populations in villages that sometimes grew into cities for trade. Populations there are still concentrated lots more in communities than here because the twin issues of invasion avoidance and housing availability for the masses. In our culture we see the ideas as “appealing to urbanists” but the settlement patterns are a historically geographic result of centuries of a restricted social class system and public utility system (the town well) – and not some progressive zoning reform. Peasants centuries ago had to live in villages and walk to work in the fields that they did not own.
Ironically, the emergence of corporations with concentrated wealth sets into motion a return to a similar situation. – Younger people are less able to buy homes thanks to the newest shackle of student loans. Now they increasingly live in corporate-owned housing (the new royalty).
– The battles about immigration are channeling a centuries-old legitimate fear of invasions by people from other kingdoms.
My sister, a professional historian her whole 50-year career, can repeat anecdotes reflecting all these things occurring in every millenium and region of the world. The major difference today is just that we can be made more aware of them with social media and easier travel (at a cost). She’s become resigned to the fact that the issues may morph but humanity will never be rid of them.
So the things that some may call universally “better” in another country may be only a nuanced attribute that could disappear in a decade or two.
I have a friend from small town Germany who moved to Seattle 12 years ago. He is tempted to move back because senior health care is better since he doesn’t make good money in his chosen career. However, as he was comparing his recent experiences in his Seattle neighborhood and his home village, he lamented how unfriendly people seemed in the village and how living in Seattle with pleasant, friendly neighbors was thus a better place for that reason.
Things here may not be ideal in 2024, but they are pretty nice relatively speaking.
“If you like fascists you can’t beat Austria.”
Um, Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Turkey, China, Myanmar.
Yeah, Spain sort of has the best in both worlds: good urban planning/public transit *and* a Mediterranean climate. Plus I do think people are friendlier there.
They have a serious drought problem, like California. On the plus side, not many other natural disasters to contend with.
Life expectancy is great. I would rather live somewhere with a high unemployment rate and a high life expectancy than the opposite. To me, average numbers of years lived without disability is one of the best indicators of how well a country is able to provide for its inhabitants.
I’ll hopefully live in Barcelona for some time. It seems like an amazing city.
Mike Orr,
France has maybe the best healthcare system in the world, but it’s underfunded… right now it’s about 11% of the economy and needs to rise to 13-14% to stay solvent. The USA is at around 18% and needs to drop to 13-14% to keep from killing off the economy. Neither of these goals will be easy politically. (My Mrs. working in the industry so I hear this stuff all the time)
As far as walkable, human sized development…. much of France was laid out before autos mucked everything up. France is always going to love bikes. France has better urban design in their DNA than America.
The real test for urbanism in the USA would be the South and Midwest. Can we build “pay as you go” neighborhoods with high home ownership AND strong urban planning around transit and walkability? There’s some hope with the folks over at Strong Towns.
The difference is that France didn’t raze swaths of their walkable urban centers to build freeways. There was that one guy who wanted to, but they were able to prevent it from happening.
The mayor of Paris has done amazing things for the city’s bike network in recent years. It goes to show how far improvements can go. I live in Portland now and it’s laughable to me how it’s supposedly bike-friendly. It’s…not. Like, sure there are a few protected bike lanes here and there, and the Tillikum Crossing is great. But I would never bike on the arterials. There aren’t even pedestrian crossings in half the places there should be.
We need to have higher standards (“We” being the US, not Seattle specifically.)
I agree completely. Freeways have chopped up a whole bunch of American cities, starting with Tacoma. Once they’re there, it’s impossible to get ride of the damn things.
As France takes a turn to Right politically, I doubt their urban planning changes any. Community design should be more enduring than the politics of the day. The French understand that.
The problem with this blog and urbanism everywhere in the USA is it’s so mixed up with Leftwing politics. Urban planning should be above politics. Cities go though political changes over decades… the streets and buildings do not.
Two thirds of Americans own their own house and most of other third would like to. Social housing has maybe 5% support across the general US population? Not a political winner.
There are two camps of urbanists in America…. the folks over at Strong Towns who seem to live in political reality and hardcore Lefties who see urbanism as a major wing in their attempt to gain political power. I’ll always be more of a Strong Towns person I guess.
If we can’t mix urbanism with the 2/3rds homeowners portion of the USA…. it’s not even worth talking about. I hate how the Left tries to brainwash young people into excepting less in life. I will not do that.
@Tacomee:
“ The problem with this blog and urbanism everywhere in the USA is it’s so mixed up with Leftwing politics. ”
Uhhh… Do you realize that most Americans above 40 own their own homes is because of “Leftwing” FDR’s programs to incentivize home ownership? And the interstate program was created by Eisenhower (with bipartisan support) who was not “Leftwing”? The post is inaccurately attributing things that are not “leftwing” as such.
Please quit lying about historical facts. . Don’t buy into the ridiculous narrative that all policies in history are only motivated by locations on today’s artificial continuum when it’s simply not true.
I agree AI
It’s very how should I put it, a very Mccarthyistic outlook on how the Left and Liberals function in broader US politics and public transit and how they have influenced government policy more broadly.
As the 1950s had a lot of bipartisan social programs and social welfare that were focused on improving American society broadly in the post war boom. Houses were cheap back then because of policies on housing and mortgage that subsidized some of the cost. Same for college, it was more or less free or low cost and broadly bipartisan as a need to have a well educated workforce in the post war boom.
And how was this done, surprise surprise very high taxes to cover the cost of said programs.
The libertarian outlook on government and its relationship to its citizens, taxation, and social services is one built upon a fragile house of cards rather than one built of a very solid and stable foundation.
I’ve now read a few different theories why Hochul paused lower Manhattan congestion pricing. 1, it will hurt NYC’s economy (Source, The NYT). 2, Worried about subjecting new riders to subway crime (Source, Former Gov Paterson). 3, Hochul acquiesced to the wealthy (Source, The comment section). 4, Powerful left wing unions joined with Republicans to get her to back down (Source, The NY Post). And here’s that story/theory …
“recently I was in Barcelona (my favorite city and country in Europe by far) and I could either take 24 hours to go to Portugal by train or fly for 30 minutes for the same price.”
Portugal has a particularly isolated rail network. We discovered this when Sam looked at a Milan-Lisbon itinerary. I couldn’t even find a site that would offer a through ticket. Milan has has fast trains west to Madrid; both Milan and Madrid have fast trains north to Switzerland, Germany, or France; but getting from Madrid to Lisbon is another matter. You can find a lower-level train to a border city, and then a one- or two-seat ride to Lisbon, but it adds many hours to the travel time, and you apparently have to get the tickets at multiple sites and piece them together, or get them at the train stations when you arrive. Somebody on YouTube said it’s because or Portugal’s decades-long neglect of international rail for some country-specific reasons.
“Country-specific” by the name of “Antonio Salazar”. Though he died in 1970, it took a good long while for the country to shake off the effects of forty years of one-man rule. People had to learn how to take responsibility for their governance.
The country seems to have made the transition successfully.
The thing about the poor train integration with RENFE is the result of six hundred years of being a nautical nation, originally in competition with Spain. They did not want closer integration of the Iberian Peninsula. And, it’s a long, long way from Lisboa to Gay Paree anyway, two hundred miles farther than from Denver to Chicago.
I agree with Stephen – the audio in the DSTT is a mess. I would defer to folks with visual impairments, though, on how they ought to be improved.
The anti-harassment announcements every five minutes create a harassing environment in themselves. It puts harassment into people’s minds constantly as if it happens every five minutes and everybody is criminals. Why not say, “Link light rail provides convenient transit” every five minutes to create a positive and non-confrontational atmosphere, instead of focusing endlessly on lecturing people on what not to do. This is not a police state, and we don’t need announcement loops that make people feel like “Big Brother is out to get you”.
I’d say just keep information pertinent to what a rider needs to know while waiting for a train and riding the system (train arrivals with what line and what terminus, train delays, construction on the line, or elevator closures) but honestly even that
will probably need adjustment as frequency increases from SODO to Lynnwood in the coming years and the line will have trains rubbing through their stations every few minutes where they interline
Adding unnecessary information to the mix just creates white noise to the listener. Where it’ll come off as more like the Peanuts Trombone which nobody wants to listen to and their eyes just glaze over from. https://youtu.be/q_BU5hR9gXE?si=irZ-kSmvn5zrqrbf
When Link runs every 1.5 minutes after ballgames, the “The next train is arriving in 2 minutes” warning happens while the previous train is boarding.
I don’t think the anti-harassment announcements go far enough. This Onion article may be a joke, but I’d actually like to see station and onboard train and bus announcements do something like this. Announce certain words at random to show allyship and inclusion.
Like that display at the south end of University Street Station that shows random nouns and verbs to create sentences.
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
That’s an art installation, forget what it’s called tho.
I find the statement “Sound Transit does not tolerate harassnent” bureaucratic and obtuse. Does this mean that I can’t overly complain about service? Is this announcement about inappropriate workplace behavior?
People are the predominant victims of harassment, not agencies. “Tolerate” sounds like that they’ll merely tell the perpetrator to stop. Then the announcement places the onus of taking action on the person being harrassed.
I think a better announcement would be:
“We have security cameras on right now, as well as guards who can be summoned quickly. If you are harassing anyone here — a rider or an employee — we can see and hear it. Harassment is more than someone verbally abusing you, it’s also begging you for money. If you are breaking the law in any way we can see it. And if you are a victim, tell us right away so we can take quick action! We’ve banned people from riding and prosecuted people before, and we won’t hesitate to do it again.”.
Too much information there AI. Like I said, we should be striving for less not more information.
Sometimes you have to ask yourself “Is this necessary?” and I think most people would argue “No” to something like the harassment announcement. It’s one of those things that make sense as a PSA video or information at the station as part of “Code of Conduct” but not so much as a frequently voiced station announcement.
I’ve always felt annoyed by South Transit announcements, and I know it’s not an inherent problem with public transit because it never seems so bad when I ride the light rail in other cities.
I think audio announcements should be limited to events that are tried to the particular moment the sound is being played – for example the imminent arrival of a train, or if service is being shut down due to an emergency and everyone needs to clear out. There is no reason for any routine audio announcement to be played over and over again in a loop every 6-8 minutes. Even if there’s something like single tracking or an elevator outage, that can be announced by posting signs, it doesn’t require interrupting everyone trying to talk or listen to music.
Sometimes, I wonder if the intent here was an accessibility thing – that is, they need a way to communicate information to blind people, so they have an automated system that plays an audio recording for every announcement printed on the electronic display signs. But, even for a blind person, this is not particularly useful, as, if there is a service disruption you want to know about, you might have to wait several minutes to hear it. And, somehow, I don’t think blind people being reminded that Sound Transit does not tolerate harassment is doing anything to actually stop harassment.
A much more useful way for a blind person to gain information about the status of the transit system is to pull up a mobile website on a smartphone and read page with audio captioning and bluetooth headphones. This technique works quite well – except, of course, when the sound coming from the headphones gets frequently interrupted with a speaker blaring “Sound Transit does not tolerate harassment”.
Asdf2, I agree it’s something that has annoyed me in Seattle compared to other cities.
Like Brussels Metro when I’ve visited there, does announcements in three languages (Dutch, French, & English) which can eat up about 60 – 90 seconds altogether so the announcements are generally spaced out to be more occasional to not be intruding into passangers waiting long periods on the platform.
Or here’s an example from Paris Metro, you listen closely and each language and they emphasize different information pertinent that each group needs to hear with French having more detailed information and other languages just focusing on the most important information to make it concise.
I assume it’s meant to deter harassers, make everyone else feel safe, show that they’re doing something about harassment, and prove that they informed the perpetrator about the policy.
The thing is, harassment occurs only occasionally, not all day every day, and it’s not the #1 thing passengers should have to think about the entire time they’re in the station.
It could be worse. The announcement could say, “Passengers are reminded that the following activities are prohibited: harassment; being present in a fare paid zone without a valid ticket or tapped-in ORCA; urinating or defecating or smoking fentanyl in elevators; sleeping on benches, floors, or tracks; riding skateboards, bicycles, or roller skates; leaving litter on benches or floors; playing music at a volume that may disturb others; homicide; wearing a green tie on Tuesdays; failing to abide by all spam rules posted at station entrances; all illegal activities and spam; spam spam spam spam ORCA spam spam spam.”
Here’s an Esperanto version: “Oni memorigas pasaĝerojn pri tio, ke jenaj agoj estas malpermesitaj: molesti; esti en veturprezo-pagenda zono sen valida bileto aŭ enfrapita ORCA; maltrinki aŭ feki aŭ fumi fentanilon en lifto; dormi sur benko, planko, aŭ trako; veturi rultabule, bicikle, aŭ glitŝue; lasi rubon sur benkoj aŭ plankoj; ludi muzikon je ĝena laŭteco; mortigi; porti verdan kravaton je la mardoj; ne obei ĉiujn spamajn regulojn afiŝitajn ĉe stacio-eniroj; ĉiujn malleĝajn agojn kaj spamon; spami spaman spamon spame ORCA spam’ spam’ spam’.”
Um, Sam, a word to the wise: The Onion is not actually a “newspaper”…..
Is that icon of two curved lines supposed to mean something, or is it just decoration?
It’s supposed to mean live tracking of train’s location by Ops similar to Transit App’s own live tracking of busses and trains on their app they get from agencies.
Ah, the Seattle Whine in all its glory. Must be a slow day in the news room.
When I read (actually skimmed) this article, my main thought was, “Gee, did ST fix all the escalators or something?”
Note: for the record, I do know that there are still escalators that are down, but I think that once ST fixed the bulk of the old Metro escalators in the DSTT, people sort of started to look for something else to whine about. This is Seattle after all!
Tbf, Lazarus this has been a complaint for awhile. Wanna say a couple years at this point about the station announcements being more white noise than useful information. In paticular the one about harassment.
I do think the article does bring up some good points.
– Overly robotic and some would say cold text to speech tone
– Announcement jingle that doesn’t help catch attention of riders and isn’t memorable
– Too many announcements in a short period of time that are repeated ad nauseum
– Announcements that aren’t pertinent to what a rider needs to know that day
Some would say this is a small detail to complain about, but in this case it does related to passanger experience, something people have complained about ST neglecting to improve and just settling for an slightly above mediocre station passanger experience.
@Zach b,
Nobody is saying that the Seattle Whine is a new thing, but that doesn’t make it any less tiring.
Per ST’s anti-harassment announcement, I think that when Link opened ST wanted to make it clear that the types of behaviors that were prevalent on our local bus system wouldn’t be tolerated on Link. I have no problem with that, and I find my rider experience on Link to be generally safe and stress free.
Whether or not that has anything to do with ST’s anti-harassment announcements I don’t know, but I certainly appreciate it.
I think that when Link opened ST wanted to make it clear that the types of behaviors that were prevalent on our local bus system wouldn’t be tolerated on Link.
Lazarus attacks Metro for no reason at all. Another angel gets its wings.
“Nobody is saying that the Seattle Whine is a new thing”
The point is that annoyance at the harrassment announcement and other repetitive announcements is not a new thing. It goes back to when those announcements started.
Lazarus, if you go to the Urbanist post and click on the link to the 1 minute and 22 second audio clip of the station announcement, I think you’ll be more sympathetic to the complaint.
@Sam,
I ride Link frequently, and I hardly notice the announcements anymore. I would agree that a few stations could use audio quality improvements, but beyond that I am not bothered by the announcements at all. But I’m a pretty tolerant person.
And if these announcements in any way help create a safer, more stress free ride, then I’m all in. And crank up the volume!
The Urbanist has a great article on the increased testing on Lynnwood Link, and on the impact of the Link on development:
SnoCo Exec Dave Somers had some very direct comments on how Lynnwood Link is already driving development and completely transforming the areas around stations:
“I’ve been here working in the county since the 70s. And Lynnwood used to be kind of known as a city without a place, without a center, and it certainly is not that now. The transformation already just in anticipation of light rail, it’s been just amazing.”
I can attest to the changes that are occurring. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in North City has seen it. There are two large apartment projects being built right next to the station, and a third one just underway in the main urban village of North City. And there are townhouses going in everywhere.
The next two years of Light Rail expansion in this region are going to be absolutely transformative! Finally, real transportation progress.
Less than 80 days to go. Can’t wait.
The growth in downtown Lynnwood is because the city rezoned for it; i.e., it allowed it to happen. It might have happened anyway without Link, but in a more car-dependent way.
Agreed. There are very few places in the Puget Sound area that allow growth but don’t see it.
@Al
Currently it’s a different pattern with the 535 heading Bellevue, canyon park then lynnwood. While 532 goes Bellevue, canyon park then Everett
Potentially they still run the 532 variant of Everett to canyon park to bellevue
A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of trying to get to downtown Seattle on a morning express bus, and it never got above about 12 mph between Everett and Northgate.
Sure, the theory of replacing Sounder North with express buses is better, but the reality is Sounder North was demanded by Snohomish County for a reason.
The next two years of Light Rail expansion in this region are going to be absolutely transformative! Finally, real transportation progress.
You are saying U-Link and Northgate Link weren’t real transportation progress? That is a bizarre take.
I think the point is that when Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way come online, it will tip the balance to a majority of Link’s potential served. Right now it’s close but major areas and transfer hubs aren’t reached yet, and the gap across the lake hinders much of East Link’s potential. You could also add Stride 1 and 2, which will improve trips in the Bellevue-Lynnwood and Bellevue-Burien corridors, and transfers between those corridors and Link.
[Edit: I originally said Bellevue-SeaTac, but Stride 1 requires a transfer at TIB, so it’s not clear that Stride would be faster than a 2+1 Line trip, and its advantage over the 560 is less pronounced. So it’s more clear that Stride will improve the Burien-Bellevue corridor than SeaTac-Bellevue corridor.]
I think the point is that when Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way come online, it will tip the balance to a majority of Link’s potential served.
It would not surprise me if we have already reached that point though. Of course it is hard to measure these things. You can look at numbers but that doesn’t tell how much time people saved, or the impact it has had on their lives. But I don’t expect ridership to double after the expansions. A lot of people will save time, but nothing like with Northgate/U-Link. I would say East Link is the wildcard. East Link offers a lot more time savings for a lot more people than either the north or south extensions. If it far more bidirectional and urban. Someone in Downtown Bellevue might spontaneously take the train to visit CID in the same way someone in Roosevelt goes to Capitol Hill on a whim. I could see ridership there being very large and proving your point. But I don’t see that with the other projects.
Which is not to say that Lynnwood Link and Federal Way Link aren’t important. I think they are essential (or at the very least something like it is). You have to have a way for suburban riders to connect to the system. Northgate does that, but not very well. Lynnwood (and the other stations) will do that much better. But I’m not convinced we will see a huge increase in overall Link ridership (let alone transit ridership) the way we did with U-Link (and the way we would have with Northgate Link if not for the pandemic, driver shortage and cuts to bus service). As the trains head north it transitions into areas which are just farther away from places people want to go. The main benefit is regional transportation. This is great, but this type of transportation (public or otherwise) is always a fairly small part of the overall trips.
I do think you reach a point where you could make a very strong case that Link should no longer expand (outward) from there. Everything else should be in the core. At that point you have your key connections for regional transit (although a bus/light-rail/Sounder station at Boeing Access Road would be great). Any expansion farther out makes access to the more distant locations easier, but not that many people are coming and going there. In contrast, improving connections to places like Belltown, First Hill and Fremont would have a much bigger impact on the trips that people take, and impact a lot more riders (from all over the region).
But again, I think Link to Lynnwood, Redmond and Federal Way represents a key milestone. But with Northgate Link we have already built our most important section. We should have started with U-District to Downtown (or maybe U-District to Rainier Beach, as some wanted). The fact that we built things out of order meant subsequent expansions (like U-Link and Northgate Link) were huge. I don’t see that with these expansions (although again I could see East Link being very big).
The upcoming openings will not create a doubling of Link total ridership. Further, it will reduce ST Express ridership and reduce ridership at end stations today. Angle Lake and Northgate in particular will lose lots of boardings once extensions open. That’s what happened to UW Station when Northgate Link extension opened.
It will however create double the track miles, especially if the ELSL opened a few months ago is included in the calculation. That is more transformative.
The result will mean lower boardings per mile in the future, by the way. That’s an important productivity measure. Right now, ST is in first place nationally on this metric.
