Countdowns: Lynnwood Link (August 30); RapidRide G (September 14)
Today is Juneteenth, a Federal holiday, but most transit operators are running normal weekday service.
Transit Updates:
Extension of the third avenue “transit mall” through Belltown to Dexter (specifically, road reconstruction) may be delayed until after the 2026 World Cup.
Metro is now officially considering hydrogen fuel-cell electric buses as part of its zero-emissions transition, like Community Transit. Meanwhile, the King County Auditor has highlighted issues with Metro’s transition implementation. Also discussed in the Seattle Times ($).
Amtrak is on-track to break its annual passenger ridership record.
New WA State Ferries head Steve Nevey says the ferry system has moved from crisis to recovery.
Local News:
Construction on the Route 40 TPMC project started this week.
Several other SDOT projects are moving forward in coming months.
Sound Transit staff are recommending delaying Sounder Capital projects and increasing service instead.
Seattle City Council is considering several amendments to the proposed Transportation Levy.
Statistics show more people die on South Seattle streets where wide streets encourage fast driving.
Opinion and Miscellaneous:
On Seattle’s underdeveloped Stadium District ($).
The double-decker battery-electric buses coming to Stride.
What’s up with all these [construction] bids?
Takeaways from Seattle Greenways’ Building Great Streets event.
The symbolism of congestion pricing.
The constitutional case against exclusionary zoning.
This is an open thread.
Sound Transit’s reset on South Sounder towards more trains is certainly welcome, but I hope they don’t completely eliminate their program to lengthen trains.
Ridership is still peaky, and still recovering. And WFH continues to flame out as employers realize that their employees are just playing with the kids or having mid-day “fun” with their spouses. Eventually ST is going to need both more trains and longer trains. And longer trains provide better economics.
And when TDLE comes on-line it won’t provide much relief to Sounder. The two markets are sufficiently distinct such that TDLE won’t provide capacity relief to South Sounder. Both corridors will have their own capacity issues.
While it’s certainly much higher when comparing average weekday ridership on S Line to the same month in 2023, the average weekday ridership since October 2023 has been relatively flat — and especially since February 2024.
Time will soon tell if the ridership is beginning to plateau.
I hope they don’t completely eliminate their program to lengthen trains.
There is nothing wrong with longer trains, but the plans for longer station platforms were always a bad idea. With open gangways riders can just move between train cars when it is crowded. This is quite common in other countries (especially the UK). I know ST likes to treat its passengers like they are idiots and can’t figure this stuff out, but I don’t think it is that hard. I could see King Street Station being extended, just because it would require so little work (an extra 25 feet). This is the station most people use (although it is also the station that is the beginning/end of most trips which means it doesn’t matter much). I certainly wouldn’t prioritize it. It is like down escalators in Link stations — a nice to have.
Another alternative is to run the trains more often. Unfortunately, according to the report:
• 15-minute headways for Sound South trains could pose risks to reliability.
• The BNSF tracks are congested by freight trains in off-peak times, limiting the available track time for passenger trains outside morning and afternoon peak travel periods.
They run through the various options and the impacts they have on freight, Amtrak and Sounder reliability. The options involve running a little bit more often, or extending the peak period. Longer trains don’t have that sort of issues. It is fairly cheap to run longer trains (without longer station platforms). Might as well.
Bigger park and rides are a different matter. There is a clear trade-off with that approach versus additional shuttle bus service. I don’t think it is worth it — the cost for the park and ride lots is way too high — but I can understand why they want them.
Given ridership levels (which are much lower than before the pandemic) none of this matters. At most you might consider running longer trains for special events, but those tend to be “reverse commute” (or weekend) anyway, and not a big issue. It is quite likely that this is the new normal, and South Sounder will never have the ridership it did before the pandemic. Even if you got rid of the peak-only ST express buses from Tacoma (like the 590) and pushed those riders to Sounder, you are still nowhere near where we were. What is the term, YAGNI? You ain’t gonna need it.
“but the plans for longer station platforms were always a bad idea.”
Disagree. The cognitive dissonance in the comment about treating customers like idiots vs. the statement above is astounding. Extending platforms to add two additional cars is purposely planned to prioritize, protect, and value the customer experience. It would also expand and improve ADA access. It’s an act of respect toward customers if anything.
Letting trains overhang platforms and forcing customers thru gangways is a half-assed way to add capacity. It introduces inconvenience and high potential for confusion and missed stops. It would increase dwell time, and thus travel time overall. And it may not be possible with the existing rolling stock, which have gangway doors for crew use only. Replacing the existing cars with new equipment well before the current fleet has reached its useful life would be a massive waste of transit funds. And there is at least one station (Kent?) where a stopped train longer than 8 cars would block the adjacent arterial crossing without an extension is the other direction.
Platform extensions were always low hanging fruit. They made sense when the system was seeing standing loads pre-pandemic, and they will eventually make sense again as population and employment growth drive higher ridership in the future.
@another engineer,
Delivering quality transportation requires delivering quality solutions to design issues. Alleviating crowding by requiring passengers to walk through the train to cars that aren’t accessible from the platform is not a quality solution to a capacity problem.
Platform extensions are relatively easy and inexpensive to implement as transit solutions go. Yes, there can be station specific issues related to things like the proximity of cross streets and switches, but these are the sorts of problems that can be assigned to a fresh out of college engineer for resolution. It just isn’t that hard.
Increasing the number of trains can of course also help with capacity issues, but at some point ST is going to have to revisit their platform extension program. It just makes too much sense to not do it.
I don’t understand why this is even an issue.
It is common throughout the world to have to walk through the train to find an open seat. That’s what makes this a “nice to have”. We don’t have down escalators at every station. Mount Baker Station is in a terrible location. We don’t run the trains as often as we should. There are various express buses that should operate, but don’t. These are all compromises that were made to save money. What makes this different?
How is this different? You cite some things that weren’t great ideas. Platform extensions ARE a good idea. You seem to think it would save money to force open gangways and drop the longer platforms. But it would likely require new fleet, which (checks notes; 78 x $12M) would cost WAY more money than extending platforms and deliver an inferior customer experience. So, yeah. Pennywise and pound foolish.
The operation may be better if only some platforms are lengthened if trains get too crowded. Say you only lengthen platforms Auburn northward. Then you keep the end cars empty (“out of service”) before Auburn, and riders in Auburn and Kent and Tukwila can perhaps have seats! Those boarding at King Street would be told that the end cars would only be for Auburn and Kent and Tukwila riders!
It also helps because riders can be told where to wait for a train door better. They don’t have to jog down the platform several hundred feet to find a door with room to board (also deleting the train).
I think a good loading-time argument could even be made to split up a long train to assign riders going short distances to have one part, and riders going long distances to have another.
… delaying the train. (Correction)
@another engineer,
Ya, it is a silly approach to solve a capacity problem by replacing the entire fleet and then requiring the passengers to walk through the train. In addition to it being an extremely expensive solution. And I can’t imagine any agency worth its salt doing such a thing (if they would even be permitted to by the responsible agencies).
As far as the rider experience goes, I distinctly remember the era of the Metro Free Ride Zone and how horrible that experience was. Anyone who had the misfortune of boarding a bus downtown and then finding themselves seated at the back of the bus knows what I am talking about.
At some point you would need to force yourself to the front of the bus to pay and then exit, and that was not always easy nor quick on a full bus. And a lot of the people you had to force yourself past were neither accommodating nor “pleasant”. It was not a good situation. Good riddance.
But I don’t see ST making mistakes like that. Lengthening the platforms is relatively simple, and it is a quality solution that yields a good rider experience at a reasonable cost.
I am sure that eventually ST will lengthen the platforms.
You cite some things that weren’t great ideas.
Wait, what? I cited three things:
1) Down escalators.
2) Having Mount Baker Station in a better location.
3) Running the trains more often.
In what world are these not great ideas? The first one is very much like the other proposal. It is simply more comfortable. The second one saves people time! Larger trains — as nice as they are — won’t. Likewise, the third idea is probably the best thing ST could do. Run Link more often and you save people time and avoid the biggest annoyance of all — having to wait.
The problem is, this costs money. That is the point.
Hey, if it is more expensive to replace the fleet, so be it. I just assumed they had open gangways, since that is, well, better, especially if you are concerned about crowding. It is unlikely that people will magically self select and find the train car that isn’t crowded. With open gangways it doesn’t matter. If the car you are in doesn’t have a seat, you just keep moving. Hell, this happens on a subway train! Yet in this case it is a commuter line, with several minutes between each stop and trips that routinely take over a half hour.
In other words if the trains really are crowded and we add more train cars and we expand each and every platform, it is quite likely that people will be wishing that the cars had open gangways so they could find a seat.
And I can’t imagine any agency worth its salt doing such a thing (if they would even be permitted to by the responsible agencies).
Yeah, what do the people in the UK know about trains. Oh yeah, they invented them. But that is different, you would never do that in the US — not for commuter rail. Except for the busiest commuter railroad in North America:
This happens with Long Island Railroad all the time: most trains have 12 cars. A few older stations can only accommodate 10 cars, and a couple of very old stations can only fit 4 cars. So they make announcements like “The next station is Forest Hills, only the first four cars will platform”.
It is just a trade-off. I’m sure they would love to make the platforms bigger, but it just isn’t worth the money.
OK, I found the project: https://st32.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/InteractiveMap/Templates/July1/Sounder_SouthSounderCapitalImprovementsProgram.pdf
Some highlights: Cost, $934 million. That is in 2014 dollars. It is likely over a billion by now.
* Auburn Station may have significant challenges to construct platform extension due to the Stampede Pass rail junction immediately south of the existing station.
* The extension to 10 car platforms may not be possible at all stations, requiring passengers to de-board through adjoining rail cars (Auburn, and potentially new stations in Tillicum and DuPont).
* Poor soil conditions are present in the study area and hazardous materials remediation may be required. [Note: Anyone who has ever dealt with this knows it is a big red flag, and costs could go way up.]
Not Included: Extensions to Tacoma Dome Station platforms.
All for a billion dollars (give or take). That doesn’t sound like low hanging fruit to me.
You can increase peak hour capacity through either more frequent trains or longer trains. Of the two, more frequent trains is clearly better for passenger experience (you don’t have to wait as long). The entire point of choosing longer trains is that it’s cheaper (fewer crews to hire, less money owed to BNSF). But, when the longer trains option requires huge capital expenses to lengthen platforms, the cost savings of longer trains vs. more frequent trains deteriorates to the point where it becomes not worth it anymore. If you’re going to be paying the big bucks anyway to get more capacity, you may as well just run the train more often.
It should also be noted that the current frequency of Sounder tops out at around 20-30 minutes between trips. So, it’s not like there isn’t room in the schedule to improve that without major track upgrades.
Wheelchair passengers on Sounder are already limited to what car they can use due to only some entrances having compatible platform ramps, so this really isn’t that big an issue for wheelchair users. Just don’t have platform ramps for the extended platforms.
There are a number of places that make do with platforms shorter than the train. It shouldn’t be that difficult to make sure people know certain doors don’t open at certain stations.
Add to the list of places that do this: New Mexico Railrunner. They operate some 5 car trains, but a few minor stations are only 3 cars long.
I would point out, however, the Bombardier bilevels have doors towards the center. You could gain an extra car by extending the platforms by 3/4 of a car and stopping so only the car doors are on the platform.
@Glenn,
The current South Sounder Capital Improvement Program is valued at right around $1B, but there is an awful lot that goes into that $1B besides just platform extensions.
One of those “additional” items is raising the platform levels for level boarding and ADA compliance. This is a good thing. And, as I’m sure you know, it is also a very expensive thing. And this cost is independent of platform extensions.
What else goes into that $1B? Well….. there is an awful lot of (cough) parking. And this is not just additional parking at the stations, but also additional parking along the feeder bus routes that serve the stations.
Local transit improvements are also included in that $1B, and are also very pricy. And there are a lot of other add on costs too. I won’t bore you.
But this gets to a key aspect of increasing Sounder capacity that some on this blog seem to be unaware of — increasing capacity on S Sounder is not just a matter of adding cars to each train to increase train capacity, it also requires a proportional increase in station capacity to handle those additional passengers.
And this increase in station capacity is required even for half arssed (non)solutions like using trains that are longer than the platforms. Full stop.
As to the feasibility of overhanging trains, ya, it exists in some places. But often this is grandfathered in, or just temporary until station upgrades can be made.
And there are some really ridiculous operational issues that are sometimes associated with overhanging trains. Amtrak has actually been known to double-stop at some stations. First the train stops at the platform to allow coach passengers to board, then the train moves up a few cars and stops again to allow sleeper car passengers to board .
I think we can all agree that such things are undesirable.
Most of the parking were ST2 projects (Puyallup, Sumner, Auburn and Kent) and thus not part of this project. I’m not claiming that the only thing the project pays for is the platforms. What I’m saying is we basically have no idea what the platform expansion costs but it the main feature of a project that costs at least a billion dollars (probably a lot more). Why then, should we assume this is cheap?
ST should be busy scrapping these plans and figuring out what is worth doing, and what isn’t. It is too late to stop most of the parking — a lot of those projects are done. But there is no reason to worry about crowding, as it is quite likely this won’t be a problem for the next twenty years (if ever). In the meantime they can transition to using train cars with open gangways since they will need them in the unlikely event they ever do have capacity problems (and they would be nice to have now). There are probably projects that are not expensive, but add significant value buried in here as well.
Then, with the money saved they can put it into things that provide more benefit to riders. Running Link more often would be nice but that is likely outside of the subarea. The obvious thing to do is just fund a lot of bus service. Given the tremendous shortage of decent service within Pierce Transit, just about anything would be a big help.
The ultimate issue with Sounder S. is the decline in riders makes extending the platforms or walk through train cars moot. Even during peak Sounder S. is running at around 8% to 10% farebox recovery. Platform crowding is not an issue, and as Ross notes won’t be for probably forever. Yes, TDLE is a very bad route that terminates at the Dome and Sounder S. serves the population centers from Kent to Sumner, but it is one or the other when both are finished and it will be TDLE.
If Sounder S. went to all day service we would see farebox recovery in the low single digits because so few want to make that very long discretionary journey (including first mile access) to Seattle, and almost no one uses Sounder S. for trips between these small car centric cities. Unless it is some sort of work these folks are not Seattle people, and I mean that in a good way.
The cities along Sounder S. demanded their park and rides under ST 2 because they wanted their piece of the pie, and because a park and ride can be used for things other than transit if located near enough the town center, if any of these cities has a center. Whether it is West Seattle or Sumner these cities are not going to accept improved bus service for the capital projects they were promised.
If anything, post pandemic S. King Co. and Pierce Co. are becoming more car centric and less transit oriented because fewer are commuting to Seattle which at least has a “center” at its termination. There just isn’t an urban center in S. King or Pierce Counties, and like Sounder S. Ridership recovering probably never will be.
Once the commute to Seattle is removed Sounder S. has very little utility, and as I noted above who wants to take a discretionary trip from Auburn to Seattle. It will be the same on TDLE. Very few Tacoma to Seattle trips, and fewer Seattle to Tacoma trips. Folks in Seattle and on this blog would never take a discretionary (or work) trip from Seattle to Kent, Auburn, Sumner or Tacoma but imagine those folks want to do the same to Seattle at well over one hour, when today you are dropped off at King St. Station which is in Pioneer Square which is dead.
I think the decline in riders on Sounder S. is a good thing. Folks in S. King and Pierce Co. don’t want to go to Seattle. That is a long slog, especially on transit. They did it because they had to because of traffic and parking in Seattle and where they worked. You can’t afford to run Sounder S. based on midday discretionary trips. That is just a waste of money. There just isn’t the number of riders or population density for that, and I doubt there ever will be in this part of the region.
The disconnect is our regional housing and jobs policy thinks this is a good thing, whereas Link was built on the concept of midlevel workers in Seattle offices commuting long distances because that is where they can afford to live. We have spent decades trying and failing to solve this problem by creating affordable housing near the urban core with better grade separated commuter rail when work from home shifted this whole debate to the urban village in which you work and shop closer to where you live.
This new paradigm is a good thing. We are shifting from one urban center too expensive or dense for the mid level office workers to live so we spend billions building transit for them to creating the jobs, retail and urbanism where they live.
Imagine a world in which someone never has to leave Auburn for their daily needs. That is the future, which is why Link as it moves out of the urban core is becoming more and more irrelevant. We are waiting tens of billions of dollars on running Link to areas but those folks don’t mind because all they know is they don’t have to ride it to work and back five days/week anymore and that has dramatically improved their lives because although some urbanists can’t understand it they like where they live and like their neighbors.
Long story short: don’t worry about longer platforms or walk through train cars.
The issue with lengthening trains and/or platforms is that if a 4-car train holds 400 people, then doubling the length holds 800, and adding two cars holds 600. In contrast, doubling the frequency holds a full 800 people and gives them more TIME FLEXIBILITY. Frequency is one of the #1 issues for passengers, and American transit agencies don’t prioritize it enough. So lengthening trains/platforms instead of adding runs is an inefficient use of funds and a slap in the face to passengers.
