133 Replies to “Sunday Movie: How Seattle Rejected the Monorail”
This is where I believe the Sound Transit bus crashed yesterday. It’s southbound 5th Ave between Terrace and Yesler. From the online photos, the nose of the bus seems to have landed in between the tall sculpture on the right, and the stairs on the left. There are reports the driver said the brakes failed. I believe this was a Seattle-bound route 545.
Who here think motorized scooters, like Vespas, should be allowed on Seattle-area bike lanes and paths?
They’re too fast. In general I’d say bike lanes are around 15~20 mph which is around where escooters, regular bikes and most ebikes are at. for the us class 2 ebikes are limited to 20 mph, class 3 ebikes can go up to 28 mph but usually it is still just e assist not full power though it’s a bit more complicated here.
Motorized scooters can easily go 40 mph and some can go 75. I guess perhaps if one is driving slowly on the vespa (and if society could trust them to ride slowly) it might have been fine but generally they’re just going too fast.
No, they’re more like motorcycles. The purpose of bike lanes is to give slower-moving traffic their own space.
The comment section frequently points to The Netherlands as an example to follow, and how we should emulate them. The Netherlands allows scooters on bike paths. Granted, there are certain restrictions, but they generally allow them. Shouldn’t we follow a more enlightened country’s example?
We’d need more information about The Netherlands’ implementation, and how it doesn’t destroy the bike lanes. When I’ve seen clips and heard reports about their extensive bike network, nobody ever mentioned motor scooters on them.
@Sam
It is not as simple as “scooters are allowed in bike paths”
> In the Netherlands, a ‘scooter’ and a ‘moped’ are the same when it comes to vehicle category, driving rules and ownership requirements. Scooters with a maximum speed of 25kph (aka 15 mph) can be driven on bicycle paths and dedicated bike lanes. However, scooters with a maximum speed of 45kph must be driven in the street, not along bicycle paths or dedicated bike lanes.
Unless if Americans are predominantly buying motorized scooters with a maximum speed of 15 or 25 mph we are not even talking about the same scooters.
And even then, for Amsterdam itself they “The Municipality of Amsterdam recently banned mopeds from bike paths within the city.” in the past couple years because too many people were removing the speed limit restrictions that allowed them on the bike paths. Other cities have also implemented restrictions.
Out in the rural areas with less people it is more accepted to use them at higher speeds and so the higher speed of mopeds is a bit more accepted.
To go into more detail there’s generally 2 types of bike lanes and for the there’s 2 types of motorized scooters. (well actually even more )
There’s a 25 km/h lane (with a blue sign that says bike only) and then a 45 km /h lane with the sign that says bike + moped. And then for the moped’s there’s ones with a blue license plate with the max speed of km/h “Snorfiets” and then moped with yellow license plate called “brommer”.
Sorry replied a bit too early the mopeds with blue license plate (25 km/h)can use the lower speed bike lanes. while the ones with yellow license plate (45 km/h) can only use the higher speed bike lanes. And within amsterdam core city center you just must use the road.
But they have the same general idea of separating out lower speed, medium speed and higher speed into different trails.
This is not the same as allowing mopeds with a max speed of 70 mph on a bike trail.
WL, I said “Granted, there are certain restrictions …” So, nothing I said was untrue.
I just thought it would be funny to trick fans of the Netherlands into admitting that their bike path laws are worse than ours.
@Sam
> WL, I said “Granted, there are certain restrictions …” So, nothing I said was untrue.
lol Sam you worded it in a heavily misleading way implying as if one could ride a Vespa with a max speed of 70mph on any bike path.
“Certain restrictions” as in basically any moped sold in America would be forbidden to be used on Netherlands bike paths.
> I just thought it would be funny to trick fans of the Netherlands into admitting that their bike path laws are worse than ours.
Mhmm is this true or did you just not know yourself?
I was getting tired of all the “In the Netherlands …” comments. Then, when I watched that YT video that I just recommended of the local Best Side Cycling in the Netherlands, he mentioned he was surprised to see motorized scooters on bike paths. So I thought I would it would be fun to ask all the “The way things are done in the Netherlands” commenters if scooters should be allowed on Seattle bike paths.
Oooh, look, Sam made a trap for the Libtards. See Sam. Sam is smiling self-satisfiedly.
Yeah, I was going to comment about the idea, but figured Sam had some ulterior motive. Sure enough.
I figured you were criticizing the recent decision to open up the Burke Gilman to peddle assist bikes. There are similarities. In Washington State you can’t have Class 3 electric bikes on bike pathways. It has be be class 1 or 2. But what is there to stop someone with a class 3 bike from using the pathway? Not much. Is it a major problem? I doubt it. The biggest complaint by people is just speed. As one rider mentioned (https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/e-bikes-scooters-an-enthusiasts-response/) it is fairly common to be passed by a regular bike going 20 MPH. There is no simple solution. There are very few places where people can safely bike, while there are lots of places where people can safely walk (they are called “sidewalks”). There are places where bikes have to mix with pedestrians, but ultimately these should be fairly short (like the crossing of the Fremont Bridge). These are places where bikes should travel at pedestrian speed. But in many other places improved infrastructure is the answer. Sometimes that means making the path wider, and marking sections for pedestrians. Other times it means giving bikers a safe alternative (like at Green Lake).
Ultimately though, the biggest dangers come from cars, and it isn’t even close.
Interesting that the Netherlands handled the problem of fast scooters by requiring different license plates. That was going to be one of my initial points — how could you enforce the different classes of mopeds?
Oooh, look, Sam made a trap for the Libtards. See Sam. Sam is smiling self-satisfiedly.
Yeah, except he didn’t get his facts straight. Poor Sam.
You know what they say: “When in the Netherlands…………”
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I don’t anything gas powered should be allowed on any off street trail, regardless of speed. A trail is supposed to be a place to get away from the noise and fumes.
The big heavy E-bikes should not be on a shared-use trail, either.
The weight of the bike is not a major issue. The weight of the rider is much more important. Speed is also a major issue. That is why the state restricts class 3 bikes in various ways, but class 1 and 2 are allowed on the paths (and sidewalks).
For example, Michael Bennett is 6 foot 3, and weighed 275 pounds when he celebrated the Seahawk win with a ride around the field. Figure the bike he rode weighs another 25 pounds. A woman pedaling a 75 pound cargo bike (with two kids in the back) is going to be much lighter.
There is always a trade-off, but the more people ride bikes the better. The safer the route, the better. Someone riding on the Burke Gilman for part of their ride may be the difference between biking, driving, or getting hit by a car while biking. I think the line they draw (with class 3) is quite reasonable, especially if people who buy a class 3 know they can’t use them on bike paths.
Ross, I am not an E-Biker so I don’t know the statistics about the various “classes”. So I used the term “big heavy” to describe them. I guess I’m meaning Class 3 which is embargoed. Good for King County.
What I do know is that there are “bicycles” now with tires three or more inches wide and a honkin’ big electric motor connected to the chain. They can go much faster than the pedestrians through whom they weave and by whom they skim like the Bull passes The Matador.
I’ve also noticed that the people who buy and ride them are a bunch of reactionary Yahoos who revel in scaring those pedestrians.
Like so many Americans they seem to believe that The Constitution makes them a “Sovereign”.
Ross, I am not an E-Biker so I don’t know the statistics about the various “classes”.
It is not based on weight, it is based on speed (and whether you need to pedal or not). But as I noted, it is not that hard to go even faster on a regular bike. Average speed on the flats for a bike racer is 25-28 MPH. Thus if they are sprinting they are going faster. These bikes don’t have an electric motor. Obviously most people aren’t that reckless, but it can happen.
I’ve also noticed that the people who buy and ride them are a bunch of reactionary Yahoos who revel in scaring those pedestrians.
And I’ve noticed that people who drive cars are psychopathic killers. Except me, of course. Seriously though, the vast majority of people who own electric bikes are just trying to get from one place to another. The biggest, heaviest bikes are cargo bikes. These are especially popular with parents who shuttle their kids.
I’m many cases, ebikes have no reasonable alternative to regional trails. For example, let’s suppose you want to cross Lake Washington on a ebike? If you don’t want them riding on the trail, what else are they supposed to do? Ride on the freeway lanes at 20 mph? Detour around the lake and clog up the SR-522 bus lanes (since you don’t want them using the Burke Gilman trail either)? None of the above is reasonable, and as RossB said, the fastest bikes are usually pedal bikes anyway.
Gas powered bikes is a totally different situation because of their noise and stench. Besides actually being worse on noise and pollution than gas powered full-sized cars, they are also simply unnecessary, as there are cheap electric alternatives widely available. Even just sitting along a trail with an idling engine, a gas powered bike is already obnoxious, just by being there. Not the case with electric assist bikes, which only pose a problem when they move too fast (which is the same as a pedal only bike).
Hate the behavior not the mode. Enforce speed, enforce dangerous actions. Don’t get all high and mighty about the type of bike, and don’t stereotype the perception of the rider.
I ride a standard road bike. My wife rides an e-bike. She would just be another car on the road, if not for being on an ebike. She rides slower, and she rides far more safely than me.
Cars are far, far more dangerous and disruptive than anybody on an e-bike. Ever.
If you want to separate those doing 20 mph from the broader multi-use trails, start advocating for taking road space from cars. I’d be hugely supportive.
Ross, thanks for the link to the regulations. It sounds to me that Class 2 is pretty questionable also. They’re just an electric motor scooter if pedaling is not required.
asdf2, the five pedestrians a day who cross one of the Lake Washington bridges do not make the bikeways “multi-use trails” like the Burke-Gilman or Green Lake Loop. The bikeways across the bridges were built primarily for bikes, and pedestrians are welcome to walk though very few do so. On the other hand thousands of people walk on the BGT in a non-December ice storm day. Ross’s solution of widening is long past due, though there are a few places where it’s not possible. In those stretches the bikes should be limited to six miles per hour. Riders who can’t be steady at that speed should simply dismount and walk through the narrow zone. And yes, “How can they effectively be limited?” is an almost impossible question to answer.
It is regrettable that responsible bike riders suffer from the actions of the jerk contingent of yahoos on wheels, but the yahoos cause enough harm on crowded trails that they make it imperative that all motorized bikes be ejected. Yes, the Spandex Mafia is a big problem, too, but they’ve been there for decades and there aren’t really that many left whizzing away. It’s not a “look” that appeals to young people these days. However, the Ebikes make the sport of scaring pedestrians — or actually mowing them down, in most cases accidentally — available to many more psychopaths.
And sorry Cam, but your solution of enforcement is a joke. The cops don’t enforce speeding on roadways by trucks and autos, because they’re part of the Drivers’ Caucus themselves. Much less are they going to enforce speeding for bikes when a lot of them think that the people walking on the trail are a bunch of Commie subversives anyway.
> Ross’s solution of widening is long past due, though there are a few places where it’s not possible. In those stretches the bikes should be limited to six miles per hour. And yes, “How can they effectively be limited?” is an almost impossible question to answer.
I guess you could add speed bumps
For widening the seattle transporation plan did list some of the trails: for widening such as the burke gilman trail, chief Sealth, alki trail — however, I don’t see them in the levy.
Cam Solomon,
Yeah, my 70-year-old overweight uncle rides an e-bike. I’m fairly sure he’s going a reasonable speed, and, given his 8 grandkids, I’ll bet he slows down for groups and families and pedestrians. Just a hunch. Far safer than any automobile.
There is generally no absolute bans on electric power or motorized power on bicycles. It’s more of how big or fast are they allowed to be. It’s defined by engine size and maximum speed.
The technology is such that a manufacturer could tweak a product to meet the standards set by a state. It’s probably not ideal though as people do take them across state lines. And a tinkerer could modify their bike’s performance.
There are other variations between states too. Some states make users qualify for a general drivers license and for these bikes to have license plates, and others have other rules or no rules (younger users for example) on these things.
The issue arises in other countries, especially in places where bicycle use is more common. There is growing concern that there is an impact to general bicycle safety.
Given the many nuances and emerging technology and safety issues involved, it’s likely not a topic that a transit blog should explore thoroughly. .
Absolutely NOT. They are too fast and too heavy. E-Bikes that go faster than fifteen miles an hour should be embargoed as well.
Allowing a gas powered scooter on a mixed use trail in which pedestrians have the right of way is a bad idea in my opinion. Where do you draw the line.
The bigger issue I see is bicyclists not following the speed limit on these mixed use trails. Especially the large bike groups. It is very difficult to walk side by side on these trails. I would like to see speed enforcement. Set up speed cameras with police officers at either end and hand out speeding tickets on the trail no matter what the mode is. Require bicyclists to carry ID just like a driver must carry a drivers license (proof of insurance wouldn’t be a bad idea too). And follow the rule about riding single file.
If a bicyclist wants to pretend they are in the Tour de France then ride on the roads. You just can’t mix bicyclists going 20 mph with pedestrians, kids, strollers, dogs, and the elderly who are going 3mph max. Plus too many bicyclists are very rude and entitled.
I have seen way more collisions between bicyclists and pedestrians on these mixed use trails than I have ever seen between cars or between cars and bicyclists on the street.
It’s a bit complicated for e-bikes. The (king county) regional trail system mostly involves pretty long routes. Without e-bikes the number of people who can actually effectively use them drops quite a lot.
Of course the most contentious areas are near the cities downtowns where the trails enter. If we had enough space allocated we could have multiple trails for each type but of course we don’t so we have to share it together.
Anyways there’s been discussions about stricter enforcement of speed limits near dense areas or perhaps widening of areas or stricter separation of pedestrian versus bikes versus even horses but honestly to go more in depth this is probably better discussed on say Seattle greenways (or whatever the issaquah equivalent is) or Seattle bike blog than this transit blog,
> You just can’t mix bicyclists going 20 mph with pedestrians, kids, strollers, dogs, and the elderly who are going 3mph max.
Yes there’s lots of tension with arguing who should be the priority and even get into debates over federal funding
The monorail hype in the 1950s and 60s ignored the fact that elevated metro trains were almost a century old by that point, and were running in New York and Chicago. One track good, two tracks bad. But why? Couldn’t people then see that they were practically the same thing? And that conventional elevated trains could be electrified and have wrap-around wheels and avant-garde shaped vehicles just like their monorail visions? That would make it incremental improvements instead of unproven technology, and lower the cost and risk.
There doesn’t seem to be the established standards adopted to make monorail systems work. Every system seems bespoke (“gadgetbahn”).
Plus, any rail technology has to be designed and built in 3-D rather than 2-D, complete with ways to allow for slopes, curves and switching — not to mention the basic objective to not derail by being off-balanced.
Tracks for at least two parallel wheels may not be the most aesthetically pleasing thing to look at, but it seems the most naturally effective way to operate heavy vehicles in a balanced way. And established rail track and vehicle design standards developed over a century has huge advantages in lots of ways.
That was one of the problems with the monorail plan. Light/heavy rail had open standards, many vendors, and decades of real-world use. Each monorail vendor had its own incompatible design, so it could charge monopoly prices and you could only get replacements and service from that vendor.
It was like the microcomputer situation in the late 70s and early 80s. Several companies had incompatible models with different unique features– Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore PET, Atari. Later the IBM PC came out and steamrollered over all the others, because pointy-headed business leaders accepted it into their companies.
@Mike Orr,
“ That was one of the problems with the monorail plan. ”
LOL. There were many, many problems with the monorail plan. Too many problems to bother regurgitating here.
Seattle dodged a bullet when the monorail plan became monofail and finally died. Good riddance.
And, for the record, I actually like the current monorail. It is sort of quaint.
Yeah, monorails are a niche system. They make sense if you plan on going above ground the entire way. It is cheaper than other forms of elevated (which is what they were getting at in the video). However, if you run on the surface or run underground then it costs more than it would otherwise. It is pretty rare that you plan on running elevated the whole way, which is why not that many people use them. Since not that many people use them, the costs go way up.
The beamway is much slimmer than a railbed, and there must be space between the two beamways whether supported (AKA “Seattle”) or suspended as in Wuppertal. So the visual impact of the beamway is considerably less than a two-track railway.
At 36:29 is a clip of a red painting-like sign that used to be at Denny Way and 1st Ave N if I remember, that I used to see from the buses to Queen Anne and Ballard. I think it was a restaurant but I don’t remember clearly.
There’s a clip of the Skyride in the closing credits, that was a gondola across the Seattle Center grounds. Or at least, it was small cars running on a cable; I don’t know what the exact definition of a gondola is compared to similar systems. I arrived in Seattle in 1972 and rode it as a child in the early 70s. It was my favorite kind of ride or feature at Seattle Center. I’d forgotten that was a precursor to my love of urban metros.
My first real metro experience was in 1986 right after high school, when my dad and I drove to San Jose and Lake Tahoe for Christmas with relatives. While we were in San Jose my dad had a day with business meetings, so his friend suggested they take me to Fremont so I could ride BART to San Francisco. So I did, and spent the afternoon in SF. Then I took BART back to Fremont and got a bus to San Jose.
Riding BART smoothly at 79 mph is an amazing thrill — particularly on the straight elevated segments in San Leandro and Oakland. It leaves a powerful impression, especially younger ones.
I’ve even viewed it as a taste of what high speed rail would feel like. It actually makes slower light rail systems feel a little disappointing. But maybe it’s because there is a bit of a speed demon in me (as well as lots of people).
What BART does and what light rail does are two different things.
In Berlin, there is the Sbahn, which really isn’t that much different than Link in terms of speed, but has somewhat more frequent stop spacing.
For BART type distances, there are regional trains, such as Re-1, operating sort of like Sounder, only Re-1 has an *average speed* including station stops around 70 mph.
So if you’re in, say, Potsdam and want to go somewhere in the Berlin region, what you use depends on where. S Bahn S7 is quite popular for some trips. For other destinations, Re-1 is a much faster choice.
yes, Mike, Seattle did have a gondola during the original world fair. After the fair closed, it was disassembled and moved to the Puyallup state fair where it still operates.
I thought the video was quite good overall. I especially liked the “death of a thousand cuts” idea. I think there were a couple key points they left out though.
The biggest omission in the story was not mentioning the bus tunnel. It was not only important in its own right, but it changed everything that followed. Without the tunnel ST would have been in deeper trouble, and might have just scrapped Link altogether. Ron Sims wanted to do that (if memory serves). Without the bus tunnel ST would have two ugly paths: build on the surface (like Portland) or watch the project become even more expensive. Running on the surface would have made it look much worse (especially in comparison to the monorail) and made the monorail people look brilliant (not an easy task). Of course if the plans for Link were replaced with buses the interest in the monorail would have been higher (and they could have gone to the UW, as originally planned). The bus tunnel (later the transit tunnel) is arguably the most important, highest-value transit project in the region.
The other thing they forgot to mention is that the Forward Thrust proposal needed a supermajority. Over 50% of the people supported it, but it wasn’t enough. It is funny because the monorail vote (and the ST vote) would have failed if they needed those kind of numbers. As with ST, the options the state gave us (not the voters) are a big reason we don’t have a better system.