“But I don’t expect ridership to double after the expansions.”
I don’t expect ridership to double with Lynnwood/Redmond/Federal Way, but another 10-15% could tip it to the majority.
There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping. That will create 4-5 minute frequency full time. It will be the first time we’ve ever had New York/Vancouver/London level of service, where you can practically just fall from a restaurant chair into a station and transit comes in five minutes. And it will be in a 15-mile corridor connecting four regional centers (downtown, U-District, Northgate, Lynnwood), plus honorable mention to Capitol Hill and Roosevelt.
The ultra-frequent corridor will change how people view transit. It will generate use cases in people’s minds that they hadn’t thought of before. People will say transit is “convenient”. Visitors to Seattle will spread the word that transit is ultra-convenient in at least one corridor. People will start clamoring for frequency increases in other Link segments and bus routes, and be more willing to pay more taxes for them.
Even for 2-seat Link+bus rides, having one side of the transfer very good will bring some benefits. We can see that in the contrast with West Seattle Link we’ve just been talking about. The biggest issue with replacing 1-seat bus rides with bus+Link transfers is the 10-minute transfer wait in a worst-case scenario, which will happen to riders 25-33% of time on average. But if the worst-case scenario drops to 5 minutes, then the average scenario to 2.5 minutes, and suddenly the transfer is less of an actual or psychological barrier to ridership or passenger satisfaction. We can’t raise West Seattle to 5 minutes on its own due to non-high ridership and impacts on the shared 2/3 Line tunnel, but that’s one of the things that makes Link less appropriate for the West Seattle area.
@Al S,
“ The upcoming openings will not create a doubling of Link total ridership.”
I wouldn’t say that at all. There will be a huge number of new riders that come into the system when LWL, RLE, full ELE, and FWLE come online. That is a huge amount of ridership potential.
ST ridership projections already point to ridership increases in excess of a doubling, and ST is already meeting their projections on ELSL. It’s hard to imagine they won’t at least be near a doubling of current ridership.
And remember, these extensions are going into areas that have never had fast, frequent, reliable, and high capacity transit before. That will unlock a lot of ridership that simply doesn’t exist today.
But we will see. It’s definitely harder to project ridership in the current post-COVID-19 environment.
@ Mike:
“The ultra-frequent corridor will change how people view transit. It will generate use cases in people’s minds that they hadn’t thought of before. People will say transit is “convenient”. ”
That’s true generically. That’s true for the segment between Northgate and Downtown. I expect those stations to gain boardings because of it when 2 Line gets added in North Seattle.
Shoreline and further north that’s much less likely though. There aren’t major destinations on Lynnwood Link within walking distance. The stations are further apart and much further away from places like the U District and Capitol Hill, so riders won’t think about using Link for local trips. ST’s own forecast show the highest proportion of commute period to daylong ridership. Instead, the stations will serve those that get to the station by driving — parking or drop off/ pickup — or by connecting bus. So I expect that Link will gain riders for the frequency reason as a system — but it likely won’t affect the Lynnwood Link stations much once 2 Line starts running.
@ Lazarus:
“ST ridership projections already point to ridership increases in excess of a doubling, …”
As me and others keep saying, extension ridership comes partly from people already on Link — just that they use a closer station today. You can’t add all those extension ridership forecasts and call them all new riders. It’s a flawed mathematical argument.
Consider too that someone in 2 years riding from Shoreline to Bellevue on Link are counted twice if you add the segment forecasts together — one for each segment.
So it just won’t double. I know it’s academic, but I think it’s important to get this. I’ll be surprised if Link has over 140K (probably will be under 130K) in 2026 once these extensions open. It’s still an impressive number; just not doubling the 80K today.
The difference between 10-minute and 5-minute service will generate riders even in Shoreline and Lynnwood. We can quibble about exactly how many, but the point is that it’s some.
Lynnwood-UDistict will be 19 minutes. That’s within the 25-30 minute window that most people are comfortable with for a commute and that most commutes are, and I assume people feel the same about non-work trips. Lynnwood-Capitol Hill will be 25 minutes, which is getting close to the outer boundary, but it’s much better than they have now with 512+Link or than they had before Link.
The good vibes will be felt by those traveling in the Lynnwood-CID corridor. They’ll tell their family and friends and coworkers. Others who don’t look at transit or live elsewhere may never hear of it. But enough people will be aware of it to make a difference in the overall transit debates. Even if it’s more dramatic south of Northgate than north of it, it will have an effect north of it.
From the eis pdfs
“By 2035, between 60,000 and 70,000 transit trips are expected on the Lynnwood Link Extension each day, compared to about 34,000 trips using buses in the corridor north of Northgate for the No Build Alternative”
Though that estimate above is not “net” aka it is double counting the current people getting off at northgate.
The actual net station boarding trips estimates for segment A is 10k, segment B 4k and segment C (lynnwood) around 20k or 34k total.
For the current 2026 projections on the main website it is listed at “47,000 – 55,000 daily riders by 2026”.
Aka estimated around a 17k~25k daily boardings increase if we don’t double count bus riders.
Great source, WL. It shows how volatile ridership forecasts can be, frankly. Later Lynnwood Link forecasts show a range of 20 percent and they vary notably from the EIS (47-55K projected in the web page compared to the 70K in the DEIS).
I still have my doubts that Lynnwood Station will get 19K boardings all by itself as stated in the EIS. ST says there are just 1,900 parking stalls . That’s about 10 percent of the boardings assuming it fills up. I don’t see the other 17K riders coming from other buses, drop offs or walking. Northgate today only has 10K boardings with plenty of buses and lots more places to walk from.
@Al S,
“ As me and others keep saying, extension ridership comes partly from people already on Link”
Nobody is disputing that. Some ridership at current termini will shift to the new extension. Happens every time. But the effect is usually pretty small compared to total new ridership.
And let’s not forget, there has never been transit on the LLE route of this speed, reliability, frequency, or capacity. Never. And it is bi-directional, something that has never been available to the traveling public before. Never. And there is a lot of untapped ridership potential as a result.
I get that people on his blog aren’t fans of Link or Sound Transit, but let’s be honest here. A doubling of Link ridership with all these extensions is actually a pretty low bar. With LLE bringing on 40 to 60k riders just by itself, it’s hard to imagine ELSL, RLE, full ELE, and FWLE not adding at least another 20k riders. In fact, they should generate way more than that.
It’s going to be a brave new transit world in 2 years. Best get used to the idea.
@Mike Orr,
“ The difference between 10-minute and 5-minute service will generate riders”
It’s certainly a massive improvement over the current lower frequency, peak’ish, directional system. But the frequency will actually be 8 mins at the start of service, going to 4 mins (probably) when full ELE opens. That is far superior to anything that has existed on this route before, and it is sure to generate a lot of ridership.
And the service will be bi-directional. That is something that just hasn’t existed on this route before. And that is also sure to generate additional ridership.
“Lynnwood-UDistict will be 19 minutes. That’s within the 25-30 minute window that most people are comfortable with”
It’s not just a commuter’s “comfort level”, it’s also what the alternatives are. Travel times LTC to DT Seattle peak direction peak time are now approaching one hour. Link will beat that cold. And will do it reliably. You just can’t get a commute that quick with that level of reliability or predictability with our current bus system. It is simply impossible.
All these massive improvements are sure to generate large volumes of riders.
@WL,
Nobody is double counting anything. That is a false narrative and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of ridership estimates.
Ridership estimates have two primary purposes: 1) to assist in making build decisions for system extensions, and 2), to set operational parameters for a given line.
Stated simply, ridership estimates determine whether a line should be built or not, and assist in funding decisions for that line.
And those same estimates determine operational parameters like frequency and overall capacity. As such, it doesn’t really matter where those riders came from. If they are on the line, they need to be accommodated.
That said, the number of riders shifting from intercepting Link at NGS to somewhere else on the line will be pretty small compared to the total ridership on LLE.
And, regardless of where they get on, they will still be traveling the same route segment they do today. It’s not like someone who travels NGS to CHS today suddenly won’t be traveling that same route simply because they are now traveling LTC to CHS. The passenger is still there, is still onboard, and still needs to be accommodated.
And again, the number of riders shifting from intercepting Link at NGS to somewhere else on the line will be pretty small compared to the total ridership on LLE.
It’s been this way with every extension. It will be the same with LLE too.
> Nobody is double counting anything. That is a false narrative and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of ridership estimates.
I am not sure why you are arguing with me, this is literally stated from the eis document statements.
From the pdf if you look at the footnote c:
“The net boardings reflect ridership at all the segment stations, less the drop in ridership that would occur at the Northgate Station; the more sizeable drop is with a station located at NE 130th Street, which overlaps more with the Northgate”
This is why the net boardings number when added up for the segments is lower than the actual riders because they subtracted the existing riders that got off at northgate and transferred to buses.
@ Mike:
“ There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping. That will create 4-5 minute frequency full time. It will be the first time we’ve ever had New York/Vancouver/London level of service, where you can practically just fall from a restaurant chair into a station and transit comes in five minutes. ”
The opening day of LLE won’t have these high frequencies due to the mistakes that delay East Link by 2.5 years. Once 2 Line trains start getting tested and presumably running in service between IDS and Lynnwood sometime in 2025, the impact of the higher frequency can be known from actual field data.
Then once 2 Line is fully running in service (almost certainly moved to early 2026 if one reads the ST press releases), the effect of through running can be known on system ridership.
So the first months of Lynnwood won’t have nearly the kind of ridership that it will by sometime in 2026 just because the service level won’t be in place. Future ST data should give a pretty good clue about the impact of higher frequency in 2025 and then full connectivity in 2026. At that point, all other future extensions will have a new and much more solid realtime data point by which to base future estimates.
Meanwhile, we should not be too harsh on ST and its blind supporters about inaccurately low ridership forecasts on Lynnwood Link when data comes in about later this year. Those forecasts won’t be comparable to the computer models until 2026.
* Those BOARDINGS won’t be comparable to the computer models until 2026.
“Lynnwood Station will get 19K boardings all by itself as stated in the EIS. ST says there are just 1,900 parking stalls . That’s about 10 percent of the boardings assuming it fills up.”
That’s the point though: park & rides account for only a small fraction of ridership. If you really wanted a parking space for every passenger, the P&Rs would have to be four times bigger. That would eat up four times the land and make it even harder to walk to the station — and a lot more depressing to walk past so much garage space.
It’s the same kind of difference as building a freeway instead of a boulevard, or a freeway instead of a rail line. The freeway right of way takes up a lot more space. Every exit has slip ramps that take up even more space. All those cars have to park somewhere. With a train line, you can move more people in a fraction of the space. With a boulevard, you have straightforward intersections and driveways instead of slip ramps.
And each of those cars needs 2.5 parking spaces: one at home, one at work or the P&R, and a shared one at stores. Each of those spaces needs an empty space in front of it so the cars can get in and out.
In contrast, non-car travelers simply walk to the bus stop and congregate there in a small space. If the stop is far away, that’s where more bus routes would solve it. If they’re carrying heavy/bulky loads, we can have some road/parking capacity for that, but it would be more like two lanes rather than four or six. We need some road/parking capacity anyway for working trucks, emergency vehicles, buses, and occasional Sunday drives.
@WL:
“ I am not sure why you are arguing with me, this is literally stated from the eis document statements.”
I agree. Even later in his post, Lazarus acknowledged that there will be some impact, contradicting his earlier statement of no impact in the post.
It’s a pretty well-documented fact that UW Station today has only about half the riders it did in 2019 before Northgate Link opened. Keep in mind that UW Station is across the street from a huge medical center and closer to many campus buildings so losing only half is not surprising. And even though the loss is only 10-15 percent of the net new ridership from Northgate extension stations, that extension ridership is significantly attribuable to pretty massive bus restructures including removing most buses from I-5 over the Ship Canal.
Lynnwood won’t have the same structural factors playing such big roles:
– Fewer buses are removed from the Ship Canal I-5 bridge with LLE than with NLE.
– No Lynnwood Link stations have nearby destinations like those in the U-District and Northgate. There are even better destinations near Roosevelt than near the four stations opening later this year.
I think ST should have revisited their forecasts in light of realtime data from Northgate Link opening as well as two years (2022 and 2023) of a post-Covid reality. Then we wouldn’t be having this discussion about the accuracy of forecasts developed a decade ago.
“ That’s the point though: park & rides account for only a small fraction of ridership. ”
In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings. It likely is much lower today as BART ridership is way down.
The bigger point is that I really see 19K boardings at Lynnwood (38K total activity) as unrealistic. Even though the EIS calls it boardings, I suspect that the exiting riders are also in the data.
I could better see a forecast of 9.5K boardings at Lynnwood or 19K total activity. That would be comparable to Northgate’s 10K boardings today. Still, I just don’t see Lynnwood getting any more than maybe 6K or maybe even 7K daily boardings with less than that until the 2 Line connects Lynnwood with the Eastside and there will be higher train frequency into Seattle. Certainly it would be slightly higher if Sounder North was cancelled.
“In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings.”
Even 40% is less than 50% or 75%. We’re spending a lot of money (~ 100K per parking stall) for a minority of riders. Each space gets only one person a day because it’s occupied 7am-6pm, and there’s much less demand at other times. In contrast, non-parking passengers come at 7am, noon, or 6pm or on weekends, so that’s multiple “shifts” of passengers per day.
At the most isolated P&Rs there’s no opportunity to walk up or transfer, so then ridership will be limited to the number of cars. But those are also low-performing stations for the same reason, or they’re an extra station on the outskirts to avoid having a P&R downtown (like South Bellevue P&R).
@ Mike:
It’s rarely talked about, but many outer BART stations had as many drop offs as they did parking riders feeding their boardings. Technology has enabled riders to much more easily not be stranded at stations for the return trip and this surged drop off and pick up ridership in the 2010’s.
You could simply text someone from the train once you’re on to pick you up when you arrive 15-30 minutes later. That wasn’t done 30 years ago. Instead stations had pay phone banks and people waited longer to get picked up.
In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings. It likely is much lower today as BART ridership is way down.
I assume that was for particular (suburban) stations and not for the system as a whole. In any event I see every station north of Northgate getting most of their riders from two sources:
1) Feeder buses.
2) Park and rides.
In both cases I think a lot of the riders are already in the system. There will be plenty of people who drive to a closer park and ride (instead of Northgate) but that just means ridership will shift around.
Same goes for a lot of buses, but not all of them. Metro only runs a handful of expresses to downtown (and will continue to run most of them). Sound Transit has already truncated the 512 and is not going to truncate the 510. Community Transit has already truncated their 800 series buses which means the main source of riders switching from a bus to a train is the 400 series CT buses. I can’t find information on how many people ride those buses. Old reports had “commuter trips” accounting for about 30% of the total fixed-route ridership. That included the buses to the UW. My guess is that ratio has gone way down (since Swift ridership has gone way up). CT gets about 25,000 riders a day, so I think somewhere around four to five thousand riders will have to switch from the bus to the train.
Of course there will be new riders. The feeder buses to Northgate are not nearly as extensive as all of the feeder buses to all of the other stations. Riders can get there (now) but it requires an extra transfer. The better connection with Link attract some riders. Of course there will be some people who walk to the stations as well (but I don’t think the numbers will be huge).
The bigger point is that I really see 19K boardings at Lynnwood (38K total activity) as unrealistic. Even though the EIS calls it boardings, I suspect that the exiting riders are also in the data.
Or they are just overconfident. It is extremely difficult to predict ridership. We’ve seen example of Sound Transit being way off either direction.
I could better see a forecast of 9.5K boardings at Lynnwood or 19K total activity. That would be comparable to Northgate’s 10K boardings today.
That sounds about right.
Certainly it would be slightly higher if Sounder North was cancelled.
Sounder North hasn’t had more than 400 riders a day since the pandemic. A lot of those riders can probably take the 510 anyway. Speaking of which, the 510 has a lot more riders (over a thousand a day) although still not enough to make a huge impact (if they cancelled it). The only reason they don’t is because of the impact on *peak* ridership. Although I can’t say for certain (because I don’t know CT Express numbers) if Lynnwood Link is very peak-centric then I don’t think it will get that many riders. I see the vast majority of *new* riders coming in the middle of the day.
We’ve been asking ST for over a decade to cancel Sounder North and put the money into replacement express buses and accelerating Link. It always refuses because “Voters approved Sounder North in 1996 so they expect it to continue.” But now with Everett Link getting closer to construction, a few boardmembers have started to muse about maybe thinking about canceling Sounder North someday.
Sounder South is a lot more justified. It goes through the middle of South King County’s population concentration, with large and growing cities (Kent and Auburn). The downtown Puyallup station is a hub for surrounding cities. Ridership has long been higher than in the north corridor.
Sounder North is in a narrow channel between the Sound and a hillside. The center of Snohomish’s population is between 99 and I-5, several miles east. Even most Edmonds and Mukilteo residents would have to drive out-of-direction to get to the Sounder station. Sounder’s Everett-Seattle travel time will be the same as Link, so the only thing you’re getting from Sounder is the view and transfers from the ferries. And ferry transferees aren’t in the Sound Transit taxing district so they’re not paying for it.
I sometimes wonder if it would be cheaper for ST to run express buses to the Sounder North stations as the replacement. Stride extensions would be enticing if they could pencil out — like Stride 3 up Aurora to Edmonds or Stride 1 to Everett after stopping at Lynnwood.
I sometimes wonder if it would be cheaper for ST to run express buses to the Sounder North stations as the replacement.
Probably. It depends on what quality of service you want to offer. I would start with the idea that you are offering better all-day service in exchange for no Sounder. In terms of stations, I would say:
1) Everett is covered fairly well with the combination of the 510 (express to downtown) 512 and 201/202 (both of which connect to Lynnwood).
2) Mukilteo is getting a big improvement with express buses to Lynnwood that will operate with every ferry run.
3) Edmonds is underserved compared to much of the network in my opinion. The routing is bad as well. There is no straight shot from Edmonds to places south. You’ve got a couple buses that head that direction but instead of connecting at 185th they double back to Mountlake Terrace. There is a bus that goes to Lynnwood, so that might be the best option. Overall it just doesn’t look good and it wouldn’t take much money to make it a lot better.
Prior to the pandemic, Edmonds also had more riders than the other stations, so it would make sense to put extra service there. ST no longer releases station data so I have to guess but Edmonds used to be about 40% of the ridership (or more). If Sounder has 400 riders that 160 a day or about 80 each direction. That isn’t a huge amount, but you wouldn’t want to leave people at the bus stop.
Of course you wouldn’t do any of this until Link gets to the East Side and we have more (Link) trains. No sense sending people to Link (especially during rush hour) if we are worried about crowding.
@Ross:
“Of course you wouldn’t do any of this until Link gets to the East Side and we have more (Link) trains. ”
That’s a good point.
The reverse sequencing of Lynnwood and East Link actually is a good opportunity to observe what happens with Sounder North when Link opens to Lynnwood but there is not yet a 2 Line. If Sounder North ridership stays level, they can continue it. If it really drops even before 2 Line opens and frequency doubles, the Board can simply tell Snohomish “the 2 Line is effectively your new Sounder North” and present it as a mode change rather than a cancellation.
“Stride extensions would be enticing if they could pencil out — like Stride 3 up Aurora to Edmonds or Stride 1 to Everett after stopping at Lynnwood.”
Stride is a commitment to 10-20 minute service full time and substantial street improvements, like RapidRide. Replacing Sounder North is just a half dozen ST Express runs peak hours. They could go nonstop from Edmonds to downtown and Mukilteo to downtown, or when Lynnwood Link starts and has enough capacity (e.g., with Line 2), to Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace stations. Everett to downtown could simply be handled with as many 510 runs as necessary.
So it would be easy to set up ST Express, at least if the driver shortage allows it. I guess Sounder staff are BNSF so they couldn’t just switch to ST Express. Stride would require a long-term decision and a substantial financial commitment.
Stride 2 doesn’t go to Everett because Link is intended to do that.
Most of the current development in Lynnwood is several blocks from the light rail station and is still car oriented, as confirmed in the article or by visiting Lynnwood, so whether it is light rail driven or not isn’t clear. It isn’t very high end like in Seattle or the Eastside. New development and housing may move closer to the station but today it is still a hefty walk.