However, sometimes there are heavy constraints to adding frequency. BNSF charges as much as it can get for time slots, so that makes them extra-expensive. However, ST has already negotiated a price for adding a few runs and says it can afford it, so there’s no reason not to. Passenger/constituent surveys say passengers want this too, because they recognize the flexibility that comes with it. So lengthening trains and platforms should just be canceled where it’s not already under construction.
>Imagine a world in which someone never has to leave Auburn for their daily needs.
What a roundabout argument for 15-minute cities.
Nathan, I didn’t mean for my argument for 15 minute cities to be roundabout. I meant it to be explicit.
The need to spend billions on Link declines as more and more 15 minute cities are created. But the number one daily need is work. If you can work in or near Auburn it has all the other daily needs one needs. Its population is around 90,000. You shouldn’t have to leave a city of 90,000 for any daily need or desire.
The area surrounding Auburn however is so large and the desired housing undense most get to the “center” of Auburn by car. That isn’t a big deal, except it affects the development in Auburn’s commercial/retail core which is not walkable. But then much of Seattle is not walkable, say from Madison Park to Broadway which many would consider “urban”.
If more people can work in Auburn they will shop and dine in Auburn which creates more retail density and produces more tax revenue for Auburn. We are seeing that in the region post pandemic. More tax revenue migrating from Seattle to smaller outlying cities where those commuters actually live, and now work. This new paradigm doesn’t need Link or Sounder.
Ridership declines on Sounder S. are the canary in a coal mine but in a good way. More and more this will call into question expensive rail systems that are really designed to take folks from these outlying cities a long way to downtown Seattle for work. If they don’t have to commute to Seattle for work they don’t go to Seattle. They stay in Auburn, their home.
People think zoning or density is the key to a 15 minute city. The key is allowing those who live there to work there. Over time that will organically grow the retail necessary for a 15 minute city. It will take time, and zoning really can’t accelerate that. What it will take is more Auburn residents working in Auburn and spending their money there.
“Imagine a world in which someone never has to leave Auburn for their daily needs.” – that world already exists? Auburn has an actual downtown, a suburban mall, some riverfront parks, even a full casino! There’s nearly 100K people in Auburn. These Sounder stations are real cities with real neighborhoods and amenities. Sounder exists to connect these cities with each other, in particular the giant job center that is Seattle.
AJ, yes Auburn has the infrastructure for a 15 minute city. But you have to leave Auburn if you live there but work some place else.
The key to the PSRC’s belated vision of urban villages is NOT commuting to Seattle for work. Work from home is allowing that. Auburn will never be a vibrant 15 minute city if so many residents have to take a train to Seattle to work and back, and arrive home too late and too exhausted to shop and dine in Auburn. For too long downtown Seattle has hogged all the tax revenue from employment when that tax revenue needs to be reallocated to the cities where the workers live.
The best thing for Auburn is if no Auburn resident needs to use Sounder. They are not driving to a park and ride to catch Sounder to Sumner or Kent for discretionary trips.
It will take time but the vision is to tear down downtown Seattle as the “giant job center” so many spend so much of their lives commuting to and from and disperse those jobs to places like Auburn. Work from home is a start, a healthy start. If the point of Sounder is to take Auburn residents away in the morning to work and bring them back in the evening exhausted that is a cancer for Auburn.
> People think zoning or density is the key to a 15 minute city. The key is allowing those who live there to work there.
How do you think people are “disallowed” from working near their homes, if not through exclusionary zoning?
FYI: The Census Bureau reports that as of 2021, Auburn had 3,453 residents who worked in Auburn, 26,226 residents who worked outside of Auburn, and 32,398 jobs filled by workers who did not live in Auburn.
https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/
Auburn isn’t an anomaly; the statistics are similar for adjacent Federal Way, and I’m sure they’re similar for other suburbs. That’s around 90% of the working population choosing to leave their city for work. You seem to think the reason people don’t work near their homes is because there aren’t enough jobs (or the right kind of jobs) near residential centers; is it possible that the real problem is that there aren’t enough homes near the employment centers?
Why does King County have over a million jobs (1,144,643 in 2021), but less than a million residents (873,106 in 2021)?
Lengthening trains vs more runs is similar to another issue: side platforms vs center platforms. Center platforms are twice as good for passengers because they make more trip pairs convenient. Both preplanned ones like Eastside to the airport, and unplanned ones, like if you miss your stop and have to backtrack, or your trip is taking too long so you decide to go somewhere else instead.
RESPONSE TO:
“Resources remain limited because suburban boardmembers like Backus have refused to cancel costly parking projects at stations on the South Sounder corridor, which could free up another $300 million or more in funding for additional service and infrastructure enhancements.”
Once King County Metro starts offering neighborhood bus service at the same level as north King County (Seattle-Shoreline-Bellevue-Kirkland-Redmond), then we won’t need the parking garages anymore. The reality right now is that the buses we have are slow and infrequent, and most of the residential neighborhoods are far from the train station. Auburn’s fastest growing neighborhoods aren’t in downtown – they are up on the top of Lea Hill and Lakeland Hills or West Hill, inaccessible to most except by car, largely due to extreme topography. Lakeland has a single bus that runs “peak hours only” so you can only get to Auburn Station (for buses or trains) if you have a straight 8-5 job in Seattle (no late arrival or early departure), or if you drive a car and park. I’m not sure that any of the newer housing on West Hill has any transit service.
Once Metro starts treating Federal Way, Auburn, and Kent the same way it treats Seattle and Bellevue in terms of service hours, then we’ll stop demanding park and rides, which, I should point out, the Eastside has had PLENTY of for MANY years.
“The best thing for Auburn is if no Auburn resident needs to use Sounder.”
Yes, but the larger the city, the more even a minority of intercity trips is large. Even if people predominantly work in their own city, there will still be a large number of remaining trips between Seattle and Bellevue, San Francisco and Oakland, Minneapolis and St Paul, etc. In the Seattle-Eastside case, transit trips are hindered by the semi-frequent 550 and congestion, and the major dropoff in off-peak transit on 520, so people either drive or don’t go. With full East Link, we should expect cross-lake transit trips to reach their natural level. Auburn is further away, smaller, and has a smaller variety of jobs, so it won’t have this phenomenon as much, but there will still be people traveling between Auburn in Seattle even if most Auburnites work in Auburn. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sounder is the best tool for the job, but we need to keep intracity trips and intercity trips in balance and not ignore intercity trips.
@Rail Skeptic
I have friends that live in Auburn (because that’s where they could afford a house) and work in Bellevue (because that’s where they found well-paying jobs). They head into Seattle all the time for cultural events (like baseball games or festivals).
I certainly agree with building a denser “15 minute city”, and I’m not sure that more Sounder runs is a cost-effective solution, but the fact of that matter is that Auburn doesn’t provide the employment opportunities or cultural amenities of the Seattle area. Maybe one day in the far, far future, but certainly not anytime soon.
> AJ, yes Auburn has the infrastructure for a 15 minute city. But you have to leave Auburn if you live there but work some place else.
Auburn their downtown upzoned only of from last year to actually higher density. Sure as Nathan and you noted there is some cluster of housing and jobs but it’s not that dense. Auburn does have the infrastructure — but their zoning banned the actual housing from being built.
https://speakupauburn.org/downtownplan
> For too long downtown Seattle has hogged all the tax revenue from employment when that tax revenue needs to be reallocated to the cities where the workers live
I mean Seattle doesn’t control Auburn or Kent’s zoning/growth. Bellevue or even at least Kirkland and Bothell were able to upzone and build apartments near their core.
Auburn has plenty of housing, and zoning capacity for much more housing. That is not an issue. Median property value is $460,100. It is nearly 80 square kilometers. Upzoning Auburn’s far flung neighborhoods or rural areas won’t do anything to increase retail density. That is a Seattle solution for Auburn when the issues are different.
I suppose one could argue that the people who live in Auburn but work outside Auburn, especially Seattle, do so because they can’t afford a single family house in Seattle, but the reality is a condo in downtown Seattle costs much more than a house in Auburn. Upzoning Seattle will never benefit them. Upzoning Auburn certainly won’t. A 15 minute city is about having the commercial, retail and other amenities needed in daily life.
The workers leaving Auburn to work in Seattle are not asking for a house in Seattle. They want to live in Auburn although some Seattleites can’t fathom that but don’t want to spend 2 to 3 hours commuting each day.
Zoning is important to allow commercial and retail density and Auburn’s code allows that along with multi-family housing although much of the commercial/retail zoning is underused because it needs more revenue, shoppers, diners.
Auburn’s median household income is $87,406/yr but the number of high wage earners that don’t work in Auburn is the key. They work in Seattle mostly.
Let them work in Auburn and like many smaller cities post pandemic with work from home their city will see increased retail and tax revenue.
That is what the PSRC was getting at. Not moving all housing to one great jobs center like Seattle but dispersing those jobs throughout the Puget Sound region. Not everything in the universe revolves around Seattle. That is why the GMPC allocates jobs to different cities along with housing targets and tries to match them, which is good for Seattle if the jobs exceed the housing. Move the jobs someplace else.
Ideally no one should have to commute outside their city for work although that is unrealistic. But whatever planners can do to reduce commuting for work is a good thing. Like I said in a perfect world we wouldn’t need Sounder S. that is so heavily commuter oriented.
What I see with Sounder cities is how incremental decisions over a few decades has ultimately put Link where Sounder should be and Sounder where Link should be.
All the cities on the Sounder corridor owe their basic roots to the interurban. That’s why there are grids and walkable Downtowns that feel like villages that seem partly sustainable. It could have been a great corridor for high frequency Link light rail service. Had FWLE and TDLE been in this corridor, every city would be looking at attractive TOD evolutions and new TODs in between.
Conversely, there was no rail transit in the I-5 corridor. That corridor mainly evolved to connect Tacoma, Seattle and maybe SeaTac as fast as possible! A faster 80 mph train with few stops would have saved lots of time for a service at the speed of Sounder and could have maybe evolved into higher frequency two-way regional rail.
At this point it’s expensive and problematic to switch these modes with the corridors. I wouldn’t know where to begin! There are just too many entities and dollars already spent to fix the problem!
If we could rewind, I would have suggested turning Link east from KDM to Downtown Kent and proceeding south from there. Conversely, I would have suggested a faster 80 mph or higher regional train from Tacoma to KDM with fewer stops that would have followed I-5 at least as far as SODO (SeaTac transfers from KDM and BAR).
But we can’t rewind at this point. We are left to create something less optimal as best as we can.
> That is what the PSRC was getting at.
The PSRC / urban villages idea’s are slightly a bit different. Yes the old idea was transit for jobs the thinking that one would commute on transit and then just go home to a suburb and walk around.
The problem was 1) that the suburb had nothing to do on the other end still being heavily car centric 2) jobs were pretty spread out nowadays.
The urban village and 15 minute model is actually kinda referencing what you’re saying focusing on everything else like groceries, movie theaters, parks, other amenities within a walkable area and somewhat (implicitly) sacrificing for jobs to just drive.
> Upzoning Auburn’s far flung neighborhoods or rural areas won’t do anything to increase retail density
You don’t have to upzone the far flung neighborhoods. Could at least upzone the blocks around the train station, which they have now done but it took them till 2023. Regarding retail density and other items you need some moderate amount of density to support say a cafe — or one just has to have a vast parking lot instead.
Anyways the main point I was making was that Seattle does not control Auburn’s zoning so I’m not sure why both of y’all make it seem as if it is.
What I see with Sounder cities is how incremental decisions over a few decades has ultimately put Link where Sounder should be and Sounder where Link should be.
I wouldn’t go that far. The biggest problem with Link is that it needlessly extends too far from the urban core while not covering it. The stop spacing is terrible. You shouldn’t build a metro with gaps that are several miles wide unless you have a really good reason (e. g. crossing a lake). In this case, they don’t. They just picked an arbitrary plan (the spine) and that is what we are left with.
Sounder is fine. It is commuter rail. It is way more expensive than it should be because BSNF owns (most of) the railway. It is easy to imagine the cities along the Sounder pathway being served by frequent and busy regional rail. The problem is, they aren’t those kind of cities. They aren’t really cities at all. They are basically small towns surrounded by acres and acres of low-density suburbs. Compare these two places: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5cSrvxPaXDwhqGy3A and https://maps.app.goo.gl/wkqq65rTjpCzht8q9. Kind of similar really. Move around and they look quite a bit alike. Zoom out and they look about the same until you realize that one is Darrington, and the other is Auburn. This is actually close to the station, and one of the older places in town. It has character. What it doesn’t have is density. There is some density in Auburn, but only a few blocks. The rest of it looks surprisingly like Darrington, or sprawling (low-density, housing-only) subdivisions. Darrington is a town of less than 2,000. Auburn is a city of 84,000. The difference isn’t those handful of apartments. It is that Auburn sprawls for miles. In contrast, consider this city of 50,000: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dpCGxK5A691tbJCL8. That isn’t the center of town, either. Again, move the map around and you can see that blocks like that are typical. It is that way throughout the entire city (then it transitions to farmland very quickly). Despite being smaller than Auburn (in total popular) it is very different.
If you consider Auburn not as a city of 84,000 but a tiny city surrounded by a lot of sprawling suburbia, then the perspective changes.
There are several reasons for this. Consider Link. Every day thousands of people take the train from Capitol Hill because they live there and want to go somewhere else. Every day thousands of people take the train to Capitol Hill because of everything that is there. This is true for much of Link (despite the lack of stations). You can see it at every station — lots of people getting on and off, no matter which way the train is going.
In contrast, cities like Auburn doesn’t have much in the way of attractions. This explains why the reverse commute trains carry so few people. You have a huge city (Seattle) and yet only a handful ever take the Sounder train. That’s because the urban part of these cities is just so tiny. (Tacoma isn’t, but Sounder doesn’t serve urban Tacoma, and the trip is very long.) Successful regional rail works the same way as a successful metro. You have lots of people making various trips all day long. But in this case that just isn’t happening. At the one time of day you would expect to see a lot of riders from Seattle you see almost nothing. You are almost entirely dependent on trips from the places outside of Seattle.
This would not be that big of a deal if not for what I mentioned. In dense neighborhoods (like Capitol Hill) a lot of people don’t own a car. Some small compact cities often have a lot of people that rely only on transit as well (or walking, or biking) to get around. That is certainly the case in Europe. That just isn’t the case with Sounder cities. You don’t move to Auburn, buy a house on a big lot and then walk three miles to the grocery store. You have a car. My guess is just about everyone has a car. This again makes it very different than Capitol Hill. It also means that if you are going to someplace in say, Kent (which also sprawls) you will probably drive. That doesn’t mean that no one rides transit, but you just don’t have much chance of getting high ridership.
What you are left with is basically the commute. No one wants to drive into Downtown Seattle, especially during rush hour. Driving is terrible. Parking is terrible. It is the one time of day where you get lots of people interested in transit. This is why various cities across the country run a lot more commuter rail than regional rail. Transit advocates think it is some bizarre weakness when it comes to transit officials. Even when they own the lines the regional train service is weak compared to the rest of the world. To be fair, there is some of that. But one of the big reasons is that the development pattern is just a lot different in other parts of the world. You don’t get the type of ridership because the places are so different.
“15-minute city” really means 15-minute neighborhood; i.e., a circle with a half-mile diameter. Downtown Auburn around Auburn Station may be a 15-minute city, but are there any other in Auburn? If not, then only 10% of Auburn is a 15-minute city, and saying the whole municipality is is misleading. 124th on the 165 looks unwalkable to me: mostly single-family and little retail. Southeast Auburn on the 184 has apartments and I don’t remember if it has some retail, but it’s not a walker’s paradise. In contrast, the entire city of Granada, Spain, is walkable — one 15-minute city after another after another — according to a friend who lives there. That’s what Auburn needs to be if it’s going to be a 15-minute municipality and a real alternative to Seattle. Only maybe 25% of Seattle is “15-minute city”, but it’s a lot higher percent than Auburn.
“And WFH continues to flame out as employers realize that their employees are just playing with the kids or having mid-day “fun” with their spouses.”
WFH is as strong as ever, in spite of a few large employers mandating a return to the office at least a few times a week. If other employers try to force workers to return en masse, they might just quit instead. Then the employers won’t be able to recruit enough workers. The median boomer reached retirement age in 2020 so the workforce is shrinking. Immigration was interrupted 2020-2023, so there’s a gap in immigrants and their future children. Employers can fill small gaps with better pay and employee relations, but they can’t fill large gaps such as if a large number of workers change careers rather than coming back to the office. And WFH has allowed some people who couldn’t participate in the workforce before to do so, such as people with some disabilities or young children. So they can’t come back to the office. I’m actually in favor of a more in-office profile and in-person teams, but these are counterarguments I see that can’t just be waved away.
WFM is a quirk that is generally isolated to white collared work in the tech sector and is most pronounced in Seattle, the Bay Area, and NYC. The rest of the world and the rest of the economy works in person. The tenants in Seattle & Bellevue CBDs will eventually self-sort into companies that value in-person work and the associated commuting.
There is also a very strong relationship between working from home (WFH) and distance. There are several reasons for this. The farther you work from the office, the more likely you are to push to work from home. You will accept the compromises that come from it. That means you might make less money. So be it. Likewise, if you take a job at a software company and they tell you that you only need to be in the office twice a week, then this factors into where you decide to live. If you want a big house with a big yard, you immediately find out that most of Seattle and the East Side is out of your range, but you can go north or south. Yeah, your commute is really bad, but it is only once or twice a week.