There were several omissions. The supermajority requirement for Forward Thrust. The Eyman initiative that revoked MVET surcharges for transit and took its funding source out from under it. (The initiative was later ruled unconstitutional, but the damage was done.) And something else I’d have to watch the video again to remember.
It was interesting to see how the maps compare: the pre-Forward Thrust concepts, the Forward Thrust plan, the Monorail iterations, and Link’s iterations.
It also shows that the pre-Forward Thrust concepts would have gone to Mountlake Terrace, Sea-Tac airport, and Kent. They and Northgate were left out of Forward Thrust, which gives the impression they weren’t populous enough then or didn’t have sufficient growth plans, but that turns out not to be the case.
If Forward Thrust had opened in 1980, I would have been 14. GenXers like myself would have had rapid transit in the eastern half of Seattle and Bellevue for our entire high school, college, career, and retirement. My parents, Silents, would have been able to use it starting in their 40s. Boomers in between would have been able to use it in their 20s. When I first encountered BART in 1986, I would have been riding something similar for six years.
When Link opened in 2009, I was 43. So I have rapid transit in southeast Seattle to the airport for half of my career years. But there was nothing in the U-District, Northgate, Capitol Hill, or the Eastside.
If the Monorail had opened in 2010, the western half of Seattle would have been open to me for half of my career years, without the 30-minute overhead of getting from Ballard to the transfer points downtown or the U-District to go anywhere further. That was one of the reasons that I left Ballard in 2003, after working there for four years and living there for one, because most of what I did was in the eastern half of Seattle or Bellevue, there was no low-overhead way to get there, and the future monorail wouldn’t have accepted transfers so I’d be riding a bus under the monorail tracks to avoid double-paying fares.
When Northgate Link opened in 2022, I was 55. So it wasn’t there for my college at the U, or my ten years living in the U-District and working in First Hill/Northgate/downtown. But it has been open for two years, and has immensely improved access from Capitol Hill to the U-District, Roosevelt, Northgate, and Lynnwood. So I’m glad for that, but I wish we’d had something much sooner.
This is what we’ve lost from taking so long to build a proper metro. An entire additional generation or two has missed out on high-capacity transit for half or all of their career years.
This is why we should have started building in the 1970s as German cities did, and never stopped.
Why did Forward Thrust require 66% of votes when later transit measures require 50%?
Because the Legislature was much more dominated by rural counties, and rural counties have forever thought that their damp pool of tax revenue was paying for their own and Seattle’s roads and schools rather than the reverse, which is a fact.
The rubes have hated the city slickers since Andrew Jackson’s time.
I should have said “since The Whiskey Rebellion”.
[You could look it up…]
“The Forward Thrust ballot initiatives were a series of bond propositions put to the voters of King County, Washington in 1968 and 1970, designed by a group called the Forward Thrust Committee. Seven of the twelve propositions in 1968 were successful; four of the remaining propositions were repackaged for a vote in 1970, when they were defeated in the darkening local economic climate of the Boeing Bust”.
Forward Thrust – Wikipedia
In WA state bonds require a 60% yes vote and 40% turnout to pass whereas levies require 50% to pass. (Rep. Tana Senn is trying to reduce the percentage to pass bonds to 55% for school bonds).
To get around this requirement agencies like ST place “levies” on the ballot but then bond the future revenue. (ST also bonded the levy revenue in ST 3 although not fiscally necessary to prevent future measures or initiatives from reducing ST’s taxing authority, which included a legal action to amend ST’s car valuations the plaintiffs claimed were not disclosed in the levy but had already been bonded).
ST also uses subarea loans which are a kind of bond, which have been disadvantageous for some subareas like Everett and Tacoma that could have bonded their own future levy revenue and built their projects long ago when construction costs were much lower. Today it looks unlikely ELE or TDLE can be completed because ST was very optimistic on project cost estimates, and the income earned on the subarea bonds pales in comparison to the rise in inflation and project costs during the period citizens in these two subareas have been paying ST taxes.
To write, “Because the Legislature was much more dominated by rural counties, and rural counties have forever thought that their damp pool of tax revenue was paying for their own and Seattle’s roads and schools rather than the reverse, which is a fact. The rubes have hated the city slickers since Andrew Jackson’s time” for why some of Forward Thrust failed at the ballot shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how bonds work and Forward Thrust in particular.
Forward Thrust was under the aegis of METRO, King Co., and the city of Seattle, none of which are rural counties or “rubes”. The Legislature did not prevent the bonds from being placed on a ballot. The voters in King Co. simply rejected the bonds due to economic hard times.
Virtually every government or government agency uses bonds, rural, suburban and urban. Unless state bonds, the repayment obligation is on the issuing agency, city, or county.
The U.S. government issues general obligation bonds which means there is no specific project securing the bonds. So do states, cities, and virtually every school district. WSDOT secures future toll revenue to issue bonds. The advantage of these government bonds is they are exempt from federal income tax and so can offer a lower interest rate compared to market rates at the time. The risk is the projects fail (eg Puerto Rico, Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island) so the security from the specific project is worth less than the outstanding bonds, or inflation and interest rates rise lowering the value of the bonds because they now have lower interest rates than new bonds.
That is the take away from the loss of Forward Thrust. Not only did the agency and county lose a $900 million federal earmark Sen. Warren had secured, the cost of the projects increased dramatically over time, which is why Everett and Tacoma have been disadvantaged by subarea loans. ST effectively bonded their subarea revenue at very low interest rates for decades while inflation and construction costs have soared.
I wasn’t here during Forward Thrust, but what’s noticeable to me is the transit measures failed while most of the others including freeways passed. If the Boeing Bust were the only reason people were hesitant to spend money, more measures would have failed and the topics would have been broader. This suggests transit skepticism was a consistent factor in the two votes. If it had just been caution during a recession, they might have realized that leaving the situation as they did would lead to a car-dependent infrastructure and people having no other alternative. They would then discuss how to fix the situation as soon as possible, if not with that bond measure, then with something smaller that could have been the starting point for a better transit network.
There’s also the evidence of the bus network at the time. I wasn’t old enough to be aware of it until the late 70s, but then most all-day bus routes in Seattle were half-hourly, suburban routes hourly, many were long slow milk runs to downtown, and three-quarters of the suburban routes were peak expresses to downtown — in other words, the bus network was pretty useless. Forward Thrust could have fixed that at least in the largest corridors. But voters apparently didn’t think that was important enough.
This all screams Futurama, the 1939 vision that foreshadowed what Seattle and King County were doing. At MOHAI there’s a clip of an interview with the Seattle mayor and city council before the World’s Fair, and they were giddy that the soon-to-be-built I-5 and 520 would be the greatest thing Seattle ever had. This was the World’s Fair vision of monorails, skyrides, and bubbleators? Apparently a lot of voters bought the Futurama and freeway-happy mindset, and didn’t think about letting transit catch up to the car infrastructure.
“Forward Thrust was under the aegis of METRO, King Co., and the city of Seattle, none of which are rural counties or “rubes”.”
The argument is that the general 60% threshold was maintained by rural interests. Forward Thrust was subject to that threshold, so rural interests were indirectly responsible for its defeat. A 60% requirement means a minority of 40% can get their way — contrary to the principle of majority-rule democracy. I said above that the public had an anti-transit attitude, but I should amend that: the majority of the public recognized the need for effective transit infrastructure and voted for it, but they were thwarted by a minority under the 60% rule.
“To get around this requirement agencies like ST place “levies” on the ballot but then bond the future revenue.”
So that’s what happened.
“ST also uses subarea loans which are a kind of bond, which have been disadvantageous for some subareas like Everett and Tacoma that could have bonded their own future levy revenue and built their projects long ago when construction costs were much lower.”
Pierce and Snohomish County stub lines to the county border would have been putting the cart before the horse. Pierce and Snohomish Counties have nothing comparable to the Bellevue-Spring District-Microsoft-Redmond corridor, which is affluent, job/retail-rich, and has walksheds away from freeways (read: ridership generators). And the Eastside stub was unintended: the result of a construction delay in the middle of the line. And if they’d built their stubs but then King County couldn’t bring Link to Federal Way and Shoreline, what then? Two white elephant investments in Pierce and Snohomish Counties.
Fact Check, the use of the terms “levies” [when used as security for bonds] and “bonds” directly issued is a distinction without a difference. If the Legislature of 1964 had wanted to allow King County to build the full set of Forward Thrust improvements, it could have offered it the same deal the Central Puget Sound Transit Authority has. But it didn’t, because it was still dominated by rural representatives, including those from Tacoma which still thought of itself as a rival to Seattle. Twenty years later the Central Puget Sound region had grown enough that it could begin to call the shots.
Now, of course, the balance of power is completely centered around Puget Sound, and the rest of the state is lucky that the people living in Paradise are generous.
Being Democrats and all.
King gets a far disproportionate level of funding, compared to Pierce, well beyond simple population. Be it general transportation dollars from the PSRC, dollars for homelessness, dollars for alternative transportation, King get’s the King’s ransom, Pierce gets crumbs and the out-sized needs, and the tiny tax-base.
Generous my ass.
King subsidizes the rest of the state. King/Pierce/Snohomish together subsidize the other counties. Who do you think is paying for exurban freeways like the Cross-Base Highway or the sprawl east/southeast of Tacoma?
You notice I didn’t mention highways. Exporting blight is not generous.
I’m pretty sure the cross-base highways is essentially canceled, just an FYI. My politicians are fighting hard against the Canyon Rd. project, which zombie’s on with little support, but nobody can zero-in on a head-shot. The I-5 expansion through the base probably benefits King more than Pierce, just by virtue of the substantially larger population using I-5 south coming from King.
The sprawl in southeast Pierce isn’t a King County conspiracy. It exists because exurban Pierce cities and unincorporated areas demand it, and the county and state are unwilling to tell them no, or that it must be more compact and walkable. None of that is King County’s fault. The nature of exurban sprawl means that the cost per capita is higher than in more compact areas. The ones who pay the most taxes are high-population, most affluent areas, so that money goes to exurban utopia dreams and keeping the rural/agricultural areas alive. That’s not “exporting blight”. it’s a messed-up political structure that gives sprawlites and nimbys too much power.
> You notice I didn’t mention highways. Exporting blight is not generous.
I didn’t realize king county/ seattle was so powerful as to control what other counties build. “exporting blight”? You’re making it sound as if the government officials in pierce county were forced by seattle to build the hov expansion projects in i5 or tacoma narrows bridge expansion.
> I’m pretty sure the cross-base highways is essentially canceled, just an FYI. My politicians are fighting hard against the Canyon Rd. project, which zombie’s on with little support, but nobody can zero-in on a head-shot.
Aren’t they moving forward with the sr 167 extension?
> The I-5 expansion through the base probably benefits King more than Pierce, just by virtue of the substantially larger population using I-5 south coming from King.
Come on, it’s literally 15 miles from the border of pierce county. I might as well “claim” the i5 hov lane project from tacoma to seattle benefits pierce county more while we’re at it.
You can’t label every time federal funding is spent within pierce county as somehow the fault of king county.
No, of course it isn’t a conspiracy. I just don’t think King should get credit for King’s superior tax-base destroying rural Pierce County.
We have lots of problems we actually do need money for. Two I care about are transit and homelessness. We are desperate for money for both, yet King uses their superior grant writing capacity and political weight to finagle limited dollars to address those two problems far in excess of proportionate needs or population, to Pierce’s detriment. In in my opinion, uses that money quite poorly.
So no, I am not really too interested in kissing King’s ring and thanking them for scraps, just because they happen to fund the destruction of our neighborhoods and farmlands, because King happens to be rich.
167 expansion is neither the cross-base nor Canyon Rd. It’s a completely separate project designed to funnel goods from the Port to Kent warehouses.
> 167 expansion is neither the cross-base nor Canyon Rd. It’s a completely separate project designed to funnel goods from the Port to Kent warehouses.
Yes I know that, I meant they are still expanding and building freeways in pierce county
Yes, they definitely are. 167 is the big one, for sure. Though it basically straddles the county line, and probably benefits King and it’s tax-base substantially more the Pierce. Particularly since the two ports now have a joint agreement. I assume the lion’s share of the tax benefit goes to where ever those warehouses reside, which is mainly King.
Random snippets (these are just candidates)
* 112th St. E., A St. S. to 18th Ave. E.: This project will widen 112th St. E. t
* 224th St. E. Widen the existing roadway to 3 lanes.
* Canyon Rd (lots of projects applied for here)
* Rhodes Lake Road East: Construct a new major principal arterial roadway
The next largest project approved is:
* I-5/SR 512 Interchange to SR 16 Interchange – Core HOV
Estimated cost $803,176,852
This section of I-5 is experiencing congestion during peak hours and is part of the HOV program. Reconstruction of the 72nd Street Interchange and the 84th Street Interchange will remove and replace the 72nd and 84th Street bridges and high occupancy vehicle lanes will be constructed on I-5. This construction will result in reduced traffic congestion and enhance motorist safety.
If you search for the seattle/king county freeway projects some of them aren’t even in this list because they don’t even apply anymore. For instance the i5 widening near northgate or adding auxiliary lanes or unweaving the i5 around spokane corridor aren’t listed any more while they were in the past.
Yeah, thanks WL. I’ve seen that. Fortunately many of the road projects score poorly.
Some of them, like Canyon Road, were proposed in the 80s or 90s. They have just been zombie’ing along, working through the process, without a lot of rethinking about how worthwhile they still are.
It’s the opposite of transit. Highways are as hard to kill as transit project are easy.
Watching the Pierce County Council discuss them is this bizarro world of “who asked for this?” “Shrug.” “How do we stop it?” “Shrug.”
@Cam.
“ King gets a far disproportionate level of funding, compared to Pierce, well beyond simple population.”
Ah, no.
The last data I saw (2016?) showed that King got $0.55 in spending for every tax dollar raised, whereas Pierce got $1.25 in spending for every tax dollar raised (IIRC). Meaning King really is floating the state, and Pierce is one of the so called “welfare counties” (more state spending than revenue raised).
And these are just ratios. In absolute dollars the disparity is even worse, mainly because the King Co economy is the biggest in the state.
In rank King was 38th out of 39. The only county that was worse was San Juan County. But there isn’t a lot of state infrastructure in the islands, so a lot lower state spending.
Cam Solomon…
We must be buddies. The exurban areas busting with population exist for one reason, and one reason only. Seattle refuses to zone appropriately to house the population of employees that its businesses have. By extension, a few dozen suburbs surrounding Seattle could absorb that growth… but they don’t; and furthermore, they accept more and more jobs and employment centers themselves, also, not upzoning appropriately to handle the population growth that matches the jobs they support. These people need to live somewhere. They end up in places like Marysville and Spanaway. A lot of the people in those areas don’t want any growth, none at all. And they don’t have tons of jobs to support the people. And nobody is making the home builders finance transit to support the growth. So, here we are dealing with the crap sandwich of a Microsoft and Amazon boom that have pushed all of the working class people out of Seattle into “anywhere else.”
Seattle is responsible for not building enough housing for everybody who wants to live there. It’s the largest city, so it should fulfill that role. But Pierce County and its cities are responsible for their sprawl. If they built walkable streetcar suburbs basically any distance from Tacoma, I wouldn’t complain. Buses or trains can go to any village anywhere, especially if they’re in a straight line, and people can walk from the stop to home, and from home to the store and other things. But the land use isn’t like that: it’s basically only houses or sometimes apartments, and the nearest store is a mile or two away, and buses can’t serve all the houses.
Car-dependent land use is designed for wealthy people, so at most it should be only 5-10% of the housing at the fringes, like the mansions along Lake Washington and Magnolia. The 1960s suburban model was for people who could easily afford to drive, and assumed that gas would always be cheap, car pollution was insignificant, car infrastructure didn’t destroy cities, and walkability was unimportant. All these may be OK for a small rich minority who wants it, but it’s cruel to force people of modest means into it and give them no other choice.
It was 60%. It was common back in the day to require 60% majority for local tax levies. I’m not sure the history. Some of it is anti-tax sentiment, some of it the desire for a more uniform level of spending across the state. This has always been an issue with schools. A wealthy district will spend a lot, while a poor district won’t, and no one wants to spend money at the state level. By setting the bar higher (or setting limits in how you can spend money locally) you force people from around the state to get together and fund schools adequately everywhere. That is the idea, but of course it hasn’t worked out that way.
Another possibility is that they wanted to raise the bar for bonds. Bond issues tend to be popular because they usually involve building stuff. But bonds can leave an area with big financial problems which can cascade throughout the state.
Because the King County population in 1970 was half of what it is today, the rapid transit perception was very different. After all, it was 54 years ago! The youngest voters in 1970 would be 72 today.
It was also in the middle of the rare period from 1960-1980 when Seattle lost population. Seattle has rebounded and added over 40 percent more residents since then.
It’s interesting history. I don’t think the results say much about today’s issues though.
“Because the King County population in 1970 was half of what it is today, the rapid transit perception was very different. ”
And New York, Chicago, and London were smaller when they started their rapid transit projects. The Bay Area was half the size when it approved BART. When Santa Clara County considered BART in the 1950s, it only had 200,000 people. (I looked it up.) German cities down to the size of 40,000 have light rail or similar, built or upgraded since 1970.
In any case, they were planning for growth. Forward Thrust went to Bel-Red and Eastgate because that’s where King County intended to channel growth and highrises to.
Back then you could can also build a lot more subway with a lot more cut and cover. For instance in berkeley you can see where they demolished the houses to dig the trenches https://maps.app.goo.gl/WV5zgE4q64D11L9w6
That is how the forward thrust / atlanta were able to build so much subway back then.
> Not only did the agency and county lose a $900 million federal earmark Sen. Warren had secured, the cost of the projects increased dramatically over time
Not to say politically those methods are completely viable now but just reminding all that costs definitely matter in how much rail is actually built. And that the cost of transit projects increasing — a lot of it is from community opposition demanding more expensive alignments not really “inflation”
I think the more interesting thing is thinking about what happens after the forward thrust vote was passed.
1) Would they have successfully built all of it? Bart originally wanted to say cross the golden gate bridge but instead that section was cut out. I could see for example them leaving out the factoria/issaquah line and going to bellevue first.
2) I wonder how well the bus connections to the heavy rail would have worked for the redmond downtown to micorsoft, upper ballard to ballard and west seattle to sodo busses. I imagine somewhat decently, but it’s kind of odd they proposed such short bus routes from the stations.
3) Where/what would have been the next expansions.
3a) Assuming like BART I guess they might have done a branch off the ‘renton’ line to seatac or southcenter (or maybe both with that expensive flyover).
3b) maybe this is when they do the issaquah line? Or the extension up to lynnwood.
