Midweek Roundup – Open Thread 53

41 Replies to “Midweek Roundup – Open Thread 53”

1. Good thing they’re considering fare capping. Denver has done the same with MyRide 2.0 alongside lowering fares and it’s nice to not need to put up all the money upfront each month for a pass or only pay as you go if you don’t spend enough for a monthly pass some months. I guess the question then becomes, do they push for a regional daily cap across all systems or just for themselves. As people are often switching modes and operators to get from A to B in the Seattle metro.

2. I run http://www.rosecitytransit.org/ as well as the King County Metro radio scanner at http://kcmscanner.ddns.net/

   I have never actually been up to Seattle but am looking at a side trip as flights to Boston were significantly cheaper than from PDX. The current plan is to be up there June 28th or 29th to July 2nd and am wondering if anyone here would be interested in doing things with me (one idea is the Big Wheel, or maybe cycling the Burke Gilman trail) or maybe hosting me.

   I also plan to finally upgrade the scanner site after leaving it untouched for years.

   If I come up there Friday, I’d want to do the trip by local transit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/wzt3sz/its_possible_to_take_regular_transit_all_the_way/

   If so, contact me at stblog@jasonmchuff.net

   1. Thanks for running KC Metro scanner! It’s a great resource. It’s especially interesting to check out on snow days.

      1. You’re welcome. Luckily I/a friend have found I think at least 3 different people to host it over the years. Hopefully it will be better after I update it. If anyone has a better spare computer or just a TB hard drive I could possibly use it as I think it may get overloaded during snow events when there’s lots of calls happening. Also, I’ve been having to move older calls to my server to make room, and plan to just create a separate fresh install instead of upgrading the existing software.

   2. Thank you for the bus info for a trip to Portland! I wasn’t aware of the routes south of Olympia.

      I have an unhealthy interest in taking long trips by public transportation. I’ve only actually done a Seattle to Long Beach, WA transit bus vacation and a day trip to Port Townsend from Seattle via a loop route, but I’ve dreamed of going down as far as Cannon Beach and up to Canada (although, apparently, the Canadian border agents look askance at visitors walking across the border and want some assurance of “legitimate” return transportation).

      1. Here’s a map I made in 2011 of NW Oregon transit connections: http://www.rosecitytransit.org/mystuff/othercreations/transitmap/

         I think there was a post here of someone who went to BC. Unfortunately, I don’t think Evan Siroky has kept his Epic Transit Journeys schedules site. See e.g. https://crosscut.com/2010/11/epic-bus-riding-you-can-get-there-from-here-on-pub

      2. We have a few people who do long rural trips like these; e.g., hiking between Bellingham and White Rock BC (where there’s a bus feeder to Skytrain), or on Whidbey Island through Anacortes to Mt Vernon, or on the Olympic Penninsula to Port Angeles, or south via Olympia and Aberdeen to Astoria OR, or from Portland to Cannon Beach, or on Orcas or San Juan or Vashon Island, etc. They may have described some of these in the article history; otherwise they’re buried in comments. The more you can identify specific corridors you’re interested in, the more they can chime in with their experiences of it, and what the conditions might be like today.

         I’m less tolerant of infrequent routes and potential broken transfers in rural areas, so I don’t do them myself, but I keep them in mind.

         Bellingham to White Rock is possible on foot, although the border guards look at you askance.

         Bellingham to Seattle has intercounty connector buses (Bellingham to Mt Vernon, Mt Vernon to Everett), although they’re only sometimes available off-peak or on weekends. There’s also Amtrak, Greyhound, and Bolt Bus or one of its successors.

         Mt Vernon to Whidbey Island and the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry has a string of timed transfers. You’d have to check whether they go all the way through at present, and the transfer between Mt Vernon and Anacortes may be an hour or so.

         Seattle to Astoria OR may still be doable. You’d have to get up early on a weekday, take Sound Transit to Lakewood, Intercity Transit to Olympia, Grays Harbor Transit to Aberdeen, and whatever goes from there to Astoria. I think Olympia-Aberdeen is peak only so you may have to stay overnight somewhere.

         Seattle to Portland, I’ve heard there’s a gap somewhere between Centralia and Vancouver; e.g., around Kelso or Longview. You may have to use a non-transit means to get through the gap.