Then there is the type of work. No one commutes from Auburn to Seattle to work at Burger King. A lot of the long distance commuters have high paying jobs. The type of professional jobs where the worker has more clout. If I’m a software security expert that just left Google for Amazon, it is quite likely I can negotiate to work from home four days a week, even if the standard is three. All this explains why commuter rail — across the country — has recovered far less than transit that serves closer areas.
I like work from home, and I would note that lower income clerical staff tend to commute the farthest due to cost of housing and living, and they like work from home even better. They also take transit to commute more than their bosses.
Before the pandemic I worked five days/week in an office in downtown Seattle. Before Covid our firm opened an office in Bellevue so I switched to that office. Covid forced all my clients to digitize payroll, accounts receivable and payable, tax filings, and so on, and moved all tax filings to online. I used to do onsite visits pretty regularly but today only if there is a due diligence issue or sale or appraisal. My clients don’t like to pay for my travel to their site anymore. Zoom is handy for any meetings.
Productivity for me has been better. I was spending over two hours commuting each day on a bus after driving to a park and ride. I go into the office around once per week, usually when I have an onsite visit at a client’s so the firm pays for the parking.
I have found it is important for me to get up and shower and shave and dress like work, and to have a dedicated home office which is a deduction. When I enter the office I am at work, and when I leave I leave work in the home office.
In 2025 our firm’s Seattle office lease expires and we are looking at reducing our office space around 60% to a more shared use design.
Claustrophobia can be an issue with WFH. Instead of going out for lunch like I use to do I do something like take the dog to the park or do errands in Issaquah to get out of the house. My wife can’t work from home and works in an intense healthcare job and sometimes when she tells me about her day I wish I had a little more interaction, but not at the cost of commuting 2.5 hours/day, and not the stress of her day.
Since she can’t work from home, although she can do a lot of her CME’s and paperwork from home now, she decided to switch from working at a Seattle hospital to an Issaquah hospital, and that has reduced her commute dramatically. Before she would drive very early to the park and ride on Mercer Island and take the 630 to Pill Hill. Now she drives to work, which is about 10 minutes. Her pay stayed the same.
Commuting is bad. It generates a lot of carbon, and it requires a lot of highway capacity to meet peak commutes. It wastes huge amounts of time, which is not compensated although some firms are now compensating employees for their commutes. It is why our regional planning focuses on allocating housing and jobs to different parts of the region so people live much closer to their work, and why planners like urban villages and 15 minute cities, which start by working near where you live. I would say that today I get to spend two more hours each day with my wife than before Covid, time we spent on a bus.
For most of us, living in downtown Seattle or Bellevue is not practical, or desirable, especially if you have kids or want a house and yard, but a lot of the large firms are located there. I personally think work from home is the future, just like who goes to a bank in person anymore or to a travel agent to buy an airline ticket. It really makes no sense to leave Issaquah to work in Seattle or Bellevue, except over the years that is where the employers have located because that is where the fancy tall office towers are. Beginning in 2025 the firm will save a lot of money on our lease in Seattle which means more pay for staff and partners.
I laugh when people think WFH thinks moving to rural Wyoming. I love Issaquah and this area and have no desire to live elsewhere. My wife and I just don’t want to spend over 2 hours on a bus M-F.
I think the “new normal” is to spend a few days in the office, and a few at home. Even before the pandemic this was common. I knew someone who lived on Bainbridge Island. Fremont was not a great commute for him. He mostly worked from home but would often come in to the office, sometimes during stretches (when working closely with someone). I’m sure this sort of thing is becoming a lot more common. That’s why (as you wrote) it doesn’t mean working in another part of the country. It just means less time spent at the office.
What that means is that there is a lot fewer commutes, even though there are almost as many commuters. The ratio goes up the farther you are from work. This explains why commuter rail has been hit so hard. Someone in Auburn commutes to downtown once a week. Someone in Roosevelt commutes four times a week.
I think the WFH situation is pretty obvious to anyone who has a computer-based job. Jobs (or project teams) where in-person collaboration is valuable will have more folks coming into the office to work adjacent to each other. Jobs or projects where in-person collaboration is unnecessary will have less folks bothering to come in to work adjacent to each other. It seems like most offices are landing on somewhere around 50% office, 50% remote, as an eventual steady state.
Meanwhile, transportation agencies are rightfully realizing that all-day operations are more valuable than peak commuters, so that’s the push for today. Some have mentioned that “weekday average” data is useless because there’s almost as much differentiation between Mondays/Fridays and midweek travel as there is between former weekdays and weekend travel.
I’d like to start seeing ridership data presented by day of week, rather than type of day, since Tuesdays and Wednesdays are becoming the notable peak travel days, as opposed to Saturdays and Sundays being the notable lull travel days. But changing that is probably a matter of public policy around weekday versus weekend transit service, and not as straightforward as simple changes in data presentation would make it seem.
As I’m a machinist, I can’t work from home; I have to be there to swap out parts the machines are running, and then handle assembly, shipping, and sometimes heading out to vendors/customers to pick up/drop off things. The only scenario I can see myself working from home is if I were a full-time novelist or screenwriter.
Some people do endure long car commutes for low-paying jobs, non-office jobs. I remember my mother during the Great Recession saying that some of the employees at the Weight Watchers-type of diet center she patronized during the Great Recession having to drive to that Bellevue branch from Kent, for a job that wasn’t much more than minimum wage. I also remember a server at a Kirkland restaurant saying that she lived in Duvall.
I’d like to start seeing ridership data presented by day of week, rather than type of day, since Tuesdays and Wednesdays are becoming the notable peak travel days, as opposed to Saturdays and Sundays being the notable lull travel days. But changing that is probably a matter of public policy around weekday versus weekend transit service, and not as straightforward as simple changes in data presentation would make it seem.
I agree. But there is so much data I want to see that the local agencies don’t provide, and they seem to be going backwards. You used to be able to get stop data (including the direction that people were going) for all ST service. ST Express (buses), Link and Sounder. Now the only thing we have is Link station data, but even that doesn’t tell you which way the rider was headed (like they used to).
@Michael Ligot — Yeah, there are a lot of jobs that can’t be done remotely. Medical, retail and a whole lot more. It is rather interesting how many can be done from home. A lot of them are very concentrated (in urban centers) which is why traffic is as bad as ever, but transit ridership (during peak) is way down. If you had to work at Northwest Hospital you probably drove and still drive. If you worked at an office downtown, you probably work from home at least once a week now.
Yeah, work-from-home is just terrible. Any time I’ve had to deal with an organization where everyone is now working from home, I can count on months-long delays that didn’t exist before covid. Any time anyone brings up work-from-home online you can expect many people claiming that they’re more productive at home, but that has not been my experience.
Lazarus,
Have you tried finding reliable child care lately? Your contempt for working people with lives and families is disgusting.
Here’s an idea: every single worker in the US who is having trouble getting reliable child care just walks off the job on the SAME EXACT DAY. No more asking for favors from a neighbor, no more cramming in meetings at home, no more taking the kids over to grandma’s. We just all walk off, all at once. Deadlines are missed. Assembly lines shut down. Deliveries sit at loading docks undelivered. Restaurants close. Construction sites stagnate. Patients pile up in emergency rooms. The economy needs us, and we know it.
The future of the economy in the US is a choice between decreased and more flexible working hours; OR skilled workers increasingly leaving the workforce and letting society pay the price. At this point in my life, I personally know more RNs who no longer work as nurses (I’ve lost track, but it’s a lot) than active RNs caring for patients in hospitals. Many of them have left to be stay at home moms, have found more lucrative work (reviewing data for insurance corporations), or have found easier more enjoyable work. One is a bartender at the airport. Another became a church secretary. It’s a lot of resources to be training college students for a healthcare career for them to be burning out after just 8 to 15 years and changing careers or leaving the workforce. The US needs to do better to prevent burnout and improve work-life balance. Employers demanding “in office 40/5” is pushing that envelope in the wrong direction.
Frankly, general strikes in the US (I know, not a realistic possibility in our current state of affairs) would do wonders to improve working conditions and improve our economy, longer term.
Those of us “at home playing with our kids” are doing so out of desperation.
Curious about this battery bus push at Metro… don’t they need like an extra 40% spare buses with battery and isn’t Metro out of space for storing buses?
Would rather they electrify with wires the easy to wire up routes (hello 48! Plus 8, 11. Also D, E, 5, 40, Madison BRT in the future) and stick to hybrid for the others.
Lithium Mining is not safe for the environment. Electric batteries are significantly more expensive. Meanwhile, Metro will face vehicle shortages and an aging fleet as they attempt to electrify. Metro runs many buses that are over 10 years in age.
This is the problem with mandates like this. The goals are stupid. It really should be “get the most bang for the buck when it comes to electrification”. It is quite likely this would involve running more wire, especially on frequent routes. But instead it is “transition to 100% electric”. Immediately you realize that running wires won’t cut it. You are aren’t going to run wires on I-5 to serve the 101 or 150. Even wires on the highways (to serve buses like A and E) won’t work. You need batteries. To no one’s surprise, the places where it would be difficult to run wire are also the places where range is an issue. Now you are focused on getting that last 10% instead of the other 90%, simply because the mandate was 100%. The problem is, it is extremely difficult to get that last 10%! This is the problem with mandates like this when it is based primarily on technology that is improving, but isn’t there yet. Maybe someday it will be cheap and easy, but it isn’t yet.
It sounds like we aren’t alone in this either. Other cities and counties across the country have done the same thing. The idea is to spur development — the more agencies demand the technology the more companies will provide — but again, a lot of this is just not practical. They can provide electric buses, but they take a long time to charge. There is no reason to demand anything better. They know very well that any technological improvement will be extremely valuable. While trolleys are pretty much unique to transit agencies, electric automobiles are not. Any breakthrough will be applied quickly to buses.
The reason battery buses available in the USA take a long time to charge is they seem to only be using automotive style connectors. The battery buses I saw being demonstrated at Innotrans in Berlin in 2016 used an overhead charger that has far more current and voltage capacity.
It’s one of those things you’d hope the US suppliers would one day make available here.
@Glenn,
I don’t know all the details, but Metro does have overhead chargers for their BEB’s.
Glenn,
The Proterra Catalyst and NFI XE40/XE60 use overhead pantograph charging. The NFIs also can be plugged in but that’s far slower and for overnight charging.
Well said. I am deeply concerned this mandate push will actually be very bad for transit with unreliable unproven vehicles pushed into service with a short shelf life in routes poorly suited for them. Also the excess vehicle storage issue remains.
Sound Transit Stride BRT is really going to push this hard and in a difficult environment, long runs in traffic clogged I-405 freeway running. We shall see how it works/doesn’t.
San Francisco Muni was talking a few years back about scrapping large parts of their trolley bus network for BEBs as part of the ill conceived state level electrification push that ignored existing proven electric trolley bus networks, everything had to be battery. I understand they have since resolved this issue and are no longer talking of eliminating the trolleys in SF.
The problem here is not the capability of batteries in general, but the capability of battery buses manufactured by US companies.
For simple proof that the “battery buses can’t have more than 150 miles of range” is bunk, look at the Tesla Semi. Fully loaded with a trailer, it gets around 400 miles of range. So, a hypothetical “bus” in the form of a trailer with seats, towed by a Tesla Semi already has considerably more range than the hydrogen buses Metro wants to use instead because battery buses supposedly can’t have enough range. (Of course, a trailer towed by a semi truck is not the most efficient way to build a bus, but you get the point).
Another example is the Amtrak bus between Seattle and Bellingham, which is already electrified, and has enough range to only need charging at one end. Seattle to Bellingham is about 80 miles, so to be able to do the round trip safely, under all weather conditions, we can probably conclude that the bus has around 250 miles of range, about equal to the hydrogen buses Metro is looking at.
The real here is that not battery technology, it’s that bus manufacturing in the US is controlled by two companies behaving like lazy monopolists, who don’t have a lot of incentive to invest in battery buses when they can make money just selling transit agencies more diesel buses. If you go to Europe or China, battery buses are deployed at a much larger scale than here, and they pay much less for the technology than we do. For example, a BYD battery bus in Europe costs less than a U.S.-based agency has to pay for a diesel bus.
Unfortunately, the same problem of lack of competition in the bus industry is the same, regardless of what powers the bus, and according to the Urbanist’ article, a hydrogen buses actually costs more to buy than a battery bus. But, unlike a battery bus, a hydrogen bus costs the equivalent of something like $10/gallon of diesel to operate, and still requires very expensive fueling infrastructure to deliver.
I totally agree that mandates to electrify 100% of the fleet by a given date are bad, and that there’s a lot of untapped fruit to be gained through strategic additions of new trolley wire on more routes.
But, at the same time, I feel like our electrification ability is being artificially constrained by the vehicle options available by two U.S. based bus companies, and that the real solution is for the U.S. government to just get rid of the trains and let us by our buses from China for cheap. The problem is, current politics prioritizes the profits of U.S. vehicle manufacturers way ahead the efficiency of our transit systems, so the system we have is what we get.
Two other factors that I wonder if are a constraint on battery buses.
First is the classic debate of low floor bus vs. high floor bus. Low floor is easier for passengers to get on and off (particularly those with wheelchairs), but high floor offers much more room at the bottom of the bus to stuff batteries into. So, it’s worth asking, could this tradeoff be revisited for longer-distance express routes if it allows for bigger battery ranges.
The second elephant in the room is heating. A bus has a huge cabin with poor insulation and doors constantly opening and closing, so heating the bus on a cold day takes a lot of energy. Furthermore, it is a hard requirement that buses have to be able to run -with the heat on – on the coldest possible day of the year, so if all this heat is coming from batteries, you have to pay for a lot of extra battery capacity, just to provide heat on a freakishly cold day, that isn’t needed the rest of the year, which, in turn, makes the bus more expensive. Ideally, Metro would look into hybrid solutions where you use batteries to move the bus and power a heat pump for mildly cold days, while, on the very cold days, supplementing the heat pump with a furnace that burns propane or some other fuel. Intuitively, this seems like it would have to be cheaper than oversizing the batteries to offer sufficient heat every day, but under a “100% zero emission mandate”, propane bus heating is probably not allowed, forcing more expensive options, such as larger batteries or hydrogen.
> For simple proof that the “battery buses can’t have more than 150 miles of range” is bunk, look at the Tesla Semi. Fully loaded with a trailer, it gets around 400 miles of range. So, a hypothetical “bus” in the form of a trailer with seats, towed by a Tesla Semi already has considerably more range than the hydrogen buses Metro wants to use instead because battery buses supposedly can’t have enough range.
Batteries are more complicated than just range. The other factor is charging speed. And then there is whether the battery will hold it’s charge after many cycles (degradation).
Long / medium route with frequent stop buses are basically one of the worse applications for batteries as you have have 1) high capacity 2) must have fast charging with the short stops 3) also do not want to degrade the battery. Anytime you try to improve one of the above you have to choose a trade off with the other one.
If you have a short route one can get by with lower capacity and try for faster charging. Or if you have a long route with few stops you can stop longer at each stop and charge for a longer amount of time in between (stride 1/2). Many frequent stops also means high capital costs to install all those bus chargers.
asdf;
All of the buses I’ve seen aimed at the European transit market are 100% low floor and have the batteries on the roof.
WL:
It would be silly to have chargers at each stop. However, each bus route includes layover time between runs. Usually, this is 10 minutes minimum but is longer in some situations.
In 2004, before the current battery and charging technology, eBus demonstrated their lead-acid battery buses could operate any number of transit routes with only the recharge time during end of route layovers. Charging and battery technology has made huge leaps since then.
Eg: one of the interesting breakthroughs that’s actually pretty obvious is battery pre-heating: when you get close to a layover point, the driver can press a button that turns on a battery heater. When the charger connects, this lets the battery charge much faster.
Battery degradation happens, but it’s nothing like the sulfating problem you get when charging lead-acid from a cheap charger. Even lead-aid can last a very long time with a good quality charger.
Low speed city driving is actually an ideal case for battery power. Regenerative braking helps offset the starting energy, so it’s quite the opposite of what you’re used to thinking where highway speeds provide the best economy. Hills at highway speed are a real problem though. I can’t think of anything in Seattle that’s this way, but the steep roller coaster hills on I-5 between Chehalis and Castle Rock are the type of thing that’s terrible, because the speeds are high but so is the rate of ascent.
That said, it’s difficult to get excited over battery buses when the 70 is running diesel because of a lack of a few blocks of trolley wire. Low hanging fruit first, please. There’s an awful lot of that around.
> It would be silly to have chargers at each stop. However, each bus route includes layover time between runs. Usually, this is 10 minutes minimum but is longer in some situations.
10 minutes is not enough time to charge the typical battery bus for the route length. There’s a reason why many us transit agencies ended up having to have 2~3 buses for the same route basically acting as backups because they couldn’t charge them fast enough.
> Battery degradation happens, but it’s nothing like the sulfating problem you get when charging lead-acid from a cheap charger. Even lead-aid can last a very long time with a good quality charger.