3c) with the high construction cost of subways generally stopping in most of america past the 80s, I wonder if they would have switched back to light rail as new jersey/dc did. Though given forward thrust covers most of seattle already the only corridors left for light rail I can think of would be south seattle with mlk way/rainier, maybe north seattle with market street but I think it might be covered already with these subways. Or maybe an eastside one on the erc from kirkland down to bellevue.
“Would they have successfully built all of it?”
It worked for MARTA.
“Bart originally wanted to say cross the golden gate bridge but instead that section was cut out.”
That’s because Marin County voted it down, along with San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. It was going to go all the way around the bay; i.e., to San Jose and Palo Alto. There’s an exhibit in Diridon station (the main train station in San Jose) on the 1950s planning. It considered both BART and what was called the return of streetcars (which became the VTA light rail project).
It’s interesting to see why they voted it down. Santa Clara County wanted to spend the money on “expressways” instead. Expressways are like sub-freeways, similar to Aurora or 15th Ave W. So the San Tomas, Lawrence, and Montague expressways were built. (As I found out later, the Lawrence Expressway was built near where I lived as a toddler in Saratoga.) When I went back there in the 2000s after the expressways had been built, I found they had all the disadvantages you can imagine: non-walkability, ugliness, and not eliminating traffic congestion.
San Mateo County voted BART down because it would have approximated the Caltrain corridor, and they thought Caltrain was sufficient. (Never mind that BART would have run every 15 minutes or more and Caltrain was hourly or less. They weren’t thinking about what would be good for pedestrians not driving cars.)
Marin County I don’t know as much about. But it was part of the anti-urban branch of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s/70s, and didn’t want density. So that might have contributed to it.
> “Would they have successfully built all of it?”
> It worked for MARTA.
No, I’m referencing MARTA as well. MARTA definitely built a lot, but that was not the original plan either.
(copied from wikipedia, this is a bit oversimplfying below as well)
MARTA was built with at least three stubs for rail lines which were never built:
* The Northwest Line towards Cobb County has a stub tunnel east of Atlantic Station
* The South Line’s branch to Hapeville was considered for extension into Clayton County as far away as Forest Park,
* The Northeast Line of the rail system, which has ended in Doraville for two decades, was considered for extension into Gwinnett County
Anyways my main point isn’t to be negative about after the vote but that circumstances still could have changed for instance building a branch in a different direction. Or maybe they added more infill stations on that bellevue / redmond section.
I’ve also been wondering what Forward Thrust station areas and expansions would have evolved into.
A lot of things were different in the 1960s. King County’s population was less than a million, and 90% lived in Seattle. Snohomish and Pierce were separate job markets and more rural. Only Boeing workers drove to all the plants. 405 didn’t exist yet, and Southcenter was going to be in Burien. West Valley Highway and the Kent P&R were the middle of nowhere when I first rode the 150 there in the early 80s. People didn’t realize how much the freeways and airport would change travel patterns or where people worked. The Central District station was called “Model Neighborhood”, because a new Spring District or something was to be built there.
So Forward Thrust was oriented to Lake City, Bellevue, Eastgate, and Renton, because that was the existing travel patterns and planned growth. Renton was clearly for the Boeing plant.
In a best-case scenario, the station areas would be popular places to live, and that would generate support for apartments and density there, and support for more high-quality transit. I hope the Renton stations would have apartments and not just the factory.
In a worst-case scenario, NIMBYs would block density, and the station areas would remain as they were in the 1960s, so people couldn’t really live near stations and walk to transit. That’s what happened to BART in Hayward and Fremont.
As to where post-1980 expansions might be, I find it hard to speculate. Most of King County’s and Snohomish/Pierce County’s growth happened after Forward Thrust would have opened. King County in the early 80s debated how to channel growth, and Microsoft grew in that era. The presence of the Forward Thrust subway would have added new factors to the debate. That could have led to a walkability/density model like Vancouver, DC, Chicago, or Toronto. Growth could have been concentrated more in King County rather than spreading out so much to Everett and Tacoma.
Or the wave of unwalkable isolated office parks and cul-de-sacs in the 80s and 90s might have continued unabated, and the subway would have continued running but otherwise be ignored.
Those two scenarios are so counterfactual that I don’t see the point in guessing where the largest neighborhoods and most likely extensions and new lines would be. It’s depressing to think about the opportunity we threw away, and to beautify cabins in a cruise ship that doesn’t exist.
WL, lots of BART is at-grade in freeway medians or alongside existing railroad tracks with arterial overpasses like happen with freeways. Just because third-rail IS dangerous does not mean it can’t be used at-grade. Look at all the electrically-powered commuter rail lines radiating out from New York City; most of the Long Island Railroad lines are at-grade their entire distance. They are fenced off so that people don’t get electrocuted.
“MARTA was built with at least three stubs for rail lines which were never built”
By “stub” I meant complete rail segments and stations. I don’t know enough about Atlanta to understand your three examples, but:
* A “stub tunnel” sounds like a short segment like the Beacon Hill tunnel. Not an entire partial line from Tacoma Dome to the county border. (I imagine Federal Way and King County would block the remainder to (South) Federal Way station if Central Link weren’t coming.)
* The other two sound like extensions on a map that were never built. That’s an ordinary situation that happens everywhere. Was any disconnected infrastructure built in those segments? Anything more substantial than a “Y” interface or tail track, that’s so small it doesn’t matter.
“(South) Federal Way station”
I don’t know whether South King’s funding ends at Federal Way Station or South Federal Way Station.
The history of Marin and BART is complex, and detailed here:
Marin County was asked to leave the BART district when San Mateo County pulled out, which they did. Marin voters never got to vote for/against BART.
Part of the controversy was the challenge of using the Golden Gate Bridge. It was unclear how and how much it would be. Plus, the approaches would pose additional challenges as neither side has easy terrain. With only about 250K population, it was a big ask — and if the bridge wouldn’t accommodate the train the cost would have ballooned.
Marin’s removal set the stage for a different approach: express buses and ferries subsidized by bridge tolls. It wasn’t until 2004 did Marin voters allocate a countywide sales tax to pay for better local transit service.
Marin is notorious for suppressing growth by never tying the water district to a more plentiful source. It’s long had a virtual growth moratorium for many decades by restricting the addition of water customers. The restriction is portrayed as environmental consciousness of its sensitive and amazing geography, but it’s certainly got an exclusionary aspect to it. And nowadays, Sonoma County just north has almost twice the population of Marin.
@Mike
> By “stub” I meant complete rail segments and stations. I don’t know enough about Atlanta to understand your three examples, but:
I’ll caution a bit that I don’t know Marta’s history as well especially when comparing multiple plans over the years. But from what I know:
The bankhead station https://maps.app.goo.gl/99ma3JwaGQNSYdVRA it’s only 1 station off the blue branch, was supposed to head further northeast into cobb county. Or at the very least reach Perry Homes neighborhood.
The dekalb one it was originally planned as a busway but then they tried to build it as a branch of the blue line. they ran out of money though and nothing was built besides a small spur.
The red line to sandy springs has the opposite scenario originally planned as a busway (at least in one of the plans im looking at) but that got upgraded as heavy rail line, I don’t know the full history behind this one.
The south king subarea southern boundary is the king-pierce county line so it does include the south federal way station (but not fife)
@Tom Terrific,
“ Just because third-rail IS dangerous does not mean it can’t be used at-grade”
All electricity is dangerous. When I was in Zagreb a few years back they had put up signs on the overpasses instructing people (actually just men) not to pee off of the overpasses and onto the electric catenary for the trains passing underneath.
The signs were schematic like drawings done without any words and indicating just how unpleasant it might be for a man to electrocute himself in this exact way.
Apparently there is some debate about whether or not this is a true hazard, but I didn’t see anyone (men) testing the theory.
That said, the risk with third rail is the accessibility. It is simply too easy to wander onto the tracks and touch (or pee on) the third rail. And that is true at grade and in underground station areas where people in mental distress might end up on the tracks.
Catenary is simply safer due to its relative inaccessibility.
It wasn’t easily traceable what the breakdown between South asking and Pierce Subarwas contribute to TDLE. It appears to be allroaching a $5B price tag.
Add to that the cost of OMF South partly for TDLE ($1.5-1.9B) and vehicles. There are separate line items. These added together seem well above another $1B.
So TDLE in total appears to already be well above $6B for a train slower than the current express bus.
Finally I’m not sure how ST is allocating the track cost to OMF South since it will require a track extension south of the Federal Way terminus.
“The south king subarea southern boundary is the king-pierce county”
The issue isn’t the subarea boundary, it’s whether South Federal Way Station benefits South King according to South King. Is it being built because South King wanted it or it’s a regional growth center? Or is it being built only because Piece wants a Tacoma Dome extension and skipping South Federal Way would be too-wide station spacing?
The same thing came up with Judkins Park station. East King was originally going to pay for everything east of Intl Dist station including Judkins Park, because the line was an East King priority, not a North King one. North King wouldn’t have built a line to Judkins Park alone. North King had too many higher priorities like 45th, Ballard, West Seattle, Lake City, Georgetown, etc.
But then the city of Bellevue wanted a downtown tunnel, and begged North King to take on the cost of ID-Judkins Park to free up East King money for the tunnel, and North King did.
After all of that was decided, Seattlites started to realize Judkings Park station could benefit North King after all, as a faster alternative to Mt Baker station (taking the 7 or 48 and transferring at Judkins Park to downtown/north). And apartment construction started to take off around Judkins Park station, surprising the skeptics. So in retrospect Judkins Park station will have substantial benefits to North King, so it makes sense for North King to pay for it.
But the issue in subarea equity is whether something benefits the subarea, not whether it’s physically in the subarea.
“The bankhead station it’s only 1 station off the blue branch, was supposed to head further northeast into cobb county.”
What’s the effect of that station without the rest? Is Bankhead a walkable neighborhood with unique retailers? Is Westside Reservoir Park a nice place to spend an afternoon in? Does it matter to Atlantans if the county border is just beyond that and the rest of it wasn’t built? Are there a lot of jobs or destinations there that the line was going to go to? Or does it only matter to the suburbanites who voted it down? Did Atlanta miss out on some other line because it built this one-station stub instead?
In any case, that’s not the situation here. If Pierce and Snohomish front-loaded their construction, the result wouldn’t be a one-station extension from downtown. It would be disconnected segments in Pierce and Snohomish Counties, several miles from Angle Lake or Northgate. Like, er, the T line. Troy said it was intended to interline with Central Link. But Central Link isn’t coming until decades later, and it was uncertain before 2016 whether it would ever come. And in the meantime, the Pierce politicians lost the plot and redefined the temporary incompatibility between TLink/CLink technology as a permanent feature that can’t be changed.
6 million. Yikes. That money could definitely be use better. If repurposed, Pierce could also demand back their portion of the second tunnel and the SFW OMB, since they wouldn’t be needing it. That would fund a lot of pocal BRTs and Sounder runs.
“If repurposed, Pierce could also demand back their portion of the second tunnel and the SFW OMB, since they wouldn’t be needing it.”
We’ve been through this a thousand times. The reason the Tacoma Dome extension is being built is the Pierce boardmembers and city/county politicians insisted on it. If they don’t want it now, they could just say no and it would be canceled. But whenever transit fans suggest the Tacoma Dome extension isn’t worth it and won’t meet Pierce’s transit needs much, the biggest resistance we get is those same Pierce politicians. They’re the decision makers, and this is what they want.
Lazarus,
I doubt that an electric current would be able to flow up urine (though maybe would be possible in some circumstances), more likely the agencies found something that people care about to keep them from depositing a corrosive liquid onto expensive, metal infrastructure.
Death by electrocution peeing has definitely happened in a few cases:
Thanks Sam! At least someone on this blog is excited about all these improvements that are coming on line. Much appreciated.
And it is interesting that those two links you posted are from people who used to frequent/post on this blog. Sounder Bruce in particular was very good and knowledgeable about the heavier side of rail.
About Here released a video about how breaking rules of traditional North American zoning and building codes could create better apartments than the traditional 5 over 1s, he mentions Seattle’s single stair complex rule change as one rule that has helped in its own way to improve the housing landscape in Seattle.
You can finally use your phone instead of an ORCA card. That’s been really convenient when visiting other cities to not have to get their local transit card.
… but reading closer, you still have to pay $3 for the digital card?! I guess I’ll keep around the ORCA cards I have to lend to guests after all.
The $3 will pay for itself with just one transfer. Metro is $2.75. ST Express is $3.25. Link will be $3 in August when the flat fare starts. So going one way, the $3 fee vs $3 second fare is a wash, but coming back you’re paying $3 if you paid that fee or $6 if you didn’t.
Lending ORCA cards to visitors can be useful in some circumstances, but it won’t cover their first/last trip from the airport unless you mail them the card beforehand and they mail it back.
And if your visitor is an ordinary tourist, or here for a business meeting, or even a low-budget backpacker, the $3 fee is nothing compared to the rest of their expenses. If they spend $23 instead of $20 on total transit expenses, or treat it as just part of their total visit cost, it’s insignificant.
The only time a one-time $3 fee really makes a difference is if somebody is so poor they only have $5 or $10 for an entire day, so paying $3 means going without a meal or another necessity. That’s an issue for homeless people or the poorest nomads, but not much beyond that. If they lived here they could get a free/discount ORCA card through one of the programs. That isn’t available to visitors. But again, the $3 pays for itself with one round trip, and it’s a one-time fee, not every trip.
I don’t see the point in using Google wallet or a credit card and paying money to third-party payment processors rather than just getting an ORCA card, but it’s available because people have demanded it. Ticketmaster charges even higher fees for the privilege of ordering a concert ticket online.
It’s still a work in progress as it’s only compatible with Android right now and no details as to when Apple will be available. People have also mentioned employee ORCA cards don’t work with the new digital wallet feature and individual employers have to turn it on from what ORCA said about it. Along with a few other quirks that will likely end having to be ironed out like deactivating current cards when switched to a digital wallet.
The fee is a psychological deterrent, granted. I have a hard time convincing people who normally drive everywhere to take transit when they think they’d only do one one-way trip or one round trip, and they think the fee is too much overhead for that. But we convinced ST to at least reduce the fee from $5 to $3, so it’s not as much of a barrier as it was.
But people need to get a sense of perspective. I used to take a bus to Seattle Center to avoid the monorail fare. But really, what’s $5 once or twice a year as part of the entertainment cost of visiting the Center? So now I take the monorail and enjoy the view. (And now it’s free with an ORCA transfer, or $7 without round trip.) And how much would it cost to take Uber or drive to the Center?
“The fee is a psychological deterrent, granted.”
Yeah. It’s not really the cost as much as it feels bad to be paying something for nothing.
I suspect you’re right and out of town visitors won’t complain given the convenience of not needing to keep track of the card. Especially useful for people in the suburbs who have a use for transit irregularly, and therefore have trouble keeping track of a physical ORCA card they use only a few times a year.
(As a local who does use transit regularly, worrying about the edge case of my phone battery being dead sounds like a downgrade… but between this and tap to pay credit cards, and some states starting to do digital IDs, not carrying a wallet at all and having everything on your phone is increasingly an option for those who want it.)
I shudder to think of not having a physical wallet and cash and ID and cards and a passport, and depending that my phone will always work and won’t get lost/stolen/broken/hacked or there’s a cell outage. But that’s what some people want. I suspect the trend will inevitably reverse someday.
As a compromise between no-phone and everything-phone, I’d just like to get a phone as small as my first smartphone was, so it wouldn’t take as much space in my pocket, but the smallest one available now is twice as large. I just went to the T-Mobile store and got the smallest/cheapest one they had ($250), and figured that if I end up exceeding its capacity, I can get a higher-end one next time.
Yeah, I can see this being especially popular for people from out of town. Less of a hassle overall, but especially if you take the bus. I think people who like to do everything on their phone will like it as well (I’m the opposite).
It’s not that there aren’t smaller fliphones (they had them). It’s that it’s increasingly necessary to have a smartphone for two-factor auth or One Bus Away or to get into your apartment building or use Uber or Metro Flex or eat at a restaurant that has forgotten about paper menus. So far I’ve had to do the first two. And I saw a recent apartment building that had a sign in front, “Use app for entry and rent payment.” I hope all apartments don’t go that way.
looks pretty exciting. hopefully it’s pretty fast and easy to use for the bus readers to pick up on.
Is there any reason they’re not letting us have the same card both physically and on the wallet? I was really excited for this but I don’t want to get rid of my physical card.
the problem with duplicate cards is that you can double pay below the balance. (not sure orca specifically) but generally when you tap to pay it doesn’t check with a central server as it takes too long and actually the card on file will balance stored locally. It’s only verified after the fact with the buses receiving the updated balances at the end or start of the shift. This is why when you add money to orca it takes some time to show up at the bus*. You can actually bypass the wait time by tapping at some link stations as it has a wired connection.
Anyways we wouldn’t want each bus tap to take as long as a credit card transaction so that’s the trade off.
*Though I know they are updating the myorca system so maybe it’ll be faster in the future
It was updated last year or so. Adding money to an ORCA online is supposed to show up immediately for buses. I haven’t tried it since I always use a TVM which were always immediate, but that’s what they said was one of the features of the new system.
I don’t know how fast it is with ORCA as I’ve not pushed the limits, but with the HOP card on TriMet, it’s pretty close to instantaneous. I’ve had to resolve issues with the account balance while boarding.
ORCA used to take 48 hours for buses if if you added money or a pass online. The reason was something about the money/pass being stored on the card. TVMs and the fixed readers at train stations are connected to the central database so they can transfer the money/pass to the card immediately. When you paying online, the system has no physical access to the card, so it can’t be transferred to the card until you tap. Bus readers are offline so they can’t transfer it to the card until they get an update at the base.
In the new system, the money/pass is in the central database, and the card has something like just an ID number like ATM cards. So the TVMs and fixed readers go by the current information, and the bus readers go by that morning’s information.
There’s also a grace period so that if you tap in with 1 cent, you can still ride and the balance is negative until you fill it up again. And monthly passes end on the 1st instead of the night before. And Metro drivers let you ride free if you say you don’t have money or you’ll fill up the card as soon as you can get to a TVM.
You got to appreciate this young man’s clever video about Denver’s County Line rail station:
It really speaks to the importance of station access and connectivity. The station is so horrible that makes our most egregious ones look well-done. The station area is probably the worst I’ve seen!
I don’t know if a planning department could have prevented it, but it does reveal many problems with suburban light rail stations by highlighting how reasonably good nearby land uses do not automatically create a good station location.
The Star Wars music in the sign reveal is particularly humorous. .
I’ve only ever just passed through that station. It really doesn’t seem that bad if you aren’t getting off.
The station that always amazes me is Ridgegate Parkway Station. It’s just absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Yet there you are.
It’s a strange experience.
My take away from the video is this was always a bad place to build a station, the old “build it and they will come” thinking because it is “rail”.