         Seattle to Port Angles and Forks has a series of local buses, but there are now two daily express options: the Dungeness Line goes through for around $40 (mainly for rural residents going to First Hill hospitals). The Strait Shot by Clallam Transit goes from Forks to the Bainbridge-Seattle ferry.

         There are a half-dozen state-subsidized routes in corridors that Greyhound doesn’t serve, like the Dungeness Line, Apple Line, Gold Line, etc. Only the Dungeness Line comes into Pugetopolis. The rest are in other parts of the state, and transfer at Greyhound stops.

      3. You can get from Seattle to Port Townsend via the Kingston ferries (fast ferry from Seattle or WS Ferry from Edmonds) and a local county bus route, Jefferson Transit Route 14. That bus is only two round trips a day, but if you missed it going out in the morning, Kingston itself is worth walking/bicycling around and there’s the ferry from there to Edmonds. Uber might be available on the peninsula side as a backup. There are also free “trolley” busses to get around Port Townsend itself, every half hour IIRC.

3. Once the Sound Transit Light Rail plan is built out, I’ll no longer have a single-seat ride from Roosevelt to SeaTac. Which is fine, but I am definitely curious what the Westlake transfer is going to be like. I’ve heard enough to know that the ID transfer will be a disaster, but can I at least transfer lines at Westlake without going all the up to the surface and down into a different tunnel?

   1. I’m in the same boat the other way – my commute is rainier beach to Northgate (soon 148th!)

      A station planning document from winter 2022 shows the two tunnels connected underground (at westlake, the new tunnel will be perpendicular to the current tunnel and below it by a few floors). Page 131 in https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/ballard-link-extension-station-planning-progress-report.pdf

      This is before the whole CID/south downtown hub business, but I think westlake plans are unchanged.

      Of course, it won’t be an issue for another 15 years…

   2. For westlake it depends on the alternative but generally it’s around 5 floors height difference so probably like the U District ground level to station platform. Then new tunnel station depth is at 135 feet.

   3. The Westlake station design is still being refined, so we’ll see if they’ve been able to get the DSTT2 Westlake platforms any closer to the DSTT1 platforms.

   4. Steve, there will also be transfers possible at SODO. That will only be two level changes. (It could be a no-level 20-second change if ST would simply redesign that proposed station.)

      However, that would mean that you would take a West Seattle train (3 Line) and not an Eastside train (2 Line). Given a cumbersome transfer of a few minutes at both Westlake and IDS, waiting 4-5 more minutes for a 3 Line train may be worth it.

      Coming back from SeaTac, you may want to again transfer at SODO depending on time of day. You’ll be able to get a seat by boarding at SODO while you may have to stand if you transfer to the same train at Westlake. The transfer will again be faster.

      The luxury of multiple transfer points is that you’ll have three transfer station options – so that you can consider factors like train loads and vertical transfer efforts at the time that you make a trip.

      ST officially says that Ballard Link extension won’t open until 2039 now. If the project happens my bet is that it will be closer to 2045 or even 2050. There are several obstacles to overcome before construction starts, mainly involving funding.

      1. My bet is if they go with 4th Avenue Shallower, we’ll have a MOS to Smith Cove in 2039 and Market Street in 2040/2041. If they do CID N/S, they’ll debate between opening Smith Cove “early” (2037) and Market street later (2039/2040).

4. https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership
   The ridership numbers for Link in May seem to exclude Link 2. Even without Link 2 it was the 2nd highest month of ridership after last July.

   1. How can you tell that 2-Link is excluded?

      That said, the data shows that Link has now fully recovered its pre-COVID ridership levels and now has higher ridership than before the pandemic. Ya, this is with the addition of 3 new stations. But that is exactly why we build new extensions — to boost ridership.

      It seems to be working.

      1. There is no station-level data for any of the 2 Line stations. I haven’t had time to transcribe the new numbers into the spreadsheet I’m building, so I can’t confirm if the station total add up to the overall total.

      2. The only stations are those of Link 1 and I added the ridership from those stations and it gave the listed number.

      3. @Sunny,

         Ah, if you add the components and the numbers match then I agree.

         But this also means that Link ridership in totality is actually much higher than listed. About 4% higher. This is a good thing.

         Note: just because a pulldown hasn’t been updated, doesn’t mean the data isn’t there. But if you took the time to add the components, then I agree.