I think you might want to google a bit about transit agencies finding out about battery bus degradation.
In general, transit agencies have learned some very harsh lessons about battery buses, they are getting slightly better but I am not sure why you are so optimistic when many many us transit agencies have found out the hard way that the range is much shorter than they expected.
> Low speed city driving is actually an ideal case for battery power.
No not really. It might be more efficient compared to gas for cost, but buses are concerned about the range and about the time it takes to recharge. For mileage it is still more efficient to be on a freeway going quickly and just reach the next charger.
If you end up having to have 2 electric buses versus 1 diesel bus for the same route, you wipe away any fuel savings.
The urbanist discussed all these issues last week.
https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/06/18/metro-hydrogen-buses/
And honestly if we actually go to the report — it’s even worse when we check the details. The article by seattletimes and the urbanist are actually quite “positive” compared to what the report says.
* Battery-electric buses also have lower passenger capacity than diesel hybrids (see
exhibit C), …. hold almost 20 percent fewer people than the standard hybrid-diesel buses Metro Transit is currently operating.
* Using conservative assumptions about outdoor temperatures, hills, and capacity of bus batteries currently available, Metro Transit’s technical consultant reported that 60 layover charging stations would be necessary to provide the 2023 level of service.
* At the time of this report, battery and charging technologies are not sufficient to meet service needs for Metro Transit’s RapidRide routes because distance per charge is too short and charging time is too long
https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/independent/governance-and-leadership/government-oversight/auditors-office/reports/audits/2024/zero-emissions/zero-emissions-2024.pdf?rev=4b7f53afc54441809d5e2a2bdead1127&hash=F81C20616F7C55BC443DE13D3D546599
Look I understand wanting to electrify the bus fleet — but electrification should not be blindly prioritized over transit passenger needs. And again we are not the first transit agency to ‘try out’ electric buses.
None of the buses I’ve seen designed for the European market remove seating for battery capacity.
They must be using awfully small recharging stations for 10 minutes to not be enough. As I’ve noted before, with a vehicle the size of a bus, you’re not going to get there with some tiny thing designed for autos.
Let’s look at the E: it’s 15 miles from Aurora Village to King Street Station. That really isn’t that far,
If you were driving this in a standard electric auto, it might take 25 miles off the battery, even with heat going and lots of start and stop driving. Let’s double it and call it 30. 4 miles per kWh isn’t unusual, but suppose it’s lower, so in the 3 range. You need 10 kWh to regain what you lost. A good automotive fast charger is capable of 150 kw, so you’d regain the lost power for that 15 miles in 4 minutes.
Buses, however, have a much larger battery. New Flyer’s biggest battery is some 500 kwh, some 10 times what you see in autos. It follows that to auto-type recharge speed you’d also need charging infrastructure that’s 10 times the capacity.
So, figure ar least 1,500 kw per charger, or 1.5 megawatts.
This shouldn’t be surprising. If you are running trolleybuses or light rail, you need a substation or two to provide adequate power. Lynnwood Link has what? 5 substations between Northgate and Lynnwood? If you’re running trolleybuses with no wire, you’ll still need to deliver that much power, but it’s going to be concentrated at a single point.
You can’t expect to need that much power, and expect to deliver enough of it on a phone booth sized device.
I won’t say I’m particularly optimistic. It’s obvious US agencies are going to wander around in the dark for a while on this. However, there are places where much more progress is being made. Hamberg plans to be zero emissions by 2030. The progress made in those places gives me optimism that one day operators in the USA will figure it out as well.
@Glenn
> If you were driving this in a standard electric auto, it might take 25 miles off the battery, even with heat going and lots of start and stop driving. Let’s double it and call it 30.
Glenn you cannot just calculate it so simply. A car on the freeway will only take say 20 minutes. The bus will take at least 40 minutes or up to an hour if stuck in traffic on Aurora avenue. There is still heavy loss whenever one accelerates and decelerates as well.
> even with heat going
Heating the bus takes a lot of energy as well or cooling it. This is not even getting into how cold weather saps the battery capacity as well.
> So, figure ar least 1,500 kw per charger, or 1.5 megawatts.
I heavily suggest you google a bit about the current state of electric buses a bit more. And again you cannot just multiple a random car charger up to bus charger wattage.
> You can’t expect to need that much power, and expect to deliver enough of it on a phone booth sized device.
I’m not quite sure why you are completely discarding the analysis done just 2~3 weeks.
> It’s obvious US agencies are going to wander around in the dark for a while on this. However, there are places where much more progress is being made. Hamberg plans to be zero emissions by 2030
It isn’t impossible, however it will require installing lots of chargers which are expensive.
> Hamberg plans to be zero emissions by 2030.
Lastly, perhaps you should check how exactly they are doing that. Hamburg also has to resort to hydrogen buses.
“””
We’re investing in hydrogen too
Fuelled by 100 percent green hydrogen, the buses are capable of at least 350-kilometre round trips – the same as a diesel bus. With this range they cover longer distances than electric buses (150-200 kilometres). That’s why they form a core part of our mobility strategy.
“””
https://www.hochbahn.de/en/projects/e-buses-
The thing about batteries is that, if the cost of the batteries themselves sufficiently drops, they can become cheaper in total lifecycle cost that diesel buses. That can never be the case for hydrogen buses (absent big increases in the cost of diesel fuel) because the fuel itself is more expensive. And, with green hydrogen requiring 3X as much electricity as input compared to charging a battery, plus the fact that it has to be transported by tanker trunk rather than wire, and chilled to nearly absolute zero for transport and storage, there are hard limits to how low the cost of hydrogen can get.
Again, it’s not as if batteries large enough to move a bus 300 miles on one charge do not exist. The Tesla Semi already has it. Electric pickup trucks are already in the market with about half that capacity, so putting two electric pickup truck batteries together (easily doable with a vehicle the size of a bus) would do it.
However, just because a bus can be electrified by equipping it with a huge battery providing 300 miles of range, to get through the entire service day on one charge, doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient way. If the route is reasonably short and frequent, a much smaller battery, backed by overhead wire, is often much cheaper. For instance, the cheapest path to electrifying RapidRide D and E is probably to just install trolley wire. The G should be using trolley wire too, if it weren’t for that ridiculous constraint that a bus can either run on trolley wire, or have left-hand side doors, but not both.
There is also a lot of potential for buses that use trolley wire for part of the route and batteries for the other part. For example, an electrified version of the 32 could, perhaps, use trolley wire to charge the battery while slogging through downtown and the U-district, while running off-wire through Interbay, Fremont, and Wallingford. You’d need some battery capacity, and maybe some small additions to the trolley, but you wouldn’t need to run wire over messy places like the Fremont Bridge to cover the entire route.
But, for “equity” reasons, Metro says that south King bus routes have to be electrified first, and Seattle must wait and, of course, any solution that involves more trolley buses runs contrary to that, because Seattle is where the trolley wire is and where the bus base capable of handling trolley buses is.
And this is where we see that lofty equity and sustainability mandates run counter to providing high quality transit service which will most benefit equity and sustainability goals. Instead we blow millions on bureaucracies of equity and sustainability armies that spend days drafting up policies and mandates.
> Again, it’s not as if batteries large enough to move a bus 300 miles on one charge do not exist. The Tesla Semi already has it. Electric pickup trucks are already in the market with about half that capacity, so putting two electric pickup truck batteries together (easily doable with a vehicle the size of a bus) would do it.
Yes, but that is not in real life. Battery electric buses only have the range of around ~100 miles.
* Battery-charged vehicles typically have a driving range of 70-100 miles, and some can go up to 265 miles before needing to be recharged (diesel buses have an average range of 690 miles).
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-electric-buses-benefits-outweigh-costs
I mean even the hamburg one says:
* With this range they cover longer distances than electric buses (150-200 kilometres) or around 100 miles.
Also you need to actually put the battery somewhere, you cannot just slap it on the bus. if you put it on the bottom then it ends becoming a high floor bus, you place it in the middle and you’re taking away seats/standing space, you put it on top you can’t put too much or your bus will become top heavy.
I haven’t even gotten into the cost of where battery electric buses are already double the cost of diesel buses — and this is before your proposed battery capacity expansion
I’m not going to be giving a complete lesson on battery electric buses here, but the main point stands that they are not ready yet.
“you put it on top you can’t put too much or your bus will become top heavy.”
Lithium batteries aren’t that heavy. The 100% low floor buses used in Europe have been operating as demonstrators for over 8 years and there don’t seem to be issues.
“ life. Battery electric buses only have the range of around ~100 miles.”
The Dutch built battery buses running from Bellingham to Seattle are making a 180 mile round trip, in both slow moving stop and go traffic and at times when the freeway is moving well.
“I haven’t even gotten into the cost of where battery electric buses are already double the cost of diesel buses”
Parts of Central America have been experiencing some 90% crop failure due to climate change. The longer greenhouse gas emission goes on, the more expensive the future becomes through increased food prices and other problems.
> Lithium batteries aren’t that heavy. The 100% low floor buses used in Europe have been operating as demonstrators for over 8 years and there don’t seem to be issues.
Yes they work for much shorter range trips, again we’ve discussed this already. I’ve literally quoted from the hamberg transit website from europe that the range is not enough for longer routes. The king county auditor has investigated the same for our system.
I don’t know why you keep trying to insist battery electric buses have longer ranges than they currently do.
> The Dutch built battery buses running from Bellingham to Seattle are making a 180 mile round trip, in both slow moving stop and go traffic and at times when the freeway is moving well.
Glenn we’ve been over this already. When on the freeway the bus can go pretty far the same as a diesel bus being more efficient. Think in terms of time traveled for the bus not just mileage. There’s been trials of electric battery buses going 500 miles — but they are just on the freeway not stopping. It’s not actually a useful transit pattern.
> Parts of Central America have been experiencing some 90% crop failure due to climate change. The longer greenhouse gas emission goes on, the more expensive the future becomes through increased food prices and other problems.
Is your plan to buy battery electric buses and then we run a third/half of the service. Or we buy 3 electric battery buses for every 1 diesel bus?
And again we are not the first US transit agency to attempt this and then fail.
If we really wanted for environmentalism there are better chinese/european electric buses — but then because of protectionism we can only use federal dollars on american electric bus companies.
A lot of the problem here is that, there’s the capabilities of battery buses in general vs. the capabilities of battery buses, as manufactured by U.S. companies. The two are not the same, and it’s not close. This is far from a surprise; even among diesel buses, the U.S. market has far fewer options to choose from than European and Asian markets.
This impacts not just feature set, but also cost. For example, according to Google, lithium ion batteries, these days, are supposed to be going for around $100/kWh, so a 300 kWh battery (enough to move a bus about 200 miles or so on one charge) should cost around $30k. Considering that this $30k battery replaces the diesel engine, and the rest of the bus is mostly the same, the actual cost difference between battery vs. diesel should be at most $30k, ideally, less. Except, it’s actually more like $300k.
This begs the question of why? Is the battery market tightly cornered by BYD and a few other companies to the point where only they can actually buy batteries for $100/kWh and everyone else has to pay 10 times as much? Is it lack of economies of scale because the market for battery buses in the US is so small? Or, is it simply a couple of monopolistic companies figuring that if an agency has a zero emissions mandate, the sky is the limit for what they will pay, so may as well milk the cow and get some profit? I don’t know, but most likely, the answer is some version of “all of the above”.
Given all these constraints, I agree that 100% electrification is not really feasible for king County Metro right now, but buying hydrogen buses instead really solve the problem. They’re still going to be very expensive, they’re still going to have much less range than diesel, and, unlike electricity, which is cheap, once the charging infrastructure is bought and paid for, hydrogen is expensive, with every fill up costing at least double per mile that of a diesel bus.
To an extent, advancing technology can bring hydrogen costs down some, but there are limits. Making green hydrogen still requires around 3X the electricity, compared to charging a battery. And transporting the hydrogen is also energy intensive and expensive – you have to move it by tanker truck rather than wires, and cool it down to near absolute zero to make it a liquid, in order to be able to hold a reasonable amount of it on one truck. Hydrogen is also very leak prone, which translates to further energy losses.
I’m not going to argue that battery buses – as actually offered by U.S. companies that King County Metro can actually buy from, today – are sufficient to meet the needs of a 100% electrified fleet, I just don’t think dabbling with hydrogen is the solution, although, (I suppose if it’s just a trial run to test the technology on a couple of buses in isolation, it won’t cost that much in the scheme of things). I’d rather see Metro focus on the low-hanging fruit of electrification (add trolley wire to a few more in-Seattle routes), and stick with diesel for everything else until costs go down a bit. Battery charging equipment too, I have a feeling is costing Metro far more money now, than the same equipment would in 10 year’s time, so simply waiting a bit would save a bundle. Except that mandates from on high say that we have to do it now, whatever the cost, and can’t wait.
Hydrogen fuel cells are a really bad solution, except in very limited cases. They’re expensive and the fuel cell is only about 50% efficient, and electrolysis of hydrogen isn’t very efficient either. Entire electricity to delivered road horsepower is only about 20%, but it’s around 70% for battery bus or trolleybus.
It’s at best a stopgap measure and works in places like Spain with a surplus of electric generation most of the year.
> Hydrogen fuel cells are a really bad solution, except in very limited cases. They’re expensive and the fuel cell is only about 50% efficient, and electrolysis of hydrogen isn’t very efficient either. Entire electricity to delivered road horsepower is only about 20%, but it’s around 70% for battery bus or trolleybus.
I agree, which is why we should just stick with diesel buses with their longer range and only switch if and only if the technology is actually there. The only reason why we are even talking about hydrogen is because of the insistence of advocates for zero emissions buses even if the technology is not ready. But replacing one diesel bus with 3 battery electric buses is ludicrous so I’ll settle for hydrogen if they really insist on it.
Anyways at the end of the day, the buses that you want do not exist yet @Glenn, though feel free to call/email the american electric bus companies and prove me and others wrong.
we should just stick with diesel buses with their longer range and only switch if and only if the technology is actually there.
Exactly. It is easy to assume that the problem is the market. They would build these things if agencies wanted to buy them. Thus by publicly stating our intentions, the companies will build them. But that simply isn’t the case. The problem is, the technology doesn’t exist. Furthermore, there is a huge market across the world for this. Agencies are will to pay extra for battery buses — if they work for them. The companies developing this technology know this, and the commitment by a various agencies doesn’t really change their approach.
RE: Statistics show more people die on South Seattle streets where wide streets encourage fast driving
New book “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” hopefully will do to the junk science/malpractice of Traffic Engineering what The Death and Life of Great American Cities did to 1950s modernist planning. Interestingly enough Jane Jacobs also unleashed on the traffic engineering profession in her last book Dark Age Ahead as an example of pseudo science.
I probably sound too cynical, but engineers recommend changes based on what leaders want. The profession has had its visionaries —but even the performance metrics that drive designs evolve because they represent what leaders want. So the culprit is ultimately our leaders more than their employees.
And engineers aren’t out there running over people. It’s the general public doing it. From overly bright new headlights to brighter and larger info screens in cars (both significantly reduce driver visibility of things happening on a street) to more people distracted by reading and even texting on smart phones that weren’t around 15 years ago (including increasing use of navigation apps), beating up on traffic engineers as the primary cause of the problem strikes me as foolishly ignoring the bigger technological and behavioral realities.
When I was a child, traffic safety ads were common (thanks to the FCC rules at the time). We no longer have a big similar effort to inspire drivers to drive more safely.
I haven’t read the book, but I can imagine how it evolved. It is quite reasonable. First you build a fast road (like Aurora). You have a lot of accidents. A lot of these are people bumping into each other, or not being able to handle the turn. So you make it wider, and smooth out the turn. If people drive the same speed, it is safer. But they either didn’t realize that people would go faster, or going faster was a bonus. It is quite possible safety was not the first priority (which gets back to your point). The goal was to allow cars to go faster with the same level of safety (not especially high).
The idea of designing roads which would force riders to slow down (and even hit the curb or encounter fender benders) is a radical departure from that mindset. Ironically the first use of Chicanes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane) was in motor racing in the 1970s. If you were to introduce one them to a typical traffic engineer at that time they would probably think you are nuts. What the hell is that? Cars are just going to run into tree! You’ve increased the likelihood of an accident, fool!
Modern traffic engineering is counter intuitive. Adding obstacles that cars can run into makes the street safer (for everyone). Adding lanes to a busy freeway doesn’t reduce traffic. Taking a general purpose lane and converting it to transit actually reduces traffic. None of that is obvious but it works.
The governments were focused on maximizing car thoroughput. If every person in North Seattle is expected to drive everywhere, and the majority of voters say that’s what they want, they need massive car lanes and tweaks to fit as many cars as possible. Safety was a secondary issue because driving was presumed safe.
Individual interests also got into the street-design specs to the detriment of the whole. In some cities the fire department demanded that streets be wide enough that two hook-and-ladder trucks could turn around at the same time. Even though that’s vanishingly rare, and one truck could just wait for the other one, or move further away to turn, streets had to be wide 100% of the time. That creates excess space that pushes things apart and encourages drivers to speed. But we must do it because think of the fire trucks.