Even the multi-family housing was built after the station, and is not transit oriented, with a church on the other side. Whether there could be easier access to the church is not the issue. Suburban churches don’t support a rail station. Building a station with nothing around it next to a freeway is not a good idea. So I disagree with the narrator this station could be a great station with design modifications, or any developer would be interested in developing the park and ride lot. This was and always will be a bad station considering its cost, because of location not design.
Despite the opening about dying malls and cities in the U.S. (which wasn’t an issue in the video about the Denver station) the mall across from the station was packed (and apparently according to the narrator the draw for the station), at least the parking lot was. The overpass was loud but so is Northgate’s ped bridge. It is suburbia. You are going to have to walk a bit to get to your destination, even from the large parking lot at the mall. Although there is a very large park and ride it charges for parking, so not surprisingly was empty, which I assume is why the mall makes clear it’s free lot is not for those using the station.
The narrator suggests this parking space could be converted to TOD, but the issue there is the housing would be next to a 14-lane freeway, and like the station itself there would be very little surrounding the development if TOD.
RTD ridership according to the video is dwindling although Denver as a city is not. Nor are Denver’s suburbs. According to the narrator one line has been cut from this station, and he doesn’t state what the ridership was on the other two lines that came through the station. I don’t think the decline in ridership has to do with the overall station designs throughout the system (although building a station at this location is a head scratcher) but more to do with post pandemic dynamics affecting most rail systems. After all, ridership was much higher pre-pandemic with the same stations.
The lesson for me is this was a terrible place to build a station to begin with. Period. Nothing is going to fix that. What were the planners thinking? Even the multi-family housing built after the station was not TOD, and obviously wanted to shield itself from a 14-lane freeway. Would a better path from the apartments to the station change this? I doubt it. Should as the narrator suggests the developer have built the apartments without parking? The developer didn’t think so.
Maybe the lesson is don’t built rail along a 14 lane freeway with the hope businesses and housing will suddenly pop up when there is so little density of any kind anywhere near the station, or RTD can manufacture the ridership from TOD along a 14-lane freeway.
In some areas segregated rail is competitive, usually in denser urban areas, not along 14 lane freeways next to a suburban mall that is never going to eliminate its parking. Other places it isn’t going to be competitive, such as in Denver’s outer suburbs like this station, unless it serves a large commuting population to the downtown urban work area (and maybe pre-pandemic this park and ride got a lot more customers which is why it charged for parking). Even then charging for park and ride space is unwise. The station probably cost over $100 million to build, and charging for the park and ride probably ensured it would have few riders.
This video and station raise an interesting issue about Northgate Mall, and how many customers it will get from the Link station. Some think Lynnwood Link will syphon away many riders who now bus or drive to the Northgate Station and so come August 31 they will simply ride through Northgate, past the mall. Of course, Northgate Mall is not TOD or transit oriented either, and probably is banking on customers driving there or taking Link to the mall as their destination, not commuting through and happening to get off to shop and dine and then continue on home.
It’s hard to judge what could be done differently unless the chronology of the building decisions are presented.
I will add that Denver put in pedestrian overpasses into the station design. And even though the shopping center path is circuitous it doesn’t appear to be overly far.
I’m reminded of how Tanforan did try to connect with a BART rail station. The owners redeveloped their building by adding a new food court atrium at the BART entrance. Sometimes developers try. Unfortunately, the mall still suffers from a lack of popularity and will be demolished for a biotech campus.
The lesson for me is this was a terrible place to build a station to begin with. Period. Nothing is going to fix that. What were the planners thinking?.
I agree with your first point. People have been saying that for years. Then folks did a study and confirmed what people have been saying: https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/economics-of-urban-light-rail-CH.pdf. There are a lot of key points in there that are worth noting. I won’t repeat them, but they should be understood before reading the rest of this concept (otherwise some of the things I mention won’t make sense).
I think it is pretty easy to point out the mistakes of various agencies. I think it is harder to explain why they made those mistakes. I’m sure people have their theories; here are mine:
1) The U. S. is poorly suited for mass transit. A typical city is very auto-centric, and has few high-density areas.
2) We don’t have good shared knowledge when it comes to transit, and we arrogantly assume we have little to learn from the rest of the world.
3) We often take an auto-oriented approach to mass transit. We basically think in terms of how long it takes to drive somewhere, or how much traffic there is. The former is completely backwards, and the latter is irrelevant.
4) Our existing rail lines do not provide much value. Sometimes (as in the case of Seattle) we don’t own the lines themselves, which makes expansion expensive. But the bigger problem is that the towns the trains run through lack density. For example this is Carlet, a suburb of Valencia (about 15 miles away). It is very compact, and very dense. There is nothing similar in most American cities.
These lead to a number of issues. For example, stop spacing with mass transit. There is always a trade-off when it comes to stop spacing. Put the stops too far apart and you require an additional transfer to get to your destination. Put the stops too close together and longer trips (e. g. across town) take longer. The more compact your city, the less of a problem this is with your metro. You follow standard urban stop spacing (600 meters, give or take) and that’s it. This means a trip from one side of the city to the other takes a while, but few people take those trips. In contrast this is a bigger issue with a sprawling low-density city (like Denver). In (physically) large cities that have a huge amount of density (like New York) you can afford to double track. But in a city like Denver this is impractical.
All of these problems are related. It makes it much more difficult (and costly) to
design a good transit system in U. S. cities than it does in Europe. The traditional worldwide model is to provide mass transit in the dense areas, while relying on buses and existing (old) rail lines everywhere else. In Europe this is fairly easy from both a political and practical standpoint. Rural and low-density suburbs don’t have that many people. The suburbs that are dense typically have an existing railway that can be leveraged. This makes the politics easier, but also makes construction and service easy.
In the US you can (and should) do the same sort of thing but you run into some tough headwinds. The mass transit system should be much smaller, because the dense part of the city is much smaller. But areas outside it assume that buses are poor because they have traditionally been poor. As the line grows in distance there is pressure to reduce coverage and have the stops farther apart. You try and leverage the freeway envelope to cut costs. You focus stations around park and ride lots because you just assume that the transit network will be poor. Despite the cost cutting measures, the system is still very expensive. Meanwhile, bus service to the low-density areas are bound to be more expensive than their counter-parts in Europe. So areas where transit is bound to be more expensive spend less on buses because they just spent a much of money on rail (that not that many people use). When the dust settles the city is left with a fairly poor transit system, and the increase in transit use is minimal.
It doesn’t have to be that way. North America has some unusual challenges, but there are ways of dealing with them. You start with the basics. You run your rail where it can do the most good. Look at where the buses are slow in the middle of the day, but lots of people still ride transit. Look at where a train would be faster than driving, at noon. But also assume that buses will play a much bigger role than in Europe. It is essential that the rail integrate well with the buses. The best example of this is Vancouver. Here is a recent quote from Vancouver’s TransLink COO Jeffrey Busby:
Our strategic plan is a bus-first plan, because our rail network can never go everywhere that we need great service.
Keep in mind this is from the guy who runs what is arguably the best rail system on the West Coast. They are about to add the Broadway addition, which will have more riders per mile than anything this side of the Second Avenue Subway. Their rail system has been huge successful, but one of the main reasons is because it integrates so well with the buses, and the buses are actually fairly good (and getting better). That is the key.
The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!
Where Seattle appears on this graph in 2027 will be interesting. Seattle will likely slip down on the chart. One of the things that strikes me is that — with the exception of East Link — we are opening stations in new extensions soon all similar to the Denver RTD model — lots of station parking in low density areas without walkable destinations in the midst of an ocean of more parking.
And of course many of the ST3 stations (excepting those within Seattle city limits) are similarly located to the one in the Denver area too. However, in those cases the cities could start setting the stage for better station areas now if they wanted. The Denver example seems illustrative of what not to build and that is a lesson that suburban planning commissions need to be trained to spot so that they can avoid the same mistakes.
A final note is that RTD charges for parking. I get why they do, but I think there is an unintended consequence: Surrounding property owners/ developers worry about parking intrusion so they design their sites to discourage or prevent it. It’s a situation where a policy choice that can be revoked creates a bad site layout that remains an impact for generations.
It makes me wonder if RTD station parking is often laid out wrong. Would it be better to have the agency lay out these station parking areas as public urban grid local streets with parallel parking on new small blocks with sidewalks, and use the interiors for parking until there is market demand for TOD? This “interior street” approach seems to be what ST is increasingly designing at several new stations — but unfortunately without the parallel on-street parking and loading zones.
@Al S,
Link is an extreamly successful Light Rail system. Depending on what data you look at, it is top 4 or 5 nationally in total ridership, and almost always listed as top in ridership per mile. It’s a phenomenal achievement for a system that is so young.
Over the next 2 years Link will see a huge expansion of coverage and that will change those rankings somewhat. Link will probably become number 1 or 2 in total ridership, but might drop to number 2 or 3 in ridership per mile. Time will see, but that is still a huge achievement given where we started.
That said, there is nothing at all in the Link expansion plans that is anything like what Denver RTD has on their suburban periphery. I have actually ridden Denver Light Rail to Ridgegate Parkway Station multiple times. It’s surreal. Like riding a modern, high capacity rail system through undeveloped prairie. Like a 21st century transportation system in an 1800’s Western. There is nothing like that anywhere in the Sound Transit expansion plans.
And the data bears that out. Lynnwood is actually denser than Denver, and several times denser than Lone Pine where the Ridgegate station is located. All of our planned stations have significant development around them, at least in comparison to what Denver has.
That said, Denver Light Rail is creating new development even on its suburban periphery. The last time I was at Ridgegate Parkway Station there was significant new development underway. LR does produce TOD.
That said, one can argue that producing TOD in an area like Ridgegate Parkway is undesirable because it is nothing more than Transit Oriented Suburban Sprawl (TOSS). But that is a whole different discussion..
The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!
Where Seattle appears on this graph in 2027 will be interesting. Seattle will likely slip down on the chart. One of the things that strikes me is that — with the exception of East Link — we are opening stations in new extensions soon all similar to the Denver RTD model — lots of station parking in low density areas without walkable destinations in the midst of an ocean of more parking.
Yes, that is the irony. The very things that have lead to our (relative) success are essentially being abandoned. Our system is becoming a lot more like the ones that haven’t been that successful.
To be fair this only looks at U. S. systems and light rail systems at that. So it ignores systems in Canada as well as post-war systems like BART and DC Metro. They aren’t really analyzing overall systems. The information they provide is far more useful at the micro-level then the macro level. So they ignore the fact that our light rail system costs a lot more than other light rail systems, or the stations we skipped but should have served. But the stations we do serve are generally just a lot better than the ones that are typically served by light rail in the US. Places like Capitol Hill and the UW, as opposed to freeway stations. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since it really isn’t a light rail system (other than in Rainier Valley) it is basically a light metro system with light rail equipment.
Analyzing systems is far more difficult and ultimately pointless. Assume Vancouver BC has the best system on the West Coast or the best system for a city its size. So what? What matters is why. I think you come to the same basic conclusions: agencies should focus on quality more than quantity. If there is one consistent problem across the board it is this. The US has built miles and miles of track with very few riders (because they often have very few stations). This is almost always a bad idea, and it doesn’t matter if it is heavy rail (like BART) or light rail (like Denver or Dallas). It doesn’t matter if there are some good — arguably essential — aspects to the system (Bay crossing with BART, UW-downtown with Link) or whether the system is just very poor overall (various streetcars, Sacramento, DART). It is this aspect of the system that is the common thread.
It is funny because people often talk about BRT-Creep. This happens when a BRT system gets worse and worse and eventually looks very much like a regular bus. But folks don’t often talk about what I would call US-Metro-Creep. This is when a system that has plenty of potential gets worse and worse because they build the wrong thing, or the stations are in the wrong place (or are eliminated). This is very common as cities focus on long distance goals (Dallas to Fort Worth) instead of serving hospitals or college campuses (or just existing dense neighborhoods) along the way. They run in areas where the buses are fast, instead of where they are slow. They look only at the line itself, and not the overall network. Every system is guilty to some degree of this — compromises are inevitable — but many are much worse than others. This is what we should fight against, but most of the time people just shrug.
> Over the next 2 years Link will see a huge expansion of coverage and that will change those rankings somewhat.
> And of course many of the ST3 stations (excepting those within Seattle city limits) are similarly located to the one in the Denver area too.
I agree with Al, the ST2 stations will start Link’s journey as a highway light rail (as all of the avenue alternatives were dropped). It’ll be interesting to see if the development is built up around the federal way, lynnwood link and east link extensions.
> That said, there is nothing at all in the Link expansion plans that is anything like what Denver RTD has on their suburban periphery
star lake station is basically pretty similar. Montlake terrace thankfully they’ve built apartments nearby so it’s better. Also we’re talking about the station locations not the ride in between.
@Ross
> It is funny because people often talk about BRT-Creep. This happens when a BRT system gets worse and worse and eventually looks very much like a regular bus. But folks don’t often talk about what I would call US-Metro-Creep.
I call it “train to nowhere”* aka political pushback against avenue alignments means people choose freeway or old freight lines* that are far from density.
Recent examples would be the noho to glendale brt where it could choose between the freeway or avenue. Or the Minneapolis blue line extension deciding between the avenue or the freight corridor (far from housing)
* perhaps a better catchphrase would be “train through no where”? “bypass transit” might be more accurate?
@ Lazarus:
I would agree with your assessment that nothing ST is planning appears as bad as these RTD stations are.
I am concerned that some ST3 stations could turn out more like these RTD stations though. The ones in TDLE, Everett LE and 4 Line could drift that way if the station layouts aren’t given focus from the outset.
I do think we need to highlight “problem poster child” stations from other regions to make it obvious to leaders what not to do. We often point to successes elsewhere but not the failures. This video represents a basic educational case study about site layouts for leaders and tangential stakeholders that static PowerPoint presentations and reports can’t convey.
“The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!”
Link is an unusual light rail, with extensive tunnels and elevated sections, and 10-minute frequency instead of 15-30. That makes it look like the best, but only because you excluded all the higher-quality metros. If you put all city subways/trams on the same scale, Link is below average. The Vancouver Skytrain, DC Metro, Chicago El, and Toronto Subway blow the socks off Link, but since they’re not “light rail” they’re not counted in a light rail comparison.
Most American light rails are like MAX, 95+% surface, with a downtown bottleneck slowdown, or are mostly along freeways like Denver, and each line runs every 15-30 minutes. That’s why Link looks so much better.
But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I would agree with your assessment that nothing ST is planning appears as bad as these RTD stations are..
I agree. But it is worth noting that the study I referenced spends a few paragraphs on freeway stations. One of the key points they make is that even if TOD occurs, it may not come with much ridership. So a station like 148th for example may have a lot of new apartments around it, but not that many will take Link. This is in contrast to a station like Capitol Hill. That is because on Capitol Hill there is a feeling that you can do anything without a car. Thus a lot of people around there don’t have a car, or rarely use it. At 148th, however, that isn’t the case. It is a long walk to anywhere. So people in the area own cars and typically use them for most trips. With the freeway right there, it makes it even more convenient. So someone who lives in Capitol Hill might take Link to Beacon Hill, then a bus to the V. A., while someone who lives close to 148th just drives.
But wait, there is another issue, which goes back to what I mentioned. You have to consider the overall network. 148th may not get many walk-up riders, but it may get a ton of riders who transfer from the bus. It will be the closest station to Shoreline Community College (and the only direct transfer). Eventually it will be the main way that the north lake suburbs connect to Link as well. From a walk-up standpoint it is poor (because it is next to the freeway) but from a network standpoint it is very good.
This makes this part segment very different than what has been built before. We lost opportunities within the city to create a very good network (imagine a station at 23rd & Madison) but are doing fairly well in the suburbs. It took a lot of effort but 130th Station is another example. Of course just about any location along that east-west corridor would be better (Bitter Lake, Pinehurst, Lake City) but it still connects to the east-west buses (and thus serves all those areas, albeit indirectly). The same is true for every Lynnwood Link Station. 185th connects to local buses as well as Swift Blue. Lynnwood is the terminus, and has a connection to HOV ramps at that. This means it will not only connect well from east and west, but from all the buses coming from the north. Mountlake Terrace may be the only stop that gets more riders on foot than by bus (even though it will get some by bus).
@Al S,
Even the best designed systems will have high ridership stations and low ridership stations, and that is true today of our current Light Rail system.
Stations like SoDo and Rainier Beach will never generate the ridership that West Lake or CHS do. But that is nothing to wring our hands over. It’s just a fact, and we still have one of the best Light Rail systems in he country even with SoDo Station.
And, if your metric of goodness is ridership per mile, don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership. Even the worst performing Denver stations do better than that. Because, you know, it is hard to underperform “zero”.
But, even with those 5.5 miles of zero ridership, we still lead the nation in ridership per mile. Not bad.
But let’s step back. We are in a pretty darn good position if the worst thing we have to worry about is dropping from #1 to #2 in ridership per mile. If that is our biggest worry about the future, then we are in pretty good shape. Because a lot of LR systems in this country will never be anywhere near as good as that.
And remember, back in the ‘80’s we had nothing in Seattle. No mass transit at all. People pinned their hopes on the bus tunnel, but the results were so underwhelming that the citizenry almost imeadeatly changed course and created ST.
And the rest is history. Pretty good history.
RTD is fine within Denver as it follows a lot of street and freight rail corridors from Union/Downtown down to I-25/Broadway with a brief sky bridge over Kalamath & Santa Fe in the Santa Fe Arts District & Baker in-between 10th & Osage and Alameda Stations. It’s once it hugs I-25 that it becomes a problem. Louisiana-Pearl is probably the worst as it sits under the overpass bridge and gets all the worst of highway noise. If they had put up a noise barrier, it’d probably be “less awful”. Colorado is the only halfway decent station on the SE section as it tunnels under Colorado and Evans to be in a below grade trench away from the highway next to a transit center and office/entertainment complex.
> But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I argue the opposite. The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only. We should instead accept some at grade crossing in order to actually reach places where people live
> People pinned their hopes on the bus tunnel, but the results were so underwhelming that the citizenry almost imeadeatly changed course and created ST.
> And the rest is history. Pretty good history.
lol pretty revisionist history that is not how it went. Again I’m not sure why you keep thinking there’s some hidden war here. If anything the largest debate in the 2000s was whether light rail would run on avenues or freeway alignment not about buses or not.
Without the bus tunnel there would be a lot lower support for transit and Link probably would have ended up copying Portland with an at grade alignment downtown or we would have done some weird freeway only alignment
Lastly people used the st express busses practically more than or at same ridership as the link light rail until the pandemic. Of course post pandemic we need to adjust to the ridership patterns now but hardly “underwhelming”
I’d agree that comparing Link to most other systems is a bit like having a minor league (light rail) club staffed with major league (Metro-style stations with subway grade lines) players. Link is put into a fluff league in the statistics.
In this case however, Denver RTD did build a glass and steel palace similar to Link on fully separated tracks like Link. I actually think that is one of the lessons – more grandiose stations and tracks don’t automatically make them more successful.