5. Here’s a map I made in 2011 of NW Oregon transit connections: http://www.rosecitytransit.org/mystuff/othercreations/transitmap/

   I think there was a post here of someone who went to BC. Unfortunately, I don’t think Evan Siroky has kept his Epic Transit Journeys schedules site. See e.g. https://crosscut.com/2010/11/epic-bus-riding-you-can-get-there-from-here-on-pub

   1. I’m taking Amtrak from Tacoma to Eugene, but was going to need to beg a ride to Depoe Bay. At least I thought so? Is there transit to the coast?

      Also, is Amtrak rail the whole way or will they transfer me to a bus to get to Eugene?

      1. The Coast to Valley Connector runs from Albany to Newport a few times a day: https://nwconnector.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Coast-to-Valley-Express-Bus-Schedule-Effective-December-1-2023_1.pdf

         And Lincoln County has an infrequent bus between Newport and Lincoln City (passes through Depot Bay): https://www.co.lincoln.or.us/371/Transit-Intercity-Bus-Schedule

      2. Cascades goes to Eugene twice a day as does the Starlight. All trains stop in Albany.

      3. Thanks, Tom. Good to know about Albany to Newport. Won’t help for this trip (college visit to U of O then to the coast), but maybe in the future.

      4. Lane County Link runs a service from Eugene to Florence. From there, there are local buses to other places.

         https://link-lane.org/eugene-florence-connector/

         Last I checked you can buy a ticket via the Amtrak web site, but I’ve never done so.

6. The article in The Urbanist is very concerning and echoes concerns many have raised on this blog.

   When ST sold levies it overestimated farebox recovery for Link (40% which dates from 1994 and is double the goal for Metro) and understated future operations costs which includes replacement.

   Recently ST acknowledged it underestimated future operations costs by $1.2 billion, some of which is probably based on an assumption inflation would remain quite low for the next few decades. ST did this to lower the amount of general taxes in the levies in order to sell them, something that is universal in those proposing levies including Move Seattle.

   Much lower ridership on Link than estimated and much higher fare evasion has reduced farebox recovery from a high of almost 40% in 2017 to around 15% today. Part of this is a loss of almost 6 million riders. According to the article an astounding 45% of riders don’t pay a fare when pre-pandemic estimates were 2.4% fare evasion, which ST hopes to reduce to 25%by 2029 with an expensive fare ambassador program.

   I think ST made a serious mistake letting fare evasion become the norm when there is no fare enforcement mechanism at the stations.

   This is exactly the time bomb Rogoff raised in his last presentation to the Board in June 2021. Although ST is a younger system and so doesn’t have the legacy costs of other systems, universally transit systems when faced with this operations funding issue defer replacement and capital maintenance. So unlike MTA the backlog isn’t $15 billion today, and well over $25 billion over the next decade which is too large to fix with today’s lower ridership.

   So the Board’s solution is to lower farebox recovery goals to:

   For Sounder, a minimum of 13% with a target of 18%,

   For ST Express, a minimum of 7% with a target of 12%,

   For Link, a minimum of 17% with a target of 22%, and

   Systemwide, a minimum of 15% with a target of 20%.

   This would be fine if the Board had a plan to lower operations costs, or for a general tax increase, but it doesn’t. Instead the Board pretends lowering the farebox recovery goal will solve the operations funding shortfall.

   Another issue many have raised on this blog is ridership and farebox recovery are going to much weaker as Link reaches the suburbs. Even pre-pandemic ST’s ridership estimates for these lines were very questionable. Today they are laughable. ST continues to estimate nearly 50,000 riders/day on both East Link and Lynnwood Link while cutting farebox recovery goal in half on these very long suburban runs through very undense areas with marginally large park and rides.

   As the article notes:

   “Operational costs are likely to balloon even more as Sound Transit expands its light rail network to 116 miles over the next two decades, continuing to put pressure on operations and farebox recovery goals”.

   I think the Board is living in fanstasy land, both for the capital projects the subareas don’t have the revenue to complete, and more importantly future operations costs including capital maintenance and replacement.

   We have seen this play out in nearly every rail system in the U. S. post pandemic, and the pandemic, work from home, and inflation have accelerated (or I suppose exposed) this disconnect between the cost to operate the system (including in some cases decades of deferred maintenance and replacement, and the farebox recovery and other operations funding sources.