The local politicians extoll a Lynnwood “city center”, but if you have been to Lynnwood lately that is somewhat optimistic. It is good to see however Lynnwood’s comprehensive plan like most of the region sees the vast majority of new housing going into already dense zones near walkable transit. Snohomish Co. is so spread out Community Transit already has its hands full serving as feeder service. It makes little sense increasing that sprawl or density in outlying areas. Still Lynnwood politicians are concerned about the impacts of such quick urban growth.
I think Lynnwood is a little different than some of the other Shoreline stations/areas in that Lynnwood hopes to be a destination, not just a park and ride for folks going somewhere else, and hopes increased urban housing leads to urban renewal (or just a beginning) along with retail renewal. I am sure the other stations/areas along Lynnwood Link dream of becoming Totem Lake, but more likely they will be park and rides for residents going somewhere else. There is only so much retail and commercial this area can support, and Northgate Mall when it opens will siphon a lot of those customers away, as well as from areas south from Roosevelt to UW to downtown Seattle if the mall is as attractive as designs suggest. At this point there is no riders from the north to Lynnwood on Link. So somehow folks from the south will need to want to ride north to Lynnwood. In the past that has been a tough sell even with congestion on I-5.
As the article noted, pre-pandemic ST estimated 47,000 to 55,000 additional daily riders on Lynnwood Link, which like East Link was insane even then. Today total boardings from Line 1 are around 80,000/day. We really don’t know how many riders who now use Northgate will simply switch to a station farther north with a convenient park and ride. Based on ridership in Line 1 I would be surprised if Lynnwood Link adds 20,000 daily riders.
The key for Lynnwood is to get Link riders coming TO Lynnwood, not so much getting Lynnwood residents or folks spread out in Snohomish Co. using Lynnwood as a transfer station to somewhere else. To do that Lynnwood is going to need a much better focus on retail density.
I think Lynnwood Link will be the last major Link opening. Ten years ago I would have said East Link would be more important but the Eastside has turned inwards. Unlike Lynnwood and Snohomish Co. there is nothing Seattle offers not available in the many Eastside cities, and I don’t think East Link serves the population centers well.
At least Lynnwood Link station is in Lynnwood. Northgate Mall could be a real draw for Snohomish Co. residents using Link but not what Lynnwood is hoping for.
I think Federal Way and Tacoma Link will be a bust. Terrible route serving an area even poorer than Snohomish Co. with a long slog through the Rainier Valley to get anywhere from the south.
@From The North: To be accurate, the ST prediction of 47,000 to 55,000 riders is listed by them as total riders, not new riders. ST has not revealed how many of those riders are already on Link, mostly boarding at Northgate today.
So your prediction of 20,000 new riders is in line with that. I think you’re being generous as those forecasts relied heavily on commuters rather than a more broad use like we see on segments further south. The 2040 Ridership diagrams that STB posted a few years ago shows that the Lynnwood segment has a much higher share of rider volumes in the PM peak to daily ratio than anywhere else on the Link system (as high as 2/3 at the county line compared to most segments under 1/2): https://seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PM_Peak_ST3_Plan_2040_Midpoint.pdf
Like Lazarus said, we are less than 90 days away from having the realtime data — so at this point speculating is merely academic. However I would be surprised if there are more than 15,000 new riders or 30,000 total riders.
Trumm at The Urbanist clearly made a common mistake about the ridership forecasts in the article. ST was always pretty clear that published Lynnwood Link ridership was for total riders and not added (new) riders.
@Al — It was “From The North” who wrote that comment you cited, so I’ll change your comment accordingly.
Thanks, Ross!
@From The North — I agree with almost all of your points (and there are a lot of them). I don’t see a lot of walk-up ridership for Lynnwood Link. As you wrote, a lot of people will switch park and rides. A lot of people who commute into Seattle will switch from the bus to the train (they will have to). I also think that many that take the bus to Northgate will take a different bus to a different station. The biggest improvement in that regard is probably around 185th. Right now the (infrequent) bus takes a long time before it gets to Northgate. The buses to 185th will be much more frequent.
Same with people along 145th. When they finally add the station at 130th it will have have a huge impact on riders from Bitter Lake, and a big impact on those in Pinehurst and Lake City.
But even with all of that I don’t see that as being as big as East Link. I get what you are saying about the East Side being far more self-contained, but I think there are still a lot of people that want to go back and forth across the bridge. It just isn’t that far, and when you do that, you are basically there. For people in Seattle, there aren’t a ton of attraction for those on the East Side, but there are some (besides jobs). Meanwhile, there is really no place like CID, Pioneer Square, the waterfront or Capitol Hill on the East Side. Most of the music, sports and other forms of entertainment are in Seattle. With a lot more people on the East Side within walking distance of a lot more stations I think East Link is a bigger deal than Lynnwood (or Federal Way) Link.
What shops will be at the renovated Northgate? I used to go to the department stores for things like sheets and clothes that aren’t available in central Seattle or the 45th corridor, but those won’t be coming back. What I still go to Northgate for is Big 5, Dick’s, and Best Buy, but those are outside the mall. I don’t ice skate or watch hockey practice [*], and that’s the biggest thing in the emerging mall that I know of.
[*] I had a roommate and friends on a local ice hockey team I watched at the arena at 185th & Aurora, but that was in the 90s.
What Lynnwood and Federal Way want the most is a corporate headquarters or two. They can’t get the top-end ones like Amazon but maybe they can get a smaller one that would be lucrative and provide high-paying jobs in their area. Snohomish County wants more employers so it’s not as dependent on Snohomish-King commutes, and more money would stay within their cities/counties.
Retailers are ho-hum, and Lynnwood has positioned Alderwood Mall as the retail center. That’s not the station-area neighborhood itself; it’s the neighborhood next to it. The Everett extension will have a separate Alderwood Mall station. So downtown Lynnwood will be focusing more on highrises, offices, and apartments, while Alderwood Mall will focus more on retail.
I don’t think the new Northgate Mall will make that much difference. It will mainly recover those that left when the shops closed a few years ago. And that’s only if the new shops have everything the old shops had. Otherwise the new mall/regional center will focus on a new market of offices, residents, boutiques, and the ice center. That has little to do with Snohomish County. There will be some interaction, but not a mass flow of Snohomans to Northgate.
Average Snohomish residents first have to get to Link before they can take it to Northgate. It’s just as easy to get to Link as to get to Alderwood Mall, assuming the core routes will serve both stops so it’s a one-seat ride to either.
A surprising thing on Link now is the percent of riders you meet in central or south Seattle that are going all the way to Northgate. This includes people after ballgames. Some of them are going to the Northgate/Licton Springs neighborhood itself, but probably a lot of them are transferring to further north. Like my friend in north Lynnwood does. ST sometimes says Northgate is the highest-ridership station now, and a lot of those people are going further north.
When Lynnwood opens, they’ll stay on Link to Lynnwood or Shoreline or wherever they’re going, and Northgate’s station volume will fall back to earth. Then Northgate can work on gradually building up its regional center and feeder-bus frequency, and that will gradually generate more station riders. Whether that number is higher or lower than the number transferring/parking at the temporary terminus, I don’t know. In the long run ridership will grow everywhere, as the population continues to grow, people get more comfortable with transit, and people get more worried about the climate.
“I think Lynnwood Link will be the last major Link opening. Ten years ago I would have said East Link would be more important but the Eastside has turned inwards. Unlike Lynnwood and Snohomish Co. there is nothing Seattle offers not available in the many Eastside cities, and I don’t think East Link serves the population centers well.”
The East Link opening is split into three phases (starter line, downtown Redmond, and cross-lake), so that dilutes the impact of one gigantic opening.
The north corridor has long had a strong tendency toward transit, and these became more clear in the pandemic era. The north end has fewer highways compared to east or south; they’re squeezed into a narrower area; congestion is worse; there’s not a lake in between; people are less affluent than the Eastside or Seattle; Snohomish doesn’t have as many jobs, retail, or entertainment options as the Eastside has. All those factors push ridership upward. That’s also probably why Snohomish has had so many peak expresses to downtown Seattle going all the way back to the 1980s.
Historically the 550 has been the highest-volume ST Express route, and it’s still the highest, but the 512 and friends have made impressive gains in the pandemic era and probably already in the late 2010s, and the 512’s frequency increases have been well used.
Northgate Link decreased the friction taking transit between Snohomish County and North Seattle in general, and Lynnwood Link will decrease it further. That’s tens of thousands of Snohomish residents and a ton of North Seattle work/shop/recreation destinations that want to be better connected to each other. That will be the main impact of Lynnwood Link, along with Snohomans going to central Seattle and the airport.
“There is only so much retail and commercial this area can support”
That’s only for siting large shopping centers. There’s room for a lot of individual shops/commercial to open here and there and to offer a variety of things.
I think Daniel and I talked past each other a bit when I kept saying we need mixed-use in more neighborhoods and he kept saying the region’s retail market is saturated. It may be too saturated for another large shopping center and the Macy’s/Williams-Sonomas of the world, but there’s still a market for more individual shops in more neighborhoods, and that’s what I envisioned.
Also worth noting: At some point it was clear that Lynnwood wanted to be the next Bellevue. They wanted big office buildings. This is probably one of those areas where the general “if they allow it they will build it” idea was not true. There just wasn’t much interest in building office buildings there even during the boom times. Now, of course, people aren’t building office buildings anywhere. The glut in office space looks a lot more long term than during the recession.
@From the North,
Yes, most of the development is still a few blocks away. But that is a huge improvement over the previous situation where there simply was no substantial development at all.
And, as the article states, some of that is due to the large amount of construction that is still occurring adjacent to the station area. That will probably change as construction wraps up.
Also, there seems to be a lot of station adjacent land that is locked up in bus infrastructure. Hopefully they take a look at that down the road to see if they can’t shrink that a bit.
But at 185th St Station the development is literally right up against the station. Future tenants will be able to go from their apartments to Link without even crossing a single street. That is impressive.
@Mike — The Northgate Big 5 (which was not close to the mall, but at about Roosevelt & Northgate Way) has closed. It sucks since that is where I would get my cheap shoes. Just a heads up in case you head out there.
Northgate Mall will be a lot more like U-Village, but with even more housing. I’m sure it will attract people who like to shop, or want to visit a bunch of stores before buying something. I don’t see that being a huge attraction, since there plenty of places where you can do that. The farther away you are, the less likely you are to go there. I could see someone who lives close enough to walk to Mountlake Terrace deciding to go to Northgate instead of Alderwood Mall simply because it right by the station. But once you are driving it is likely you just drive to whatever mall they are interested in.
The north corridor has long had a strong tendency toward transit, and these became more clear in the pandemic era.
A lot of it is because they already have fairly good transit (at least to a lot of the places that Link will serve). The 512 is a great bus. If I’m in Everett, Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood and want to get to Northgate the bus runs every 15 minutes throughout the day. It is quite fast. Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention. From Northgate, of course you can get to the other Link locations (UW, Capitol Hill, downtown). Again, this is huge. With Lynnwood Link this gets better. But it isn’t the type of improvement that occurred with U/Northgate Link. People will avoid a transfer (which is good) and the train will be more frequent than the bus (more about that later). But trips to Capitol Hill (and there are a lot of them) are dramatically faster with Link then the old bus system. I said it at the time — that section was huge and gave us the first glimpse of what a real metro can offer. We’ve never had so many trips be so fast. Faster than express buses and in some cases faster than driving — at noon. I just don’t see that with Lynnwood Link. It is definitely better, but not a gigantic improvement for a lot of people.
With East Link you do have places that will now be much faster than before. It didn’t help that the bus took a relatively slow route between Downtown Bellevue and Downtown Seattle (or that the buses have been kicked out of the tunnel for quite some time now). But there are places east of Downtown Bellevue that have always been awkward to reach. To be fair, these places didn’t have much (e. g. Spring District) and now they do. It is definitely not at the level of Northgate/U-Link. My guess is that in the middle of the day it is faster to drive. There are not that many people making trips involving these stations. But it is at least the type of thing that create big ridership when little existed before.
Then Northgate can work on gradually building up its regional center and feeder-bus frequency, and that will gradually generate more station riders.
I see Northgate eventually being a lot less important in terms of feeder-buses. From a regional standpoint it becomes largely meaningless. Lynnwood will serve the north, while 145th will serve the northeast. From a local standpoint there is really only one direction where it is good: northeast to southwest (Lake City to Greenwood). Every other direction is challenging. That doesn’t mean that the buses won’t continue to run there, but other buses will steal their thunder. For example someone at 15th & 125th (in Pinehurst) has only one option for Link now (and for the next couple years): take a bus to Northgate. But as soon as 130th gets here they take a bus there (it will be much faster than going to Northgate). Same thing goes for 145th as well as 185th. It is somewhat dependent on what Metro decides in terms of routing (e. g. I think the 348 should go to Roosevelt instead of Northgate) but I see a lot fewer people taking buses to the Northgate Station and a lot more people walking (to and from it).
There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping.
I forgot about that, and that part will be huge. It is quite possible that more people save more time because of that than anything else.
“The Northgate Big 5 … has closed.”
I’ll go to the one in Ballard on the 40/28 then. Big 5 and Dick’s are where I get my shoes; they have a good selection of walking shoes and boots, and Big 5 has particularly good deals. Now that I can only wear slip-on shoes, Big 5 has them.
“A lot of it is because they already have fairly good transit. The 512 is a great bus.”
It’s also demographics. The north corridor has more people going to service-type jobs. The Eastside is full of tech workers and people who think they’re too rich to take transit. In the pandemic and post-pandemic world, Eastside ridership fell the most, while the 512 corridor is more like South King County.
“If I’m in Everett, Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood and want to get to Northgate the bus runs every 15 minutes throughout the day. It is quite fast. Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention. From Northgate, of course you can get to the other Link locations (UW, Capitol Hill, downtown). Again, this is huge. With Lynnwood Link this gets better. But it isn’t the type of improvement that occurred with U/Northgate Link.”
Yes, I’m part of it. Capitol Hill-Roosevelt has gone from 45 minutes on the 49+67 to 10 minutes on Link. Lynnwood-Northgate has gotten much better, along with Lynnwood-Roosevelt and Lynnwood-Capitol Hill. My friend in north Lynnwood does that one or two days a week. But Lynnwood-downtown has gotten 15 minutes longer due to the transfer, because you often get from Link to the bus stop and the 512 has just left so you have to wait for the next one. Likewise, Lynnwood-Roosevelt and Lynnwood-Capitol Hill will get 15 minutes shorter when Lynnwood Link starts.
If you’re going to Ash Way, Lynnwood Link seems to just move the transfer point. But for Northgate-Ash Way there’s only the 512. For Lynnwood-Ash Way there’s the 512, Swift Orange, 201, and 202. And Lynnwood Link avoids congestion, collisions, and lane closures in Shoreline and Mountlake Terrace.
Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way won’t be as big as U-Link and Northgate Link, but they’ll be bigger than Everett, Tacoma, and Issaquah.
Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way won’t be as big as U-Link and Northgate Link, but they’ll be bigger than Everett, Tacoma, and Issaquah.
Agreed.
“At some point it was clear that Lynnwood wanted to be the next Bellevue.”
Lynnwood and Federal Way missed out by not upzoning earlier. Then they could have gotten some of the real estate investment that was sloshing around in the 2000s and again in the 2010s. They talked about upzoning but failed to do it until Link was about ready to begin construction. They thus missed the opportunities when growth money was easy to come by, and how the pandemic and work-from-home happened and they haven’t started yet.
What Lynnwood desired was a corporate headquarters or two, high-end luxury shopping, and tons of apartments. Of those, only tons of apartments are flexible enough to work in any non-recession environment (2000s, 2010s, 2020s). The rest would have to be adjusted for the environment they’re built in.
I don’t know what Lynnwood is envisioning for its downtown now or how it has changed. I assume it’s just assuming a full buildout will take two or three times as long.
Yeah, it is possible that Lynnwood could have added some big office towers if they timed things differently. But I think a lot of the reason the East Side grew was just luck. Microsoft decided to set up shot on the East Side. They got big. Downtown Bellevue was basically half way in between. It was inevitable that there would be some tall buildings over there but if Microsoft set up shop somewhere else or just built compilers (which is all they did initially) then downtown Bellevue would probably be very small (similar to Factoria).
What happened in Seattle had an impact as well. There was a lot of growth in Downtown Seattle, especially at South Lake Union. It is easier to make the case that this was inevitable, given it sits between the old downtown and the UW. Paul Allen recognized this which is why he bought up so much property. Amazon just added fuel to the fire.
Given all that I think places like Lynnwood (or Tukwila) would have had to be pretty luck to be like Bellevue (even if they wanted to be).
“Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention.”
Yes, but the New Jersey guys who raved about the 512 know full well it’s not as good as the NYC subway or PATH. They just mean it’s harder for New York area governments to create new regional services as good as the 512 or Sounder. A lot of it is because they don’t have to: PATH and New Jersey Transit are already there. But they still have some gaps, and it’s harder to fill them.
(I don’t know what those gaps are. What does the New York area need that it doesn’t already have? But that’s because I don’t live there, and when I do go to somewhere like Red Bank, I come from Manhattan, so there’s probably radial service of some sort. (In this case an hourly regional train.))
Mike, Bellevue upzoned a long time ago, well before Lynnwood’s recent upzone of its business district. Recently Bellevue did upzone even further in its commercial core, but refuses to upzone its single family zones.
It isn’t delayed upzoning that has delayed construction along East Link, it is the five-year delay in East Link, the pandemic, borrowing costs going up, and construction costs going up. It is also the loss of office demand, because if you look at the proposed projects in Wilburton and The Spring Dist. they were mostly commercial office space because pre-pandemic office space was cheaper to build and maintain and more lucrative to lease.
Not today, and without the office space much of the development doesn’t pan out. Plus transit ridership in east King Co. Is down so significantly building any kind of housing TOD is risky if folks are working from home or have free parking at work or at the mall.
From Lynnwood to Bellevue to Renton to Federal Way we see some really bad development because money was free. You can build it but it doesn’t mean foks will come. Sales prices per sf for office buildings in Seattle are now down 50%, so who wants to build in Lynnwood or Federal Way?
Ross is correct. Lynnwood would love to become the Bellevue of Snohomish Co. (and the other stations would love to become Totem Lake). But that isn’t going to happen. You need a Microsoft and Amazon, and a lot of very rich people. Bellevue has also benefitted from Seattle’s mistakes since it is just across the bridge and so many wealthy Seattle workers live east of the lake. Lynnwood is too far north, and folks are not going to send their kids to school in Lynnwood or Snohomish Co. The average education levels between Bellevue and Lynnwood are vastly different.
Snohomish Co. and Federal Way and S. King Co. and Pierce Co. are poor. Poor people don’t create urban centers. There is no other way to put it. The average sales price for a house in east King Co. is now $1.7 million. Something like 50% of Seattleites are millionaires. Mountlake Terrace and the other stations along Lynnwood Link hoped to attract the Seattle downtown worker who couldn’t afford a house in Seattle (but still wants a single-family home), and this development would swell tax revenue and retail development. That is looking unlikely today, and the development that is planned looks like typical Snohomish Co. cheap shlock.
Upzoning by itself means nothing. You could take any area throughout the three-county area and zone it to the sky but that doesn’t mean businesses and people will move there. You just end up like in Asia with empty developments.
“What Lynnwood desired was a corporate headquarters or two, high-end luxury shopping, and tons of apartments”. You are right on this. But every poor city in the three-county area wants this. It doesn’t mean they will get it, no matter how high they zone. Sometimes a lack of zoning, or zoning exuberance, is a negative. Without the retail vibrancy folks won’t move there and you can’t have walkable neighborhoods.
Unfortunately what we are seeing today is a retrenchment of development and growth back to the original cores like Bellevue and Seattle which are now more affordable per sf.
Lynnwood and Federal Way are lucky because they started with nothing, although they must be careful about zoning that is counterproductive today. I don’t think Link will be a huge catalyst for Lynnwood, and so far its upzoning and development have not been transit oriented, or even within walking distance of the light rail station. Snohomish Co. And Lynnwood are still very, very car/truck oriented, and folks in Snohomish Co. are still damn poor. You don’t zone like Bellevue for poor people, and you don’t build like Bellevue for poor people with a high school degree who don’t have temperature controlled wine cellars, or where private high schools cost about what the average person in Snohomish Co. earns in a year.