And I would opine that Lynnwood and Federal Way stations would end up like this County Line station if they weren’t at the end of the line and didn’t have all those bus routes planned to feed it. Once TDLE presumably opens, the three Federal Way stations will all perform badly unless the station areas fundamentally transform.
I’m always amused at how ST never discloses how many of the Everett or Tacoma Dome extension riders would have still been on Link (boarding at end of line stations) if they didn’t happen. Just Like ST hasn’t told us how many Lynnwood Link riders are already boarding at Northgate.
“don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership.”
Why does that matter? It’s an industrial area. Non-workers go through it to get to the airport. The workers aren’t likely to take Link, and they can’t bring their bulky equipment on the trains. The industrial area has to be somewhere, and that’s where it’s established.
I also disagree it generates zero riders. It generates all the riders who go through it. If Link didn’t go to the airport or South King County, people wouldn’t take it there. Not stopping in an industrial gap is unimportant. Just like it’s unimportant that there are no stations on the Mercer Island Bridge. Link still has to go to the Eastside anyway, or there’s a gap in transit mobility. We can’t move Bellevue next to Madison Park, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on the Eastside, so they need to be connected to the other large city across the lake.
Also, Boeing Access Road station is in ST3, for better or worse. Another potential station at 133rd is in ST’s concepts.
“The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only.”
AHEM. Skytrain stops all over Vancouver and Surrey. BART has stops on Mission Street. The DC Metro stops in all sorts of neighborhoods, and at a shopping mall. We need to build transit right, and not throw away half its potential by putting its stations at freeway exits. That may mean paying more, but the benefits are worth it. An effective transit network maximizes the most people’s non-car mobility, and allows them to work and shop and go to medical appointments easily without an expensive, dangerous, space-consuming personal tank. That work and shopping boosts the economy. Those medical appointments, social trips, and visits to parks improve public health, and reduce mental-health problems that society would otherwise have to deal with.
> Skytrain stops all over Vancouver and Surrey. BART has stops on Mission Street. The DC Metro stops in all sorts of neighborhoods, and at a shopping mall.
Bart was done using cut and cover which people now refuse.
Same with the dc metro. Out in silver line was done mostly freeway alignment with a small elevated section in dc as well
“don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership.”
Why does that matter?
It is a bad sign. To borrow a couple software terms it can be considered a “bad smell” or even an “anti-pattern”. It doesn’t mean that it is fundamentally bad, but it is suspicious. Remember the basics. An ideal metro has urban stop spacing (every 600 meters, give or take) and quite a few stops. Ridership comes from the various combinations (a network effect). Capitol costs are based in large part on the distance, while operational costs are based almost entirely on it. Thus having a long system with very few stations is less efficient. Making matters worse, long distance lines require more time to travel. People take fewer half hour trips than fifteen minute trips.
In this case there is another problem, which is that there is a long stretch that is not especially fast compared to driving. By itself this is bad. But the combination means that it doesn’t compete well with driving.
That doesn’t mean that they should have added more stations along the way, but it does mean there were definite flaws with the choice. That doesn’t mean they should never run a train there, but it does mean it is quite likely there were much better choices in other places — places where you could put stations close fairly together and you would get a lot of ridership between them.
> But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I argue the opposite. The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only. We should instead accept some at grade crossing in order to actually reach places where people live.
The other alternative is just build a smaller system. Quality over quantity. American mass transit systems are famous for being really long and really bad. In many if not most cases they would have been much better off with a much smaller but better system. Focus on the really high density areas and the areas that are very difficult to access by car (or bus). Capitol Hill to the UW; Ballard to the UW; places like that. Supplement with lots of buses, even if the buses are crowded during rush hour (which actually isn’t the case anymore).
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for surface rail. But it is basically a niche system (despite US agencies treating it like it is the default). It makes sense if you have enough density, but not enough density to justify grade-separation. Link in Rainier Valley may fit just that niche. But a hybrid system has weaknesses. You can’t automate the system, despite a huge amount of money spent on miles and miles of elevated (and underground) track. South of downtown it varies from being high speed (with very few stations) and then low speed. This isn’t that bad except the low speed section is not a major destination (it isn’t downtown). A hybrid system has its flaws — it should really be one or the other. If the line kept going to Renton (and there were a lot more stations) then maybe that would work. But with so little of it running on the surface, I think it would have made sense to just elevate or bury the tracks in Rainier Valley.
“To borrow a couple software terms it can be considered a “bad smell” or even an “anti-pattern”. It doesn’t mean that it is fundamentally bad, but it is suspicious.”
That’s ridiculous. There’s an airport nearby where hundreds of thousands of people travel and work every day. We’re tying to get more of them onto transit. You’re more concerned about not going through an industrial area or not having stations there than about serving a major transfer point? So we could have airport Link only if we convert the industrial area into housing? Then where would we put the industrial area?
The corollary of not having low-ridership stations in an industrial area is faster travel time for the vast majority of people, who do go to the airport but don’t work in the industrial area.
“The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only.”
We know the cost difference for Lynnwood, Federal Way, and Tacoma. It’s not insurmountable. Federal Way costs the same on 99 vs I-5. Tacoma Dome costs the same on 99 vs I-5. Lynnwood costs slightly more on 99, but not that much.
It was ST’s bad decisions and priorities that put Link on I-5 there, not huge costs. A different agency would have chosen a better alignment.
It helps to put the station’s location in context. Map of Denver’s light rail network. The station is in the lower right corner.
Denver resident here (although will be moving back to Tacoma again soon), County Line station is probably not the worst but it is C tier amongst rail stops in the RTD system in my opinion. It actually used to be worse from what long time locals have told me as the pedestrian bridge section to Park Meadows wasn’t built with the initial station in 2006 and was added later in 2008. And even when the Park Meadows side opened you had to go through turnstiles that the mall requested be put in to curb P&R drivers from parking at Park Meadows (even though their lot is never full at all even during the holidays). Wherein you needed to buy an exit ticket just to leave the station. It was convoluted and dumb and they turned off the turnstiles around 2015 or something and the turnstiles only getting removed in 2022.
I have used the station multiple times over the years living here to go to Costco or Park Meadows, as it’s one of the better malls in the region (Somewhere between Southcenter and Bellevue Square). So it isn’t a complete waste of a station to a degree.
The worst station in the system atm is Lone Tree City Center as it’s basically plopped in an empty prarie land with nothing built on it yet and is supposed to be part of the City of Lone Tree’s grand plan for a TOD downtown in their city with apartments and office spaces in the next two to three decades. So it’ll get less bad with time as will Ridgegate, which is seeing a bunch of apartment complexes built next to the station right now.
If you want my opinion for worst in the RTD system with actual stuff around it that’d be Fitzsimons or Red Rocks CC, which ironically are supposed to both serve colleges. They’re both at the edges of campus and don’t really serve staff or students on foot well. Red Rocks CC station is salvageable with time if the CC considered expansion of campus closer to the station. Fitzsimons on the other is just plain bad as it’s shunted to the northernmost edge of Anschultz Medical Campus and just takes forever to get anywhere on campus. If it had been put on Montview (like it should of been) was originally planned, it’d be less awful. But the infinite wisdom of CU Anschultz feared it’d mess with their “sensitive medical equipment”, so now riders are stuck with an awful station with a shuttle or having to take the 10/15/15L/20 at Colfax station to reach the campus.
I will say that RTD is trying to remedy the failure of some stops by proposing to convert P&Rs to TOD development. It’s just a slow process as building here takes forever to get off the ground (5 years minimum for a lot of big apartment complexes or towers). Like Central Park getting more TOD on current P&R lots, which is good as the Central Park where Denver Stapleton International Airport used to be is one of the fastest growing parts of Denver. https://www.cpr.org/2024/06/21/housing-development-rtd-park-and-ride-parking-lots/
The most common comparison is with Houston versus Dallas for their light rail
“””
While both have enthusiastically embraced the transit mode, Texas’s two largest cities occupy extreme ends of two philosophies on how, exactly, rail-based transit should work.
Dallas has built its light rail system far and wide, stretching into far-flung suburban park-and-ride stations to bring commuters into the city center at high speeds.
The Houston system is small by comparison, with lines built in the already-dense city center, with trains arriving every few minutes to minimize wait times. It relies on express buses – not rail – to bring residents in from the suburbs.
The Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency, or DART, conceived of rail as a regional system that should cover as much area as possible without particular concern for reaching specific destinations, said Kyle Shelton, postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Officials with the Houston-area METRO agency, meanwhile, always have a destination or set of destinations in mind when planning their system.
“””
This is where I believe the Sound Transit bus crashed yesterday. It’s southbound 5th Ave between Terrace and Yesler. From the online photos, the nose of the bus seems to have landed in between the tall sculpture on the right, and the stairs on the left. There are reports the driver said the brakes failed. I believe this was a Seattle-bound route 545.
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6020498,-122.3277786,3a,75y,123.42h,87.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1se8-huyl1oF7rx8T_dtAvvg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
How likely is brake failure? These seem like fairly new buses that are common throughout North America. I have lots more questions about this crash.
Does anyone remember this Sound Transit bus crash in Totem Lake from 2013?
https://www.kiro7.com/news/wsp-brakes-were-not-issue-kirkland-bus-crash/246489345/
Who here think motorized scooters, like Vespas, should be allowed on Seattle-area bike lanes and paths?
They’re too fast. In general I’d say bike lanes are around 15~20 mph which is around where escooters, regular bikes and most ebikes are at. for the us class 2 ebikes are limited to 20 mph, class 3 ebikes can go up to 28 mph but usually it is still just e assist not full power though it’s a bit more complicated here.
Motorized scooters can easily go 40 mph and some can go 75. I guess perhaps if one is driving slowly on the vespa (and if society could trust them to ride slowly) it might have been fine but generally they’re just going too fast.
If they’re slowly using the on street ones in a traffic jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGmbTFaO6yk&ab_channel=KGWNews personally I’d say it’s morally fine
Definitely not on bike paths or trails though.
No, they’re more like motorcycles. The purpose of bike lanes is to give slower-moving traffic their own space.
The comment section frequently points to The Netherlands as an example to follow, and how we should emulate them. The Netherlands allows scooters on bike paths. Granted, there are certain restrictions, but they generally allow them. Shouldn’t we follow a more enlightened country’s example?
We’d need more information about The Netherlands’ implementation, and how it doesn’t destroy the bike lanes. When I’ve seen clips and heard reports about their extensive bike network, nobody ever mentioned motor scooters on them.
@Sam
It is not as simple as “scooters are allowed in bike paths”
> In the Netherlands, a ‘scooter’ and a ‘moped’ are the same when it comes to vehicle category, driving rules and ownership requirements. Scooters with a maximum speed of 25kph (aka 15 mph) can be driven on bicycle paths and dedicated bike lanes. However, scooters with a maximum speed of 45kph must be driven in the street, not along bicycle paths or dedicated bike lanes.
https://www.leideninternationalcentre.nl/living-here/getting-around/motor-vehicles-and-driving-license/motorcycling
Unless if Americans are predominantly buying motorized scooters with a maximum speed of 15 or 25 mph we are not even talking about the same scooters.
And even then, for Amsterdam itself they “The Municipality of Amsterdam recently banned mopeds from bike paths within the city.” in the past couple years because too many people were removing the speed limit restrictions that allowed them on the bike paths. Other cities have also implemented restrictions.
Out in the rural areas with less people it is more accepted to use them at higher speeds and so the higher speed of mopeds is a bit more accepted.
To go into more detail there’s generally 2 types of bike lanes and for the there’s 2 types of motorized scooters. (well actually even more )
There’s a 25 km/h lane (with a blue sign that says bike only) and then a 45 km /h lane with the sign that says bike + moped. And then for the moped’s there’s ones with a blue license plate with the max speed of km/h “Snorfiets” and then moped with yellow license plate called “brommer”.
Sorry replied a bit too early the mopeds with blue license plate (25 km/h)can use the lower speed bike lanes. while the ones with yellow license plate (45 km/h) can only use the higher speed bike lanes. And within amsterdam core city center you just must use the road.
But they have the same general idea of separating out lower speed, medium speed and higher speed into different trails.
This is not the same as allowing mopeds with a max speed of 70 mph on a bike trail.
WL, I said “Granted, there are certain restrictions …” So, nothing I said was untrue.
I just thought it would be funny to trick fans of the Netherlands into admitting that their bike path laws are worse than ours.
@Sam
> WL, I said “Granted, there are certain restrictions …” So, nothing I said was untrue.
lol Sam you worded it in a heavily misleading way implying as if one could ride a Vespa with a max speed of 70mph on any bike path.
“Certain restrictions” as in basically any moped sold in America would be forbidden to be used on Netherlands bike paths.
> I just thought it would be funny to trick fans of the Netherlands into admitting that their bike path laws are worse than ours.
Mhmm is this true or did you just not know yourself?
I was getting tired of all the “In the Netherlands …” comments. Then, when I watched that YT video that I just recommended of the local Best Side Cycling in the Netherlands, he mentioned he was surprised to see motorized scooters on bike paths. So I thought I would it would be fun to ask all the “The way things are done in the Netherlands” commenters if scooters should be allowed on Seattle bike paths.
Oooh, look, Sam made a trap for the Libtards. See Sam. Sam is smiling self-satisfiedly.
Yeah, I was going to comment about the idea, but figured Sam had some ulterior motive. Sure enough.
I figured you were criticizing the recent decision to open up the Burke Gilman to peddle assist bikes. There are similarities. In Washington State you can’t have Class 3 electric bikes on bike pathways. It has be be class 1 or 2. But what is there to stop someone with a class 3 bike from using the pathway? Not much. Is it a major problem? I doubt it. The biggest complaint by people is just speed. As one rider mentioned (https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/e-bikes-scooters-an-enthusiasts-response/) it is fairly common to be passed by a regular bike going 20 MPH. There is no simple solution. There are very few places where people can safely bike, while there are lots of places where people can safely walk (they are called “sidewalks”). There are places where bikes have to mix with pedestrians, but ultimately these should be fairly short (like the crossing of the Fremont Bridge). These are places where bikes should travel at pedestrian speed. But in many other places improved infrastructure is the answer. Sometimes that means making the path wider, and marking sections for pedestrians. Other times it means giving bikers a safe alternative (like at Green Lake).
Ultimately though, the biggest dangers come from cars, and it isn’t even close.
Interesting that the Netherlands handled the problem of fast scooters by requiring different license plates. That was going to be one of my initial points — how could you enforce the different classes of mopeds?
Oooh, look, Sam made a trap for the Libtards. See Sam. Sam is smiling self-satisfiedly.
Yeah, except he didn’t get his facts straight. Poor Sam.
You know what they say: “When in the Netherlands…………”
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I don’t anything gas powered should be allowed on any off street trail, regardless of speed. A trail is supposed to be a place to get away from the noise and fumes.
The big heavy E-bikes should not be on a shared-use trail, either.
The weight of the bike is not a major issue. The weight of the rider is much more important. Speed is also a major issue. That is why the state restricts class 3 bikes in various ways, but class 1 and 2 are allowed on the paths (and sidewalks).
For example, Michael Bennett is 6 foot 3, and weighed 275 pounds when he celebrated the Seahawk win with a ride around the field. Figure the bike he rode weighs another 25 pounds. A woman pedaling a 75 pound cargo bike (with two kids in the back) is going to be much lighter.
There is always a trade-off, but the more people ride bikes the better. The safer the route, the better. Someone riding on the Burke Gilman for part of their ride may be the difference between biking, driving, or getting hit by a car while biking. I think the line they draw (with class 3) is quite reasonable, especially if people who buy a class 3 know they can’t use them on bike paths.
Ross, I am not an E-Biker so I don’t know the statistics about the various “classes”. So I used the term “big heavy” to describe them. I guess I’m meaning Class 3 which is embargoed. Good for King County.
What I do know is that there are “bicycles” now with tires three or more inches wide and a honkin’ big electric motor connected to the chain. They can go much faster than the pedestrians through whom they weave and by whom they skim like the Bull passes The Matador.
I’ve also noticed that the people who buy and ride them are a bunch of reactionary Yahoos who revel in scaring those pedestrians.
Like so many Americans they seem to believe that The Constitution makes them a “Sovereign”.
Ross, I am not an E-Biker so I don’t know the statistics about the various “classes”.
I’m not either. I looked it up. You can look up the actual statutes (I did) but if you don’t want to skip the legal language here is a pretty good summary: https://www.withoyster.com/library/washington-e-bike-laws-regulations.
It is not based on weight, it is based on speed (and whether you need to pedal or not). But as I noted, it is not that hard to go even faster on a regular bike. Average speed on the flats for a bike racer is 25-28 MPH. Thus if they are sprinting they are going faster. These bikes don’t have an electric motor. Obviously most people aren’t that reckless, but it can happen.
I’ve also noticed that the people who buy and ride them are a bunch of reactionary Yahoos who revel in scaring those pedestrians.
And I’ve noticed that people who drive cars are psychopathic killers. Except me, of course. Seriously though, the vast majority of people who own electric bikes are just trying to get from one place to another. The biggest, heaviest bikes are cargo bikes. These are especially popular with parents who shuttle their kids.
I’m many cases, ebikes have no reasonable alternative to regional trails. For example, let’s suppose you want to cross Lake Washington on a ebike? If you don’t want them riding on the trail, what else are they supposed to do? Ride on the freeway lanes at 20 mph? Detour around the lake and clog up the SR-522 bus lanes (since you don’t want them using the Burke Gilman trail either)? None of the above is reasonable, and as RossB said, the fastest bikes are usually pedal bikes anyway.
Gas powered bikes is a totally different situation because of their noise and stench. Besides actually being worse on noise and pollution than gas powered full-sized cars, they are also simply unnecessary, as there are cheap electric alternatives widely available. Even just sitting along a trail with an idling engine, a gas powered bike is already obnoxious, just by being there. Not the case with electric assist bikes, which only pose a problem when they move too fast (which is the same as a pedal only bike).
Hate the behavior not the mode. Enforce speed, enforce dangerous actions. Don’t get all high and mighty about the type of bike, and don’t stereotype the perception of the rider.
I ride a standard road bike. My wife rides an e-bike. She would just be another car on the road, if not for being on an ebike. She rides slower, and she rides far more safely than me.
Cars are far, far more dangerous and disruptive than anybody on an e-bike. Ever.
If you want to separate those doing 20 mph from the broader multi-use trails, start advocating for taking road space from cars. I’d be hugely supportive.
Ross, thanks for the link to the regulations. It sounds to me that Class 2 is pretty questionable also. They’re just an electric motor scooter if pedaling is not required.
asdf2, the five pedestrians a day who cross one of the Lake Washington bridges do not make the bikeways “multi-use trails” like the Burke-Gilman or Green Lake Loop. The bikeways across the bridges were built primarily for bikes, and pedestrians are welcome to walk though very few do so. On the other hand thousands of people walk on the BGT in a non-December ice storm day. Ross’s solution of widening is long past due, though there are a few places where it’s not possible. In those stretches the bikes should be limited to six miles per hour. Riders who can’t be steady at that speed should simply dismount and walk through the narrow zone. And yes, “How can they effectively be limited?” is an almost impossible question to answer.