In my experience working with planners in Albuquerque, this isn’t true. The planners and politicians were on the same page, but when the rubber hit the road, and the engineers went to build, they always found a reason in one of their uniform manuals to make the road faster, and therefore the pedestrian and bicycle environment less safe.
The manuals is part of what I’m talking about. They’re mostly designed to maximize car thoroughput, and for esoteric things like large fire trucks making U-turns anywhere.
I’m still waiting on my copy from Elliott Bay Books, which I pre-ordered a while ago.
Based on a podcast interview with the author, it sounds like a very relevant book for urban planning and transportation policy.
One example he used is how if he lives in an urban area and drives one mile and crashes once, he’s statistically less safe (using the common “crashes per VMT” metric) than someone who drives 10 miles and crashes 5 times.
In the interview, he also mentioned that minor crashes (“fender benders”) are conflated with major crashes in safety statistics, such that if a road redesign takes a road from 1 deadly crash per year and 5 fender benders to 0 deadly crashes and 10 fender benders, that redesign is statistically less safe than the original, although it has apparently saved lives.
As I remember there was supposed to be a freeway where Mercer is now that would have connected I-5 to Seattle Center, and the freeway they planned to build along the waterfront.
All of it, and the Thompson freeway, got shut down when people protested.
But it explains why Mercer is a mess. Mercer wasn’t designed to be what it is.
Jas and Mike: I agree that the prior streets made no sense and that was a vestige of building only part of the freeway system. Plus, the 99 tunnel was coming on line at that time so there was an interest to fix things. Finally, the Gates Foundation was ready to build!
Is it better? Oh probably. Is it great? I would say no.
It was a hard fix then and a harder fix now. A fix at this point would be expensive and messy. I’m not proposing a solution.
The lesson I see though is simply to not build crazy wide streets anywhere in a city where there are often pedestrians.
I speculate that a full one-way Mercer/ Roy couplet between I-5 and Queen Anne would have been conceptually better for both pedestrians and traffic flow. There would be less street width to cross at one time. The signals could have shorter cycles (fewer phases) so pedestrians and bicyclists wouldn’t have such long waits to cross’s the street. The one-way layout would allow the signals to be sequenced together, like they are on 2nd and 4th Avenues downtown. Still, given all that has happened, I don’t see advocating for a new plan to change the situation.
The lesson I see though is simply to not build crazy wide streets anywhere in a city where there are often pedestrians.
Yeah, I agree. I think if they had simply kept is small it would be fine. There are several sections. The area by the Center was four lanes then, it is four lanes now. North of there on Roy is similar (it was two lanes then, it is two lanes now). The streets are bidirectional instead of one way. I suppose that is better (I assume it is, otherwise they wouldn’t have done it).
It is east of there that they went crazy. Between Fifth Avenue and Taylor it went from four lanes to basically seven! You can see the before and after pictures on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hMt96ft8GgTAh2Dc7. This is where the traffic engineers hubris kicked in. I’m sure they thought this would solve everything. It hasn’t. Traffic has just shifted around. In terms of the streetscape, it peaked in 2011 — after the giant parking lot was replaced by the Gates Center, but before they gave so much space to the cars. It wasn’t all bad. They added bike lanes and made it much nicer to walk under Aurora. They should have done that, and not added the extra lanes. Same goes for everything east of there. Mercer used to be four lanes (https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZhWnwEQjrxMHsn9p9). Yeah, it was a dump. But they made it six lanes (three each direction). This is so wide you need a center spot in the middle in case the light changes. To be fair this did make Valley a lot nicer — it went from five lanes to two. You can kind of see the thinking here:
1) No one walks on Mercer, unless they have to. Allow for a decent way to go under Aurora and that is it.
2) Make Valley nice. It is where people will want to walk and bike.
3) You need three lanes each way on Mercer to alleviate traffic.
The only flaw is that last item, really. If Mercer was two lanes each way it wouldn’t be that bad. Of course it would be nice if it was like Valley, but it is more important that Valley is nice.
The lesson I take is don’t rip a massive gash through the middle of your city with an interstate highway. The distributor/collectors like Mercer are all a consequence of the larger disease. Vamcouver BC got it right.
> As I remember there was supposed to be a freeway where Mercer is now that would have connected I-5 to Seattle Center, and the freeway they planned to build along the waterfront.
@jas
It was the seattle commons plan. https://crosscut.com/sponsored/walking-tour-south-lake-union-might-have-been
Though to be fair back then it wasn’t quite planned for the sr 99 tunnel either.
> The lesson I take is don’t rip a massive gash through the middle of your city with an interstate highway. The distributor/collectors like Mercer are all a consequence of the larger disease. Vancouver BC got it right.
I’ve thought about it a bit and also there’s the urbanist article about making i-405 the main path. https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/12/20/changing-freeway-names-offers-path-to-removing-i-5-from-downtown-seattle/
Originally I thought the line of thinking made more sense, but one large flaw is that say with Vancouver and even San Francisco is that they aren’t on the main freeway path. For instance for Vancouver it’s British Columbia Highway 1 not actually highway 99 or highway 7a.
For San francisco, i5 is all the way in central valley and then even i-280 can skirt the bottom of the city to reach the bay bridge.
For Seattle region the north/south freeway basically has to go through west of lake washington aka as i-5 in seattle. Or east of lake washington aka i-405 in bellevue. Sure we could redesignate i-405 but then basically we’re just shifting the problem over the bellevue.
For specifically mercer street / aurora avenue tunnel / i5 unfortunately part of the problem is that the projects were all implemented somewhat independently and didn’t really consider everything together. I don’t think the planners really considered that many people trying to avoid the sr 99 tolls and using mercer street to such an extend. Otherwise they definitely would have added a much more usable off ramp instead of the 90 degree turn off roy street.
I mean even the seattle commons proposal if you look at it closely that jas is referencing doesn’t actually add ramps in the directions that we are usually talking about from sr 99 southbound to mercer street eastbound or mercer street westbound to sr 99 northbound.
Instead it proposed a ramp from mercer street westbound to sr 99 southbound — something not really that useful because the sr 99 tunnel now skips downtown.
“As I remember there was supposed to be a freeway where Mercer is now that would have connected I-5 to Seattle Center, and the freeway they planned to build along the waterfront.”
“It was the seattle commons plan”
The freeway was a 1950s plan called the Bay Freeway that would have connected I-5 to 99 around Mercer Street. It was part of a series of freeways including upgrading highway 99 downtown, NE 50th Street, and the Thompson expressway on MLK/Empire Way.
The Seattle Commons was a 1990s proposal to turn Westlake Avenue into a linear park promenade, with mixed-use in the surrounding streets. So it would have been like SLU is now but with a linear park.
@WL,
You are misinterpreting a drawing. The idea of making Mercer St limited access did not originate with the Commons plan. It goes all the way back to the 1950’s and the freeway mania of the era.
The only reason you see what looks like a freeway in those drawings of the Commons is because of landscape design. Basically there is no need for exits anywhere between approx Fairview and Dexter, mainly because it is proposed to be a park, and therefore there are no roads to exit too.
Ditto for stop lights and pedestrian crossings. The concept was to go with a lid instead to avoid bifurcating the park, and the concept of a lid worked well with the concept of connecting the pre-existing exit ramps at I-5 and the underpasses at Broad. All that infrastructure predates the commons and is still there.
But bottom line, the idea of making Mercer limited access did not originate with the Commons. The concept predates the Commons by several decades.
“Sure we could redesignate i-405 but then basically we’re just shifting the problem over the bellevue.”
The Eastside is more car-happy than Seattle so let them take the cars.
I’m not convinced eliminating I-5 in Seattle would work, as there would at least need to be a wide boulevard in its place for intra-Seattle and adjacent trips.
Sure we could redesignate i-405 but then basically we’re just shifting the problem over to bellevue.
That would still be a huge improvement. Seattle was not built around the freeway. The freeway(s) rammed right through it, and we’ve been struggling with the aftermath ever since. There is a big difference between that and a city like Bellevue, which was not really a city until they built the freeway. There were places like Kirkland, but the freeway skirted the town (thankfully). In contrast, the freeway ran through Chinatown and still damages it to this day.
Of course it is much harder to fix it now. But at some point it may very well be worth removing the freeway. It will eventually cost a bundle to repair it. The freeway dramatically reduces the value of the land around it. Downtown Bellevue, meanwhile, could build a few caps if they felt like it was worth it.
The lesson I take is don’t rip a massive gash through the middle of your city with an interstate highway. The distributor/collectors like Mercer are all a consequence of the larger disease. Vancouver BC got it right.
Absolutely. I think most European cities are like Vancouver as well. There are freeways, but they basically get to the edge of town. Of course there is a range. It is common to find websites showing the impact that freeways had on American cities — it is harder to find that for European cities.
@Lazarus
> The only reason you see what looks like a freeway in those drawings of the Commons is because of landscape design. Basically there is no need for exits anywhere between approx Fairview and Dexter, mainly because it is proposed to be a park, and therefore there are no roads to exit too.
I never said it needed to exit earlier. What I am saying is that the mercer underpass even in the commons and even in the 50s design doesn’t actually connect to Aurora avenue well, which is where a lot of the traffic is coming from.
> But bottom line, the idea of making Mercer limited access did not originate with the Commons. The concept predates the Commons by several decades.
I know that I was just giving a brief description to jas if they wanted to find it. The more recent plans in 2000s is probably more relevant than plans more than 70 years ago.
I do think that overly wide streets are more dangerous. It’s why I’m not a fan of putting surface light rail or high frequency buses in the medians of busy, multi-lane arterials. If a street carries a huge volume of traffic, dedicated room for surface transit usually makes it even wider. MLK and Aurora both take a relatively long time to walk across!
Envision MLK with a simple cut and cover set of Link tracks under the lanes in one direction. The surface traffic lanes could then be positioned next to each other making the street more narrow and faster/ safer to walk across. The light cycles could then be lots shorter so jaywalking would drop. The vacated space could be replaced by a multi-use trail with the station entrances directly off that trail. Buses on cross streets could have stops right at the trail so transferring riders wouldn’t have to cross any streets!
Can confirm this, where I live in Denver I cross Colorado Blvd almost everyday and have to maintain eye contact with left turning drivers so they know I’m watching them and for them to wait their turn as I’m crossing the street. Tho California stop (rolling stop) drivers also annoy me when crossing. Just wait at the signal till it turns green to go instead of being impatient to turn right on red.
It really isn’t the width itself that makes streets so dangerous. It is the multiple lanes of cars. I remember some of the wide streets in Amsterdam, and what a challenge it was to cross the street. You have pedestrians, then bikes, then a lane of cars, then the tram, then everything all over again in reverse. The thing is, as intimidating as it was (especially for tourists) you could see little kids doing it. There was only one lane of cars, so everyone in a car was going slow. The trams are big, so you can’t miss those. The bikes are probably the most challenging (since there are a lot of them) but again, they are going fairly slow. So even if you are jaywalking it isn’t that dangerous.
Compare that to a similar street in Seattle (or just about any US city). They have at least two lanes for cars, each direction. This is already terrible. Yet there are places where there are even more lanes for cars. I’m not talking about a freeway — that is regular — but a regular street with pedestrians along the side, like here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/o3jE7FynJ8fRurSt5. Note: that particular crossing isn’t as bad anymore. It looks like this. Still too many lanes for cars, but they just gave one lane for the bikes. They didn’t widen the street — there is just one less lane for cars.
This is the good news. Seattle is moving in the right direction. The number of lanes for cars is slowly shrinking, and one lane each direction for general purpose traffic (with maybe a middle turn lane) is becoming the standard. Even in areas with lots of traffic (e. g. Westlake or Rainier) this is happening. Like on Aurora, this means giving a lane to bikes (or transit). The street isn’t any wider, there are just fewer lanes for cars.
This improves safety in multiple ways. Fewer car lanes is inherently safer. Better transit leads to fewer traffic accidents and deaths. Giving bikes better bike lanes also increases safety. Of course really narrow cobblestone streets (with cars traveling 10 MPH) are safer, but few cities consist only of that, and they rely on a major metro system (which we will never build). Our best chance at improving safety is to keep doing what we are doing — converting general purpose lanes to bike and transit lanes.
The biggest recent mistake that Seattle made was planning Mercer Street through South Lake Union. Why a city would build a giant wide street like that next to an exploding high-rise district is mind-blowing. I guess they didn’t think that people will walk across streets. The traffic flow should have been split into less wide streets — like one-way pairs or more east-west through arterials. We live in Seattle; not Houston!
Envision MLK with a simple cut and cover set of Link tracks under the lanes in one direction. The surface traffic lanes could then be positioned next to each other making the street more narrow and faster/ safer to walk across.
Yeah, sure, but it would still be extremely dangerous, because the biggest danger comes from two lanes of cars each direction. Imagine instead you got rid of one lane each direction. That makes the street roughly as wide (but much safer). I have never biked it, but I imagine it is hellish right now. With one lane each direction, it would be much better, but still not as safe as bike lanes. So now add back bike lanes on each side. That is a bit wider than what you had in mind, but much, much safer. At that point the best thing to do (for safety) would be to bury the tram, but the biggest problem is not the tram, it is the cars.
Yeah, the “Mercer Mess” project was stupid. I think it was possible in part because there was so little in South Lake Union at the time. It was basically an industrial area. Some of the ideas were actually good ones — more two lane roads. But they almost immediately started thinking about making it really big, and that’s where it got nasty. Meanwhile, South Lake Union boomed, and a lot of those people felt like driving down there (and still do).
@ Ross:
The whole concept of “road diets” was more about reducing the psychological effects of wide streets than the vehicle throughput. It is why it’s called a “diet” — because the streets feel too “fat”. Lane reductions are merely a subset of the bigger principle. Many streets have been given diets with no traffic lane reductions.
Making MLK one lane in each direction won’t make it safer to cross. It won’t reduce the pedestrian crossing time. It won’t discourage impatient people to stop jaywalking at signals. And it will force local traffic onto narrower side streets with children playing and cars parked on the side making those streets more dangerous. The lower speeds may result in an injury instead of a fatality, but it’s still just as dangerous.
I think the Mercer Mess fix was envisioned to be better, but in the end it catered to cars so much that it’s not much better than the mess it replaced. Although there is an advantage in having a straight two-way street, and eliminating the Broad Street spur, and not making cars turn right then left to go west from I-5. So it’s still a car sewer, and wide, and long stoplights, but it’s not as ugly or as schizophrenic as it was.
What did the original politicians who pushed the Mercer overhaul say it would be like? How does that compare to how it turned out?
Making MLK one lane in each direction won’t make it safer to cross.
Yes it would! There is plenty of evidence that reducing lanes reduces the average speed of cars. The road diets were not just “feel good measures”. Cars went slower.
It won’t reduce the pedestrian crossing time.
Yes it would, because the street would be narrower. Bike lanes are not as wide as car lanes.
And it will force local traffic onto narrower side streets with children playing and cars parked on the side making those streets more dangerous.
Cars parked on the side is what you want! They act like chicanes. Other things can be done (blocking off roads to through traffic; one way streets, etc.) but it is all part of the same general idea. Improve transit and bike mobility while reducing the speed of cars. It is what they do in Europe and it works. For example look at this street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/s6vz82aM9NVLptXZA. It is quite wide. It is like Mercer. In America this would be three lanes of traffic each direction. Is it? No. It is basically one lane of traffic each direction: https://maps.app.goo.gl/M91MDxrq7Nf756bH7, with the occasional turn lane. As a result people drive much slower. Slow enough that people can comfortably cross with no traffic light (https://maps.app.goo.gl/EM27LsiCfULYfCez5). Note how the pedestrian is carrying at least three full bags — they aren’t sprinting across the road. But wait. Because there is only one lane each direction it pushes traffic onto side streets. Places like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ym6ZdQAJSedpyJp88, or this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/z3pvGPwwujdCmYnv7. Look at all those cars! How very dangerous — what were they thinking.
Sorry, but that isn’t how it works. Car travel is not a zero-sum game. Car traffic just disappears. I’m not making this shit up. https://thecityfix.com/blog/traffic-evaporation-what-really-happens-when-road-space-is-reallocated-from-cars/.
What did the original politicians who pushed the Mercer overhaul say it would be like? How does that compare to how it turned out?
I would imagine they would say:
1) We didn’t promise a great pedestrian experience. We only said we would add these handful of improvements for pedestrians and bikes (and they did).
2) We didn’t anticipate the huge rise in traffic. In other words we expected it to be just as ugly, but with less congestion.
I agree that there were good things that came with it, but the basic problem is just too many lanes. It is funny that I was trying to find an example of a street that was three lanes each direction and yet Mercer didn’t occur to me. It is a class example of a street has way too many lanes (each direction). There are no bike lanes, no bus lanes — just cars. It is essentially a long on-ramp and exit lane for the freeway, except it is integrated into a very urban environment (https://maps.app.goo.gl/YwDNaBachULZn3EX9). It is just … wrong.
To be fair, because of the freeway there is limited value for a bike or transit lane. It is probably one of the last streets in the city I would put on a diet. First priority should be to add BAT lanes to Denny, which parallels it. We should use the fact that Mercer is three lanes each direction as justification for the project. We added lanes. Now we are taking one. Live with it. In the long run it would be nice to carve out a path for a bus going on the north side of the Seattle Center but that requires additional service hours (which we currently don’t have) as well as other BAT lanes along 5th (which should be a priority since it is shared with the 3/4). Likewise the part of Mercer that could use BAT lanes is the west end (as it connects to Elliot).