Even though I moved to Seattle much later, my first Downtown Bellevue visit was in 1990 (34 years ago). Even then it was more “urban” than either Lynnwood or Federal Way station areas are today.
The tallest buildings near Federal Way Link station today are hotels. The Commons feels barren and ripe for redevelopment. There is already lots more within walking distance than at Lynnwood. The FW station is in the middle of things. I think that the future of TOD there is much brighter. The parcel sizes are quite big so a developer could do something more transformative. It may even emerge as the “hotel district” for the entire South Sound given its potential.
I think Lynnwood will be harder and take longer. The heart of activity there is Alderwood. The Lynnwood CC Station is more on the edge of things.
I wouldn’t discount Mountlake Terrace station as a busy station. While the transit connections and expansive parking will likely make Lynnwood CC the station with the highest boardings for LLE, I could see Mountlake Terrace getting the most riders that walk to and from a station. Shoreline stations have less “there” there in 2024.
“Bellevue upzoned a long time ago, well before Lynnwood’s recent upzone of its business district.”
I was talking about Lynnwood and Federal Way, not Bellevue. Bellevue planned for downtown growth in the 1960s, and it started appearing in the 1990s. When I grew up in Bellevue in the 1970s and early 80s, I was too young to understand that, so I thought it would always be two-story, and I was surprised when highrises started appearing after I left. But later I learned that the dense downtown had been planned while I was living there.
Bellevue’s planning essentially coincided with Forward Thrust. They were going to get regional rail, and a dense downtown sprouting up at the same time. (There were also plans for growth along I-90 and a Forward Thrust line there, but neither of those happened, and I-90 slid into unwalkable sprawl.) Forward Thrust failed, but big downtown Bellevue came anyway. It was built up in the 1990s and 2000s, before East Link was certain. So Bellevue was able to catch the waves of real-estate money in the 2000s and 2010s. East Link was approved by voters in 2008, and will be finished in 2025. That’s thirty years after the highrises around NE 8th & Bellevue Way appeared.
The sharp drop-off to single-family (e.g., Surrey Downs) and the supermajority percent of single-family land in Bellevue is disgraceful, but that’s common to all cities in Pugetopolis, not just Bellevue.
“But every poor city in the three-county area wants this. It doesn’t mean they will get it, no matter how high they zone.”
If you create the regulatory/structural prerequisites for it, it might happen. If you don’t, it definitely won’t. It’s like the question of whether to build a dense neighborhood in Seattle or upgrade the Lynnwood-Seattle corridor to Link. If you do it, people might or might not move into those buildings, a variety of retail/services might appear, and ridership might increase toward international levels. If you don’t it definitely won’t. And something worse might come in instead, like two-story car-oriented buildings, or big-box stores with surface parking lots in front.
It’s not that people will move to density or downsize their number of cars. It’s that you’re making it possible for them to do so. Odds are that you’ll get at least half of the desired transformation, and in the long run you may get all of it. Because even if the people living there or who might move there initially reject it, other people will come along who want it or are satisfied with it. People who aren’t at that life stage yet, don’t live in the area yet, aren’t born yet, haven’t gotten a job there yet, or haven’t gotten interested in walkable urbanism yet.
Mike, I am pretty sure every regional city does have greater zoning for its commercial zones. The one exception is Sammamish but they don’t have a commercial zone.
Most don’t need a 660’ height limit like Bellevue, and what is the right height limit (because commercial zones generally have no setbacks of FAR limits) depends on the city. Really we are just talking height when we talk about commercial zoning.
The PSRC since around 2008 has recommended cities upzone their commercial zones for housing and offices because it is near walkable transit. That is where 90% of future housing will go.
Lynnwood long ago upzoned its “town center”, and then upzoned again. Lynnwood doesn’t support really tall office or multi-family buildings. The units can’t be too expensive or they exceed the area’s AMI which is low so no Lincoln Towers. Most businesses are not true office businesses but manufacturing or service oriented.
Lynnwood has seen some development. Enthusiasm cooled after the pandemic. Leaders now hope Link somehow restarts that development and enthusiasm. It hurts that retail is so bad in Lynnwood. All the potential visitors or residents go someplace else to shop or dine, and does anyone really want to live in an apartment building in Lynnwood if they don’t have to? Anyone on this Seattle blog live in an apartment in Lynnwood? Rents are a lot cheaper than in Seattle.
Anyone on this Seattle blog live in an apartment in Lynnwood?
I used to but that was decades ago. I think I found the place and it isn’t that far from the station. It was a condo but the owners were renting it out to us (five of us in what I think was a one-bedroom — the kids were little). Transit was pretty bad back then, and it would have been nice to have better options since we didn’t have a car. I remember hitchhiking on SR 99 back from work (although it was late at night). Anyway, rent is cheaper in Lynnwood. In general it gets cheaper as you go north of Roosevelt (Lake City is a lot cheaper than Roosevelt).
SDOT as a blog post update on 10 projects moving forward.
Highlights:
Actually retrofitting NE 45th St Pedestrian Bridge. Rapidride J had the construction bid sent out, hopefully the bid’s aren’t too expensive. For the denny way repaving they’ll also be doing one pair of bus stop consolidation for route 8, removing the 6th ave stops and adding a new (westbound) stop on 7th avenue instead, overall I think it’s fine the bus stops were a bit frequent on that corridor. Both beacon ave bike lanes and rainier bus lanes might actually move forward in july.
List:
1) Georgetown to Downtown Safety
2) Georgetown to South Park Connection
3) Bridge Seismic Retrofit
4) RapidRide J Line
5) Route 40 Transit-Plus Multimodal Corridor
6) 2024 Slurry Seal Program
7) Denny Way Paving
8) Safe Routes to School Improvements at Broadview-Thomson and Cedar Park Elementary
9) Beacon Ave S & 15th Ave S Safety (North Segment)
10) Rainier Ave S Bus Lane (Phase 2)
From a transit perspective the improvements to the 7 and 40 look huge. The J is important, but holy cow it has taken a really long time, and when the dust settles it won’t be much better than the 7 or 40. Both of those projects show you don’t have to convert a route to RapidRide to make a big improvement.
I wish they were adding bus lanes on Denny. It may take a while, but my hope is before the end of the decade they will have done it. As these other projects progress people will get used to the idea that you can just take a lane. General purpose traffic isn’t much worse because it was bad to begin with. The difference is you have an alternative.
> I wish they were adding bus lanes on Denny. It may take a while, but my hope is before the end of the decade they will have done it.
The problem is that southbound aurora avenue car drivers all take denny way to reach i5 southbound. I think they were originally expecting a lot more drivers to pay for the tunnel and take the i90 flyover to i5.
Today is a perfect example of why I often wish I could drive. I have to e somewhere today at 2pm. I checked the schedule planner. It said leave my home at 12:22. I left at noon instead. When I was across the street from my first stop, the bus was there, four minutes early. The next one was 8 minutes late. I finally traveled the 2 miles to the station and it took 20 minutes to start the Trek to Seattle. It took over an hour just to begin the Seattle trip.
I see it as a perfect example of how a more frequent bus would have served you that much better. You could have spent less time waiting for the next bus, and less time waiting at the train station.
Mathew, you don’t check One Bus Away before heading out to the bus stop?
Metro’s reliability got bad in the early 2010s. Several routes were regularly late every day. Then with the booming economy and Seattle’s Transit Benefit District and strategic restructures, Metro fixed most of the reliability problems. Since 2022 it has gotten bad again.
The reason is increasing congestion, which throws the buses off-schedule. What Metro did in the late 2010s was to add standby buses to swoop in when regular runs got caught in bottlenecks or breakdowns. It doesn’t have the resources for that now, with the driver shortage, maintenance-worker shortage, and supply-chain bottlenecks for parts. Whenever it does get more service hours someday and a full staff, the first chunk of service hours will go to restoring reliability, before frequency additions are made. So when we’re thinking about various levies to increase Metro service, we have to include enough for reliability improvements too. Otherwise the reliability improvements would swallow any frequency increases.
Seattle and the other cities could also get better with transit-priority lanes, to get buses out the bottlenecks that make them unpredictable.
I take the 131, 132, and 62 several times a month. They’re all notoriously late almost every day from 10am to 7pm. They’re supposed to be 15-minute corridors, but the buses usually show up 5-15 minutes late. When they’re 15 minutes late, the next bus catches up to it, so two come at the same time or almost at the same time. The second one is naturally empty, unless the first one is so crowded that people spill over to the second one. I’ve heard the E is also pretty unreliable. And the 10, 11, and 49 on Pine Street are regularly 5-10 minutes late too now. That doesn’t make sense because the routes are so short, and the 10 and 11 have no congestion points like freeway entrances or bridges. I don’t know which other routes are the worst; what have people seen?
It’s not just increasing congestion. I have many times observed buses 5-10 minutes late, even in situations where the bus is practically the only vehicle on the road. The reasons include a combination of the bus driver starting the run late and poorly times traffic lights that leave the bus sitting at red lights for long periods of time. 15th and Pacific is one such example. The buses just sit there for over a minute, every time, with no other cars around. You’d think with all that space, SDOT could create a roundabout or something.
In Denver, the 15 and 15L (Limited Skip Stop Bus) are notorious for this too with bus bunching. They come 6x ph for the 15 and 5-8x ph on the 15L during peak hours. So you may end up with 3 busses (one standard, two articulated) at one stop if one of the 15Ls gets mildly to moderately delayed to any degree anywhere in the system.
It’s supposed to get better with the shift to BRT on East Colfax as construction is supposed to start this year or next year. So the 15L will have its own dedicated Bus Lane to itself.
The 67 isn’t great, but the biggest irritant for me is the lack of useful realtime arrival data. I catch it southbound at Roosevelt and 80th, right outside of Don Lucho’s, which is ~10 minutes into its run. OBA shows ‘scheduled’ time >50% of the time, and when it has a ‘realtime’, it is often wrong by several minutes in either direction, to the point of being useless.
They might be moving forward with the route 40 bus lanes, though I’ve noticed they’ve made quite a large change at the last second.
“Construction on the Route 40 Transit-Plus Multimodal Corridor project set to begin as soon as early June!”
Starting with the positives:
* Three miles total of business access and transit (BAT) or “Freight and Bus only” (FAB) lanes
* 6,000+ feet of upgraded sidewalks. Three new or upgraded crosswalks
* Upgraded watermain in Fremont
* 47 upgraded curb ramps; Eight new bus bulbs
* 5–10% transit travel time reductions
https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/transit-program/transit-plus-multimodal-corridor-program/route-40—transit-plus
## Fremont Bus Stop
Based on feedback we heard from the Fremont business community, we are starting a process to move the proposed northbound bus stop on the northwest corner of Fremont Ave N and Fremont Pl N to approximately 250 ft west of it, next to the Lenin statue. As part of this new design change, we will be assessing what changes could be needed to other nearby bus zones along the new proposed bus stop. (This was posted May 24, 2024)
This is going to make the transfer from route 40 to the other bus routes of 62, 32, 31 much more painful with having to walk the full block in addition to crossing the two crosswalks.
For a bit of history and context for everyone not following, originally the 31, 32, 40 and 62 were going to continue using the existing northbound bus stop on Fremont Ave / 34th (1) back in 2021. This was changed to a protected bike lane instead of a shared bus/bike lane which moved the 31, 32, and 60 onto a N 35th St heading east and the 40 by itself heading west on Fremont Pl N (2), but it was at least still close to the intersection. They’ve now moved the 40 bus stop further to the west.
1. (2021 document page 15 https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/AttachmentD-Route_40_STAB_Presentation_04_28_2021.pdf#page=15)
2. (2023 designs page 15 https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/Route%2040%20TPMC/Route40_60_Submittal_Channelization-Only.pdf#page=15)
Though I guess the bus lanes are probably worth more than the increased transfer time and hopefully most aren’t transferring between the two buses but it is definitely quite annoying to see such a change.
The diagram on https://route40.infocommunity.org/fremont-neighborhood/#fremont-north already shows the new relocated bus stop of the 40 placed closer to evanston.
Honestly it’s even a large pain for south bound 62/31/32 transfers to 40 now as well.
Checking the merchant feedback it seems it stems from these comments:
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/Route%2040%20TPMC/Route40_TPMC_Businesses_Organizations_Feedback_Summary_FINAL.pdf#page=5
Well, well, well, from the linked community comments, it looks like Fremont and Ballard is filled with small business owners who want to push transit and transit stops further away from their businesses. The comment section had me believe that only happens in Bellevue.
Sam, I’m not sure where you got the impression that no Seattle businesses ever oppose bus lanes and transit prioritization. It’s certainly a well-documented phenomenon, even if the vocal minority is just that.
OMG, the whole “buses bring violent people and criminals”.
These are literally within a block or two of the existing stops with the same bus routes. Do they think those routes are bringing violent people and criminals now? What about all the customers who come by bus?
Which businesses? Walking through their this weekend, that block is oddly full of empty storefronts.
It’s really weird, actually. When I lived there, that was the busiest part of Fremont, and still mostly is. But the premier intersection, at 34th and Fremont, every corner is a vacant storefront. I don’t know what to make of it.
There’s a “fix the 40” website that has a bunch of signed-on businesses. Northwest Greenways organized a “save the 40” campaign and found that many businesses were supportive but didn’t want to get in trouble with their landlords for supporting street use changes.
There’s a “fix the 40” website that has a bunch of signed-on businesses.
A small bunch. Some of the companies are listed twice (with different names) like Nautical Landing Marina. This is a company that offers “yacht and superyacht moorage” according to their website. The company called “Signature Yachts” is also listed twice. Or Suzie Burke, who is a major commercial landlord in the area (a lot of the small businesses in Fremont hate Suzie). If you look at the number of businesses that are served by the 40 bus (dozens in Fremont and Ballard alone) it is a very tiny portion of them, and mostly those that cater to the very wealthy. If you moor your superyacht and are “just 15 minutes from Boeing Field’s private jet terminal” then you aren’t taking the 40.
> Walking through their this weekend, that block is oddly full of empty storefronts.
I assume the problem is high rents demanded by commercial landlords for the intersection, and a relatively poor pedestrian environment. Fremont & 34th should be a scramble crossing.
I have a question about Sounder North. If ST were to suspend service on the route due to low ridership after Lynnwood Link opens, could they sell/transfer the easements to WSDOT to enable additional Cascades runs to Vancouver BC?
That would depend on the terms of the agreement with BNSF, but it is an interesting proposition.
WSDOT is planning to increase frequencies on Cascades at some point – taking over the Sounder North runs might be one way to enable that. It would also be interesting if those runs of Cascades could also make the same stop at Mukilteo, if only for the same few runs that Sounder makes that stop.
1. Mukilteo is a state ferry terminal, and could very easily be part of an overall state transportation plan.
2. Station stops can be quite quick if done right, even on Cascades. I’ve been on trains that stop for less than a minute at Olympia and Kelso. There’s no ability to handle checked luggage at Mukilteo, so 3/4 the delay problem can’t happen there.
I’m not sure about how hardball BNSF would play for the segment north of Everett.
According to various state rail plans, there are 24 trains a day on the line with 10 going all the way to Vancouver. And there’s just one track mostly so it’s used in both directions.
It’s a unique situation where the most strategic action would probably be negotiations done behind closed doors. Double tracking or frequent sidings would help lots (both passenger and freight/ economic development benefits) but it’s not cheap and there are environmentally sensitive areas on the route. So the various entities would need to bring their best cards to play (needs and money) to get a deal that would pencil out.
Here’s a second thought: would there be any way to “save” Sounder North by turning them to through-running with Sounder South? Essentially the current Sounder North runs would become reverse peak trips for Sounder South and continue all the way from Everett to Tacoma or vice-versa.
That is basically Amtrak. I’m not sure if Amtrak is cheaper to run than Sounder. The big problem is not the operations but the leasing of the lines. They go up as you add more service. So six trips a day costs more than twice what three trips a day costs (etc.).
Amtrak only has to pay the incremental costs the trains impose. That’s a special privilege in the railroad laws, and is one reason why Washington and other states have Amtrak operate state-funded regional rail rather than doing it themselves.
Yeah I guess I’m thinking through Sounder North and trying to figure out how to mitigate the high operational cost. By making those trips into Sounder South trips I thought it would make the equipment more productive and amortize the cost per rider a bit more. It maybe this should be left to Amtrak, perhaps expanding RailPlus program to be all Amtrak stops between Tacoma and Everett.
By making those trips into Sounder South trips I thought it would make the equipment more productive and amortize the cost per rider a bit more.
I’m sure it would. I think the biggest problem with Sounder is the money we pay BNSF, not the cost of operating the trains. If we owned the tracks it is quite likely we would run (smaller) trains every hour along South Sounder (at the very least). Some of those would keep going to Everett. We might spend money on electrifying the route instead of building giant park and ride lots. Alas, that isn’t the world we live in.
The Devin Silvernail video made me laugh. Funny he releases that on the eve of Rightwing parties election gains across France. The France Mr. Slivernail thinks he knows is likely going away….. I’m guessing in the next election.
I’ve been to France a few times. Never had any trouble crossing the boarder. Until traveling with my African American nephew. That time I was questioned for 45 minutes.
Doesn’t surprise me Mr. Silvernail loves France. He’s White with money and connections. Life was pretty easy for him in Seattle and that White Privilege carries over into Europe, no problem. I’d love to see this dude banished to Aubervilliers for a year. Live life with the “Great Unwashed” in France. Learn that most of Europe is even more economically divided and racist than the USA.
What was the point of this comment?
To point out the toxic mix of urbanism, socialism and White privilege that’s infected Seattle and currently is dying off in Europe.
France has these quasi-Socialist policies that serve the upper income urban population… and give the rural population and minorities the short end of the stick. Incoming French President La Pen is going to make big changes in 2027…
The USA and Greater Seattle need to avoid the political road France is headed down at all costs. That starts with a vision of urbanism that doesn’t just serve a small slice of the White affluent population.
Want a local example? Millions spent a 3 mile light rail line in Tacoma… while the rest of Pierce County has subpar bus service. As a true urbanist and believer in social justice, there is no excuse for this.
neat.
Tacomee, isn’t the rise of the political right in Europe mostly driven by anti-immigration sentiment, and let’s face it, often involving their version of white supremacy? So, similar to the US and not a “road that we can avoid” at this point? Pretty ironic that you would suggest that the surge of the Right in France means racism/white privilege is “likely going away” there! And Urbanism/transport? A culture war issue for sure, but likely more of a niche one, more the stuff of Conservative talk radio and cheap shots by pundits than national election polling.
Is France getting rid of its transit, bike lanes, pedestrianized downtowns, and universal healthcare in its rightward turn? Will Nantes soon look like a California suburb?
Brandon,
The “Mouvement des gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests Movement in English). Started because of high fuel taxes.. France has an unfair tax code that cheats rural residents. … as well as a lot of Brown and Black ones. Like America, France is a good place to be college educated and White.
Rich White urbanists live in desirable, walkable neighborhoods with good transit. I’m highly supportive of this sort of thing. The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism.
Let’s go back to Devin Silvernail for a minute. This guy was part of the Seattle City government… a City looking at a huge budget deficit….. A city whose transit system is addicted to Federal money….. a City with a crap public education system that’s closing 20+ schools. What’s Mr. Slivernail’s answer? More Federal Money! More State Money! In a City where 1 out of every 14 people is millionaire…. the Seattle City government wants a never ending stream of Federal money.
Seattle’s government is playing right into Trump’s reelection plans.
With Trump and Le Pen coming into power…. there’s no more Federal money headed towards Seattle. Now what?
What’s the way forward here? How does urbanism get off the tit of other people’s money? The rich coastal cities in America need to move forward without Federal handouts.
“The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism. ”
The point in France, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Germany, etc, is it’s not just a few neighborhoods for affluent whites. It’s entire cities, suburbs, and rural villages for everybody. It’s not uniform throughout the country, but the average is more practical, convenient, and shared space than in US cities, and more available to a wider cross-section of the population.