It is regrettable that responsible bike riders suffer from the actions of the jerk contingent of yahoos on wheels, but the yahoos cause enough harm on crowded trails that they make it imperative that all motorized bikes be ejected. Yes, the Spandex Mafia is a big problem, too, but they’ve been there for decades and there aren’t really that many left whizzing away. It’s not a “look” that appeals to young people these days. However, the Ebikes make the sport of scaring pedestrians — or actually mowing them down, in most cases accidentally — available to many more psychopaths.
And sorry Cam, but your solution of enforcement is a joke. The cops don’t enforce speeding on roadways by trucks and autos, because they’re part of the Drivers’ Caucus themselves. Much less are they going to enforce speeding for bikes when a lot of them think that the people walking on the trail are a bunch of Commie subversives anyway.
> Ross’s solution of widening is long past due, though there are a few places where it’s not possible. In those stretches the bikes should be limited to six miles per hour. And yes, “How can they effectively be limited?” is an almost impossible question to answer.
I guess you could add speed bumps
For widening the seattle transporation plan did list some of the trails: for widening such as the burke gilman trail, chief Sealth, alki trail — however, I don’t see them in the levy.
Cam Solomon,
Yeah, my 70-year-old overweight uncle rides an e-bike. I’m fairly sure he’s going a reasonable speed, and, given his 8 grandkids, I’ll bet he slows down for groups and families and pedestrians. Just a hunch. Far safer than any automobile.
There is generally no absolute bans on electric power or motorized power on bicycles. It’s more of how big or fast are they allowed to be. It’s defined by engine size and maximum speed.
Every state adopts its own rules. So some states regulate CCs and some don’t. Maximum speeds can vary too.
https://www.bikeberry.com/blogs/learning-center/motorized-bike-laws
The technology is such that a manufacturer could tweak a product to meet the standards set by a state. It’s probably not ideal though as people do take them across state lines. And a tinkerer could modify their bike’s performance.
There are other variations between states too. Some states make users qualify for a general drivers license and for these bikes to have license plates, and others have other rules or no rules (younger users for example) on these things.
The issue arises in other countries, especially in places where bicycle use is more common. There is growing concern that there is an impact to general bicycle safety.
Given the many nuances and emerging technology and safety issues involved, it’s likely not a topic that a transit blog should explore thoroughly. .
Absolutely NOT. They are too fast and too heavy. E-Bikes that go faster than fifteen miles an hour should be embargoed as well.
Allowing a gas powered scooter on a mixed use trail in which pedestrians have the right of way is a bad idea in my opinion. Where do you draw the line.
The bigger issue I see is bicyclists not following the speed limit on these mixed use trails. Especially the large bike groups. It is very difficult to walk side by side on these trails. I would like to see speed enforcement. Set up speed cameras with police officers at either end and hand out speeding tickets on the trail no matter what the mode is. Require bicyclists to carry ID just like a driver must carry a drivers license (proof of insurance wouldn’t be a bad idea too). And follow the rule about riding single file.
If a bicyclist wants to pretend they are in the Tour de France then ride on the roads. You just can’t mix bicyclists going 20 mph with pedestrians, kids, strollers, dogs, and the elderly who are going 3mph max. Plus too many bicyclists are very rude and entitled.
I have seen way more collisions between bicyclists and pedestrians on these mixed use trails than I have ever seen between cars or between cars and bicyclists on the street.
It’s a bit complicated for e-bikes. The (king county) regional trail system mostly involves pretty long routes. Without e-bikes the number of people who can actually effectively use them drops quite a lot.
Of course the most contentious areas are near the cities downtowns where the trails enter. If we had enough space allocated we could have multiple trails for each type but of course we don’t so we have to share it together.
Anyways there’s been discussions about stricter enforcement of speed limits near dense areas or perhaps widening of areas or stricter separation of pedestrian versus bikes versus even horses but honestly to go more in depth this is probably better discussed on say Seattle greenways (or whatever the issaquah equivalent is) or Seattle bike blog than this transit blog,
> You just can’t mix bicyclists going 20 mph with pedestrians, kids, strollers, dogs, and the elderly who are going 3mph max.
Yes there’s lots of tension with arguing who should be the priority and even get into debates over federal funding
The monorail hype in the 1950s and 60s ignored the fact that elevated metro trains were almost a century old by that point, and were running in New York and Chicago. One track good, two tracks bad. But why? Couldn’t people then see that they were practically the same thing? And that conventional elevated trains could be electrified and have wrap-around wheels and avant-garde shaped vehicles just like their monorail visions? That would make it incremental improvements instead of unproven technology, and lower the cost and risk.
There doesn’t seem to be the established standards adopted to make monorail systems work. Every system seems bespoke (“gadgetbahn”).
Plus, any rail technology has to be designed and built in 3-D rather than 2-D, complete with ways to allow for slopes, curves and switching — not to mention the basic objective to not derail by being off-balanced.
Tracks for at least two parallel wheels may not be the most aesthetically pleasing thing to look at, but it seems the most naturally effective way to operate heavy vehicles in a balanced way. And established rail track and vehicle design standards developed over a century has huge advantages in lots of ways.
That was one of the problems with the monorail plan. Light/heavy rail had open standards, many vendors, and decades of real-world use. Each monorail vendor had its own incompatible design, so it could charge monopoly prices and you could only get replacements and service from that vendor.
It was like the microcomputer situation in the late 70s and early 80s. Several companies had incompatible models with different unique features– Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore PET, Atari. Later the IBM PC came out and steamrollered over all the others, because pointy-headed business leaders accepted it into their companies.
@Mike Orr,
“ That was one of the problems with the monorail plan. ”
LOL. There were many, many problems with the monorail plan. Too many problems to bother regurgitating here.
Seattle dodged a bullet when the monorail plan became monofail and finally died. Good riddance.
And, for the record, I actually like the current monorail. It is sort of quaint.
Yeah, monorails are a niche system. They make sense if you plan on going above ground the entire way. It is cheaper than other forms of elevated (which is what they were getting at in the video). However, if you run on the surface or run underground then it costs more than it would otherwise. It is pretty rare that you plan on running elevated the whole way, which is why not that many people use them. Since not that many people use them, the costs go way up.
The beamway is much slimmer than a railbed, and there must be space between the two beamways whether supported (AKA “Seattle”) or suspended as in Wuppertal. So the visual impact of the beamway is considerably less than a two-track railway.
At 36:29 is a clip of a red painting-like sign that used to be at Denny Way and 1st Ave N if I remember, that I used to see from the buses to Queen Anne and Ballard. I think it was a restaurant but I don’t remember clearly.
There’s a clip of the Skyride in the closing credits, that was a gondola across the Seattle Center grounds. Or at least, it was small cars running on a cable; I don’t know what the exact definition of a gondola is compared to similar systems. I arrived in Seattle in 1972 and rode it as a child in the early 70s. It was my favorite kind of ride or feature at Seattle Center. I’d forgotten that was a precursor to my love of urban metros.
My first real metro experience was in 1986 right after high school, when my dad and I drove to San Jose and Lake Tahoe for Christmas with relatives. While we were in San Jose my dad had a day with business meetings, so his friend suggested they take me to Fremont so I could ride BART to San Francisco. So I did, and spent the afternoon in SF. Then I took BART back to Fremont and got a bus to San Jose.
Riding BART smoothly at 79 mph is an amazing thrill — particularly on the straight elevated segments in San Leandro and Oakland. It leaves a powerful impression, especially younger ones.
I’ve even viewed it as a taste of what high speed rail would feel like. It actually makes slower light rail systems feel a little disappointing. But maybe it’s because there is a bit of a speed demon in me (as well as lots of people).
What BART does and what light rail does are two different things.
In Berlin, there is the Sbahn, which really isn’t that much different than Link in terms of speed, but has somewhat more frequent stop spacing.
For BART type distances, there are regional trains, such as Re-1, operating sort of like Sounder, only Re-1 has an *average speed* including station stops around 70 mph.
So if you’re in, say, Potsdam and want to go somewhere in the Berlin region, what you use depends on where. S Bahn S7 is quite popular for some trips. For other destinations, Re-1 is a much faster choice.
yes, Mike, Seattle did have a gondola during the original world fair. After the fair closed, it was disassembled and moved to the Puyallup state fair where it still operates.
I thought the video was quite good overall. I especially liked the “death of a thousand cuts” idea. I think there were a couple key points they left out though.
The biggest omission in the story was not mentioning the bus tunnel. It was not only important in its own right, but it changed everything that followed. Without the tunnel ST would have been in deeper trouble, and might have just scrapped Link altogether. Ron Sims wanted to do that (if memory serves). Without the bus tunnel ST would have two ugly paths: build on the surface (like Portland) or watch the project become even more expensive. Running on the surface would have made it look much worse (especially in comparison to the monorail) and made the monorail people look brilliant (not an easy task). Of course if the plans for Link were replaced with buses the interest in the monorail would have been higher (and they could have gone to the UW, as originally planned). The bus tunnel (later the transit tunnel) is arguably the most important, highest-value transit project in the region.
The other thing they forgot to mention is that the Forward Thrust proposal needed a supermajority. Over 50% of the people supported it, but it wasn’t enough. It is funny because the monorail vote (and the ST vote) would have failed if they needed those kind of numbers. As with ST, the options the state gave us (not the voters) are a big reason we don’t have a better system.
There were several omissions. The supermajority requirement for Forward Thrust. The Eyman initiative that revoked MVET surcharges for transit and took its funding source out from under it. (The initiative was later ruled unconstitutional, but the damage was done.) And something else I’d have to watch the video again to remember.
It was interesting to see how the maps compare: the pre-Forward Thrust concepts, the Forward Thrust plan, the Monorail iterations, and Link’s iterations.
It also shows that the pre-Forward Thrust concepts would have gone to Mountlake Terrace, Sea-Tac airport, and Kent. They and Northgate were left out of Forward Thrust, which gives the impression they weren’t populous enough then or didn’t have sufficient growth plans, but that turns out not to be the case.
If Forward Thrust had opened in 1980, I would have been 14. GenXers like myself would have had rapid transit in the eastern half of Seattle and Bellevue for our entire high school, college, career, and retirement. My parents, Silents, would have been able to use it starting in their 40s. Boomers in between would have been able to use it in their 20s. When I first encountered BART in 1986, I would have been riding something similar for six years.
When Link opened in 2009, I was 43. So I have rapid transit in southeast Seattle to the airport for half of my career years. But there was nothing in the U-District, Northgate, Capitol Hill, or the Eastside.
If the Monorail had opened in 2010, the western half of Seattle would have been open to me for half of my career years, without the 30-minute overhead of getting from Ballard to the transfer points downtown or the U-District to go anywhere further. That was one of the reasons that I left Ballard in 2003, after working there for four years and living there for one, because most of what I did was in the eastern half of Seattle or Bellevue, there was no low-overhead way to get there, and the future monorail wouldn’t have accepted transfers so I’d be riding a bus under the monorail tracks to avoid double-paying fares.
When Northgate Link opened in 2022, I was 55. So it wasn’t there for my college at the U, or my ten years living in the U-District and working in First Hill/Northgate/downtown. But it has been open for two years, and has immensely improved access from Capitol Hill to the U-District, Roosevelt, Northgate, and Lynnwood. So I’m glad for that, but I wish we’d had something much sooner.
This is what we’ve lost from taking so long to build a proper metro. An entire additional generation or two has missed out on high-capacity transit for half or all of their career years.
This is why we should have started building in the 1970s as German cities did, and never stopped.
Why did Forward Thrust require 66% of votes when later transit measures require 50%?
Because the Legislature was much more dominated by rural counties, and rural counties have forever thought that their damp pool of tax revenue was paying for their own and Seattle’s roads and schools rather than the reverse, which is a fact.
The rubes have hated the city slickers since Andrew Jackson’s time.
I should have said “since The Whiskey Rebellion”.
[You could look it up…]
“The Forward Thrust ballot initiatives were a series of bond propositions put to the voters of King County, Washington in 1968 and 1970, designed by a group called the Forward Thrust Committee. Seven of the twelve propositions in 1968 were successful; four of the remaining propositions were repackaged for a vote in 1970, when they were defeated in the darkening local economic climate of the Boeing Bust”.
Forward Thrust – Wikipedia
In WA state bonds require a 60% yes vote and 40% turnout to pass whereas levies require 50% to pass. (Rep. Tana Senn is trying to reduce the percentage to pass bonds to 55% for school bonds).
To get around this requirement agencies like ST place “levies” on the ballot but then bond the future revenue. (ST also bonded the levy revenue in ST 3 although not fiscally necessary to prevent future measures or initiatives from reducing ST’s taxing authority, which included a legal action to amend ST’s car valuations the plaintiffs claimed were not disclosed in the levy but had already been bonded).
ST also uses subarea loans which are a kind of bond, which have been disadvantageous for some subareas like Everett and Tacoma that could have bonded their own future levy revenue and built their projects long ago when construction costs were much lower. Today it looks unlikely ELE or TDLE can be completed because ST was very optimistic on project cost estimates, and the income earned on the subarea bonds pales in comparison to the rise in inflation and project costs during the period citizens in these two subareas have been paying ST taxes.
To write, “Because the Legislature was much more dominated by rural counties, and rural counties have forever thought that their damp pool of tax revenue was paying for their own and Seattle’s roads and schools rather than the reverse, which is a fact. The rubes have hated the city slickers since Andrew Jackson’s time” for why some of Forward Thrust failed at the ballot shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how bonds work and Forward Thrust in particular.
Forward Thrust was under the aegis of METRO, King Co., and the city of Seattle, none of which are rural counties or “rubes”. The Legislature did not prevent the bonds from being placed on a ballot. The voters in King Co. simply rejected the bonds due to economic hard times.
Virtually every government or government agency uses bonds, rural, suburban and urban. Unless state bonds, the repayment obligation is on the issuing agency, city, or county.
The U.S. government issues general obligation bonds which means there is no specific project securing the bonds. So do states, cities, and virtually every school district. WSDOT secures future toll revenue to issue bonds. The advantage of these government bonds is they are exempt from federal income tax and so can offer a lower interest rate compared to market rates at the time. The risk is the projects fail (eg Puerto Rico, Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island) so the security from the specific project is worth less than the outstanding bonds, or inflation and interest rates rise lowering the value of the bonds because they now have lower interest rates than new bonds.
That is the take away from the loss of Forward Thrust. Not only did the agency and county lose a $900 million federal earmark Sen. Warren had secured, the cost of the projects increased dramatically over time, which is why Everett and Tacoma have been disadvantaged by subarea loans. ST effectively bonded their subarea revenue at very low interest rates for decades while inflation and construction costs have soared.
I wasn’t here during Forward Thrust, but what’s noticeable to me is the transit measures failed while most of the others including freeways passed. If the Boeing Bust were the only reason people were hesitant to spend money, more measures would have failed and the topics would have been broader. This suggests transit skepticism was a consistent factor in the two votes. If it had just been caution during a recession, they might have realized that leaving the situation as they did would lead to a car-dependent infrastructure and people having no other alternative. They would then discuss how to fix the situation as soon as possible, if not with that bond measure, then with something smaller that could have been the starting point for a better transit network.
There’s also the evidence of the bus network at the time. I wasn’t old enough to be aware of it until the late 70s, but then most all-day bus routes in Seattle were half-hourly, suburban routes hourly, many were long slow milk runs to downtown, and three-quarters of the suburban routes were peak expresses to downtown — in other words, the bus network was pretty useless. Forward Thrust could have fixed that at least in the largest corridors. But voters apparently didn’t think that was important enough.
This all screams Futurama, the 1939 vision that foreshadowed what Seattle and King County were doing. At MOHAI there’s a clip of an interview with the Seattle mayor and city council before the World’s Fair, and they were giddy that the soon-to-be-built I-5 and 520 would be the greatest thing Seattle ever had. This was the World’s Fair vision of monorails, skyrides, and bubbleators? Apparently a lot of voters bought the Futurama and freeway-happy mindset, and didn’t think about letting transit catch up to the car infrastructure.
“Forward Thrust was under the aegis of METRO, King Co., and the city of Seattle, none of which are rural counties or “rubes”.”
The argument is that the general 60% threshold was maintained by rural interests. Forward Thrust was subject to that threshold, so rural interests were indirectly responsible for its defeat. A 60% requirement means a minority of 40% can get their way — contrary to the principle of majority-rule democracy. I said above that the public had an anti-transit attitude, but I should amend that: the majority of the public recognized the need for effective transit infrastructure and voted for it, but they were thwarted by a minority under the 60% rule.
“To get around this requirement agencies like ST place “levies” on the ballot but then bond the future revenue.”
So that’s what happened.
“ST also uses subarea loans which are a kind of bond, which have been disadvantageous for some subareas like Everett and Tacoma that could have bonded their own future levy revenue and built their projects long ago when construction costs were much lower.”
Pierce and Snohomish County stub lines to the county border would have been putting the cart before the horse. Pierce and Snohomish Counties have nothing comparable to the Bellevue-Spring District-Microsoft-Redmond corridor, which is affluent, job/retail-rich, and has walksheds away from freeways (read: ridership generators). And the Eastside stub was unintended: the result of a construction delay in the middle of the line. And if they’d built their stubs but then King County couldn’t bring Link to Federal Way and Shoreline, what then? Two white elephant investments in Pierce and Snohomish Counties.
Fact Check, the use of the terms “levies” [when used as security for bonds] and “bonds” directly issued is a distinction without a difference. If the Legislature of 1964 had wanted to allow King County to build the full set of Forward Thrust improvements, it could have offered it the same deal the Central Puget Sound Transit Authority has. But it didn’t, because it was still dominated by rural representatives, including those from Tacoma which still thought of itself as a rival to Seattle. Twenty years later the Central Puget Sound region had grown enough that it could begin to call the shots.
Now, of course, the balance of power is completely centered around Puget Sound, and the rest of the state is lucky that the people living in Paradise are generous.
Being Democrats and all.
King gets a far disproportionate level of funding, compared to Pierce, well beyond simple population. Be it general transportation dollars from the PSRC, dollars for homelessness, dollars for alternative transportation, King get’s the King’s ransom, Pierce gets crumbs and the out-sized needs, and the tiny tax-base.
Generous my ass.
King subsidizes the rest of the state. King/Pierce/Snohomish together subsidize the other counties. Who do you think is paying for exurban freeways like the Cross-Base Highway or the sprawl east/southeast of Tacoma?
You notice I didn’t mention highways. Exporting blight is not generous.
I’m pretty sure the cross-base highways is essentially canceled, just an FYI. My politicians are fighting hard against the Canyon Rd. project, which zombie’s on with little support, but nobody can zero-in on a head-shot. The I-5 expansion through the base probably benefits King more than Pierce, just by virtue of the substantially larger population using I-5 south coming from King.