“Making MLK one lane in each direction won’t make it safer to cross.”
This is false. I can bore you with the studies if you beg.
SDOT published a study on the effective lane reductions in Rainier Ave. They didn’t reduce the pavement width. They just repurposed lanes.
https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SDOT/MaintenanceProgram/RainierAveS_BeforeAfter.pdf
Collisions fell by 15 percent in this study. But traffic volumes fell by 27 percent. Many merely shifted to MLK or neighborhood streets. The recorded traffic increase on MLK was actually numerically higher than the traffic decrease on Rainier.
That means:
1. The changes SDOT made made any single car MORE likely to be in a collision. (Sure the serious injuries and fatalities fell to 0 but the before period was several years while the after period was only several months.)
2. They moved the problem rather than solved the problem. And now here we are talking about the very section of a street that got the traffic increase!
By merely repurposing a lane can’t be proven to significantly help safety on MLK based on this study. It just would sends traffic back to a more notoriously dangerous Rainier Ave.
Finally, the new protected bicycle lanes now installed are as wide as a car travel lane. They aren’t narrower. There aren’t new cub extensions added.
I think you guys are missing the point about my original comment. That is simply that overly wide streets are bad for psychological reasons. You know what these streets are — the ones that are over 90 feet wide maybe with light rail or buses in the middle. That’s the kind of street the article is pointing to. It’s not pointing to a street with just five lanes at about 60 feet wide.
I think they are bad because everyone on them —drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists get unnerved due to their long signal waits and related eagerness to not be delayed on their journeys. So they do more dangerous things in their impatience.
“We didn’t anticipate the huge rise in traffic.”
Did traffic increase on Mercer? If it did, how much of it was the new office towers as opposed to the same people driving more?
Did traffic increase on Mercer? If it did, how much of it was the new office towers as opposed to the same people driving more?
I assume there are more cars on Mercer (it is much wider). It is a classic induced demand situation, although the growth in South Lake Union complicates it. That is why I’m not letting those in charge off the hook. The idea that this would fix the Mercer mess was bullshit to begin with. They say the same thing when they wide streets. It just doesn’t work.
Collisions fell by 15 percent in this study. But traffic volumes fell by 27 percent.
So you cite a study that shows that collisions went down to prove that it doesn’t matter? What???
Many merely shifted to MLK or neighborhood streets.
And many stopped driving. Unless you have proof that accidents increased in other streets, I’m inclined to assume that this is consistent with the mega study I cited earlier: a lot of traffic just evaporated.
By merely repurposing a lane can’t be proven to significantly help safety on MLK based on this study.
No, but combined with the other study it sure looks like it did. Let’s review:
1) On this particular street, average speeds and accidents went down.
2) There is no evidence for an increase anywhere else.
3) In a major study (in many different and similar countries, over decades) they found that similar projects lead to less driving (and fewer accidents).
Finally, the new protected bicycle lanes now installed are as wide as a car travel lane. They aren’t narrower. There aren’t new cub extensions added.
Fair enough, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It is quite common for bike lanes to be roughly half the width of a car lane.
That is simply that overly wide streets are bad for psychological reasons.
Do you have a study for that? Because again, the people here do not look like they are freaking out. That is a very wide street. But since there is only one lane of car traffic each direction it doesn’t really matter. They do a great job of making sure that the cars go slow. It looks far more pleasant than a lot of two lanes streets in Seattle (e. g. 15th NE on Maple Leaf). Want a more extreme example: https://x.com/i/status/869687734608244736.
The problem isn’t the width — it is the cars.
@Ross:
“ And many stopped driving. ”
If you read the SDOT study, you would see that MLK traffic went up numerically by more than Rainier traffic fell. It’s on the map on page 14.
So you’re wrong on this one, buddy.
Interesting. So not as many people stopped driving, and instead went to MLK because MLK “is under-capacity”. Fair enough. How is this a bad thing? The result was fewer accidents and none of the terrible traffic problems that people thought were going to happen. This doesn’t change the fundamentals. If anything it confirms them.
The next step for Rainier Valley (after fixing Rainier) is to fix MLK in the same manner. Get rid of a lane of cars. That itself makes things safer. Since it already has a tram, it would make sense to add bike lanes. That also makes it safer. The better your bike system the safer your city (just like the better your transit system the safer your city). So not only are these individual streets safer, but the overall area is safer (because there is better bike and transit infrastructure).
Look, I understand why traffic engineers thought that adding lanes to Mercer would fix the problem. I understand why they thought adding lanes to I-90 would help as well. I understand why people assume that reducing lanes will make traffic worse. Or why there is a static number of drivers at any moment. It sounds reasonable. But numerous studies show otherwise. By the 1990s the UK government had rejected the idea of adding lanes because they knew it didn’t work. But they didn’t know the opposite. From the paper:
However, while it was officially recognised that building roads could induce additional traffic, the opposite proposition, namely that reducing roadspace could reduce traffic, was not widely accepted in either theory or practice. Consequently, numerous proposals for pedestrianisation or bus priority schemes were rejected, due to fears of the problems that they could create on surrounding streets.
Sound familiar? It is basically what you are arguing. More from the paper:
To address the issue, a research study was commissioned by London Transport and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions in 1997. Two reports were published—by Cairns, Hass-Klau and Goodwin on the practical evidence, 2 and by MVA 3 on the implications for modelling. This paper summarises and updates the evidence study. …
The key findings were as follows:
(a) When roadspace for cars is reallocated, traffic problems are usually far less serious than predicted.
(b) Overall traffic levels can reduce by significant amounts.
(c) Traffic reduction is partly explained by recognising that people react to a change in road conditions in much more complex ways than has traditionally been assumed in traffic models.
… it is rare that roadspace reallocation schemes cause substantial and unacceptable levels of congestion and disruption.
In short, a lot of people just adjust their driving habits. It is basically the same as induced demand, just in the other direction. It isn’t just people switching modes, but it includes switching modes. It also includes people driving at different types of the day.
Same goes for safety. Again, read the article. Read the citations. It is pretty clear that you can make a city much safer by simply doing what we are doing on Rainier (and what we’ve done throughout the city). Reduce the number of lanes for cars (while also improving transit and bike pathways) and the streets are safer. You don’t end up with “carmageddon”. You end up with fewer people driving.
If the objective is to remove a lane of traffic from MLK, a better concept would be to put all the arterial traffic on one side of the tracks, and repurpose the other side for bicyclists and pedestrians and local access slow speed traffic as needed. That way, pedestrians would be able to quickly cross the side with the traffic and no one would have long waits at an intersection signal. Bus stops for Link transferring can be located on the non-arterial side to reduce the need to cross any MLK traffic. Gates for Link trains would be much more straightforward to install.
The safety problem on MLK would likely continue to exist even if traffic dropped in half — with or without taking away a lane for bicyclists — if the distance to get across is not significantly reduced. It’s just too wide of a street to operate well in a more urban setting because of the signal delays. The end result should be to have a street that feels less like a river to drivers and less like a wall to pedestrians and merely taking away a lane doesn’t accomplish this because the long signal cycles would still be needed to get across the overly wide street.
Reducing the signal cycle lengths should be the primary redesign target! It requires more imagination and money to convert the street in this way. Design challenges would certainly exist. It’s not an easy redesign.
The effect of having the long signal cycles because of overly wide intersections is referenced here:
https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/intersection-design-elements/traffic-signals/signal-cycle-lengths/
Mercer Street has Seattle Center with several arenas and the largest regional festivals, and limited transit access from places like the Eastside or north and south. Mercer Street needs at least four lanes for that.
If the objective is to remove a lane of traffic from MLK, a better concept would be to put all the arterial traffic on one side of the tracks, and repurpose the other side for bicyclists and pedestrians and local access slow speed traffic as needed. That way, pedestrians would be able to quickly cross the side with the traffic and no one would have long waits at an intersection signal.
I’m not sure if that gets you anything. Look at that Dutch example again: https://maps.app.goo.gl/NYYLrpqKj32vSQUc6. This is at a major intersection. Notice that if there are no bikes, a pedestrian can essentially jaywalk until they get to where the cars are. If there are no cars, they keep going (to where the tram is). That continues on the other side. Bike/car/tram, tram/car/bike. Of course if it is busy (as shown) then you most likely just wait for the signal. But if you are slow to get across, you have places to stop, and if you have made it past the trams and the cars, it is likely the bikes will stop for you. Now imagine the bikes were both next to each other. Does that make any difference? Not really.
Meanwhile the road is just as wide, but instead of a narrow bike path on each side, you’ve got the two bike paths next to each other and an occasional car mixed in. I’m not saying agencies don’t do this sort of thing, but it is usually out of desperation.
No, the thing to do is mimic the Dutch. It is worth checking out what they’ve done. It isn’t consistent, but it is consistently nice. There are places where you just have a crosswalk (not a signal) https://maps.app.goo.gl/hNu1d8SkPtizmjEw8. You can get across bit by bit (first go by the bikes, then the car, etc.). Having the cars separated in that manner helps. You don’t have to quickly look one way or another (you do with the trams, but those things are tall enough that it is obvious). Speaking of which, check out this tram stop: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hqLGGf5ErzJVzfXn7. Notice that they allow parking (for taxis) and the bikes do a little zig-zag. As a result, there is a little less sidewalk space there (it is used for parking). But crossing is just not that bad. Overall, it is just inherently safer.
It reminds me of health insurance. It is easy to think of things we can do, but it is easiest to remember that every advanced country does it better than us. There are different ways of doing it, but they are just better at it than us. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The Dutch don’t do everything well, but they do an excellent job of handling surface traffic (pedestrians, bikes, cars, trucks, trams, etc.).
Mercer Street needs at least four lanes for that.
I wouldn’t reduce the number of lanes until you are running buses there. At that point you are much better off having one general purpose lane and one bus lane (each direction). But first you need bus lanes for Denny. This is why I wrote that this is one of the last streets I would put on a road diet. What we have on Mercer is actually fairly unusual. We have a huge number of cars, and no transit. That is why, to a certain extent, all bets are off. I would bet that in almost all cases where they have done this, there is either very little congestion, or there is a transit alternative. Mercer is weird. So many cars and no transit.
Your Dutch example is an extreme example of what not to do, Ross.
Amsterdam is universally panned for being dangerous to both pedestrians and bicyclists. That intersection may exist but it doesn’t make it good design. The topic is safety here. Many bicyclists even complain about it. There are more bicycle fatalities in the Netherlands than there are car fatalities.
Plus, the entire intersection has slow moving streetcars and traffic. No one here will tolerate riding Link under 20 or 15 mph at four miles with stops every block or two. If MLK is designed that slow, traffic will divert to very narrow side streets. Even bicyclists here would gripe if they had to go that slow for four miles.
MLK is wider than these streets. Part of that is because MLK runs a bit diagonally so street crossings have a longer distance to get across. But even perpendicularly it’s still about 20 feet wider. Notice how narrow those bicycle lanes are! Notice how there isn’t a pedestrian refuge in the median! Notice the shared traffic lanes! Notice how the pedestrians can wander into the bicycle lane!
Seattle DOT has put in a number of things in place to make intersections safer on MLK for everyone. Leading pedestrian intervals. Countdown signals. Train approaching signs. No permissive phases for left turns across the tracks. Warning sounds. Designing a street like that corner in Amsterdam would make a mockery of the entire Vision Zero program.
Amsterdam is universally panned for being dangerous to both pedestrians and bicyclists.
What??? It is the opposite. Amsterdam has some of the highest bike ridership in the world. It is common for little kids to ride to school, whereas in this country we just drive them. Too dangerous. We have an entire bike culture built on the idea of going really fast. It is like every biker is supposed to be a racer (to avoid getting hit I suppose). The idea that just a regular person in dress pants or a woman in a skirt would bike is considered crazy here, but it is commonplace there.
Seriously, I wouldn’t hesitate to bike on that street. I would also feel quite safe biking. Would I bike on Aurora or Lake City Way? Hell no. I’m way too old.
MLK is wider than these streets.
Is it? Look at what is there. Two lanes for cars. Two lanes for trams. Two bike lanes for bikes. It is exactly what I am proposing.
Maybe it just looks narrower because it is obviously less of a car sewer. I get that. This goes back to what you wrote about earlier. A road diet makes you think the street isn’t as wide. But in this case I’m suggesting narrowing the sidewalk as well (because bike lanes don’t have to be as wide as bus lanes). More to the point I’m focused on reducing the lanes of cars, because that is more than perception — it actually makes it safer.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/bicycle-mobility-transport-ranked-world/?DAG=3
Amsterdam 5 friendliest city for bikes. Your news feed has been hijacked by the Ford-AI.
Also 5th most walkable city in the world.
https://www.travelawaits.com/2886119/most-walkable-cities-international/
@Mike: It might be possible to divert much of the I-5 to Seattle Center traffic on Mercer to the bypass tunnel. It’s remarkable how after a game or concert traffic is at a standstill trying to get to I-5 SB, while the tunnel is right there and has no traffic. That tunnel (together with the new surface highway) has a much greater capacity than Mercer! Yes, the multiple turns from the NB tunnel exit to Seattle Center are not very efficient, but people are arriving at staggered intervals, and I-5 to Mercer itself isn’t very efficient either.
NB is trickier, but similarly, the Aurora Bridge has pretty light traffic during the event “Mercer Mess” hours. The tricky part is getting between Aurora and I-5 north of the ship canal.
> Amsterdam is universally panned for being dangerous to both pedestrians and bicyclists.
What, I have never heard this claim before.
> It’s remarkable how after a game or concert traffic is at a standstill trying to get to I-5 SB, while the tunnel is right there and has no traffic
Yeah part of the problem is many people head down aurora and then don’t want to pay the toll so go across mercer to i 5. Or vice versa heading towards fremont/ballard from south of seattle but don’t want to pay the toll.
Maybe one way to decrease the number of cross east-west travelers would be to toll aurora so that if you get on it, it’s the same if you take the tunnel or not. This would deincentivize trying to use mercer to i5 to skip the tunnel
I always assumed the traffic was headed to the eastside, but I’ve never really paid attention. If someone is driving in to an event they’re likely paying $30+ for parking; I can’t imagine they would be against paying another $1-2 to take the tunnel.
You can try it out on google maps say right now (4pm weekday) south center to uptown or Ballard or Fremont or north of it as well.
Without tolls it’ll route you to take i5 then Mercer street over to aurora.
About the exact relative amount on Mercer street that’s coming from each direction I don’t quite know. Perhaps I’ll google around and see if there’s some existing sdot or wsdot document
Since you guys don’t believe me about Amsterdam, I refer you to some things.
Here’s a link to a blog post written by a US bicycle advocate describing bicycling in Amsterdam:
https://www.bikelaw.com/2019/05/amsterdam-not-cycling-paradise/
Here is a statistical analysis of seriously injured bicyclists and pedestrians:
https://swov.nl/en/fact/infrastructure-how-many-casualties-are-there-among-pedestrians-and-cyclists
Of particular note is that a bicyclist is three times more likely to get seriously injured by another bicyclist or obstacle than by a vehicle.
Take a good look at Ross’ example corner. Everything is quite porous and dimensions are narrow including the bike lane itself . It doesn’t bother the bicyclists there; they simply ignore traffic laws.
I believe you guys conflate popularity with safety. They aren’t the same thing. If they were, then car oriented places would have the safest roads too!
At some point, you can’t keep claiming that two car lanes are the main danger. It’s more complex than that. It’s instead human behavior.
https://www.bikelaw.com/2019/05/amsterdam-not-cycling-paradise/
> Between 2000 and 2013 cyclists in Amsterdam accounted for 28% of all traffic deaths in that City, making it the Netherlands’ most dangerous biking city.
The author does not know how to apply statistics at all. It’d be like saying more Americans die in New York than London, therefore New York is the most dangerous place for Americans.
https://swov.nl/en/fact/infrastructure-how-many-casualties-are-there-among-pedestrians-and-cyclists
> Here is a statistical analysis of seriously injured bicyclists and pedestrians:
Uhh okay, but this does not compare against other countries or cities at all.
Whereas if I do a cursory google search about bike death rate by country. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/02/24/the-more-cyclists-in-a-country-the-fewer-fatal-crashes-report-infographic/
cyclists killed per billion km (lower is better)
* netherlands is at 10
* switzerland is at 18
* france at 27
* south korea 32
* united states at 44
I can dig up other stat’s but they all generally show America is vastly more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists. It is basically a fact that Amsterdam is vastly safer for pedestrians and cyclists even compared to most cities in europe.
At some point, you can’t keep claiming that two car lanes are the main danger.
It is well established even in the United States that two lanes each directions is much more dangerous than one lane each direction. I find it baffling that you don’t get that. For example, this is Roosevelt Way between 125th and 130th: https://maps.app.goo.gl/evtKexK9F4Mm5SNh6. Notice something? No crosswalks.