Japan and China are like this too. In fact, it’s telling which parts of China AREN’T like this. It’s new affluent suburbs that are aping the American stereotype. In other words, the richest Chinese can CHOOSE to live in car-dependent areas, while the majority of less-affluent people get the walkable default. In the US it’s the opposite: the top 10% can choose to live in a few highly-walkable areas, while the bottom 50% has to live in the car-dependent default, and often in far suburbs or exurbs that don’t have good transit options. This is insane.
Another striking thing is that in the US, several different things get polarized together: opposition to walkable designs, to comprehensive transit, to immigrants, to most minorities, to universal healthcare, to housing policies that would work for more people and lower costs, to being open to dictators, to accepting/encouraging misinformation, to denying that Russia is acting like a psychopathic bully. The same people tend to support all of them, or at least there’s a lot of overlap.
In Europe, they’re less together. Walkable design, transit, universal healthcare, etc, are less political; they’re just common sense. So even as some turn against immigrants or toward dictators and Putin, they aren’t arguing to reverse their urban layout or drop universal healthcare. When they hear about Americans getting unexpected $30K medical bills, or not able to see a doctor or get prescriptions due to cost, or going bankrupt or homeless due to medical needs, they react in horror and say, “We don’t want that.” Some of this may have weakened slightly here and there, like more people buying cars or getting some doubts about the rapid green transition, but it’s not a total reversal, like it would have to be if they were to become like the US.
“Seattle’s government is playing right into Trump’s reelection plans.”
You mean the new moderate mayor and councilmembers who have reversed some of the previous progressive policies? This is causing more people to vote for Trump? How?
Mike Orr,
Ah, Le Pen is about the run the table in France. Macron knows he’s toast at this point. We’ll know more after the election later this Summer.
I have friends in Hamburg Germany. Nice part town. My friend works at a big import/export business, in the big office downtown. We drove down to their warehouse one day to meet the guys who work there… mostly Turkish. These guys live in a cramped Turkish getto with bad bus service. They’ll never be German even though most of them were born in Hamburg. The healthcare they have access to is substandard. How would you like to a “guest worker” for your entire life? And your German speaking kids? Also “guest workers”. Europe deals Black and Brown people off the bottom of the deck even worse than the USA.
If this Socialist paradise in Europe is so great, why is the Right winning election after election? Things change Mike. The Europe you idolize is already dying. Because it’s been so currently Leftwing and hard Right are coming into power…. they’ll meet somewhere in the Middle I guess?
The reason every Seattle pol is unwilling working for the Trump campaign is the Liberal addiction to Federal and State money. Every problem…. transit, education, housing, requires at pile of “other people’s money”. Listen to KUOW over the Summer and you’ll hear constant sniveling about the need for the State and Feds to bail out the Seattle Public Schools. Same shit with housing…. and everything else. We need Federal money!!!!!!
We have the richest places in America…. all completely Liberal….. crying for Federal money. It’s bad look and it’s the gift that keeps on giving for the GOP.
It’s not that the GOP doesn’t spend Federal money on stupid local projects… they do. But they don’t cry about it in the media.
On a local note, who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma that’s a complete disaster? The City of Tacoma? The County? WDOT? Sound Transit? It’s horseshit like this that holds transit back.
We’ll see when/if France turns away from transit and walkability.
Germany changed its citizenship laws a couple decades ago to allow descendants of guest workers to get citizenship. I don’t know what the situation is with that particular family.
“The Europe you idolize is already dying.”
Again, our interest is transit and walkability in Europe vs the US, not all these other social/political issues.
“The reason every Seattle pol is unwilling working for the Trump campaign is the Liberal addiction to Federal and State money.”
I’m absolutely stunned that you just dismiss the concerns about having the freedom to choose your leaders that we fought a revolutionary war to get, into just a question of federal subsidies. If we lose democracy, we lose everything. Whether the policies are conservative or liberal, whether cities get subsidies, whether the economy is capitalist, whether laws are consistent, it will all depend on the leader’s whim. And they’ll be taking the country’s resources for themself, and taking over all the media channels, and maybe filling them with misinformation.
“who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma that’s a complete disaster? ”
I care more about getting good transit than about punishing and getting revenge on people for bad transit.
“…who’s taking the blame for spending millions planning the BRT #1 route in Tacoma…”
I think, at the time, WSDOT was unwilling to give up a general-purpose lane, setting up a spiral of takings and costs. I don’t know that the planning was a disaster, but maybe you know more than me.
I’m hopeful that this can be revisited, and different decisions made in the future. WSDOT is now much more flexible on road-use, with the recently passed complete streets legislation.
“How does urbanism get off the tit of other people’s money? The rich coastal cities in America need to move forward without Federal handouts.”
Those rich coastal cities and states are the ones subsidizing the rest of the country. They’re not asking for anything for themselves that they don’t think everyone should have.
On a local level, liberals aren’t asking to take other people’s money for themselves. They’re asking everybody to agree to do something collectively, to benefit everybody. It’s their money too, since they’ll also be paying the taxes.
> Rich White urbanists live in desirable, walkable neighborhoods with good transit. I’m highly supportive of this sort of thing. The problem in France (and America) is the government uses taxes of the unfortunate people who don’t live in these affluent, urban, mostly White areas (like our Capitol Hill) to pay for this upper class urbanism.
It’s been proven over and over again that it is the other way around. The urban areas subsidize the suburbs just like how the blue states mostly subsidize the red states. Also do you really think the rural/suburbs do not receive any subsidies?
“These guys live in a cramped Turkish getto with bad bus service.”
How bad is it? What kind of transit do they have? Is it like Pierce County for instance? What financial/social/legal limitations prevent them from moving out of the ghetto if they want to?
Mike Orr,
The reason urbanism doesn’t stand much of a chance in the USA is guys like Devin Silvernail are constantly tying it to Socialism. The USA is built on the nuclear family and home ownership. Because many urbanists insist on Leftwing politics and goofy ideas like social housing and way too much low income housing into the mix, it makes building walkable neighborhoods with transit much, much harder.
Let’s say Washington State planned a whole new community of 100,000 people. (Much of Europe was built this way after WWII BTW). It might be possible to pre-sell 25,000 (or more!) at $400k each for $1,000,0000,000. That’s a lot of money to start off with.
Measure that against the “House Our Neighbors” group pushing social housing in Seattle. Last thing I read was they’re looking at a tax increase for adding maybe 200 units of social housing a year?
The difference is people would be on the hook for home mortgages in the first proposal. Traditionally housing in America is financed on the buyer’s personal credit. The other model that’s gaining traction is housing owned by corporate interests for profit. I think most of America doesn’t want that. I know most of America wants nothing to do with social housing. America needs its own brand of urbanism that respects the past.
In full honesty I’ve met many people like Devin Silvernail and I’ve hated most of them. The guy never held elected office. There’s this “master class” of political staff, NGO employees, and self proclaimed “activists” of every stripe and hue who “know” all the answers. I mean Mr. Silvernail falls out of political power in Seattle and runs off to France, makes a video about how great France is…. and begs Lefties to run for political office. He’s not running for office however. Fuck, he’s running away from America. Good thing he has is White Privilege card handy!
“The USA is built on the nuclear family and home ownership.”
Says you, and the 1950s ideal.
Urbanism is compatible with home ownership. E.g., townhouses and condos.
“way too much low income housing into the mix”
Why are people low-income? Why are housing prices so out of proportion with income? Why don’t we spend our energy reducing inequality rather than making people suffer more?
I am not sure what to make of Silvernail’s video, or the point of it on this blog. There are many better travel videos for Nantes. In part just another burned-out American expat falling in love with France, for a while.
He states he “immigrated” to France but I think he has a tourist visa. It isn’t clear whether he has a work visa. I have gone through customs in Paris many times and other than Charles De Gaulle airport being a nightmare and dysfunctional (an overlooked part of “socialism”) it isn’t much of a process for a U.S. citizen, and is no process for a European citizen. What did he expect. Had he never been to Europe before (if he had he would know everyone knows to fly through Iceland to avoid customs at Charles De Gaulle airport). Now if he was coming from Africa that would be different. France knows Silvernail will be going home one day. They all do.
Silvernail is upfront his video is about “socialism” with a big S, but I think he overstates France’s “socialism”. Who doesn’t go to the east coast of France for a vacation or extended vacation and not fall in love, for a while. France isn’t Xanadu. It certainly makes biking easy when the town is flat. I think some on this blog tend to romanticize other countries.
I think Silvernail is a bit bitter because the reason he is in France is because his socialist polices working for Morales led Seattle voters to throw out the baby with the bath water. So he really didn’t “leave” a job he loved. The job left him.
One thing he notes and is true is how easy it is to travel by air in Europe. He flew to Vienna for 60 Euros. Europe is quite dense in areas and easy to travel by train or air to completely different cultures, unlike saying flying from Seattle to Wyoming. The low-cost airlines are just as cheap as rail, and the lack of coordination between countries can make train travel impossible. For example, recently I was in Barcelona (my favorite city and country in Europe by far) and I could either take 24 hours to go to Portugal by train or fly for 30 minutes for the same price. My guess is he Ubered to the airports on both ends which most do in Europe. FYI I wouldn’t recommend Vienna. Big stick up their Austrian right wing arse.
Tacomee is correct that politics in Europe are swinging right, really far right, mostly due to immigration which has put a tremendous strain on a lot of countries. Fortunately for Silvernail he chose a part of France with few immigrants. Other than the Japanese I don’t think I have met more xenophobic people than the French. Try becoming a French citizen, even as an American. Silvernail is the only person I have heard state the French are welcoming to strange Americans.
So what did we learn from the video? Nantes is a lovely place for a holiday, or extended holiday. Americans have travelled to France to regroup forever (beginning in the 1920’s to Henry Miller in the 1930’s) and think they are the first Americans to discover France and “become French” which they naturally think makes them more sophisticated despite not speaking the language, and of course their first video living there for a few weeks “taking the scenic route” is lovely and extolls the virtues of their vacation, and how the French are so much more sophisticated than the ugly Americans.
Not too many Americans travel to Africa to regroup.
But is France or any European country a model for the U.S.? Hard to say. If you like fascists you can’t beat Austria. Wealth disparity in Switzerland is terrible.
Youth unemployment is awful in France due to coagulation of employment by the state, and innovation is weak for such a wealthy country which is why U.S. technology and culture dominates. . Education is as segregated as in the U.S. Healthcare is universal like Medicare and pretty good and that is something to consider, except it isn’t working well in Great Britain (France is not nearly as obese as the U.S. which is straining our health system).
The French are some of the most xenophobic and have treated immigrants deplorably and never allow them to actually Integrate into French society or become citizens. This is especially acute in the countryside where Silvernail is. The young feel stifled by the sclerotic state civil servant structure, and lack of employment opportunities. The subsidies to the rural areas to maintain the lovely countryside are enormous (the U.S. does the same just by owning the land, or the sheer size of the U.S. in which 3% is actually urbanized or suburbanized).
I like France. Some parts. Not Paris anymore, and certainly not the outer ring where the immigrants live. Spain is probably my favorite country in Europe. The people are happier than in the north. Germany is not my cup of tea. Too “verbotten”. Same with Great Britain: the countryside is lovely to visit but London has become overwhelming and terribly expensive. I hate that kind of urbanism on steroids. I don’t think any of these countries are “socialist”, and some like Germany are seeing serious economic issues with its bad energy policy and is really going right.
So I didn’t learn much from the video except what I already knew: biking around Nantes in the summer and visiting the sites and markets is lovely, until the vacation ends or the visa expires and it is time to return to the real world. Plus as Tacomee notes Europeans including France are moving way further right than the Seattle Council.
And I wish I could afford to drop out and move to someplace exotic like Nantes to bike the countryside.
The inherent freedom of the US lies in the evolution of democracy by people who lived for centuries under royalty. A generic king or queen can’t remain in power without having designs on keeping if not growing the empire — and the way to get that is for the king or queen to get their subjects to hate people from outside the kingdom. And the kernel of wealth in a kingdom was always property ownership.
One thing the system did do is to concentrate populations in villages that sometimes grew into cities for trade. Populations there are still concentrated lots more in communities than here because the twin issues of invasion avoidance and housing availability for the masses. In our culture we see the ideas as “appealing to urbanists” but the settlement patterns are a historically geographic result of centuries of a restricted social class system and public utility system (the town well) – and not some progressive zoning reform. Peasants centuries ago had to live in villages and walk to work in the fields that they did not own.
Ironically, the emergence of corporations with concentrated wealth sets into motion a return to a similar situation. – Younger people are less able to buy homes thanks to the newest shackle of student loans. Now they increasingly live in corporate-owned housing (the new royalty).
– The battles about immigration are channeling a centuries-old legitimate fear of invasions by people from other kingdoms.
My sister, a professional historian her whole 50-year career, can repeat anecdotes reflecting all these things occurring in every millenium and region of the world. The major difference today is just that we can be made more aware of them with social media and easier travel (at a cost). She’s become resigned to the fact that the issues may morph but humanity will never be rid of them.
So the things that some may call universally “better” in another country may be only a nuanced attribute that could disappear in a decade or two.
I have a friend from small town Germany who moved to Seattle 12 years ago. He is tempted to move back because senior health care is better since he doesn’t make good money in his chosen career. However, as he was comparing his recent experiences in his Seattle neighborhood and his home village, he lamented how unfriendly people seemed in the village and how living in Seattle with pleasant, friendly neighbors was thus a better place for that reason.
Things here may not be ideal in 2024, but they are pretty nice relatively speaking.
“If you like fascists you can’t beat Austria.”
Um, Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Turkey, China, Myanmar.
Yeah, Spain sort of has the best in both worlds: good urban planning/public transit *and* a Mediterranean climate. Plus I do think people are friendlier there.
They have a serious drought problem, like California. On the plus side, not many other natural disasters to contend with.
Life expectancy is great. I would rather live somewhere with a high unemployment rate and a high life expectancy than the opposite. To me, average numbers of years lived without disability is one of the best indicators of how well a country is able to provide for its inhabitants.
I’ll hopefully live in Barcelona for some time. It seems like an amazing city.
Mike Orr,
France has maybe the best healthcare system in the world, but it’s underfunded… right now it’s about 11% of the economy and needs to rise to 13-14% to stay solvent. The USA is at around 18% and needs to drop to 13-14% to keep from killing off the economy. Neither of these goals will be easy politically. (My Mrs. working in the industry so I hear this stuff all the time)
As far as walkable, human sized development…. much of France was laid out before autos mucked everything up. France is always going to love bikes. France has better urban design in their DNA than America.
The real test for urbanism in the USA would be the South and Midwest. Can we build “pay as you go” neighborhoods with high home ownership AND strong urban planning around transit and walkability? There’s some hope with the folks over at Strong Towns.
The difference is that France didn’t raze swaths of their walkable urban centers to build freeways. There was that one guy who wanted to, but they were able to prevent it from happening.
The mayor of Paris has done amazing things for the city’s bike network in recent years. It goes to show how far improvements can go. I live in Portland now and it’s laughable to me how it’s supposedly bike-friendly. It’s…not. Like, sure there are a few protected bike lanes here and there, and the Tillikum Crossing is great. But I would never bike on the arterials. There aren’t even pedestrian crossings in half the places there should be.
We need to have higher standards (“We” being the US, not Seattle specifically.)
I agree completely. Freeways have chopped up a whole bunch of American cities, starting with Tacoma. Once they’re there, it’s impossible to get ride of the damn things.
As France takes a turn to Right politically, I doubt their urban planning changes any. Community design should be more enduring than the politics of the day. The French understand that.
The problem with this blog and urbanism everywhere in the USA is it’s so mixed up with Leftwing politics. Urban planning should be above politics. Cities go though political changes over decades… the streets and buildings do not.
Two thirds of Americans own their own house and most of other third would like to. Social housing has maybe 5% support across the general US population? Not a political winner.
There are two camps of urbanists in America…. the folks over at Strong Towns who seem to live in political reality and hardcore Lefties who see urbanism as a major wing in their attempt to gain political power. I’ll always be more of a Strong Towns person I guess.
If we can’t mix urbanism with the 2/3rds homeowners portion of the USA…. it’s not even worth talking about. I hate how the Left tries to brainwash young people into excepting less in life. I will not do that.
@Tacomee:
“ The problem with this blog and urbanism everywhere in the USA is it’s so mixed up with Leftwing politics. ”
Uhhh… Do you realize that most Americans above 40 own their own homes is because of “Leftwing” FDR’s programs to incentivize home ownership? And the interstate program was created by Eisenhower (with bipartisan support) who was not “Leftwing”? The post is inaccurately attributing things that are not “leftwing” as such.
Please quit lying about historical facts. . Don’t buy into the ridiculous narrative that all policies in history are only motivated by locations on today’s artificial continuum when it’s simply not true.
I agree AI
It’s very how should I put it, a very Mccarthyistic outlook on how the Left and Liberals function in broader US politics and public transit and how they have influenced government policy more broadly.
As the 1950s had a lot of bipartisan social programs and social welfare that were focused on improving American society broadly in the post war boom. Houses were cheap back then because of policies on housing and mortgage that subsidized some of the cost. Same for college, it was more or less free or low cost and broadly bipartisan as a need to have a well educated workforce in the post war boom.
And how was this done, surprise surprise very high taxes to cover the cost of said programs.
The libertarian outlook on government and its relationship to its citizens, taxation, and social services is one built upon a fragile house of cards rather than one built of a very solid and stable foundation.
I’ve now read a few different theories why Hochul paused lower Manhattan congestion pricing. 1, it will hurt NYC’s economy (Source, The NYT). 2, Worried about subjecting new riders to subway crime (Source, Former Gov Paterson). 3, Hochul acquiesced to the wealthy (Source, The comment section). 4, Powerful left wing unions joined with Republicans to get her to back down (Source, The NY Post). And here’s that story/theory …
https://nypost.com/2024/06/09/us-news/how-power-players-from-left-to-right-stopped-nyc-congestion-pricing/
“recently I was in Barcelona (my favorite city and country in Europe by far) and I could either take 24 hours to go to Portugal by train or fly for 30 minutes for the same price.”
Portugal has a particularly isolated rail network. We discovered this when Sam looked at a Milan-Lisbon itinerary. I couldn’t even find a site that would offer a through ticket. Milan has has fast trains west to Madrid; both Milan and Madrid have fast trains north to Switzerland, Germany, or France; but getting from Madrid to Lisbon is another matter. You can find a lower-level train to a border city, and then a one- or two-seat ride to Lisbon, but it adds many hours to the travel time, and you apparently have to get the tickets at multiple sites and piece them together, or get them at the train stations when you arrive. Somebody on YouTube said it’s because or Portugal’s decades-long neglect of international rail for some country-specific reasons.
“Country-specific” by the name of “Antonio Salazar”. Though he died in 1970, it took a good long while for the country to shake off the effects of forty years of one-man rule. People had to learn how to take responsibility for their governance.
The country seems to have made the transition successfully.
The thing about the poor train integration with RENFE is the result of six hundred years of being a nautical nation, originally in competition with Spain. They did not want closer integration of the Iberian Peninsula. And, it’s a long, long way from Lisboa to Gay Paree anyway, two hundred miles farther than from Denver to Chicago.
It’s no wonder people fly to and from Portugal.
So the Urbanist put out an article about ST Stations needing an audio makeover
https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/06/06/op-ed-sound-transit-stations-need-an-audio-makeover/
I agree with Stephen – the audio in the DSTT is a mess. I would defer to folks with visual impairments, though, on how they ought to be improved.
The anti-harassment announcements every five minutes create a harassing environment in themselves. It puts harassment into people’s minds constantly as if it happens every five minutes and everybody is criminals. Why not say, “Link light rail provides convenient transit” every five minutes to create a positive and non-confrontational atmosphere, instead of focusing endlessly on lecturing people on what not to do. This is not a police state, and we don’t need announcement loops that make people feel like “Big Brother is out to get you”.
I’d say just keep information pertinent to what a rider needs to know while waiting for a train and riding the system (train arrivals with what line and what terminus, train delays, construction on the line, or elevator closures) but honestly even that
will probably need adjustment as frequency increases from SODO to Lynnwood in the coming years and the line will have trains rubbing through their stations every few minutes where they interline
Adding unnecessary information to the mix just creates white noise to the listener. Where it’ll come off as more like the Peanuts Trombone which nobody wants to listen to and their eyes just glaze over from.
https://youtu.be/q_BU5hR9gXE?si=irZ-kSmvn5zrqrbf
When Link runs every 1.5 minutes after ballgames, the “The next train is arriving in 2 minutes” warning happens while the previous train is boarding.