The sprawl in southeast Pierce isn’t a King County conspiracy. It exists because exurban Pierce cities and unincorporated areas demand it, and the county and state are unwilling to tell them no, or that it must be more compact and walkable. None of that is King County’s fault. The nature of exurban sprawl means that the cost per capita is higher than in more compact areas. The ones who pay the most taxes are high-population, most affluent areas, so that money goes to exurban utopia dreams and keeping the rural/agricultural areas alive. That’s not “exporting blight”. it’s a messed-up political structure that gives sprawlites and nimbys too much power.
> You notice I didn’t mention highways. Exporting blight is not generous.
I didn’t realize king county/ seattle was so powerful as to control what other counties build. “exporting blight”? You’re making it sound as if the government officials in pierce county were forced by seattle to build the hov expansion projects in i5 or tacoma narrows bridge expansion.
> I’m pretty sure the cross-base highways is essentially canceled, just an FYI. My politicians are fighting hard against the Canyon Rd. project, which zombie’s on with little support, but nobody can zero-in on a head-shot.
Aren’t they moving forward with the sr 167 extension?
https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-projects/sr-167-completion-project
> The I-5 expansion through the base probably benefits King more than Pierce, just by virtue of the substantially larger population using I-5 south coming from King.
Come on, it’s literally 15 miles from the border of pierce county. I might as well “claim” the i5 hov lane project from tacoma to seattle benefits pierce county more while we’re at it.
You can’t label every time federal funding is spent within pierce county as somehow the fault of king county.
https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-projects/i-5-mounts-rd-steilacoom-dupont-rd-corridor-improvements
No, of course it isn’t a conspiracy. I just don’t think King should get credit for King’s superior tax-base destroying rural Pierce County.
We have lots of problems we actually do need money for. Two I care about are transit and homelessness. We are desperate for money for both, yet King uses their superior grant writing capacity and political weight to finagle limited dollars to address those two problems far in excess of proportionate needs or population, to Pierce’s detriment. In in my opinion, uses that money quite poorly.
So no, I am not really too interested in kissing King’s ring and thanking them for scraps, just because they happen to fund the destruction of our neighborhoods and farmlands, because King happens to be rich.
167 expansion is neither the cross-base nor Canyon Rd. It’s a completely separate project designed to funnel goods from the Port to Kent warehouses.
> 167 expansion is neither the cross-base nor Canyon Rd. It’s a completely separate project designed to funnel goods from the Port to Kent warehouses.
Yes I know that, I meant they are still expanding and building freeways in pierce county
Yes, they definitely are. 167 is the big one, for sure. Though it basically straddles the county line, and probably benefits King and it’s tax-base substantially more the Pierce. Particularly since the two ports now have a joint agreement. I assume the lion’s share of the tax benefit goes to where ever those warehouses reside, which is mainly King.
@Cam
Here you can look for yourself.
https://www.piercecountywa.gov/Archive/ViewFile/Item/7168
Ctrl+f “pierce county” these are all the projects pierce county or the cities are applying for federal funding.
Random snippets (these are just candidates)
* 112th St. E., A St. S. to 18th Ave. E.: This project will widen 112th St. E. t
* 224th St. E. Widen the existing roadway to 3 lanes.
* Canyon Rd (lots of projects applied for here)
* Rhodes Lake Road East: Construct a new major principal arterial roadway
The next largest project approved is:
* I-5/SR 512 Interchange to SR 16 Interchange – Core HOV
Estimated cost $803,176,852
This section of I-5 is experiencing congestion during peak hours and is part of the HOV program. Reconstruction of the 72nd Street Interchange and the 84th Street Interchange will remove and replace the 72nd and 84th Street bridges and high occupancy vehicle lanes will be constructed on I-5. This construction will result in reduced traffic congestion and enhance motorist safety.
If you search for the seattle/king county freeway projects some of them aren’t even in this list because they don’t even apply anymore. For instance the i5 widening near northgate or adding auxiliary lanes or unweaving the i5 around spokane corridor aren’t listed any more while they were in the past.
Yeah, thanks WL. I’ve seen that. Fortunately many of the road projects score poorly.
Some of them, like Canyon Road, were proposed in the 80s or 90s. They have just been zombie’ing along, working through the process, without a lot of rethinking about how worthwhile they still are.
It’s the opposite of transit. Highways are as hard to kill as transit project are easy.
Watching the Pierce County Council discuss them is this bizarro world of “who asked for this?” “Shrug.” “How do we stop it?” “Shrug.”
@Cam.
“ King gets a far disproportionate level of funding, compared to Pierce, well beyond simple population.”
Ah, no.
The last data I saw (2016?) showed that King got $0.55 in spending for every tax dollar raised, whereas Pierce got $1.25 in spending for every tax dollar raised (IIRC). Meaning King really is floating the state, and Pierce is one of the so called “welfare counties” (more state spending than revenue raised).
And these are just ratios. In absolute dollars the disparity is even worse, mainly because the King Co economy is the biggest in the state.
In rank King was 38th out of 39. The only county that was worse was San Juan County. But there isn’t a lot of state infrastructure in the islands, so a lot lower state spending.
Cam Solomon…
We must be buddies. The exurban areas busting with population exist for one reason, and one reason only. Seattle refuses to zone appropriately to house the population of employees that its businesses have. By extension, a few dozen suburbs surrounding Seattle could absorb that growth… but they don’t; and furthermore, they accept more and more jobs and employment centers themselves, also, not upzoning appropriately to handle the population growth that matches the jobs they support. These people need to live somewhere. They end up in places like Marysville and Spanaway. A lot of the people in those areas don’t want any growth, none at all. And they don’t have tons of jobs to support the people. And nobody is making the home builders finance transit to support the growth. So, here we are dealing with the crap sandwich of a Microsoft and Amazon boom that have pushed all of the working class people out of Seattle into “anywhere else.”
Seattle is responsible for not building enough housing for everybody who wants to live there. It’s the largest city, so it should fulfill that role. But Pierce County and its cities are responsible for their sprawl. If they built walkable streetcar suburbs basically any distance from Tacoma, I wouldn’t complain. Buses or trains can go to any village anywhere, especially if they’re in a straight line, and people can walk from the stop to home, and from home to the store and other things. But the land use isn’t like that: it’s basically only houses or sometimes apartments, and the nearest store is a mile or two away, and buses can’t serve all the houses.
Car-dependent land use is designed for wealthy people, so at most it should be only 5-10% of the housing at the fringes, like the mansions along Lake Washington and Magnolia. The 1960s suburban model was for people who could easily afford to drive, and assumed that gas would always be cheap, car pollution was insignificant, car infrastructure didn’t destroy cities, and walkability was unimportant. All these may be OK for a small rich minority who wants it, but it’s cruel to force people of modest means into it and give them no other choice.
It was 60%. It was common back in the day to require 60% majority for local tax levies. I’m not sure the history. Some of it is anti-tax sentiment, some of it the desire for a more uniform level of spending across the state. This has always been an issue with schools. A wealthy district will spend a lot, while a poor district won’t, and no one wants to spend money at the state level. By setting the bar higher (or setting limits in how you can spend money locally) you force people from around the state to get together and fund schools adequately everywhere. That is the idea, but of course it hasn’t worked out that way.
Another possibility is that they wanted to raise the bar for bonds. Bond issues tend to be popular because they usually involve building stuff. But bonds can leave an area with big financial problems which can cascade throughout the state.
Because the King County population in 1970 was half of what it is today, the rapid transit perception was very different. After all, it was 54 years ago! The youngest voters in 1970 would be 72 today.
It was also in the middle of the rare period from 1960-1980 when Seattle lost population. Seattle has rebounded and added over 40 percent more residents since then.
It’s interesting history. I don’t think the results say much about today’s issues though.
“Because the King County population in 1970 was half of what it is today, the rapid transit perception was very different. ”
And New York, Chicago, and London were smaller when they started their rapid transit projects. The Bay Area was half the size when it approved BART. When Santa Clara County considered BART in the 1950s, it only had 200,000 people. (I looked it up.) German cities down to the size of 40,000 have light rail or similar, built or upgraded since 1970.
In any case, they were planning for growth. Forward Thrust went to Bel-Red and Eastgate because that’s where King County intended to channel growth and highrises to.
Back then you could can also build a lot more subway with a lot more cut and cover. For instance in berkeley you can see where they demolished the houses to dig the trenches https://maps.app.goo.gl/WV5zgE4q64D11L9w6
That is how the forward thrust / atlanta were able to build so much subway back then.
> Not only did the agency and county lose a $900 million federal earmark Sen. Warren had secured, the cost of the projects increased dramatically over time
Not to say politically those methods are completely viable now but just reminding all that costs definitely matter in how much rail is actually built. And that the cost of transit projects increasing — a lot of it is from community opposition demanding more expensive alignments not really “inflation”
I think the more interesting thing is thinking about what happens after the forward thrust vote was passed.
1) Would they have successfully built all of it? Bart originally wanted to say cross the golden gate bridge but instead that section was cut out. I could see for example them leaving out the factoria/issaquah line and going to bellevue first.
2) I wonder how well the bus connections to the heavy rail would have worked for the redmond downtown to micorsoft, upper ballard to ballard and west seattle to sodo busses. I imagine somewhat decently, but it’s kind of odd they proposed such short bus routes from the stations.
3) Where/what would have been the next expansions.
3a) Assuming like BART I guess they might have done a branch off the ‘renton’ line to seatac or southcenter (or maybe both with that expensive flyover).
3b) maybe this is when they do the issaquah line? Or the extension up to lynnwood.
3c) with the high construction cost of subways generally stopping in most of america past the 80s, I wonder if they would have switched back to light rail as new jersey/dc did. Though given forward thrust covers most of seattle already the only corridors left for light rail I can think of would be south seattle with mlk way/rainier, maybe north seattle with market street but I think it might be covered already with these subways. Or maybe an eastside one on the erc from kirkland down to bellevue.
“Would they have successfully built all of it?”
It worked for MARTA.
“Bart originally wanted to say cross the golden gate bridge but instead that section was cut out.”
That’s because Marin County voted it down, along with San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. It was going to go all the way around the bay; i.e., to San Jose and Palo Alto. There’s an exhibit in Diridon station (the main train station in San Jose) on the 1950s planning. It considered both BART and what was called the return of streetcars (which became the VTA light rail project).
It’s interesting to see why they voted it down. Santa Clara County wanted to spend the money on “expressways” instead. Expressways are like sub-freeways, similar to Aurora or 15th Ave W. So the San Tomas, Lawrence, and Montague expressways were built. (As I found out later, the Lawrence Expressway was built near where I lived as a toddler in Saratoga.) When I went back there in the 2000s after the expressways had been built, I found they had all the disadvantages you can imagine: non-walkability, ugliness, and not eliminating traffic congestion.
San Mateo County voted BART down because it would have approximated the Caltrain corridor, and they thought Caltrain was sufficient. (Never mind that BART would have run every 15 minutes or more and Caltrain was hourly or less. They weren’t thinking about what would be good for pedestrians not driving cars.)
Marin County I don’t know as much about. But it was part of the anti-urban branch of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s/70s, and didn’t want density. So that might have contributed to it.
> “Would they have successfully built all of it?”
> It worked for MARTA.
No, I’m referencing MARTA as well. MARTA definitely built a lot, but that was not the original plan either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Atlanta_Rapid_Transit_Authority
http://www.atletcetra.com/2018/02/marta-original-plan.html
(copied from wikipedia, this is a bit oversimplfying below as well)
MARTA was built with at least three stubs for rail lines which were never built:
* The Northwest Line towards Cobb County has a stub tunnel east of Atlantic Station
* The South Line’s branch to Hapeville was considered for extension into Clayton County as far away as Forest Park,
* The Northeast Line of the rail system, which has ended in Doraville for two decades, was considered for extension into Gwinnett County
This is the 1971 original map https://www.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/3dibzp/map_of_the_original_marta_railbusway_system/ you can see the airport alignment is a bit different. There’s also the suggested busways which didn’t happen.
Anyways my main point isn’t to be negative about after the vote but that circumstances still could have changed for instance building a branch in a different direction. Or maybe they added more infill stations on that bellevue / redmond section.
I’ve also been wondering what Forward Thrust station areas and expansions would have evolved into.
A lot of things were different in the 1960s. King County’s population was less than a million, and 90% lived in Seattle. Snohomish and Pierce were separate job markets and more rural. Only Boeing workers drove to all the plants. 405 didn’t exist yet, and Southcenter was going to be in Burien. West Valley Highway and the Kent P&R were the middle of nowhere when I first rode the 150 there in the early 80s. People didn’t realize how much the freeways and airport would change travel patterns or where people worked. The Central District station was called “Model Neighborhood”, because a new Spring District or something was to be built there.
So Forward Thrust was oriented to Lake City, Bellevue, Eastgate, and Renton, because that was the existing travel patterns and planned growth. Renton was clearly for the Boeing plant.
In a best-case scenario, the station areas would be popular places to live, and that would generate support for apartments and density there, and support for more high-quality transit. I hope the Renton stations would have apartments and not just the factory.
In a worst-case scenario, NIMBYs would block density, and the station areas would remain as they were in the 1960s, so people couldn’t really live near stations and walk to transit. That’s what happened to BART in Hayward and Fremont.
As to where post-1980 expansions might be, I find it hard to speculate. Most of King County’s and Snohomish/Pierce County’s growth happened after Forward Thrust would have opened. King County in the early 80s debated how to channel growth, and Microsoft grew in that era. The presence of the Forward Thrust subway would have added new factors to the debate. That could have led to a walkability/density model like Vancouver, DC, Chicago, or Toronto. Growth could have been concentrated more in King County rather than spreading out so much to Everett and Tacoma.
Or the wave of unwalkable isolated office parks and cul-de-sacs in the 80s and 90s might have continued unabated, and the subway would have continued running but otherwise be ignored.
Those two scenarios are so counterfactual that I don’t see the point in guessing where the largest neighborhoods and most likely extensions and new lines would be. It’s depressing to think about the opportunity we threw away, and to beautify cabins in a cruise ship that doesn’t exist.
WL, lots of BART is at-grade in freeway medians or alongside existing railroad tracks with arterial overpasses like happen with freeways. Just because third-rail IS dangerous does not mean it can’t be used at-grade. Look at all the electrically-powered commuter rail lines radiating out from New York City; most of the Long Island Railroad lines are at-grade their entire distance. They are fenced off so that people don’t get electrocuted.
“MARTA was built with at least three stubs for rail lines which were never built”
By “stub” I meant complete rail segments and stations. I don’t know enough about Atlanta to understand your three examples, but:
* A “stub tunnel” sounds like a short segment like the Beacon Hill tunnel. Not an entire partial line from Tacoma Dome to the county border. (I imagine Federal Way and King County would block the remainder to (South) Federal Way station if Central Link weren’t coming.)
* The other two sound like extensions on a map that were never built. That’s an ordinary situation that happens everywhere. Was any disconnected infrastructure built in those segments? Anything more substantial than a “Y” interface or tail track, that’s so small it doesn’t matter.
“(South) Federal Way station”
I don’t know whether South King’s funding ends at Federal Way Station or South Federal Way Station.
The history of Marin and BART is complex, and detailed here:
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/How-BART-almost-connected-to-Marin-by-way-of-the-16309661.php
Marin County was asked to leave the BART district when San Mateo County pulled out, which they did. Marin voters never got to vote for/against BART.
Part of the controversy was the challenge of using the Golden Gate Bridge. It was unclear how and how much it would be. Plus, the approaches would pose additional challenges as neither side has easy terrain. With only about 250K population, it was a big ask — and if the bridge wouldn’t accommodate the train the cost would have ballooned.
Marin’s removal set the stage for a different approach: express buses and ferries subsidized by bridge tolls. It wasn’t until 2004 did Marin voters allocate a countywide sales tax to pay for better local transit service.
Marin is notorious for suppressing growth by never tying the water district to a more plentiful source. It’s long had a virtual growth moratorium for many decades by restricting the addition of water customers. The restriction is portrayed as environmental consciousness of its sensitive and amazing geography, but it’s certainly got an exclusionary aspect to it. And nowadays, Sonoma County just north has almost twice the population of Marin.
@Mike
> By “stub” I meant complete rail segments and stations. I don’t know enough about Atlanta to understand your three examples, but:
I’ll caution a bit that I don’t know Marta’s history as well especially when comparing multiple plans over the years. But from what I know:
The bankhead station https://maps.app.goo.gl/99ma3JwaGQNSYdVRA it’s only 1 station off the blue branch, was supposed to head further northeast into cobb county. Or at the very least reach Perry Homes neighborhood.
The dekalb one it was originally planned as a busway but then they tried to build it as a branch of the blue line. they ran out of money though and nothing was built besides a small spur.
The red line to sandy springs has the opposite scenario originally planned as a busway (at least in one of the plans im looking at) but that got upgraded as heavy rail line, I don’t know the full history behind this one.
@Mike
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/fly_sound-transit-district.pdf
The south king subarea southern boundary is the king-pierce county line so it does include the south federal way station (but not fife)
@Tom Terrific,
“ Just because third-rail IS dangerous does not mean it can’t be used at-grade”
All electricity is dangerous. When I was in Zagreb a few years back they had put up signs on the overpasses instructing people (actually just men) not to pee off of the overpasses and onto the electric catenary for the trains passing underneath.
The signs were schematic like drawings done without any words and indicating just how unpleasant it might be for a man to electrocute himself in this exact way.
Apparently there is some debate about whether or not this is a true hazard, but I didn’t see anyone (men) testing the theory.
That said, the risk with third rail is the accessibility. It is simply too easy to wander onto the tracks and touch (or pee on) the third rail. And that is true at grade and in underground station areas where people in mental distress might end up on the tracks.
Catenary is simply safer due to its relative inaccessibility.
It wasn’t easily traceable what the breakdown between South asking and Pierce Subarwas contribute to TDLE. It appears to be allroaching a $5B price tag.
Add to that the cost of OMF South partly for TDLE ($1.5-1.9B) and vehicles. There are separate line items. These added together seem well above another $1B.
So TDLE in total appears to already be well above $6B for a train slower than the current express bus.
Finally I’m not sure how ST is allocating the track cost to OMF South since it will require a track extension south of the Federal Way terminus.
“The south king subarea southern boundary is the king-pierce county”
The issue isn’t the subarea boundary, it’s whether South Federal Way Station benefits South King according to South King. Is it being built because South King wanted it or it’s a regional growth center? Or is it being built only because Piece wants a Tacoma Dome extension and skipping South Federal Way would be too-wide station spacing?
The same thing came up with Judkins Park station. East King was originally going to pay for everything east of Intl Dist station including Judkins Park, because the line was an East King priority, not a North King one. North King wouldn’t have built a line to Judkins Park alone. North King had too many higher priorities like 45th, Ballard, West Seattle, Lake City, Georgetown, etc.