That’s because SDOT has officially banned crosswalks if there are two lanes each direction. It is too dangerous. You either have a traffic light, or you are on your own. They don’t want to give people a false sense of safety by painting stripes on the street. Now check out Roosevelt a little bit south of there: https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXzWpBmdSNLSc3uR6. Crosswalks. Or check out 125th: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FKavo8gbo31MMrca6. Crosswalks.
If you’ve every tried to cross a street with two lanes of traffic going one way it isn’t hard to understand what the problem is. If you’ve driven it you may have seen it as well. Someone in a car closest to the pedestrian stops. Someone behind that driver has no idea why they stopped. Maybe they are turning right and forgot to turn on their signal. So they go to pass them. Now the pedestrian walks in front of the first car while the other car is passing them. This gets reversed going the other direction. Yes, it can be done, but it is really dangerous, and SDOT knows this. That is why they don’t have crosswalks (without signals) if there are two lanes of traffic going the same direction.
Now go back to the Amsterdam example. There are crosswalks in the middle of the street. No beg button, no traffic light, just a place to walk across this street that is much wider than the Roosevelt example (or similar four lane roads). That is because the crossing isn’t that difficult. When a car passes another car it is quite likely you don’t see them. In this case you have a lane for bikes, then cars, then a tram (then the reverse). The bikes don’t obscure the cars. The cars don’t obscure the trams. Visibility is just so much better. Everyone can see everyone.
The main safety hazard is clearly the cars. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other dangers, but they are tiny in comparison. There are very wide streets with no cars that are quite safe. There are very wide streets with only a handful of cars that are fairly safe. There are narrow streets with cars that are extremely dangerous. The main correspondence with width and safety is the behavior of the cars. The most important factor, by far, is what the cars are doing. One lane of cars each direction means the cars are going slower and visibility is improved. All or things being equal, this is definitely safer.
@ Ross:
“ That’s because SDOT has officially banned crosswalks if there are two lanes each direction. ”
We may have different views on the danger priorities, but this statement borders on the absurd. Seattle abounds in crosswalks on four-lane and five-lane streets all over the City — from SODO to Northgate to Ballard to the U District to SLU to West Seattle. It’s only in SE Seattle that SDOT is obsessed with removing every single one.
And there is a difference between a five lane street that is maybe 60 or 65 feet from curb to curb and a street like MLK that varies from 80 to 120 feet across because the extra width of the light rail tracks adds to the width – along with special added turn lanes, median refuges of a reasonable width, on-street parking in places, a diagonal crosswalk geometry and a host of other factors friending in the block.
Why do pedestrians jaywalk? Why do bicyclists run red lights? Why do drivers text and drive? These are behaviors that design treatments like lane removals and lower speed limits can’t ultimately fix. If they did, our fatalities in Seattle should have already fallen. And bicycle riders in Amsterdam wouldn’t be so impatient that they disobey road signs and markings at their widest intersections.
At the end of the day, I’m primarily pointing out that overly wide streets take longer for pedestrians to get across, and that waiting encourages risky travel behavior by everyone. And that merely not changing width but simply converting a lane from cars to bicycles doesn’t solve the underlying behavioral problem of an overly wide street — because the crosswalk distance and hence the wait time at a signal for every mode stays the same. When anyone waits for an extra 50 seconds as the crosswalk goes through its walk and countdown phases — and when they have to wait at least another two minutes to get the opportunity to cross again because of this, they will more likely take risks by crossing illegally or be distracted because they will start doing other things like texting or reading on their smart phones. I think that a rational person “gets” it even though you personally disagree.
Seattle abounds in crosswalks on four-lane and five-lane streets all over the City — from SODO to Northgate to Ballard to the U District to SLU to West Seattle.
No they don’t. To be clear I’m talking about crosswalks with no signals or stop signs. Basically just some white paint. On four lane roads they have been going away for safety reasons. It is either one or the other. A signal/stop sign or nothing. Look at the SDOT criteria for building crosswalks: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/pedestrian-program/pedestrian-crossings:
Therefore, we generally consider the following factors when deciding whether to mark a crosswalk:
If it is on an arterial street with no more than two travel lanes (could have a center turn lane too) …
In other words, they won’t add a crosswalk on a four lane road (unless they also add a traffic signal or stop sign). Why? Safety.
At the end of the day, I’m primarily pointing out that overly wide streets take longer for pedestrians to get across, and that waiting encourages risky travel behavior by everyone.
Yes, and I’m saying that the biggest problem, by far, is cars. Not bike lanes, not trams, but cars. If we got rid of one lane of traffic each direction it would create just as much space as burying the tram lines. What are you arguing? That the tram poses a greater risk than the extra lane of traffic? That we shouldn’t add (fairly narrow) bike lanes, because they make the street a little bit wider?
@Ross: I read your statement as for all crosswalks and not uncontrolled crosswalks. It’s missing that adjective.
****
The original article shows three of six fatalities in the observed week were on Aurora or MLK. What do these streets have in common? They are overly wide. That looks like a pretty high correlation to me.
Do you want to legalize disobeying controls at intersections? That’s what happens in Amsterdam.
Do you want to reduce the pedestrian crossing times by having bike lanes on the outside of pedestrian waiting spots at intersections? That’s often done in Amsterdam.
Do you want to delay Route 106 by putting the buses in a longer line of cars for a four-mile stretch? You seem eager to make the route operate slower.
Do you recommend a 15 mph speed limit on every city street including for the buses? That’s the law in Amsterdam.
I offered a different approach. I suggested that it would be better to put all the traffic on one side of the tracks. Pedestrians would have a much shorter distance to cross and more time to dodge a Link train. . Link preemption logic would have less crossing time for pedestrians to consider, making Link trains more reliable. The carrying capacity of MLK would increase because less time would be needed for cross streets, easing delays to both cars and Route 106. Pedestrians and bicyclists would have shorter waits for cross-street traffic when traveling MLK.
You seem to say that restricting for a PBL is all that is needed to achieve safety instead. I’m saying it does very little because it does nothing to reduce delay for anyone — including bicyclists waiting at a light while using MLK. You are looking to justify a project rather than address the core problem of overly wide streets.
You see the solution as a “hammer” of taking a traffic lane for an occasional bicyclist and this problem to you looks like a “nail”. I’m saying that this particular hammer doesn’t get into the root problem.
It’s very aggregating to be on a Link train that has to slam on their brakes and then wait almost a minute because someone punched a pedestrian crossing button because the crossing is so wide. And it’s scary for that pedestrian to make that wide crossing.
re taking a lane of general traffic from MLK, Metro has identified the 106 as needing reliability investments, where even on Sundays over 1/5 of trips are late (weekdays it’s over 1/4). Metro and SDOT should take this opportunity to put in camera-enforced BAT lanes the entire length of MLK. There’s a good chance it would reduce risky driving too, which will help Link reliability as well.
The original article shows three of six fatalities in the observed week were on Aurora or MLK. What do these streets have in common? They are overly wide. That looks like a pretty high correlation to me.
Yes, and they all have multiple lanes of traffic going each direction (at fairly high speed).
You seem to say that restricting for a PBL is all that is needed to achieve safety instead.
I never wrote that.
I’m saying it does very little because it does nothing to reduce delay for anyone — including bicyclists waiting at a light while using MLK. You are looking to justify a project rather than address the core problem of overly wide streets.
And I’m saying that isn’t the biggest problem. Take Aurora for example. One of the reasons it is so wide is because of the bus lanes. If we got rid of the bus lanes we could make it easier to cross. Would this make it safer? Not necessarily. Transit ridership would be worse, which we know means more accidents. So crossing the street might be a little bit easier, but overall things are more dangerous.
Now consider just getting rid of a lane, but doing nothing else. Get rid of the middle lanes and add trees. The street is just as wide. Is this safer? Yes! It is much safer. Fewer lanes of traffic is safer, regardless of how wide the street is.
That is the key. Get rid of a lane of traffic and it is safer. At that point, it is not clear what the best approach is (from a safety standpoint) to make it even better. Add a transit lane (for a bike or tram)? That definitely has benefits in terms of safety (because better transit means a safer city). Add bike lanes? That definitely has benefits in terms of safety (same idea — the safer your bike system the fewer people driver). With the bike lanes it also means the street becomes narrower, which makes crossing easier. Just widen the sidewalk? That means the street is even narrower, which makes it easier to cross. All three have additional benefit. But I’m arguing that from a safety standpoint the first two options are better than the third. In the case of Aurora, for example, the bike and bus approach is better than the “walkable boulevard”.
What is the best approach? I would say it depends. In the case of Aurora I would go with center bus lanes. There are existing, parallel, first-class bike lanes much of the way. It wouldn’t be difficult to make the parallel paths even better. Worse case scenario someone bikes on the sidewalk (for a short distance) or just walks their bike (like they do in the heart of Fremont). Meanwhile, the bus already plays a major part in our transit network. Converting it to BRT (with center-running buses) would make a huge difference.
In the case of MLK I would add bike lanes. I would add stations to Link (and at least one will eventually be added). The 106 is a relatively minor bus. In contrast with Aurora, there is really no alternative for bikes other than Rainier and MLK in the valley. Since bike lanes are narrower you might be able to finesse it (e. g. bidirectional bike lanes and one bus lane inbound) but the priority should be bikes.
On Rainier it is the opposite. We should take a lane (each direction) and give it to the buses. The 7 should be able to run in its own lane all the way to downtown. Eventually this will happen, it is just that the city is very conservative when it comes to these things.
I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t do: Get rid of Link. Again, this would make crossing the street much easier (you could move the traffic towards the center and widen the sidewalks) but ultimately this would be bad for safety given the number of people that rely on Link. Link isn’t the problem. The bus lanes on Aurora aren’t the problem. The problem is the multiple lanes of cars.
@ Skylar:
Thanks for mentioning Sundays and for mentioning reliability as opposed to speed. That reinforces my observation that it’s the wide design of the roadway that’s the biggest factor to delay and reliability rather than the mere volume of cars.
There is a difference between speed and reliability. For a bus to get through an intersection in 5-10 seconds rather than in a line of cars and taking 30-40 seconds can improve speed, but when that same bus has to repeatedly sit for 90-120 seconds at several intersections regardless of congestion so that pedestrians can get across the wide street destroys reliability regardless of where or not there is a bus lane.
And with signal priority rightfully focused on frequent Link trains already pushing the street operations (limited time windows to permit the long pedestrian crossings) already, adding priority for Route 106 would seem to be almost impossible without hurting the Link train priority.
Ross, the 106 carried over 5000 daily riders last month, so I don’t think I’d call it a minor route. It’s an important shadow for Link, and partially makes up for Link’s wide stop spacing. I definitely agree that that area of Seattle badly needs bike connectivity as well, not sure how best to balance the two though.
Ross, the 106 carried over 5000 daily riders last month, so I don’t think I’d call it a minor route. It’s an important shadow for Link, and partially makes up for Link’s wide stop spacing. I definitely agree that that area of Seattle badly needs bike connectivity as well, not sure how best to balance the two though.
It is a judgement call. But the 106 is far less important than the 7. I also think they should simply add more stations to Link. Graham Street should help, and they should go farther. Ideally Link would have decent stop spacing and wouldn’t need a shadow. Right now the 106 does three things: serves Renton, shadows Link and doubles up service along Rainier. The first is essential, the second is a coverage route and the third is redundant. Thus worse case scenario the 106 could be broken up. The northern half could be a coverage route, with less frequent (and reliable) service. The southern part would retain 15 minute service, and maybe take over the 107 route (and go to Beacon Hill). To be clear, I’m not saying I would do any of that. First priority should be to add bus lanes (both directions) for the 7, and then add bike lanes for MLK. If at that point the 106 is stuck in traffic, there are options.
The main thing I’m getting at is that we often have this conflict. People want bike lanes on bus corridors. At the same time, our buses are stuck in traffic. Sometimes the street is wide enough to accommodate both, but quite often it is not. Sometimes we have to choose, and it is never easy to choose. We have to consider the alternatives for bike paths, as well as the importance of the transit corridor. A street like Aurora sits on the bus-priority end of the spectrum, while MLK sits on the bike-priority end.
> Several other SDOT projects are moving forward in coming months.
> https://streets.mn/2024/06/18/walk-the-talk-celebrate-brt-and-lrt-milestones/
Minneapolis is starting work on their brt’s similar to our rapidrides.
“B Line: Set to operate primarily on Lake Street in Minneapolis and Marshall and Selby avenues in St. Paul, the $65 million B Line is currently under construction and is expected to open next June, largely replacing service from Route 21. Comprehensive construction updates — including maps of new stations and tips on how to navigate the labyrinthian construction zones — can be found here.
E Line: Also currently under construction is the $60 million E Line, which will largely follow the path of Route 6 (or at least one of its many branches)”
Notably the B line travels 11 miles. It’ll be interesting to see if king county metro considers implementing other ‘long’ rapidrides on avenues such as the 5 to shoreline, 106 to renton or 150 to southcenter/ kent. Granted the rapidride H was pretty long reaching burien.
Here’s a thought. Someone above suggested If on MLK you put all of the traffic on one side of the tracks that you could put on the other side a trail for walking and biking
Why not also add another trackway? This could be used for express trains during commute times that would bypass some or all of the rainier valley stops.
Even better – dig down so this express trackage would go under those intersections that cross, which would allow for higher speeds too.
Course I can’t see them ever reducing MLK lanes but I like the idea
If you could do cut and cover, we probably would have mlk way as a cut and cover subway right now. You’d have to close the street for around 5~10 years though.*
If you’re deep boring it it’d be too expensive, and if it’s elevated one might as well just build the georgetown / marginal way bypass for the same cost instead.
*The part that takes a long time is moving the utilities.
I guess for a slight counter example here’s BART’s 30th street infill station proposal. https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/30th.a.pdf
it is an underground one but they suggested adding express tracks at the station.
los angeles also their regional connector they converted the at grade light rail to underground tunnel — though it was a much shorter tunnel.
No, there was never a surface LRT segment through Downtown LA (there was a forced transfer), rather the project is the last phase of the Originally planned system to be opened.
The A Line was always planned to go from Pasadena to Long Beach, but the shifting political winds meant that it was only realized last year.
> No, there was never a surface LRT segment through Downtown LA (there was a forced transfer), rather the project is the last phase of the Originally planned system to be opened.
the former gold line (azuza to atlantic) was at grade and went through chinatown with the arts district station converted from at grade to underground. Though yes the portion from metro center to arts district is new.
In any case I was more just showcasing an example of at grade stations changed to underground stations with tunnel
It’s an interesting idea, but a longer, single bypass track on MLK wouldn’t help very much because the needed train frequency would probably be too high. Note that today when ST must run trains on a single track through just one station on MLK, they often have to reduce trains to run only every 15-20 minutes.
The one concept that could take advantage of this would be something like a special overlay line that only runs every 30 minutes to an hour — like one that runs from Downtown to SeaTac designed for people with luggage. I’m however hard-pressed to see how such a line would be an improvement though. The time savings of skipping three or four stations would be negated by a long wait to board as the frequency couldn’t be very good.
A shorter bypass track maybe could be helpful, but the first challenge emerges in hooking up the new lowered track with the existing surface tracks.
The technique would however be how to maybe build a cut-and-cover subway replacement for the MLK surface rail segment in phases — one direction at a time. A replaced track that isn’t on the surface would allow for increased capacity and/or automated/ driverless trains. It would take several years to get the full conversion done, but it would seem to be the way to address converting the corridor without canceling Link service for several years.
It’s also could be a way to do something like create a track and platform separated from street traffic only in the most congested areas (also where the current stations are) rather than along the whole street for several miles. For example, I’ve thought about ST converting the segment from north of Orcas to south of Renton Ave in this way to replace Othello station with two new subway stations at Graham and Othello as a more expensive but value-added approach to the Graham infill station project, for example.
If the objective is truly to bypass MLK stations because there are too many stops (as many as 19 from the ID or 23 from Westlake to Tacoma done) and because MLK can’t handle two lines without making it hard for pedestrians to cross MLK (not enough time between trains for the 45 seconds fir pedestrians to cross the wide street), the easier, faster and cheaper option may be to build the bypass because it would skip all those years of street disruption.
What’s probably needed is objective study to look at the benefits, negative impacts, constructibility and cost of adding capacity and/or automation between SODO and SeaTac (no pre-determined outcome). ST doesn’t do these kinds of broad open question reference studies these days. So we as well as Board members are left to our amateur speculation. Then when time comes to put a funding referendum on the ballot, ST repeats the “fill the shopping cart right away” fire drill like we had in 2016 where the Board chooses projects more on populist hunches and not on objective systems planning and honest cost estimates with appropriate contingencies.
As WL suggested, the Duwamish bypass would probably be a better investment to do an express line. It would also serve Georgetown and South Park and surrounding areas such as White Center and the southern part of West Seattle.
Another way to add grade-separation to MLK would be to add underpasses for major arteries (Genesee, Orca…). Those could be used by cyclists and pedestrians to cross the tracks, too. The Link could go at full speed, too.
In previous discussions of the Duwamish Bypass, it’s been illustrated that it would only save about 3-5 minutes over the existing Rainier Valley line.
In Europe, the Siemens S700 / Avanto meets UIC standards for operating on a main line, so if you wanted an express train you’d probably drop it down onto the main line at the overcrossing, and run at mainline speed to King Street.