I don’t think the anti-harassment announcements go far enough. This Onion article may be a joke, but I’d actually like to see station and onboard train and bus announcements do something like this. Announce certain words at random to show allyship and inclusion.
https://www.theonion.com/queer-black-poc-says-white-liberal-as-random-non-s-1850717760
Like that display at the south end of University Street Station that shows random nouns and verbs to create sentences.
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
That’s an art installation, forget what it’s called tho.
I find the statement “Sound Transit does not tolerate harassnent” bureaucratic and obtuse. Does this mean that I can’t overly complain about service? Is this announcement about inappropriate workplace behavior?
People are the predominant victims of harassment, not agencies. “Tolerate” sounds like that they’ll merely tell the perpetrator to stop. Then the announcement places the onus of taking action on the person being harrassed.
I think a better announcement would be:
“We have security cameras on right now, as well as guards who can be summoned quickly. If you are harassing anyone here — a rider or an employee — we can see and hear it. Harassment is more than someone verbally abusing you, it’s also begging you for money. If you are breaking the law in any way we can see it. And if you are a victim, tell us right away so we can take quick action! We’ve banned people from riding and prosecuted people before, and we won’t hesitate to do it again.”.
Too much information there AI. Like I said, we should be striving for less not more information.
Sometimes you have to ask yourself “Is this necessary?” and I think most people would argue “No” to something like the harassment announcement. It’s one of those things that make sense as a PSA video or information at the station as part of “Code of Conduct” but not so much as a frequently voiced station announcement.
I’ve always felt annoyed by South Transit announcements, and I know it’s not an inherent problem with public transit because it never seems so bad when I ride the light rail in other cities.
I think audio announcements should be limited to events that are tried to the particular moment the sound is being played – for example the imminent arrival of a train, or if service is being shut down due to an emergency and everyone needs to clear out. There is no reason for any routine audio announcement to be played over and over again in a loop every 6-8 minutes. Even if there’s something like single tracking or an elevator outage, that can be announced by posting signs, it doesn’t require interrupting everyone trying to talk or listen to music.
Sometimes, I wonder if the intent here was an accessibility thing – that is, they need a way to communicate information to blind people, so they have an automated system that plays an audio recording for every announcement printed on the electronic display signs. But, even for a blind person, this is not particularly useful, as, if there is a service disruption you want to know about, you might have to wait several minutes to hear it. And, somehow, I don’t think blind people being reminded that Sound Transit does not tolerate harassment is doing anything to actually stop harassment.
A much more useful way for a blind person to gain information about the status of the transit system is to pull up a mobile website on a smartphone and read page with audio captioning and bluetooth headphones. This technique works quite well – except, of course, when the sound coming from the headphones gets frequently interrupted with a speaker blaring “Sound Transit does not tolerate harassment”.
Asdf2, I agree it’s something that has annoyed me in Seattle compared to other cities.
Like Brussels Metro when I’ve visited there, does announcements in three languages (Dutch, French, & English) which can eat up about 60 – 90 seconds altogether so the announcements are generally spaced out to be more occasional to not be intruding into passangers waiting long periods on the platform.
Or here’s an example from Paris Metro, you listen closely and each language and they emphasize different information pertinent that each group needs to hear with French having more detailed information and other languages just focusing on the most important information to make it concise.
No Smoking
https://youtu.be/tLGPpdWU9tA?si=jWNpOXpTP1zl7YZC
Beware of Pickpockets
https://youtu.be/hbQsEDkP3P4?si=X259TDX6J7eMwObv
Hot Weather
https://youtu.be/gWJH46eDivE?si=7B0-b8jbaSNK7pfe
Anti-Pollution Tickets
https://youtu.be/LbQ9KIuwxPI?si=MfSPWhD7bnbbnpYc
New Years Eve Service
https://youtu.be/F9Uzp8umNhU?si=YhRl86W0W5iGN7wL
I’ll also add that I really like RATPs announcement jingle as it’s very friendly and courteous
https://youtu.be/0Jr350qpM2U?si=rNmXYEXiUr9O1_Se
Honorable Mention to SNCF
https://youtu.be/C1UOIHsT8Ds?si=ddkvLfe3j9YxORW-
I assume it’s meant to deter harassers, make everyone else feel safe, show that they’re doing something about harassment, and prove that they informed the perpetrator about the policy.
The thing is, harassment occurs only occasionally, not all day every day, and it’s not the #1 thing passengers should have to think about the entire time they’re in the station.
It could be worse. The announcement could say, “Passengers are reminded that the following activities are prohibited: harassment; being present in a fare paid zone without a valid ticket or tapped-in ORCA; urinating or defecating or smoking fentanyl in elevators; sleeping on benches, floors, or tracks; riding skateboards, bicycles, or roller skates; leaving litter on benches or floors; playing music at a volume that may disturb others; homicide; wearing a green tie on Tuesdays; failing to abide by all spam rules posted at station entrances; all illegal activities and spam; spam spam spam spam ORCA spam spam spam.”
Here’s an Esperanto version: “Oni memorigas pasaĝerojn pri tio, ke jenaj agoj estas malpermesitaj: molesti; esti en veturprezo-pagenda zono sen valida bileto aŭ enfrapita ORCA; maltrinki aŭ feki aŭ fumi fentanilon en lifto; dormi sur benko, planko, aŭ trako; veturi rultabule, bicikle, aŭ glitŝue; lasi rubon sur benkoj aŭ plankoj; ludi muzikon je ĝena laŭteco; mortigi; porti verdan kravaton je la mardoj; ne obei ĉiujn spamajn regulojn afiŝitajn ĉe stacio-eniroj; ĉiujn malleĝajn agojn kaj spamon; spami spaman spamon spame ORCA spam’ spam’ spam’.”
Um, Sam, a word to the wise: The Onion is not actually a “newspaper”…..
Is that icon of two curved lines supposed to mean something, or is it just decoration?
It’s supposed to mean live tracking of train’s location by Ops similar to Transit App’s own live tracking of busses and trains on their app they get from agencies.
Ah, the Seattle Whine in all its glory. Must be a slow day in the news room.
When I read (actually skimmed) this article, my main thought was, “Gee, did ST fix all the escalators or something?”
Note: for the record, I do know that there are still escalators that are down, but I think that once ST fixed the bulk of the old Metro escalators in the DSTT, people sort of started to look for something else to whine about. This is Seattle after all!
Tbf, Lazarus this has been a complaint for awhile. Wanna say a couple years at this point about the station announcements being more white noise than useful information. In paticular the one about harassment.
I do think the article does bring up some good points.
– Overly robotic and some would say cold text to speech tone
– Announcement jingle that doesn’t help catch attention of riders and isn’t memorable
– Too many announcements in a short period of time that are repeated ad nauseum
– Announcements that aren’t pertinent to what a rider needs to know that day
Some would say this is a small detail to complain about, but in this case it does related to passanger experience, something people have complained about ST neglecting to improve and just settling for an slightly above mediocre station passanger experience.
@Zach b,
Nobody is saying that the Seattle Whine is a new thing, but that doesn’t make it any less tiring.
Per ST’s anti-harassment announcement, I think that when Link opened ST wanted to make it clear that the types of behaviors that were prevalent on our local bus system wouldn’t be tolerated on Link. I have no problem with that, and I find my rider experience on Link to be generally safe and stress free.
Whether or not that has anything to do with ST’s anti-harassment announcements I don’t know, but I certainly appreciate it.
I think that when Link opened ST wanted to make it clear that the types of behaviors that were prevalent on our local bus system wouldn’t be tolerated on Link.
Lazarus attacks Metro for no reason at all. Another angel gets its wings.
“Nobody is saying that the Seattle Whine is a new thing”
The point is that annoyance at the harrassment announcement and other repetitive announcements is not a new thing. It goes back to when those announcements started.
Lazarus, if you go to the Urbanist post and click on the link to the 1 minute and 22 second audio clip of the station announcement, I think you’ll be more sympathetic to the complaint.
@Sam,
I ride Link frequently, and I hardly notice the announcements anymore. I would agree that a few stations could use audio quality improvements, but beyond that I am not bothered by the announcements at all. But I’m a pretty tolerant person.
And if these announcements in any way help create a safer, more stress free ride, then I’m all in. And crank up the volume!
The Urbanist has a great article on the increased testing on Lynnwood Link, and on the impact of the Link on development:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/06/10/sound-transit-begins-lynnwood-link-testing-countdown-clock/
SnoCo Exec Dave Somers had some very direct comments on how Lynnwood Link is already driving development and completely transforming the areas around stations:
“I’ve been here working in the county since the 70s. And Lynnwood used to be kind of known as a city without a place, without a center, and it certainly is not that now. The transformation already just in anticipation of light rail, it’s been just amazing.”
I can attest to the changes that are occurring. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in North City has seen it. There are two large apartment projects being built right next to the station, and a third one just underway in the main urban village of North City. And there are townhouses going in everywhere.
The next two years of Light Rail expansion in this region are going to be absolutely transformative! Finally, real transportation progress.
Less than 80 days to go. Can’t wait.
The growth in downtown Lynnwood is because the city rezoned for it; i.e., it allowed it to happen. It might have happened anyway without Link, but in a more car-dependent way.
Agreed. There are very few places in the Puget Sound area that allow growth but don’t see it.
@Al
Currently it’s a different pattern with the 535 heading Bellevue, canyon park then lynnwood. While 532 goes Bellevue, canyon park then Everett
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/schedule-532-535.pdf
Potentially they still run the 532 variant of Everett to canyon park to bellevue
A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of trying to get to downtown Seattle on a morning express bus, and it never got above about 12 mph between Everett and Northgate.
Sure, the theory of replacing Sounder North with express buses is better, but the reality is Sounder North was demanded by Snohomish County for a reason.
The next two years of Light Rail expansion in this region are going to be absolutely transformative! Finally, real transportation progress.
You are saying U-Link and Northgate Link weren’t real transportation progress? That is a bizarre take.
I think the point is that when Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way come online, it will tip the balance to a majority of Link’s potential served. Right now it’s close but major areas and transfer hubs aren’t reached yet, and the gap across the lake hinders much of East Link’s potential. You could also add Stride 1 and 2, which will improve trips in the Bellevue-Lynnwood and Bellevue-Burien corridors, and transfers between those corridors and Link.
[Edit: I originally said Bellevue-SeaTac, but Stride 1 requires a transfer at TIB, so it’s not clear that Stride would be faster than a 2+1 Line trip, and its advantage over the 560 is less pronounced. So it’s more clear that Stride will improve the Burien-Bellevue corridor than SeaTac-Bellevue corridor.]
I think the point is that when Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way come online, it will tip the balance to a majority of Link’s potential served.
It would not surprise me if we have already reached that point though. Of course it is hard to measure these things. You can look at numbers but that doesn’t tell how much time people saved, or the impact it has had on their lives. But I don’t expect ridership to double after the expansions. A lot of people will save time, but nothing like with Northgate/U-Link. I would say East Link is the wildcard. East Link offers a lot more time savings for a lot more people than either the north or south extensions. If it far more bidirectional and urban. Someone in Downtown Bellevue might spontaneously take the train to visit CID in the same way someone in Roosevelt goes to Capitol Hill on a whim. I could see ridership there being very large and proving your point. But I don’t see that with the other projects.
Which is not to say that Lynnwood Link and Federal Way Link aren’t important. I think they are essential (or at the very least something like it is). You have to have a way for suburban riders to connect to the system. Northgate does that, but not very well. Lynnwood (and the other stations) will do that much better. But I’m not convinced we will see a huge increase in overall Link ridership (let alone transit ridership) the way we did with U-Link (and the way we would have with Northgate Link if not for the pandemic, driver shortage and cuts to bus service). As the trains head north it transitions into areas which are just farther away from places people want to go. The main benefit is regional transportation. This is great, but this type of transportation (public or otherwise) is always a fairly small part of the overall trips.
I do think you reach a point where you could make a very strong case that Link should no longer expand (outward) from there. Everything else should be in the core. At that point you have your key connections for regional transit (although a bus/light-rail/Sounder station at Boeing Access Road would be great). Any expansion farther out makes access to the more distant locations easier, but not that many people are coming and going there. In contrast, improving connections to places like Belltown, First Hill and Fremont would have a much bigger impact on the trips that people take, and impact a lot more riders (from all over the region).
But again, I think Link to Lynnwood, Redmond and Federal Way represents a key milestone. But with Northgate Link we have already built our most important section. We should have started with U-District to Downtown (or maybe U-District to Rainier Beach, as some wanted). The fact that we built things out of order meant subsequent expansions (like U-Link and Northgate Link) were huge. I don’t see that with these expansions (although again I could see East Link being very big).
The upcoming openings will not create a doubling of Link total ridership. Further, it will reduce ST Express ridership and reduce ridership at end stations today. Angle Lake and Northgate in particular will lose lots of boardings once extensions open. That’s what happened to UW Station when Northgate Link extension opened.
It will however create double the track miles, especially if the ELSL opened a few months ago is included in the calculation. That is more transformative.
The result will mean lower boardings per mile in the future, by the way. That’s an important productivity measure. Right now, ST is in first place nationally on this metric.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_light_rail_systems
“But I don’t expect ridership to double after the expansions.”
I don’t expect ridership to double with Lynnwood/Redmond/Federal Way, but another 10-15% could tip it to the majority.
There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping. That will create 4-5 minute frequency full time. It will be the first time we’ve ever had New York/Vancouver/London level of service, where you can practically just fall from a restaurant chair into a station and transit comes in five minutes. And it will be in a 15-mile corridor connecting four regional centers (downtown, U-District, Northgate, Lynnwood), plus honorable mention to Capitol Hill and Roosevelt.
The ultra-frequent corridor will change how people view transit. It will generate use cases in people’s minds that they hadn’t thought of before. People will say transit is “convenient”. Visitors to Seattle will spread the word that transit is ultra-convenient in at least one corridor. People will start clamoring for frequency increases in other Link segments and bus routes, and be more willing to pay more taxes for them.
Even for 2-seat Link+bus rides, having one side of the transfer very good will bring some benefits. We can see that in the contrast with West Seattle Link we’ve just been talking about. The biggest issue with replacing 1-seat bus rides with bus+Link transfers is the 10-minute transfer wait in a worst-case scenario, which will happen to riders 25-33% of time on average. But if the worst-case scenario drops to 5 minutes, then the average scenario to 2.5 minutes, and suddenly the transfer is less of an actual or psychological barrier to ridership or passenger satisfaction. We can’t raise West Seattle to 5 minutes on its own due to non-high ridership and impacts on the shared 2/3 Line tunnel, but that’s one of the things that makes Link less appropriate for the West Seattle area.
@Al S,
“ The upcoming openings will not create a doubling of Link total ridership.”
I wouldn’t say that at all. There will be a huge number of new riders that come into the system when LWL, RLE, full ELE, and FWLE come online. That is a huge amount of ridership potential.
ST ridership projections already point to ridership increases in excess of a doubling, and ST is already meeting their projections on ELSL. It’s hard to imagine they won’t at least be near a doubling of current ridership.
And remember, these extensions are going into areas that have never had fast, frequent, reliable, and high capacity transit before. That will unlock a lot of ridership that simply doesn’t exist today.
But we will see. It’s definitely harder to project ridership in the current post-COVID-19 environment.
@ Mike:
“The ultra-frequent corridor will change how people view transit. It will generate use cases in people’s minds that they hadn’t thought of before. People will say transit is “convenient”. ”
That’s true generically. That’s true for the segment between Northgate and Downtown. I expect those stations to gain boardings because of it when 2 Line gets added in North Seattle.
Shoreline and further north that’s much less likely though. There aren’t major destinations on Lynnwood Link within walking distance. The stations are further apart and much further away from places like the U District and Capitol Hill, so riders won’t think about using Link for local trips. ST’s own forecast show the highest proportion of commute period to daylong ridership. Instead, the stations will serve those that get to the station by driving — parking or drop off/ pickup — or by connecting bus. So I expect that Link will gain riders for the frequency reason as a system — but it likely won’t affect the Lynnwood Link stations much once 2 Line starts running.
@ Lazarus:
“ST ridership projections already point to ridership increases in excess of a doubling, …”
As me and others keep saying, extension ridership comes partly from people already on Link — just that they use a closer station today. You can’t add all those extension ridership forecasts and call them all new riders. It’s a flawed mathematical argument.
Consider too that someone in 2 years riding from Shoreline to Bellevue on Link are counted twice if you add the segment forecasts together — one for each segment.
So it just won’t double. I know it’s academic, but I think it’s important to get this. I’ll be surprised if Link has over 140K (probably will be under 130K) in 2026 once these extensions open. It’s still an impressive number; just not doubling the 80K today.
The difference between 10-minute and 5-minute service will generate riders even in Shoreline and Lynnwood. We can quibble about exactly how many, but the point is that it’s some.
Lynnwood-UDistict will be 19 minutes. That’s within the 25-30 minute window that most people are comfortable with for a commute and that most commutes are, and I assume people feel the same about non-work trips. Lynnwood-Capitol Hill will be 25 minutes, which is getting close to the outer boundary, but it’s much better than they have now with 512+Link or than they had before Link.
The good vibes will be felt by those traveling in the Lynnwood-CID corridor. They’ll tell their family and friends and coworkers. Others who don’t look at transit or live elsewhere may never hear of it. But enough people will be aware of it to make a difference in the overall transit debates. Even if it’s more dramatic south of Northgate than north of it, it will have an effect north of it.
From the eis pdfs
“By 2035, between 60,000 and 70,000 transit trips are expected on the Lynnwood Link Extension each day, compared to about 34,000 trips using buses in the corridor north of Northgate for the No Build Alternative”
Though that estimate above is not “net” aka it is double counting the current people getting off at northgate.
The actual net station boarding trips estimates for segment A is 10k, segment B 4k and segment C (lynnwood) around 20k or 34k total.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/projects/north_hct/lynnwooddeis/201307_drafteis_02_summary.pdf
For the current 2026 projections on the main website it is listed at “47,000 – 55,000 daily riders by 2026”.
Aka estimated around a 17k~25k daily boardings increase if we don’t double count bus riders.
Great source, WL. It shows how volatile ridership forecasts can be, frankly. Later Lynnwood Link forecasts show a range of 20 percent and they vary notably from the EIS (47-55K projected in the web page compared to the 70K in the DEIS).
I still have my doubts that Lynnwood Station will get 19K boardings all by itself as stated in the EIS. ST says there are just 1,900 parking stalls . That’s about 10 percent of the boardings assuming it fills up. I don’t see the other 17K riders coming from other buses, drop offs or walking. Northgate today only has 10K boardings with plenty of buses and lots more places to walk from.
@Al S,
“ As me and others keep saying, extension ridership comes partly from people already on Link”
Nobody is disputing that. Some ridership at current termini will shift to the new extension. Happens every time. But the effect is usually pretty small compared to total new ridership.
And let’s not forget, there has never been transit on the LLE route of this speed, reliability, frequency, or capacity. Never. And it is bi-directional, something that has never been available to the traveling public before. Never. And there is a lot of untapped ridership potential as a result.
I get that people on his blog aren’t fans of Link or Sound Transit, but let’s be honest here. A doubling of Link ridership with all these extensions is actually a pretty low bar. With LLE bringing on 40 to 60k riders just by itself, it’s hard to imagine ELSL, RLE, full ELE, and FWLE not adding at least another 20k riders. In fact, they should generate way more than that.
It’s going to be a brave new transit world in 2 years. Best get used to the idea.
@Mike Orr,
“ The difference between 10-minute and 5-minute service will generate riders”
It’s certainly a massive improvement over the current lower frequency, peak’ish, directional system. But the frequency will actually be 8 mins at the start of service, going to 4 mins (probably) when full ELE opens. That is far superior to anything that has existed on this route before, and it is sure to generate a lot of ridership.
And the service will be bi-directional. That is something that just hasn’t existed on this route before. And that is also sure to generate additional ridership.