   As the congestion tax in NYC proved passing any kind of general tax for transit today is very difficult. Too few normal people are riding transit so the systems become less safe, and less attractive because there the agencies are skimping on maintenance. It is death spiral. If less than 10% of the citizens are using a transit system they object to a tax increase to fund the system when so many are struggling with inflation.

   Some on this blog, most notably Tisgwym and Daniel, raised these issues repeatedly, and predicted there would be a reckoning the Board was trying didn’t exist. Extending the completion date for capital projects when inflation is higher than the estimated tax revenue during the extension, pre-pandemoic ridership estimates ST clings to even today, and now a Board lowering the 40% farebox recovery goal for Link as though that solves the REAL issue and not responsible.

   as Roof told them in June 2021 farebox recovery and other operations funding sources won’t cover future operations and maintenance and replacement costs, which are also rising faster than estimated.

   The good news I suppose is ST and the Board will be able to see how this plays out with the older systems like MTA and BART that have more acute problems due to their legacy costs being so massive. But the farebox recovery on East Link and Lynnwood Link are going to be so low it will accurate the time frame the Board has to either get off the Board or do something.

   I thought it was telling it was the new Board member grilling ST over reducing goals. The rest just want to pretend this issue does not exist until their tenure on the Board ends. I noticed that despite the excellent article The Urbanist did not have a solution although the article really didn’t put two and two together and instead focuses on fare caps or increases.

   1. > This would be fine if the Board had a plan to lower operations costs, or for a general tax increase, but it doesn’t.

      Sound Transit does not need a general tax increase to cover operations. The tax base for ST3 is currently the ceiling for Sound Transit’s income, and well exceeds any reasonable estimates of inflating operations costs over time. As made clear in ST’s financial planning documents, the Board will decide how much to reduce its tax revenue once the ST3 capital projects are complete. Its only mandate is to reduce taxes to whatever is necessary to pay off bonds, pay for Operations, and maintain SOGR.

      Frankly, I completely foresee ST’s Board putting together a proposal to continue ST’s tax base in perpetuity in 2040, with a plan to use the “excess” to continue to upgrade and expand services. Things like automation, signal upgrades, infill stations, etc., will all be capital projects needing authorization as ST3 finishes.

   2. Link has the long-term cost of maintenance and fleet replacement built into the budget, so it’s not in the situation of NYC or DC or BART that never addressed maintenance.

      1. All transit systems budget for maintenance and replacement. The problem is when the assumptions change.

         On the revenue side that is farebox recovery and other funding sources. ST clearly over estimated farebox recovery. IMO some of that is pandemic related and some a desire to keep general taxes lower in the levies, not unlike using a car depreciation schedule that was not disclosed to the average voter.

         Then you have future operations and maintenance costs. ST has restated those by around $1.2 billion. Some was underestimating the number of trains that would be required, some inflation, and some lowballing these costs to sell the levies.

         What is unknown is whether farebox recovery will decline further with the more suburban routes with fewer riders as The Urbanist notes, and whether future operations and maintenance cost estimates will be restated again.

         Nathan believes the Board can simply extend ST 3 taxes indefinitely even if the capital projects are completed (and I am not sure the capital projects can be completed in some subareas because project costs keep rising faster than tax revenue). I don’t know how the Board would do that per subarea and whether there would be objections from some subareas or voters. Like the MTA a small percentage of voters use Link. I wouldn’t want to have to place ST 4 on a ballot today to cover misstated future operations costs. A lot of voters are still angry about the bait and switch on car depreciation.

         But in any case some kind of a major tax increase will be required if farebox recovery is going to be closer to 15% rather than 40%, or like other transit systems ST will begin or continue to defer maintenance and replacement until the deferred cost is hard to manage like MTA. The key to me for the congestion tax was it would have covered a small fraction of past, current and future capital maintenance for the MTA despite a political backlash. After a while the deficit becomes too large to fix, especially if inflation is much higher than estimated or farebox recovery much lower than estimated.

         Anyway I thought The Urbanist article was good although it didn’t suggest any solutions like Nathan did.

      2. Fact Check, I don’t just “believe” that ST can keep its taxes going in perpetuity; it’s literally part of the ST3 financial policies:

         https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/project-documents/st3-system-plan-2016-appendix-b.pdf

         When the voter-approved capital projects in ST3, ST2 and Sound Move are completed and implemented, the Board will initiate two steps to roll back the rate of one or more of the taxes collected by Sound Transit.