Of course, if it were Europe, you’d probably be using something like the low floor version of the Alstom Corradio local service trainset operating at 200kph/125mph for this type service…
(sigh)
The ST2 long-range plan had a Georgetown bypass. It was deleted in the 2015 revision because ST thought it was unnecessary. The supposed beneficiaries of it, South King and Pierce, didn’t lift a finger to save it.
If Link on MLK ever starts getting too crowded (because the trains are full of riders going to/from stations of the segment), I expect the bypass idea to reemerge. I could see SE Seattle residents becoming really irked by not being able to squeeze into a train — and never getting a seat.
The langage choice of “Duwamish bypass” is probably not the best. It’s not bypassing the Duwamish or even next to the Duwamish. The term “bypass” implies that it’s avoiding something rather than promoting the expansion of the system. The project would seem to be more appropriately called something like “South Seattle Express Reliever Line”.
> RapidRide G (September 14)
Walked by the rapidride G bus lanes yesterday. It’s quite interesting setup with center bus lanes and then switching to the outer (right side) bus lanes for the second half. Did get to see the existing 12 and partially 11 use some of the outer bus lanes.
Switch over point on 15th ave https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/RapidRide/Madison/2021_13thTo17th.pdf
The new sidewalks also were quite nice.
The other madison brt in Wisconsin is also launching this fall.
https://www.cityofmadison.com/metro/routes-schedules/bus-rapid-transit/east-west-brt-line
It’s a happy day! Eastside Transit has posted 2 new Lynnwood Link testing videos:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZPrh7M1Crs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrUS-h7gf4
Both vids are shot from the top of the parking garage at LTC. The first vid is probably a bit better because the Link LRV is operating on the track nearest the viewer.
According to Nathan’s countdown clock it is only 69 days and change until LLE and local transit is completely transformed. And 2 weeks after that we have the big Community Transit restructure that will completely remake bus transit in SnoCo and along the I-5 corridor.
And extending Swift Blue to 185th St Station will be a huge improvement.
Things are finally beginning to happen.
(Note to Nathan: As an editor on this blog, if you have the contact info for whoever is behind Eastside Transit, please extend a hearty thanks to them on behalf of the STB community. Their work is much appreciated.)
I have no idea who is running the Eastside Transit account, but their videos are appreciated.
It may be the same channel Sam recommended several months ago.
I remember recommending Best Side Cycling’s YouTube video about the opening of the 2 Line. Checking his channel, it looks like he’s in the Netherlands right now making bike riding videos. “Exploring the Best Cycling City in the World” looks interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/@BestSideCycling/videos
There has been a pretty steady stream of news out of Edmonton And Austin detailing their issues with going to all battery so this can hardly be called a surprise. Not enough due diligence prior to grandiose announcements landed us here…
The SDOT released a post on the racial equity toolkit for the seattle transportation plan. I’ve glanced through the document and unlike the king county metro one, I don’t think this one really matters too much as basically most of the major projects to be built are already in the “highest equity priority” (their definition) areas.
But anyways here’s the details:
There’s 14 projects originally from the street maintenance and modernization from the transportation levy but they’d prioritize the top half
“Higher priority” in their words “projects intersect the highest equity priority areas”
o S Henderson St (implementing ideas from Rainier Beach Action Coalition).
o Beacon Ave S investments in paving, transit improvements and a bicycling corridor.
o 1st Ave S/SW Olson Pl making a key connection between communities.
o Rainier Ave S: both Rapid Ride R and repaving work.
o 15th Ave NE, Pinehurst Way NE, Roosevelt Way NE
o 35th Ave SW
o James St
o N 130th St: 1st Ave NW to I-5
o S Albro Pl, Ellis Ave S, Corson Ave S, 16th Ave S
o Aurora Ave N multimodal improvements (on different list)
“Medium priority?”
o East Marginal Way S
o Elliott Ave, Western Ave
o South Lake Union, East/West, (under transit connections)
o 14th Ave S, 12th Ave S, Golf Dr S *
“Lowest priority??” (implicitly by not being listed)
o 23rd Ave E / 24th Ave E: E John St to E Lake Washington Blvd
o NW Market St: 15th Ave NW to 24th Ave NW
o NE 65th St: 2nd Ave NE to 35th Ave NE
Honestly the exercise here seems a bit pointless if they are going to label 75% of the projects as important. For the other section there’s stuff about vision zero, pedestrian accessible curb ramps for equity priority areas etc… but I don’t find it too different than the original goals.
For transit it says “Improvements on up to 4 streets with high-ridership bus routes in equity priority areas” but that is just the same number of projects in the transit corridor and connections in the levy. while for bicycle safety it just says “New and upgraded bikeways in equity priority areas” but no mile or number of projects goal.
Racial equity toolkit: https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2024/06/21/understanding-the-racial-equity-toolkit-ret-for-the-transportation-levy-proposal/
List of 14 projects: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/About/Funding/Levy/SDOT_Levy_Proposal_May2024.pdf#page=16
Link light rail is closed this weekend between Capitol hill and SoDo stations for another maintenance and upgrade period. That’s right, the most critical segment of mass transit in the region is nonfunctional yet again, with only a 15 minute frequency bus bridge to attempt to fill the gap.
If this was I-5 through downtown closing for a whole weekend, for the 4th week this year, there would be riots. Instead we accept this as the price of doing business and wonder why more people don’t ditch their cars to rely on transit.
For all of you who question the need for a second downtown tunnel, this is a perfect example. If we can get a second tunnel and also get more crossover tracks in the current tunnel, then handling most of these regular closures could be as simple as making a couple extra transfers at Westlake and ID stations, with extra trains to handle the capacity squeeze. Don’t settle for a single point of failure. That’s unacceptable for a $50 billion transit system.
> If this was I-5 through downtown closing for a whole weekend, for the 4th week this year, there would be riots. Instead we accept this as the price of doing business and wonder why more people don’t ditch their cars to rely on transit.
Funnily enough they are actually closing down two lanes of i-5 south for the weekend. I guess not quite the same thing.
“””
Washington Department of Transportation’s (WSDOT) Amy Moreno said in an email that crews will close two lanes of Interstate 5 (I-5) south from Albro Place to mid-Boeing Field to replace expansion joints.
The roadwork starts Friday at 10 p.m. and will last around the clock until 5 a.m. Monday.
“So now we’re getting down to the last few weekends,” spokesperson Tom Peare told KIRO Newsradio. “We’re going to replace the concrete approaching the Military Road overpass southbound and then we’re gonna be back for a couple more weekends to replace expansion joints on both the southbound and northbound Military Road overpasses.”
If this is your route, expect delays of up to 20 minutes during high-peak travel times.
“””
> For all of you who question the need for a second downtown tunnel, this is a perfect example. If we can get a second tunnel and also get more crossover tracks in the current tunnel, then handling most of these regular closures could be as simple as making a couple extra transfers at Westlake and ID stations, with extra trains to handle the capacity squeeze. Don’t settle for a single point of failure. That’s unacceptable for a $50 billion transit system
It became 50 billion dollars because of the deep downtown tunnel. In any case even with a new tunnel they would still need to shut it down for maintenance and isn’t quite magical. For example with the current one they are closing it from capitol hill to sodo. Even with a second tunnel you cannot reach lynnwood because the portion from westlake to capitol hill would be closed.
Anyways most of us (in general) here are not against the idea of a second transit tunnel, but more were against the deep tunnel that both costs a lot to build and also is hard to transfer.
Anyways most of us (in general) here are not against the idea of a second transit tunnel, but more were against the deep tunnel that both costs a lot to build and also is hard to transfer.
And the fact that it is extremely expensive but doesn’t add coverage downtown. And the fact that it only adds redundancy for a tiny section (as you mentioned) and not very well, because the transfers downtown will be poor (as you mentioned). It is just a poorly designed section by an agency that has a record of poor design decisions (e. g. “the spine”).
Thanks, I was going to mention the closure. The maintenance period is like a barbell, with two downtown weekend closures at each end. This is the second one. The work in between has been limited to SeaTac-Angle Lake, late-night reductions, and one single-tracking weekend. But Sunday is the end of all the work (except one more 11pm reduction Tuesday).
Three more weekend downtown closures are expected for East Link testing over the next several months, according to Mike Lindblom in the Seattle Times.
“If we can get a second tunnel and also get more crossover tracks in the current tunnel”
We won’t get crossover tracks. ST hasn’t said anything about crossovers between DSTT1 and DSTT2, or within DSTT1 somewhere. All that has been unofficial suggestions by STB commentators. So even if one tunnel closes, trains won’t be able to divert to the second tunnel, so it will be the same situation as now. ST might stop running bus shuttles and instead tell passengers to transfer to the other tunnel and back — which to passengers would be the same overhead as transferring to a 15-minute bus shuttle and back.
Exactly right about DSTT1 and DSTT2 connectivity, Mike.
The general public thinks that Link trains are designed to be easily diverted from one into the other. That’s wrong!
That’s not what ST current designs show! The proposal in SODO doesn’t even have two tracks going in the same direction next to each other. For a train to keep going in the same direction, it will have to first cross a track going into the opposite direction if current designs hold.
So not only are the transfers for riders a hassled with at least 2 escalators at SODO and many more in the Downtown transfer stations, but the trains themselves can’t simply use a crossover to switch to the other tunnel.
It’s a reason why I keep saying (albeit to deaf ears) that the SODO station and nearby track configuration needs a major rethink.
Just be thankful you’re not in Denver where we’ve had two consecutive summers of light rail shut down or frequency heavily reduced because they’ve put off maintenance for so long that even the state is grilling them for this years long project
https://www.cpr.org/2024/06/17/state-safety-regulator-says-rtd-failed-to-head-off-preventable-light-rail-disruptions/
I’ve basically avoided light rail this summer due to this, and locals are pretty annoyed at the agency’s about face response to the situation. Tho I’m also annoyed at them doing this and not just shutting down stations to do maintenance and upkeep of stations as some of them need a deep clean and a fresh coat of paint.
Another good event coming up. Tomorrow the new ped/bike bridge opens at Wilburton Station:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/new-bellevue-bridge-linking-trail-with-light-rail-opens-sunday/
This year is really shaping up to be a year of progress for local transportation. Three new pedestrian bridges, the East Link Starter Line, the Lynnwood Link Extension on August 30th, and the Community Transit bus restructure two weeks later, all happening this year.
I can’t remember ever seeing this much transportation progress in Seattle in one year. Impressive.
I can’t think of any either. They were all delayed by different amounts and ended up converging now. East Link was split into two phases, and then three, so that artificially added openings. Otherwise we’d be talking about the wonderful 2 Line that doubled frequency in North Seattle and simultaneously brought high-capacity transit to and within Bellevue-Redmond. But each part might not get as much attention as when they open separately.
@Mike Orr,
A lot of different things converged to make this 2 to 3 year stretch very busy for transit expansion locally. Everything from how we fund transit expansion to the plinth problem.
But none of that changes or diminishes the magnitude of what is currently happening. The changes we will see over this 2 to 3 year stretch are absolutely transformational.
However, we should also recognize that having all these openings occur so close together is a really tough problem for ST to work through. So far they have done an excellent job. Let’s hope they keep it up.
The changes we will see over this 2 to 3 year stretch are absolutely transformational.
Yeah, just like many other periods. If I had to rank the eras (by projects) I would say:
1) The bus tunnel. It is easy to forget how much time this saved riders when it was just used by buses, but the difference was huge. But it also set the stage for everything else. It is quite possible that light rail never would have happened without it, or that it would have been much worse.
2) U-Link and the bus changes that occurred at roughly the same time. This is what we should have started with but it wasn’t just the changes to Link. Because of the bus restructure and the additional funding in Seattle the buses suddenly got a lot more frequent. Fifteen minute bus service became the norm in much of the city. Seattle became one of the few cities with increasing use of transit. Meanwhile, the change with Link was huge, as plenty of trips became really fast (e. g. UW to Capitol Hill).
3) Northgate Link. If U-Link included the U-District Station then this would be a lot less important. But adding what is probably the most important station outside of downtown makes this very important. The combination changed the perspective of various places. I never considered taking transit to Capitol Hill. Now I never consider driving there.
4) Changes for this year. Lynnwood Link is basically an add-on. It is nice, but I wouldn’t consider it essential (unlike a station at the U-District). A fair number of people will save a little bit of time. A few people will save a lot. But I don’t think it will be as big a change as the ones listed above. East Link is a much bigger change, but I still don’t think it equals the changes in Seattle (or the first Link line). RapidRide G is a big improvement, but it comes at a time when bus service is much worse than it was just a few years ago. I suppose the combination could bump this up a bit, but given the overall state of transit in this city (which is suffering from lack of funding) I think I would stick with this order. Things will be better at the end of the year, but unless we get our act together with regards to bus service (and right-of-way) things won’t be that great.
If it weren’t for the bus tunnel, I’m pretty sure Seattle would be stuck with Link on the surface at 15 mph and waiting at traffic lights.
The decision to keep the trolleybus network a few years ago may not have been transformational, but at least was a major step in not making things worse.
In the list of transformative transit changes, I would add three more.
A. The beginning of Link operations in 2009 and 2010. It legitimized Link. It revolutionized SE Seattle land use;the area was considered as too dangerous by many people. The accompanying redevelopment of the housing projects near some of the stations changed things too. But getting Downtown was a slow Route 7 trip (unless you hopped an 7X) and many felt unsafe. After being mostly in decline for decades, Link changed SE Seattle. It also changed things for airport bound people too — even though the former express bus was just as fast. Luggage is just easier on rail. And it made many aware of the power of comprehensive transit signal priority.
B. RapidRide program 2011-14. It made Seattle much faster to get around. It may have felt a bit cosmetic, but the waiting environment really matters. It changed the way things felt at many bus stops and made longer trips faster.
C. Initiation of ST Express and Sounder. 1999-2000. That really made transit so much more reasonable to use when traveling across the region. Its effect on Seattle residents wasn’t as profound but it added some much needed glue to the region as a whole.
I’ll leave it to others where to place these in Ross’ list. I would highlight that they each did affect many thousands of riders within a few years.
Among the new openings, I see the full 2 Line opening as the most impactful. From doubling train frequency in Seattle to connecting both Downtown and UW to the Eastside, it will carry all types of trips and be a catalyst to use transit for new destinations. From performances and nightlife in Seattle to shopping in Bellevue to college student life across the region it will change the interest to take advantage of the many interesting things to do in the region and that improves our quality of life. The other extensions are good, but I don’t see them as changing behavior and attitudes about using transit that the 2 Line will because 2 Line is adding accessibility to destinations as opposed to more residential areas and parking lots that the other extensions will serve.
I was going to list the opening of Link on there. At one point I had it towards the top but then pushed it down. If you are focused on the long term impact then it is clearly towards the top (probably right below the bus tunnel). It is quite possible we wouldn’t have a mass transit system by now (although who knows — maybe we would have a monorail, or maybe we would have started over, once again). But if you are looking at what it’s impact is now, then it gets pushed down the list. There are just far fewer trips that are dramatically faster to the south.
Good point about the other projects. Also good point about East Link doubling frequency on the north part of the line. I always forget that, and it will have a huge impact.
The work for 520 should be done this year as well. That is a huge improvement, and much better than what people have been putting up with for a long time. There is also RapidRide G, which is the first BRT in the state. There are also small improvements being made here and there (e. g. Rainier Avenue but lanes). This is more an iterative thing, but still important. You could say the same thing about Lynnwood Link (it is iterative). It is basically just part of “north end Link”. The steps were never intuitive. U-District and UW came in two different projects. Northgate and Shoreline are in two different projects. 130th is going in its own project. Lynnwood Link is definitely an important addition, but it is probably third in terms of projects along the route (behind U-Link and Northgate-Link).
In contrast East Link is a dramatic change. Yes, it is done in pieces now, but the train across the lake will make a big difference. It is similar to the 520 fix in that things got worse before they got better. The peak of Bellevue-Seattle service was back when the bus ran in the tunnel. Peak ridership of the 550 was back in 2016. This will (hopefully) exceed it.
Unfortunately there are some strong headwinds at the same time. The RapidRide G is coming with some really poor restructures (in my opinion). It will be strange to have one bus running so frequently (and quickly) while a bunch of other buses are running so infrequently (and failing to even combine for good frequency). I don’t think the East Link bus restructure is quite that bad. I think the bigger problem is lack of money. As a result, transit won’t be that good. Stephen Fesler wrote about that recently, and I agree: https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/06/19/more-cross-lake-service-in-restructure/. The future 270 should run more often. How to achieve that is a challenge though. (This makes it different than Capitol Hill where simple restructures could lead to much better frequency.)
So as I see it, things are going forward and backwards at the same time. This is in contrast to the U-Link era. At that point Seattle was spending more money on buses while also completing (at least most) of what they should have started with in terms of Link (UW to downtown). The restructures were strong, and while I didn’t agree with parts of it, they were much better than the ones for Lynnwood Link and RapidRide G. In general I felt like things were getting better across the board. Now it is more of a mixed bag.
When The Vine “BRT” opened in Vancouver, Washington, in 2017, it had 45% increase in ridership and 21% drop in operating costs over the standard bus route it replaced.
I hope RR G has a similar experience.