“Lynnwood-UDistict will be 19 minutes. That’s within the 25-30 minute window that most people are comfortable with”
It’s not just a commuter’s “comfort level”, it’s also what the alternatives are. Travel times LTC to DT Seattle peak direction peak time are now approaching one hour. Link will beat that cold. And will do it reliably. You just can’t get a commute that quick with that level of reliability or predictability with our current bus system. It is simply impossible.
All these massive improvements are sure to generate large volumes of riders.
@WL,
Nobody is double counting anything. That is a false narrative and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of ridership estimates.
Ridership estimates have two primary purposes: 1) to assist in making build decisions for system extensions, and 2), to set operational parameters for a given line.
Stated simply, ridership estimates determine whether a line should be built or not, and assist in funding decisions for that line.
And those same estimates determine operational parameters like frequency and overall capacity. As such, it doesn’t really matter where those riders came from. If they are on the line, they need to be accommodated.
That said, the number of riders shifting from intercepting Link at NGS to somewhere else on the line will be pretty small compared to the total ridership on LLE.
And, regardless of where they get on, they will still be traveling the same route segment they do today. It’s not like someone who travels NGS to CHS today suddenly won’t be traveling that same route simply because they are now traveling LTC to CHS. The passenger is still there, is still onboard, and still needs to be accommodated.
And again, the number of riders shifting from intercepting Link at NGS to somewhere else on the line will be pretty small compared to the total ridership on LLE.
It’s been this way with every extension. It will be the same with LLE too.
> Nobody is double counting anything. That is a false narrative and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of ridership estimates.
I am not sure why you are arguing with me, this is literally stated from the eis document statements.
From the pdf if you look at the footnote c:
“The net boardings reflect ridership at all the segment stations, less the drop in ridership that would occur at the Northgate Station; the more sizeable drop is with a station located at NE 130th Street, which overlaps more with the Northgate”
This is why the net boardings number when added up for the segments is lower than the actual riders because they subtracted the existing riders that got off at northgate and transferred to buses.
@ Mike:
“ There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping. That will create 4-5 minute frequency full time. It will be the first time we’ve ever had New York/Vancouver/London level of service, where you can practically just fall from a restaurant chair into a station and transit comes in five minutes. ”
The opening day of LLE won’t have these high frequencies due to the mistakes that delay East Link by 2.5 years. Once 2 Line trains start getting tested and presumably running in service between IDS and Lynnwood sometime in 2025, the impact of the higher frequency can be known from actual field data.
Then once 2 Line is fully running in service (almost certainly moved to early 2026 if one reads the ST press releases), the effect of through running can be known on system ridership.
So the first months of Lynnwood won’t have nearly the kind of ridership that it will by sometime in 2026 just because the service level won’t be in place. Future ST data should give a pretty good clue about the impact of higher frequency in 2025 and then full connectivity in 2026. At that point, all other future extensions will have a new and much more solid realtime data point by which to base future estimates.
Meanwhile, we should not be too harsh on ST and its blind supporters about inaccurately low ridership forecasts on Lynnwood Link when data comes in about later this year. Those forecasts won’t be comparable to the computer models until 2026.
* Those BOARDINGS won’t be comparable to the computer models until 2026.
“Lynnwood Station will get 19K boardings all by itself as stated in the EIS. ST says there are just 1,900 parking stalls . That’s about 10 percent of the boardings assuming it fills up.”
That’s the point though: park & rides account for only a small fraction of ridership. If you really wanted a parking space for every passenger, the P&Rs would have to be four times bigger. That would eat up four times the land and make it even harder to walk to the station — and a lot more depressing to walk past so much garage space.
It’s the same kind of difference as building a freeway instead of a boulevard, or a freeway instead of a rail line. The freeway right of way takes up a lot more space. Every exit has slip ramps that take up even more space. All those cars have to park somewhere. With a train line, you can move more people in a fraction of the space. With a boulevard, you have straightforward intersections and driveways instead of slip ramps.
And each of those cars needs 2.5 parking spaces: one at home, one at work or the P&R, and a shared one at stores. Each of those spaces needs an empty space in front of it so the cars can get in and out.
In contrast, non-car travelers simply walk to the bus stop and congregate there in a small space. If the stop is far away, that’s where more bus routes would solve it. If they’re carrying heavy/bulky loads, we can have some road/parking capacity for that, but it would be more like two lanes rather than four or six. We need some road/parking capacity anyway for working trucks, emergency vehicles, buses, and occasional Sunday drives.
@WL:
“ I am not sure why you are arguing with me, this is literally stated from the eis document statements.”
I agree. Even later in his post, Lazarus acknowledged that there will be some impact, contradicting his earlier statement of no impact in the post.
It’s a pretty well-documented fact that UW Station today has only about half the riders it did in 2019 before Northgate Link opened. Keep in mind that UW Station is across the street from a huge medical center and closer to many campus buildings so losing only half is not surprising. And even though the loss is only 10-15 percent of the net new ridership from Northgate extension stations, that extension ridership is significantly attribuable to pretty massive bus restructures including removing most buses from I-5 over the Ship Canal.
Lynnwood won’t have the same structural factors playing such big roles:
– Fewer buses are removed from the Ship Canal I-5 bridge with LLE than with NLE.
– No Lynnwood Link stations have nearby destinations like those in the U-District and Northgate. There are even better destinations near Roosevelt than near the four stations opening later this year.
I think ST should have revisited their forecasts in light of realtime data from Northgate Link opening as well as two years (2022 and 2023) of a post-Covid reality. Then we wouldn’t be having this discussion about the accuracy of forecasts developed a decade ago.
“ That’s the point though: park & rides account for only a small fraction of ridership. ”
In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings. It likely is much lower today as BART ridership is way down.
The bigger point is that I really see 19K boardings at Lynnwood (38K total activity) as unrealistic. Even though the EIS calls it boardings, I suspect that the exiting riders are also in the data.
I could better see a forecast of 9.5K boardings at Lynnwood or 19K total activity. That would be comparable to Northgate’s 10K boardings today. Still, I just don’t see Lynnwood getting any more than maybe 6K or maybe even 7K daily boardings with less than that until the 2 Line connects Lynnwood with the Eastside and there will be higher train frequency into Seattle. Certainly it would be slightly higher if Sounder North was cancelled.
“In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings.”
Even 40% is less than 50% or 75%. We’re spending a lot of money (~ 100K per parking stall) for a minority of riders. Each space gets only one person a day because it’s occupied 7am-6pm, and there’s much less demand at other times. In contrast, non-parking passengers come at 7am, noon, or 6pm or on weekends, so that’s multiple “shifts” of passengers per day.
At the most isolated P&Rs there’s no opportunity to walk up or transfer, so then ridership will be limited to the number of cars. But those are also low-performing stations for the same reason, or they’re an extra station on the outskirts to avoid having a P&R downtown (like South Bellevue P&R).
@ Mike:
It’s rarely talked about, but many outer BART stations had as many drop offs as they did parking riders feeding their boardings. Technology has enabled riders to much more easily not be stranded at stations for the return trip and this surged drop off and pick up ridership in the 2010’s.
You could simply text someone from the train once you’re on to pick you up when you arrive 15-30 minutes later. That wasn’t done 30 years ago. Instead stations had pay phone banks and people waited longer to get picked up.
In places like BART stations, parking riders were as much as 30-40 percent of boardings. It likely is much lower today as BART ridership is way down.
I assume that was for particular (suburban) stations and not for the system as a whole. In any event I see every station north of Northgate getting most of their riders from two sources:
1) Feeder buses.
2) Park and rides.
In both cases I think a lot of the riders are already in the system. There will be plenty of people who drive to a closer park and ride (instead of Northgate) but that just means ridership will shift around.
Same goes for a lot of buses, but not all of them. Metro only runs a handful of expresses to downtown (and will continue to run most of them). Sound Transit has already truncated the 512 and is not going to truncate the 510. Community Transit has already truncated their 800 series buses which means the main source of riders switching from a bus to a train is the 400 series CT buses. I can’t find information on how many people ride those buses. Old reports had “commuter trips” accounting for about 30% of the total fixed-route ridership. That included the buses to the UW. My guess is that ratio has gone way down (since Swift ridership has gone way up). CT gets about 25,000 riders a day, so I think somewhere around four to five thousand riders will have to switch from the bus to the train.
Of course there will be new riders. The feeder buses to Northgate are not nearly as extensive as all of the feeder buses to all of the other stations. Riders can get there (now) but it requires an extra transfer. The better connection with Link attract some riders. Of course there will be some people who walk to the stations as well (but I don’t think the numbers will be huge).
The bigger point is that I really see 19K boardings at Lynnwood (38K total activity) as unrealistic. Even though the EIS calls it boardings, I suspect that the exiting riders are also in the data.
Or they are just overconfident. It is extremely difficult to predict ridership. We’ve seen example of Sound Transit being way off either direction.
I could better see a forecast of 9.5K boardings at Lynnwood or 19K total activity. That would be comparable to Northgate’s 10K boardings today.
That sounds about right.
Certainly it would be slightly higher if Sounder North was cancelled.
Sounder North hasn’t had more than 400 riders a day since the pandemic. A lot of those riders can probably take the 510 anyway. Speaking of which, the 510 has a lot more riders (over a thousand a day) although still not enough to make a huge impact (if they cancelled it). The only reason they don’t is because of the impact on *peak* ridership. Although I can’t say for certain (because I don’t know CT Express numbers) if Lynnwood Link is very peak-centric then I don’t think it will get that many riders. I see the vast majority of *new* riders coming in the middle of the day.
We’ve been asking ST for over a decade to cancel Sounder North and put the money into replacement express buses and accelerating Link. It always refuses because “Voters approved Sounder North in 1996 so they expect it to continue.” But now with Everett Link getting closer to construction, a few boardmembers have started to muse about maybe thinking about canceling Sounder North someday.
Sounder South is a lot more justified. It goes through the middle of South King County’s population concentration, with large and growing cities (Kent and Auburn). The downtown Puyallup station is a hub for surrounding cities. Ridership has long been higher than in the north corridor.
Sounder North is in a narrow channel between the Sound and a hillside. The center of Snohomish’s population is between 99 and I-5, several miles east. Even most Edmonds and Mukilteo residents would have to drive out-of-direction to get to the Sounder station. Sounder’s Everett-Seattle travel time will be the same as Link, so the only thing you’re getting from Sounder is the view and transfers from the ferries. And ferry transferees aren’t in the Sound Transit taxing district so they’re not paying for it.
I sometimes wonder if it would be cheaper for ST to run express buses to the Sounder North stations as the replacement. Stride extensions would be enticing if they could pencil out — like Stride 3 up Aurora to Edmonds or Stride 1 to Everett after stopping at Lynnwood.
I sometimes wonder if it would be cheaper for ST to run express buses to the Sounder North stations as the replacement.
Probably. It depends on what quality of service you want to offer. I would start with the idea that you are offering better all-day service in exchange for no Sounder. In terms of stations, I would say:
1) Everett is covered fairly well with the combination of the 510 (express to downtown) 512 and 201/202 (both of which connect to Lynnwood).
2) Mukilteo is getting a big improvement with express buses to Lynnwood that will operate with every ferry run.
3) Edmonds is underserved compared to much of the network in my opinion. The routing is bad as well. There is no straight shot from Edmonds to places south. You’ve got a couple buses that head that direction but instead of connecting at 185th they double back to Mountlake Terrace. There is a bus that goes to Lynnwood, so that might be the best option. Overall it just doesn’t look good and it wouldn’t take much money to make it a lot better.
Prior to the pandemic, Edmonds also had more riders than the other stations, so it would make sense to put extra service there. ST no longer releases station data so I have to guess but Edmonds used to be about 40% of the ridership (or more). If Sounder has 400 riders that 160 a day or about 80 each direction. That isn’t a huge amount, but you wouldn’t want to leave people at the bus stop.
Of course you wouldn’t do any of this until Link gets to the East Side and we have more (Link) trains. No sense sending people to Link (especially during rush hour) if we are worried about crowding.
@Ross:
“Of course you wouldn’t do any of this until Link gets to the East Side and we have more (Link) trains. ”
That’s a good point.
The reverse sequencing of Lynnwood and East Link actually is a good opportunity to observe what happens with Sounder North when Link opens to Lynnwood but there is not yet a 2 Line. If Sounder North ridership stays level, they can continue it. If it really drops even before 2 Line opens and frequency doubles, the Board can simply tell Snohomish “the 2 Line is effectively your new Sounder North” and present it as a mode change rather than a cancellation.
“Stride extensions would be enticing if they could pencil out — like Stride 3 up Aurora to Edmonds or Stride 1 to Everett after stopping at Lynnwood.”
Stride is a commitment to 10-20 minute service full time and substantial street improvements, like RapidRide. Replacing Sounder North is just a half dozen ST Express runs peak hours. They could go nonstop from Edmonds to downtown and Mukilteo to downtown, or when Lynnwood Link starts and has enough capacity (e.g., with Line 2), to Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace stations. Everett to downtown could simply be handled with as many 510 runs as necessary.
So it would be easy to set up ST Express, at least if the driver shortage allows it. I guess Sounder staff are BNSF so they couldn’t just switch to ST Express. Stride would require a long-term decision and a substantial financial commitment.
Stride 2 doesn’t go to Everett because Link is intended to do that.
Most of the current development in Lynnwood is several blocks from the light rail station and is still car oriented, as confirmed in the article or by visiting Lynnwood, so whether it is light rail driven or not isn’t clear. It isn’t very high end like in Seattle or the Eastside. New development and housing may move closer to the station but today it is still a hefty walk.
The local politicians extoll a Lynnwood “city center”, but if you have been to Lynnwood lately that is somewhat optimistic. It is good to see however Lynnwood’s comprehensive plan like most of the region sees the vast majority of new housing going into already dense zones near walkable transit. Snohomish Co. is so spread out Community Transit already has its hands full serving as feeder service. It makes little sense increasing that sprawl or density in outlying areas. Still Lynnwood politicians are concerned about the impacts of such quick urban growth.
I think Lynnwood is a little different than some of the other Shoreline stations/areas in that Lynnwood hopes to be a destination, not just a park and ride for folks going somewhere else, and hopes increased urban housing leads to urban renewal (or just a beginning) along with retail renewal. I am sure the other stations/areas along Lynnwood Link dream of becoming Totem Lake, but more likely they will be park and rides for residents going somewhere else. There is only so much retail and commercial this area can support, and Northgate Mall when it opens will siphon a lot of those customers away, as well as from areas south from Roosevelt to UW to downtown Seattle if the mall is as attractive as designs suggest. At this point there is no riders from the north to Lynnwood on Link. So somehow folks from the south will need to want to ride north to Lynnwood. In the past that has been a tough sell even with congestion on I-5.
As the article noted, pre-pandemic ST estimated 47,000 to 55,000 additional daily riders on Lynnwood Link, which like East Link was insane even then. Today total boardings from Line 1 are around 80,000/day. We really don’t know how many riders who now use Northgate will simply switch to a station farther north with a convenient park and ride. Based on ridership in Line 1 I would be surprised if Lynnwood Link adds 20,000 daily riders.
The key for Lynnwood is to get Link riders coming TO Lynnwood, not so much getting Lynnwood residents or folks spread out in Snohomish Co. using Lynnwood as a transfer station to somewhere else. To do that Lynnwood is going to need a much better focus on retail density.
I think Lynnwood Link will be the last major Link opening. Ten years ago I would have said East Link would be more important but the Eastside has turned inwards. Unlike Lynnwood and Snohomish Co. there is nothing Seattle offers not available in the many Eastside cities, and I don’t think East Link serves the population centers well.
At least Lynnwood Link station is in Lynnwood. Northgate Mall could be a real draw for Snohomish Co. residents using Link but not what Lynnwood is hoping for.
I think Federal Way and Tacoma Link will be a bust. Terrible route serving an area even poorer than Snohomish Co. with a long slog through the Rainier Valley to get anywhere from the south.
@From The North: To be accurate, the ST prediction of 47,000 to 55,000 riders is listed by them as total riders, not new riders. ST has not revealed how many of those riders are already on Link, mostly boarding at Northgate today.
So your prediction of 20,000 new riders is in line with that. I think you’re being generous as those forecasts relied heavily on commuters rather than a more broad use like we see on segments further south. The 2040 Ridership diagrams that STB posted a few years ago shows that the Lynnwood segment has a much higher share of rider volumes in the PM peak to daily ratio than anywhere else on the Link system (as high as 2/3 at the county line compared to most segments under 1/2):
https://seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PM_Peak_ST3_Plan_2040_Midpoint.pdf
Like Lazarus said, we are less than 90 days away from having the realtime data — so at this point speculating is merely academic. However I would be surprised if there are more than 15,000 new riders or 30,000 total riders.
Trumm at The Urbanist clearly made a common mistake about the ridership forecasts in the article. ST was always pretty clear that published Lynnwood Link ridership was for total riders and not added (new) riders.
@Al — It was “From The North” who wrote that comment you cited, so I’ll change your comment accordingly.
Thanks, Ross!
@From The North — I agree with almost all of your points (and there are a lot of them). I don’t see a lot of walk-up ridership for Lynnwood Link. As you wrote, a lot of people will switch park and rides. A lot of people who commute into Seattle will switch from the bus to the train (they will have to). I also think that many that take the bus to Northgate will take a different bus to a different station. The biggest improvement in that regard is probably around 185th. Right now the (infrequent) bus takes a long time before it gets to Northgate. The buses to 185th will be much more frequent.
Same with people along 145th. When they finally add the station at 130th it will have have a huge impact on riders from Bitter Lake, and a big impact on those in Pinehurst and Lake City.
But even with all of that I don’t see that as being as big as East Link. I get what you are saying about the East Side being far more self-contained, but I think there are still a lot of people that want to go back and forth across the bridge. It just isn’t that far, and when you do that, you are basically there. For people in Seattle, there aren’t a ton of attraction for those on the East Side, but there are some (besides jobs). Meanwhile, there is really no place like CID, Pioneer Square, the waterfront or Capitol Hill on the East Side. Most of the music, sports and other forms of entertainment are in Seattle. With a lot more people on the East Side within walking distance of a lot more stations I think East Link is a bigger deal than Lynnwood (or Federal Way) Link.
What shops will be at the renovated Northgate? I used to go to the department stores for things like sheets and clothes that aren’t available in central Seattle or the 45th corridor, but those won’t be coming back. What I still go to Northgate for is Big 5, Dick’s, and Best Buy, but those are outside the mall. I don’t ice skate or watch hockey practice [*], and that’s the biggest thing in the emerging mall that I know of.
[*] I had a roommate and friends on a local ice hockey team I watched at the arena at 185th & Aurora, but that was in the 90s.
What Lynnwood and Federal Way want the most is a corporate headquarters or two. They can’t get the top-end ones like Amazon but maybe they can get a smaller one that would be lucrative and provide high-paying jobs in their area. Snohomish County wants more employers so it’s not as dependent on Snohomish-King commutes, and more money would stay within their cities/counties.
Retailers are ho-hum, and Lynnwood has positioned Alderwood Mall as the retail center. That’s not the station-area neighborhood itself; it’s the neighborhood next to it. The Everett extension will have a separate Alderwood Mall station. So downtown Lynnwood will be focusing more on highrises, offices, and apartments, while Alderwood Mall will focus more on retail.
I don’t think the new Northgate Mall will make that much difference. It will mainly recover those that left when the shops closed a few years ago. And that’s only if the new shops have everything the old shops had. Otherwise the new mall/regional center will focus on a new market of offices, residents, boutiques, and the ice center. That has little to do with Snohomish County. There will be some interaction, but not a mass flow of Snohomans to Northgate.
Average Snohomish residents first have to get to Link before they can take it to Northgate. It’s just as easy to get to Link as to get to Alderwood Mall, assuming the core routes will serve both stops so it’s a one-seat ride to either.
A surprising thing on Link now is the percent of riders you meet in central or south Seattle that are going all the way to Northgate. This includes people after ballgames. Some of them are going to the Northgate/Licton Springs neighborhood itself, but probably a lot of them are transferring to further north. Like my friend in north Lynnwood does. ST sometimes says Northgate is the highest-ridership station now, and a lot of those people are going further north.