         1 | First, Sound Transit will initiate an accelerated pay-off schedule for any outstanding bonds whose retirement will not otherwise impair the ability to collect tax revenue and complete ST3, ST2 or Sound Move, or impair contractual obligations and bond covenants. Sound Transit will implement a tax rollback to a level necessary to pay the accelerated schedule for debt service on outstanding bonds, system operations and maintenance, fare administration, capital replacement and ongoing system-wide costs and reserves.

         2 | After all debt is retired, Sound Transit will implement a tax rollback to a level necessary to pay for permanent operations, including, system operations and maintenance, fare administration, capital replacement and ongoing systemwide costs and reserves.

         The tax rollback will only be to a level required for the items listed. I believe that ST will, instead, offer to keep taxes at the same level and use excess funds for new capital projects. They could probably even make a case for automation and signals upgrades as part of “capital replacement”.

      3. Their primary tax base is sales and use taxes, which generally scale well with inflation, and overall tax revenue is expected to top $4B in the 2040’s. O&M is expected to reach ~$2B in 2045; SOGR is expected to be around $0.75M at the same time. Reduced fare income is already included in the most recent financial plans, and projected to be about $300-350M in the 2040’s (which, notably, is less than 20% of the expected O&M costs, indicating that the financial projections are independent from farebox recovery policy).

      4. Also, BART didn’t plan for fleet replacement.

      5. ST 1/2/3 are like three tax streams on top of each other. When construction finishes, the tax rate automatically rolls back to the cost of ongoing operations, maintenance, and debt service, which are estimated to be around a third of the capital-project rate.

         With ST2, ST asked the legislature for authorization for a second set of tax streams, and to recycle the excess part of the first stream (the part that would have been rolled back) into ST2.

         With ST3 it did the same thing. So ST3 is conceptually the ST1/2/3 tax streams. The 1 and 2 streams won’t be fully available until their construction is finished and their bonds are substantially paid down. (That’s why many ST3 projects wouldn’t even start construction until the mid 2020s, because they’re waiting for the ST2 bills to finish coming in.)

         So if there’s no ST4, the ST1/2/3 taxes will be rolled back around 2041. If construction takes longer, ST can either keep the tax rate up as long as it takes, or delete/defer projects out of ST3. That will be the board’s choice then, and it will be a different generation making the decision, based on future political factors.

         If ST has extra money left over from its original “full rate until 2039 schedule” (I can’t even remember when ST3 was originally going to finish), it can spend it on whatever it wants (within subarea equity). What it can’t do is build non-voter-approved things before the voter-approved things are fully funded, or extend the full rate for non-voter-approved things.

         There’s also the debt ceiling, which ST was projected to hit from the late 2020s to the early 2030s. That also caused some ST3 projects to be postponed until after it. There are two debt ceilings: a hard legislature cap, and a soft self-imposed cap below that.

      6. It’s too early to speculate on ST4 or supplemental funding. The board hasn’t even started to consider when ST4 might be, how large it might be, or what might be in it. If it doesn’t know, it’s useless for us to speculate. It might not even start to look at it until the 2030s or 2040s. ST3 was enlarged to include things that were previously expected to be in ST4, so ST is busy with that full plate now.

         The first thing ST would do for ST4 is to update the long-range plan, so look for signs of that.

         What we know about ST4 is that some subareas had certain top-priority requests in 2016, and ST3 includes preliminary studies for things that might get default priority. Pierce wants a Tacoma Mall extension. Snohomish wants an Everett College extension. North/South/East King may still be interested in the AJ-Burien-Renton extension; we’re not sure. But whether they’ll still have these priorities in ten or fifteen years, we don’t know.

         Likewise, it’s useless to speculate on an ST4 that backfills more ST3 funding. The legislature would have to authorize any additional tax streams. Voters may think the combined 1/2/3 rate is already high, and they don’t want to go above that. Even whether ST can have a “second ST3” to reuse the 1/2/3 streams for additional projects without going back to the legislature is unclear, with STB commentators on both sides of the legal issue. And the ST board hasn’t said anything about considering a backfill levy.