When Lynnwood opens, they’ll stay on Link to Lynnwood or Shoreline or wherever they’re going, and Northgate’s station volume will fall back to earth. Then Northgate can work on gradually building up its regional center and feeder-bus frequency, and that will gradually generate more station riders. Whether that number is higher or lower than the number transferring/parking at the temporary terminus, I don’t know. In the long run ridership will grow everywhere, as the population continues to grow, people get more comfortable with transit, and people get more worried about the climate.
“I think Lynnwood Link will be the last major Link opening. Ten years ago I would have said East Link would be more important but the Eastside has turned inwards. Unlike Lynnwood and Snohomish Co. there is nothing Seattle offers not available in the many Eastside cities, and I don’t think East Link serves the population centers well.”
The East Link opening is split into three phases (starter line, downtown Redmond, and cross-lake), so that dilutes the impact of one gigantic opening.
The north corridor has long had a strong tendency toward transit, and these became more clear in the pandemic era. The north end has fewer highways compared to east or south; they’re squeezed into a narrower area; congestion is worse; there’s not a lake in between; people are less affluent than the Eastside or Seattle; Snohomish doesn’t have as many jobs, retail, or entertainment options as the Eastside has. All those factors push ridership upward. That’s also probably why Snohomish has had so many peak expresses to downtown Seattle going all the way back to the 1980s.
Historically the 550 has been the highest-volume ST Express route, and it’s still the highest, but the 512 and friends have made impressive gains in the pandemic era and probably already in the late 2010s, and the 512’s frequency increases have been well used.
Northgate Link decreased the friction taking transit between Snohomish County and North Seattle in general, and Lynnwood Link will decrease it further. That’s tens of thousands of Snohomish residents and a ton of North Seattle work/shop/recreation destinations that want to be better connected to each other. That will be the main impact of Lynnwood Link, along with Snohomans going to central Seattle and the airport.
“There is only so much retail and commercial this area can support”
That’s only for siting large shopping centers. There’s room for a lot of individual shops/commercial to open here and there and to offer a variety of things.
I think Daniel and I talked past each other a bit when I kept saying we need mixed-use in more neighborhoods and he kept saying the region’s retail market is saturated. It may be too saturated for another large shopping center and the Macy’s/Williams-Sonomas of the world, but there’s still a market for more individual shops in more neighborhoods, and that’s what I envisioned.
Also worth noting: At some point it was clear that Lynnwood wanted to be the next Bellevue. They wanted big office buildings. This is probably one of those areas where the general “if they allow it they will build it” idea was not true. There just wasn’t much interest in building office buildings there even during the boom times. Now, of course, people aren’t building office buildings anywhere. The glut in office space looks a lot more long term than during the recession.
@From the North,
Yes, most of the development is still a few blocks away. But that is a huge improvement over the previous situation where there simply was no substantial development at all.
And, as the article states, some of that is due to the large amount of construction that is still occurring adjacent to the station area. That will probably change as construction wraps up.
Also, there seems to be a lot of station adjacent land that is locked up in bus infrastructure. Hopefully they take a look at that down the road to see if they can’t shrink that a bit.
But at 185th St Station the development is literally right up against the station. Future tenants will be able to go from their apartments to Link without even crossing a single street. That is impressive.
@Mike — The Northgate Big 5 (which was not close to the mall, but at about Roosevelt & Northgate Way) has closed. It sucks since that is where I would get my cheap shoes. Just a heads up in case you head out there.
Northgate Mall will be a lot more like U-Village, but with even more housing. I’m sure it will attract people who like to shop, or want to visit a bunch of stores before buying something. I don’t see that being a huge attraction, since there plenty of places where you can do that. The farther away you are, the less likely you are to go there. I could see someone who lives close enough to walk to Mountlake Terrace deciding to go to Northgate instead of Alderwood Mall simply because it right by the station. But once you are driving it is likely you just drive to whatever mall they are interested in.
The north corridor has long had a strong tendency toward transit, and these became more clear in the pandemic era.
A lot of it is because they already have fairly good transit (at least to a lot of the places that Link will serve). The 512 is a great bus. If I’m in Everett, Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood and want to get to Northgate the bus runs every 15 minutes throughout the day. It is quite fast. Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention. From Northgate, of course you can get to the other Link locations (UW, Capitol Hill, downtown). Again, this is huge. With Lynnwood Link this gets better. But it isn’t the type of improvement that occurred with U/Northgate Link. People will avoid a transfer (which is good) and the train will be more frequent than the bus (more about that later). But trips to Capitol Hill (and there are a lot of them) are dramatically faster with Link then the old bus system. I said it at the time — that section was huge and gave us the first glimpse of what a real metro can offer. We’ve never had so many trips be so fast. Faster than express buses and in some cases faster than driving — at noon. I just don’t see that with Lynnwood Link. It is definitely better, but not a gigantic improvement for a lot of people.
With East Link you do have places that will now be much faster than before. It didn’t help that the bus took a relatively slow route between Downtown Bellevue and Downtown Seattle (or that the buses have been kicked out of the tunnel for quite some time now). But there are places east of Downtown Bellevue that have always been awkward to reach. To be fair, these places didn’t have much (e. g. Spring District) and now they do. It is definitely not at the level of Northgate/U-Link. My guess is that in the middle of the day it is faster to drive. There are not that many people making trips involving these stations. But it is at least the type of thing that create big ridership when little existed before.
Then Northgate can work on gradually building up its regional center and feeder-bus frequency, and that will gradually generate more station riders.
I see Northgate eventually being a lot less important in terms of feeder-buses. From a regional standpoint it becomes largely meaningless. Lynnwood will serve the north, while 145th will serve the northeast. From a local standpoint there is really only one direction where it is good: northeast to southwest (Lake City to Greenwood). Every other direction is challenging. That doesn’t mean that the buses won’t continue to run there, but other buses will steal their thunder. For example someone at 15th & 125th (in Pinehurst) has only one option for Link now (and for the next couple years): take a bus to Northgate. But as soon as 130th gets here they take a bus there (it will be much faster than going to Northgate). Same thing goes for 145th as well as 185th. It is somewhat dependent on what Metro decides in terms of routing (e. g. I think the 348 should go to Roosevelt instead of Northgate) but I see a lot fewer people taking buses to the Northgate Station and a lot more people walking (to and from it).
There’s also the impact of the 1/2 Lines overlapping.
I forgot about that, and that part will be huge. It is quite possible that more people save more time because of that than anything else.
“The Northgate Big 5 … has closed.”
I’ll go to the one in Ballard on the 40/28 then. Big 5 and Dick’s are where I get my shoes; they have a good selection of walking shoes and boots, and Big 5 has particularly good deals. Now that I can only wear slip-on shoes, Big 5 has them.
“A lot of it is because they already have fairly good transit. The 512 is a great bus.”
It’s also demographics. The north corridor has more people going to service-type jobs. The Eastside is full of tech workers and people who think they’re too rich to take transit. In the pandemic and post-pandemic world, Eastside ridership fell the most, while the 512 corridor is more like South King County.
“If I’m in Everett, Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood and want to get to Northgate the bus runs every 15 minutes throughout the day. It is quite fast. Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention. From Northgate, of course you can get to the other Link locations (UW, Capitol Hill, downtown). Again, this is huge. With Lynnwood Link this gets better. But it isn’t the type of improvement that occurred with U/Northgate Link.”
Yes, I’m part of it. Capitol Hill-Roosevelt has gone from 45 minutes on the 49+67 to 10 minutes on Link. Lynnwood-Northgate has gotten much better, along with Lynnwood-Roosevelt and Lynnwood-Capitol Hill. My friend in north Lynnwood does that one or two days a week. But Lynnwood-downtown has gotten 15 minutes longer due to the transfer, because you often get from Link to the bus stop and the 512 has just left so you have to wait for the next one. Likewise, Lynnwood-Roosevelt and Lynnwood-Capitol Hill will get 15 minutes shorter when Lynnwood Link starts.
If you’re going to Ash Way, Lynnwood Link seems to just move the transfer point. But for Northgate-Ash Way there’s only the 512. For Lynnwood-Ash Way there’s the 512, Swift Orange, 201, and 202. And Lynnwood Link avoids congestion, collisions, and lane closures in Shoreline and Mountlake Terrace.
Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way won’t be as big as U-Link and Northgate Link, but they’ll be bigger than Everett, Tacoma, and Issaquah.
Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way won’t be as big as U-Link and Northgate Link, but they’ll be bigger than Everett, Tacoma, and Issaquah.
Agreed.
“At some point it was clear that Lynnwood wanted to be the next Bellevue.”
Lynnwood and Federal Way missed out by not upzoning earlier. Then they could have gotten some of the real estate investment that was sloshing around in the 2000s and again in the 2010s. They talked about upzoning but failed to do it until Link was about ready to begin construction. They thus missed the opportunities when growth money was easy to come by, and how the pandemic and work-from-home happened and they haven’t started yet.
What Lynnwood desired was a corporate headquarters or two, high-end luxury shopping, and tons of apartments. Of those, only tons of apartments are flexible enough to work in any non-recession environment (2000s, 2010s, 2020s). The rest would have to be adjusted for the environment they’re built in.
I don’t know what Lynnwood is envisioning for its downtown now or how it has changed. I assume it’s just assuming a full buildout will take two or three times as long.
Yeah, it is possible that Lynnwood could have added some big office towers if they timed things differently. But I think a lot of the reason the East Side grew was just luck. Microsoft decided to set up shot on the East Side. They got big. Downtown Bellevue was basically half way in between. It was inevitable that there would be some tall buildings over there but if Microsoft set up shop somewhere else or just built compilers (which is all they did initially) then downtown Bellevue would probably be very small (similar to Factoria).
What happened in Seattle had an impact as well. There was a lot of growth in Downtown Seattle, especially at South Lake Union. It is easier to make the case that this was inevitable, given it sits between the old downtown and the UW. Paul Allen recognized this which is why he bought up so much property. Amazon just added fuel to the fire.
Given all that I think places like Lynnwood (or Tukwila) would have had to be pretty luck to be like Bellevue (even if they wanted to be).
“Folks have lauded our regional bus system and this is the type of thing they mention.”
Yes, but the New Jersey guys who raved about the 512 know full well it’s not as good as the NYC subway or PATH. They just mean it’s harder for New York area governments to create new regional services as good as the 512 or Sounder. A lot of it is because they don’t have to: PATH and New Jersey Transit are already there. But they still have some gaps, and it’s harder to fill them.
(I don’t know what those gaps are. What does the New York area need that it doesn’t already have? But that’s because I don’t live there, and when I do go to somewhere like Red Bank, I come from Manhattan, so there’s probably radial service of some sort. (In this case an hourly regional train.))
Mike, Bellevue upzoned a long time ago, well before Lynnwood’s recent upzone of its business district. Recently Bellevue did upzone even further in its commercial core, but refuses to upzone its single family zones.
It isn’t delayed upzoning that has delayed construction along East Link, it is the five-year delay in East Link, the pandemic, borrowing costs going up, and construction costs going up. It is also the loss of office demand, because if you look at the proposed projects in Wilburton and The Spring Dist. they were mostly commercial office space because pre-pandemic office space was cheaper to build and maintain and more lucrative to lease.
Not today, and without the office space much of the development doesn’t pan out. Plus transit ridership in east King Co. Is down so significantly building any kind of housing TOD is risky if folks are working from home or have free parking at work or at the mall.
From Lynnwood to Bellevue to Renton to Federal Way we see some really bad development because money was free. You can build it but it doesn’t mean foks will come. Sales prices per sf for office buildings in Seattle are now down 50%, so who wants to build in Lynnwood or Federal Way?
Ross is correct. Lynnwood would love to become the Bellevue of Snohomish Co. (and the other stations would love to become Totem Lake). But that isn’t going to happen. You need a Microsoft and Amazon, and a lot of very rich people. Bellevue has also benefitted from Seattle’s mistakes since it is just across the bridge and so many wealthy Seattle workers live east of the lake. Lynnwood is too far north, and folks are not going to send their kids to school in Lynnwood or Snohomish Co. The average education levels between Bellevue and Lynnwood are vastly different.
Snohomish Co. and Federal Way and S. King Co. and Pierce Co. are poor. Poor people don’t create urban centers. There is no other way to put it. The average sales price for a house in east King Co. is now $1.7 million. Something like 50% of Seattleites are millionaires. Mountlake Terrace and the other stations along Lynnwood Link hoped to attract the Seattle downtown worker who couldn’t afford a house in Seattle (but still wants a single-family home), and this development would swell tax revenue and retail development. That is looking unlikely today, and the development that is planned looks like typical Snohomish Co. cheap shlock.
Upzoning by itself means nothing. You could take any area throughout the three-county area and zone it to the sky but that doesn’t mean businesses and people will move there. You just end up like in Asia with empty developments.
“What Lynnwood desired was a corporate headquarters or two, high-end luxury shopping, and tons of apartments”. You are right on this. But every poor city in the three-county area wants this. It doesn’t mean they will get it, no matter how high they zone. Sometimes a lack of zoning, or zoning exuberance, is a negative. Without the retail vibrancy folks won’t move there and you can’t have walkable neighborhoods.
Unfortunately what we are seeing today is a retrenchment of development and growth back to the original cores like Bellevue and Seattle which are now more affordable per sf.
Lynnwood and Federal Way are lucky because they started with nothing, although they must be careful about zoning that is counterproductive today. I don’t think Link will be a huge catalyst for Lynnwood, and so far its upzoning and development have not been transit oriented, or even within walking distance of the light rail station. Snohomish Co. And Lynnwood are still very, very car/truck oriented, and folks in Snohomish Co. are still damn poor. You don’t zone like Bellevue for poor people, and you don’t build like Bellevue for poor people with a high school degree who don’t have temperature controlled wine cellars, or where private high schools cost about what the average person in Snohomish Co. earns in a year.
Even though I moved to Seattle much later, my first Downtown Bellevue visit was in 1990 (34 years ago). Even then it was more “urban” than either Lynnwood or Federal Way station areas are today.
The tallest buildings near Federal Way Link station today are hotels. The Commons feels barren and ripe for redevelopment. There is already lots more within walking distance than at Lynnwood. The FW station is in the middle of things. I think that the future of TOD there is much brighter. The parcel sizes are quite big so a developer could do something more transformative. It may even emerge as the “hotel district” for the entire South Sound given its potential.
I think Lynnwood will be harder and take longer. The heart of activity there is Alderwood. The Lynnwood CC Station is more on the edge of things.
I wouldn’t discount Mountlake Terrace station as a busy station. While the transit connections and expansive parking will likely make Lynnwood CC the station with the highest boardings for LLE, I could see Mountlake Terrace getting the most riders that walk to and from a station. Shoreline stations have less “there” there in 2024.
“Bellevue upzoned a long time ago, well before Lynnwood’s recent upzone of its business district.”
I was talking about Lynnwood and Federal Way, not Bellevue. Bellevue planned for downtown growth in the 1960s, and it started appearing in the 1990s. When I grew up in Bellevue in the 1970s and early 80s, I was too young to understand that, so I thought it would always be two-story, and I was surprised when highrises started appearing after I left. But later I learned that the dense downtown had been planned while I was living there.
Bellevue’s planning essentially coincided with Forward Thrust. They were going to get regional rail, and a dense downtown sprouting up at the same time. (There were also plans for growth along I-90 and a Forward Thrust line there, but neither of those happened, and I-90 slid into unwalkable sprawl.) Forward Thrust failed, but big downtown Bellevue came anyway. It was built up in the 1990s and 2000s, before East Link was certain. So Bellevue was able to catch the waves of real-estate money in the 2000s and 2010s. East Link was approved by voters in 2008, and will be finished in 2025. That’s thirty years after the highrises around NE 8th & Bellevue Way appeared.
The sharp drop-off to single-family (e.g., Surrey Downs) and the supermajority percent of single-family land in Bellevue is disgraceful, but that’s common to all cities in Pugetopolis, not just Bellevue.
“But every poor city in the three-county area wants this. It doesn’t mean they will get it, no matter how high they zone.”
If you create the regulatory/structural prerequisites for it, it might happen. If you don’t, it definitely won’t. It’s like the question of whether to build a dense neighborhood in Seattle or upgrade the Lynnwood-Seattle corridor to Link. If you do it, people might or might not move into those buildings, a variety of retail/services might appear, and ridership might increase toward international levels. If you don’t it definitely won’t. And something worse might come in instead, like two-story car-oriented buildings, or big-box stores with surface parking lots in front.
It’s not that people will move to density or downsize their number of cars. It’s that you’re making it possible for them to do so. Odds are that you’ll get at least half of the desired transformation, and in the long run you may get all of it. Because even if the people living there or who might move there initially reject it, other people will come along who want it or are satisfied with it. People who aren’t at that life stage yet, don’t live in the area yet, aren’t born yet, haven’t gotten a job there yet, or haven’t gotten interested in walkable urbanism yet.
Mike, I am pretty sure every regional city does have greater zoning for its commercial zones. The one exception is Sammamish but they don’t have a commercial zone.
Most don’t need a 660’ height limit like Bellevue, and what is the right height limit (because commercial zones generally have no setbacks of FAR limits) depends on the city. Really we are just talking height when we talk about commercial zoning.
The PSRC since around 2008 has recommended cities upzone their commercial zones for housing and offices because it is near walkable transit. That is where 90% of future housing will go.
Lynnwood long ago upzoned its “town center”, and then upzoned again. Lynnwood doesn’t support really tall office or multi-family buildings. The units can’t be too expensive or they exceed the area’s AMI which is low so no Lincoln Towers. Most businesses are not true office businesses but manufacturing or service oriented.
Lynnwood has seen some development. Enthusiasm cooled after the pandemic. Leaders now hope Link somehow restarts that development and enthusiasm. It hurts that retail is so bad in Lynnwood. All the potential visitors or residents go someplace else to shop or dine, and does anyone really want to live in an apartment building in Lynnwood if they don’t have to? Anyone on this Seattle blog live in an apartment in Lynnwood? Rents are a lot cheaper than in Seattle.
Anyone on this Seattle blog live in an apartment in Lynnwood?
I used to but that was decades ago. I think I found the place and it isn’t that far from the station. It was a condo but the owners were renting it out to us (five of us in what I think was a one-bedroom — the kids were little). Transit was pretty bad back then, and it would have been nice to have better options since we didn’t have a car. I remember hitchhiking on SR 99 back from work (although it was late at night). Anyway, rent is cheaper in Lynnwood. In general it gets cheaper as you go north of Roosevelt (Lake City is a lot cheaper than Roosevelt).
https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2024/06/11/projects-moving-forward-overview/
SDOT as a blog post update on 10 projects moving forward.
Highlights:
Actually retrofitting NE 45th St Pedestrian Bridge. Rapidride J had the construction bid sent out, hopefully the bid’s aren’t too expensive. For the denny way repaving they’ll also be doing one pair of bus stop consolidation for route 8, removing the 6th ave stops and adding a new (westbound) stop on 7th avenue instead, overall I think it’s fine the bus stops were a bit frequent on that corridor. Both beacon ave bike lanes and rainier bus lanes might actually move forward in july.
List:
1) Georgetown to Downtown Safety
2) Georgetown to South Park Connection
3) Bridge Seismic Retrofit
4) RapidRide J Line
5) Route 40 Transit-Plus Multimodal Corridor
6) 2024 Slurry Seal Program
7) Denny Way Paving
8) Safe Routes to School Improvements at Broadview-Thomson and Cedar Park Elementary
9) Beacon Ave S & 15th Ave S Safety (North Segment)
10) Rainier Ave S Bus Lane (Phase 2)
From a transit perspective the improvements to the 7 and 40 look huge. The J is important, but holy cow it has taken a really long time, and when the dust settles it won’t be much better than the 7 or 40. Both of those projects show you don’t have to convert a route to RapidRide to make a big improvement.
I wish they were adding bus lanes on Denny. It may take a while, but my hope is before the end of the decade they will have done it. As these other projects progress people will get used to the idea that you can just take a lane. General purpose traffic isn’t much worse because it was bad to begin with. The difference is you have an alternative.
> I wish they were adding bus lanes on Denny. It may take a while, but my hope is before the end of the decade they will have done it.
The problem is that southbound aurora avenue car drivers all take denny way to reach i5 southbound. I think they were originally expecting a lot more drivers to pay for the tunnel and take the i90 flyover to i5.