         Many of us think the subareas’ interests will diverge after ST3, so it will be hard to agree on a common tax rate across all subareas. Up till now all subareas wanted expensive things: North King its Seattle projects; the other subareas their Everett/Tacoma/Redmond spine. When Everet Station and Tacoma Dome are finished, North King will still want a lot more, but will the other subareas? The short extensions to Tacoma Mall and Everett College wouldn’t cost much. They may not really be serious about other projects they’ve talked about. And their taxpayers may be tired of paying for expansions. Pierce and South King voted no on some or all of the phases; it was only the other subareas that had enough votes to get them to pass. Some in North King who supported ST3 are having doubts about post-vote changes in WS/BLE, especially long downtown transfers and a Ballard 14th station which could cripple Link’s usefulness. So they may not be fully onboard with an ST4 either.

   3. Has Daniel gone full Trump, referring to himself in the Third Person now? And recommending his own posts is sketchy, TBH.

      So far as the content, yep, it’s correct, and is a very good reason to halt construction southbound at Federal Way and make do with two Maintenance Facilities. Northbound is completo, fini, vollendet today.

      Don’t turn one shovel, ever, for “Line 4” and replace WSBLE with a newly built Monorail Dogbone as I mentioned elsewhere, paid mostly by a City levy using the Monorail Bonding Authority. You’re right in thinking “That can’t be done for $1 billion!”, but the Leg should be amenable to letting the City have the equivalent in today’s purchasing power.

      Or, if the Seattle CBD doesn’t rebound by 2030 simply do nothing further in North King. Planning and engineering can continue, but should be re-directed to a more complete and honest needs analysis, since it’s a relatively small chunk of change. The bottom line is that if the City isn’t growing again by 2030, it’s not going to resume growth and won’t need underground or elevated transit anyway.

      I too agree that the clear way out of the operations cost sinkhole is simply to continue the levies at the current rate. SoundTransit has the right to tax for operations and maintenance without specific “voter approval”. It was implicitly granted when ST1 and ST2 were approved.

      1. Correction: “more underground or elevated transit anyway”. Apologies.

7. Wow! The City is proposing radical street changes in Alaska Junction! I bet all those West Seattle locals will come out of the woodwork once they see this. Alaska Street is so different that it should probably be a transit only street! It has no bus pullouts, meaning that any bus unloading or loading at the station will stop every bus and car right behind it for as long as it needs to be at the stop.

   1. I agree; Alaska should be a transit + freight only street.

8. Vox has an interesting article about how business owners tend to drastically estimate the percentage of their customers that arrive by car. This story is centered around New York and congestion pricing, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that the same problem exists in Seattle too, and makes everything from bus lanes to bike lanes more difficult.

   https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/354672/hochul-congestion-pricing-manhattan-diners-cars-transit

9. This is a bit late and I think we briefly discussed this in march, but for the may psrc meeting there was talks about the federal funding prioritization. (For context the PSRC semi chooses where federal funds are allocated throughout the metro area).

   https://psrc2.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=psrc2_9c6eab817e08030145ecb631373d1f3e.pdf&view=1

   “””
   As discussed at recent meetings, the board directed PSRC staff to continue working on two items that were considered as part of the 2024 Policy Framework for PSRC’s Federal Funds but ultimately not advanced. These two items were:

   1. Prohibiting from the competition projects that add general purpose capacity on limited access highways…
   2. Setting a threshold for funding projects only above a certain total score, since the final scores and rankings reflect how well each project meets each of the project evaluation criteria and regional policies…
   “””
   Most interesting were the comments responding the objections:

   “””
   WSDOT supports this concept, but it is important for WSDOT projects centered on safety, preservation, and operational improvements to be eligible for funding. The RTP states that “the state’s Managed Lanes System is one approach WSDOT uses to operate its highway facilities efficiently…(managed lanes)

   Snohomish County: Limiting capacity on large principal roadways like I-5 and I-405 may make sense, but it would be very concerning to Snohomish County residents and businesses if this limitation was extended to other limited access facilities in our county, such as SR 522, SR 9, SR 532, US 2 etc. that are still not built out to their full configurations.
   “””

   Either way it does seem likely they will at least be changing the scoring formula and it will probably slightly favor managed lanes over general lane expansions more so than in the past. Though outside of hov to managed lane conversions, I’m not quite sure if WSDOT really wants to move forward with the more expensive intersection hov direct connectors.

10. The city of Charlotte, NC and state of Virginia are working on purchasing parts of Norfolk Southern’s main lines for expansion of passenger service.

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