But then the city of Bellevue wanted a downtown tunnel, and begged North King to take on the cost of ID-Judkins Park to free up East King money for the tunnel, and North King did.
After all of that was decided, Seattlites started to realize Judkings Park station could benefit North King after all, as a faster alternative to Mt Baker station (taking the 7 or 48 and transferring at Judkins Park to downtown/north). And apartment construction started to take off around Judkins Park station, surprising the skeptics. So in retrospect Judkins Park station will have substantial benefits to North King, so it makes sense for North King to pay for it.
But the issue in subarea equity is whether something benefits the subarea, not whether it’s physically in the subarea.
“The bankhead station it’s only 1 station off the blue branch, was supposed to head further northeast into cobb county.”
What’s the effect of that station without the rest? Is Bankhead a walkable neighborhood with unique retailers? Is Westside Reservoir Park a nice place to spend an afternoon in? Does it matter to Atlantans if the county border is just beyond that and the rest of it wasn’t built? Are there a lot of jobs or destinations there that the line was going to go to? Or does it only matter to the suburbanites who voted it down? Did Atlanta miss out on some other line because it built this one-station stub instead?
In any case, that’s not the situation here. If Pierce and Snohomish front-loaded their construction, the result wouldn’t be a one-station extension from downtown. It would be disconnected segments in Pierce and Snohomish Counties, several miles from Angle Lake or Northgate. Like, er, the T line. Troy said it was intended to interline with Central Link. But Central Link isn’t coming until decades later, and it was uncertain before 2016 whether it would ever come. And in the meantime, the Pierce politicians lost the plot and redefined the temporary incompatibility between TLink/CLink technology as a permanent feature that can’t be changed.
6 million. Yikes. That money could definitely be use better. If repurposed, Pierce could also demand back their portion of the second tunnel and the SFW OMB, since they wouldn’t be needing it. That would fund a lot of pocal BRTs and Sounder runs.
“If repurposed, Pierce could also demand back their portion of the second tunnel and the SFW OMB, since they wouldn’t be needing it.”
We’ve been through this a thousand times. The reason the Tacoma Dome extension is being built is the Pierce boardmembers and city/county politicians insisted on it. If they don’t want it now, they could just say no and it would be canceled. But whenever transit fans suggest the Tacoma Dome extension isn’t worth it and won’t meet Pierce’s transit needs much, the biggest resistance we get is those same Pierce politicians. They’re the decision makers, and this is what they want.
Lazarus,
I doubt that an electric current would be able to flow up urine (though maybe would be possible in some circumstances), more likely the agencies found something that people care about to keep them from depositing a corrosive liquid onto expensive, metal infrastructure.
Death by electrocution peeing has definitely happened in a few cases:
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/wash-man-electrocuted-by-urinating-on-power-line/
https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/07/08/brooklyn-man-electrocuted-after-urinating-on-subways-third-rail/
A few links to some opening day pics of the new pedestrian bridge next to Wilburton Link station.
https://x.com/SounderBruce/status/1804970448331112695
https://x.com/oranv/status/1804953471965397503
Thanks Sam! At least someone on this blog is excited about all these improvements that are coming on line. Much appreciated.
And it is interesting that those two links you posted are from people who used to frequent/post on this blog. Sounder Bruce in particular was very good and knowledgeable about the heavier side of rail.
About Here released a video about how breaking rules of traditional North American zoning and building codes could create better apartments than the traditional 5 over 1s, he mentions Seattle’s single stair complex rule change as one rule that has helped in its own way to improve the housing landscape in Seattle.
https://youtu.be/011TOfugais?si=ZIRPFkYXuZzFDeR8
https://info.myorca.com/news/orca-card-now-in-google-wallet/
You can finally use your phone instead of an ORCA card. That’s been really convenient when visiting other cities to not have to get their local transit card.
… but reading closer, you still have to pay $3 for the digital card?! I guess I’ll keep around the ORCA cards I have to lend to guests after all.
The $3 will pay for itself with just one transfer. Metro is $2.75. ST Express is $3.25. Link will be $3 in August when the flat fare starts. So going one way, the $3 fee vs $3 second fare is a wash, but coming back you’re paying $3 if you paid that fee or $6 if you didn’t.
Lending ORCA cards to visitors can be useful in some circumstances, but it won’t cover their first/last trip from the airport unless you mail them the card beforehand and they mail it back.
And if your visitor is an ordinary tourist, or here for a business meeting, or even a low-budget backpacker, the $3 fee is nothing compared to the rest of their expenses. If they spend $23 instead of $20 on total transit expenses, or treat it as just part of their total visit cost, it’s insignificant.
The only time a one-time $3 fee really makes a difference is if somebody is so poor they only have $5 or $10 for an entire day, so paying $3 means going without a meal or another necessity. That’s an issue for homeless people or the poorest nomads, but not much beyond that. If they lived here they could get a free/discount ORCA card through one of the programs. That isn’t available to visitors. But again, the $3 pays for itself with one round trip, and it’s a one-time fee, not every trip.
I don’t see the point in using Google wallet or a credit card and paying money to third-party payment processors rather than just getting an ORCA card, but it’s available because people have demanded it. Ticketmaster charges even higher fees for the privilege of ordering a concert ticket online.
It’s still a work in progress as it’s only compatible with Android right now and no details as to when Apple will be available. People have also mentioned employee ORCA cards don’t work with the new digital wallet feature and individual employers have to turn it on from what ORCA said about it. Along with a few other quirks that will likely end having to be ironed out like deactivating current cards when switched to a digital wallet.
The fee is a psychological deterrent, granted. I have a hard time convincing people who normally drive everywhere to take transit when they think they’d only do one one-way trip or one round trip, and they think the fee is too much overhead for that. But we convinced ST to at least reduce the fee from $5 to $3, so it’s not as much of a barrier as it was.
But people need to get a sense of perspective. I used to take a bus to Seattle Center to avoid the monorail fare. But really, what’s $5 once or twice a year as part of the entertainment cost of visiting the Center? So now I take the monorail and enjoy the view. (And now it’s free with an ORCA transfer, or $7 without round trip.) And how much would it cost to take Uber or drive to the Center?
“The fee is a psychological deterrent, granted.”
Yeah. It’s not really the cost as much as it feels bad to be paying something for nothing.
I suspect you’re right and out of town visitors won’t complain given the convenience of not needing to keep track of the card. Especially useful for people in the suburbs who have a use for transit irregularly, and therefore have trouble keeping track of a physical ORCA card they use only a few times a year.
(As a local who does use transit regularly, worrying about the edge case of my phone battery being dead sounds like a downgrade… but between this and tap to pay credit cards, and some states starting to do digital IDs, not carrying a wallet at all and having everything on your phone is increasingly an option for those who want it.)
I shudder to think of not having a physical wallet and cash and ID and cards and a passport, and depending that my phone will always work and won’t get lost/stolen/broken/hacked or there’s a cell outage. But that’s what some people want. I suspect the trend will inevitably reverse someday.
As a compromise between no-phone and everything-phone, I’d just like to get a phone as small as my first smartphone was, so it wouldn’t take as much space in my pocket, but the smallest one available now is twice as large. I just went to the T-Mobile store and got the smallest/cheapest one they had ($250), and figured that if I end up exceeding its capacity, I can get a higher-end one next time.
Yeah, I can see this being especially popular for people from out of town. Less of a hassle overall, but especially if you take the bus. I think people who like to do everything on their phone will like it as well (I’m the opposite).
Mike, you need a Zoolander Phone.
It’s not that there aren’t smaller fliphones (they had them). It’s that it’s increasingly necessary to have a smartphone for two-factor auth or One Bus Away or to get into your apartment building or use Uber or Metro Flex or eat at a restaurant that has forgotten about paper menus. So far I’ve had to do the first two. And I saw a recent apartment building that had a sign in front, “Use app for entry and rent payment.” I hope all apartments don’t go that way.
looks pretty exciting. hopefully it’s pretty fast and easy to use for the bus readers to pick up on.
Is there any reason they’re not letting us have the same card both physically and on the wallet? I was really excited for this but I don’t want to get rid of my physical card.
the problem with duplicate cards is that you can double pay below the balance. (not sure orca specifically) but generally when you tap to pay it doesn’t check with a central server as it takes too long and actually the card on file will balance stored locally. It’s only verified after the fact with the buses receiving the updated balances at the end or start of the shift. This is why when you add money to orca it takes some time to show up at the bus*. You can actually bypass the wait time by tapping at some link stations as it has a wired connection.
Anyways we wouldn’t want each bus tap to take as long as a credit card transaction so that’s the trade off.
*Though I know they are updating the myorca system so maybe it’ll be faster in the future
It was updated last year or so. Adding money to an ORCA online is supposed to show up immediately for buses. I haven’t tried it since I always use a TVM which were always immediate, but that’s what they said was one of the features of the new system.
I don’t know how fast it is with ORCA as I’ve not pushed the limits, but with the HOP card on TriMet, it’s pretty close to instantaneous. I’ve had to resolve issues with the account balance while boarding.
ORCA used to take 48 hours for buses if if you added money or a pass online. The reason was something about the money/pass being stored on the card. TVMs and the fixed readers at train stations are connected to the central database so they can transfer the money/pass to the card immediately. When you paying online, the system has no physical access to the card, so it can’t be transferred to the card until you tap. Bus readers are offline so they can’t transfer it to the card until they get an update at the base.
In the new system, the money/pass is in the central database, and the card has something like just an ID number like ATM cards. So the TVMs and fixed readers go by the current information, and the bus readers go by that morning’s information.
There’s also a grace period so that if you tap in with 1 cent, you can still ride and the balance is negative until you fill it up again. And monthly passes end on the 1st instead of the night before. And Metro drivers let you ride free if you say you don’t have money or you’ll fill up the card as soon as you can get to a TVM.
You got to appreciate this young man’s clever video about Denver’s County Line rail station:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=elCXaOwP0dA
It really speaks to the importance of station access and connectivity. The station is so horrible that makes our most egregious ones look well-done. The station area is probably the worst I’ve seen!
I don’t know if a planning department could have prevented it, but it does reveal many problems with suburban light rail stations by highlighting how reasonably good nearby land uses do not automatically create a good station location.
Parts relevant to Seattle:
– Noisy freeway overpass
– Circuitous paths
– Private developers hostile to transit
– Barren parking
The Star Wars music in the sign reveal is particularly humorous. .
I’ve only ever just passed through that station. It really doesn’t seem that bad if you aren’t getting off.
The station that always amazes me is Ridgegate Parkway Station. It’s just absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Yet there you are.
It’s a strange experience.
My take away from the video is this was always a bad place to build a station, the old “build it and they will come” thinking because it is “rail”.
Even the multi-family housing was built after the station, and is not transit oriented, with a church on the other side. Whether there could be easier access to the church is not the issue. Suburban churches don’t support a rail station. Building a station with nothing around it next to a freeway is not a good idea. So I disagree with the narrator this station could be a great station with design modifications, or any developer would be interested in developing the park and ride lot. This was and always will be a bad station considering its cost, because of location not design.
Despite the opening about dying malls and cities in the U.S. (which wasn’t an issue in the video about the Denver station) the mall across from the station was packed (and apparently according to the narrator the draw for the station), at least the parking lot was. The overpass was loud but so is Northgate’s ped bridge. It is suburbia. You are going to have to walk a bit to get to your destination, even from the large parking lot at the mall. Although there is a very large park and ride it charges for parking, so not surprisingly was empty, which I assume is why the mall makes clear it’s free lot is not for those using the station.
The narrator suggests this parking space could be converted to TOD, but the issue there is the housing would be next to a 14-lane freeway, and like the station itself there would be very little surrounding the development if TOD.
RTD ridership according to the video is dwindling although Denver as a city is not. Nor are Denver’s suburbs. According to the narrator one line has been cut from this station, and he doesn’t state what the ridership was on the other two lines that came through the station. I don’t think the decline in ridership has to do with the overall station designs throughout the system (although building a station at this location is a head scratcher) but more to do with post pandemic dynamics affecting most rail systems. After all, ridership was much higher pre-pandemic with the same stations.
The lesson for me is this was a terrible place to build a station to begin with. Period. Nothing is going to fix that. What were the planners thinking? Even the multi-family housing built after the station was not TOD, and obviously wanted to shield itself from a 14-lane freeway. Would a better path from the apartments to the station change this? I doubt it. Should as the narrator suggests the developer have built the apartments without parking? The developer didn’t think so.
Maybe the lesson is don’t built rail along a 14 lane freeway with the hope businesses and housing will suddenly pop up when there is so little density of any kind anywhere near the station, or RTD can manufacture the ridership from TOD along a 14-lane freeway.
In some areas segregated rail is competitive, usually in denser urban areas, not along 14 lane freeways next to a suburban mall that is never going to eliminate its parking. Other places it isn’t going to be competitive, such as in Denver’s outer suburbs like this station, unless it serves a large commuting population to the downtown urban work area (and maybe pre-pandemic this park and ride got a lot more customers which is why it charged for parking). Even then charging for park and ride space is unwise. The station probably cost over $100 million to build, and charging for the park and ride probably ensured it would have few riders.
This video and station raise an interesting issue about Northgate Mall, and how many customers it will get from the Link station. Some think Lynnwood Link will syphon away many riders who now bus or drive to the Northgate Station and so come August 31 they will simply ride through Northgate, past the mall. Of course, Northgate Mall is not TOD or transit oriented either, and probably is banking on customers driving there or taking Link to the mall as their destination, not commuting through and happening to get off to shop and dine and then continue on home.
It’s hard to judge what could be done differently unless the chronology of the building decisions are presented.
I will add that Denver put in pedestrian overpasses into the station design. And even though the shopping center path is circuitous it doesn’t appear to be overly far.
I’m reminded of how Tanforan did try to connect with a BART rail station. The owners redeveloped their building by adding a new food court atrium at the BART entrance. Sometimes developers try. Unfortunately, the mall still suffers from a lack of popularity and will be demolished for a biotech campus.
The lesson for me is this was a terrible place to build a station to begin with. Period. Nothing is going to fix that. What were the planners thinking?.
I agree with your first point. People have been saying that for years. Then folks did a study and confirmed what people have been saying: https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/economics-of-urban-light-rail-CH.pdf. There are a lot of key points in there that are worth noting. I won’t repeat them, but they should be understood before reading the rest of this concept (otherwise some of the things I mention won’t make sense).
I think it is pretty easy to point out the mistakes of various agencies. I think it is harder to explain why they made those mistakes. I’m sure people have their theories; here are mine:
1) The U. S. is poorly suited for mass transit. A typical city is very auto-centric, and has few high-density areas.
2) We don’t have good shared knowledge when it comes to transit, and we arrogantly assume we have little to learn from the rest of the world.
3) We often take an auto-oriented approach to mass transit. We basically think in terms of how long it takes to drive somewhere, or how much traffic there is. The former is completely backwards, and the latter is irrelevant.
4) Our existing rail lines do not provide much value. Sometimes (as in the case of Seattle) we don’t own the lines themselves, which makes expansion expensive. But the bigger problem is that the towns the trains run through lack density. For example this is Carlet, a suburb of Valencia (about 15 miles away). It is very compact, and very dense. There is nothing similar in most American cities.
These lead to a number of issues. For example, stop spacing with mass transit. There is always a trade-off when it comes to stop spacing. Put the stops too far apart and you require an additional transfer to get to your destination. Put the stops too close together and longer trips (e. g. across town) take longer. The more compact your city, the less of a problem this is with your metro. You follow standard urban stop spacing (600 meters, give or take) and that’s it. This means a trip from one side of the city to the other takes a while, but few people take those trips. In contrast this is a bigger issue with a sprawling low-density city (like Denver). In (physically) large cities that have a huge amount of density (like New York) you can afford to double track. But in a city like Denver this is impractical.
All of these problems are related. It makes it much more difficult (and costly) to
design a good transit system in U. S. cities than it does in Europe. The traditional worldwide model is to provide mass transit in the dense areas, while relying on buses and existing (old) rail lines everywhere else. In Europe this is fairly easy from both a political and practical standpoint. Rural and low-density suburbs don’t have that many people. The suburbs that are dense typically have an existing railway that can be leveraged. This makes the politics easier, but also makes construction and service easy.
In the US you can (and should) do the same sort of thing but you run into some tough headwinds. The mass transit system should be much smaller, because the dense part of the city is much smaller. But areas outside it assume that buses are poor because they have traditionally been poor. As the line grows in distance there is pressure to reduce coverage and have the stops farther apart. You try and leverage the freeway envelope to cut costs. You focus stations around park and ride lots because you just assume that the transit network will be poor. Despite the cost cutting measures, the system is still very expensive. Meanwhile, bus service to the low-density areas are bound to be more expensive than their counter-parts in Europe. So areas where transit is bound to be more expensive spend less on buses because they just spent a much of money on rail (that not that many people use). When the dust settles the city is left with a fairly poor transit system, and the increase in transit use is minimal.
It doesn’t have to be that way. North America has some unusual challenges, but there are ways of dealing with them. You start with the basics. You run your rail where it can do the most good. Look at where the buses are slow in the middle of the day, but lots of people still ride transit. Look at where a train would be faster than driving, at noon. But also assume that buses will play a much bigger role than in Europe. It is essential that the rail integrate well with the buses. The best example of this is Vancouver. Here is a recent quote from Vancouver’s TransLink COO Jeffrey Busby:
Our strategic plan is a bus-first plan, because our rail network can never go everywhere that we need great service.
Keep in mind this is from the guy who runs what is arguably the best rail system on the West Coast. They are about to add the Broadway addition, which will have more riders per mile than anything this side of the Second Avenue Subway. Their rail system has been huge successful, but one of the main reasons is because it integrates so well with the buses, and the buses are actually fairly good (and getting better). That is the key.
The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!
Where Seattle appears on this graph in 2027 will be interesting. Seattle will likely slip down on the chart. One of the things that strikes me is that — with the exception of East Link — we are opening stations in new extensions soon all similar to the Denver RTD model — lots of station parking in low density areas without walkable destinations in the midst of an ocean of more parking.
And of course many of the ST3 stations (excepting those within Seattle city limits) are similarly located to the one in the Denver area too. However, in those cases the cities could start setting the stage for better station areas now if they wanted. The Denver example seems illustrative of what not to build and that is a lesson that suburban planning commissions need to be trained to spot so that they can avoid the same mistakes.
A final note is that RTD charges for parking. I get why they do, but I think there is an unintended consequence: Surrounding property owners/ developers worry about parking intrusion so they design their sites to discourage or prevent it. It’s a situation where a policy choice that can be revoked creates a bad site layout that remains an impact for generations.
It makes me wonder if RTD station parking is often laid out wrong. Would it be better to have the agency lay out these station parking areas as public urban grid local streets with parallel parking on new small blocks with sidewalks, and use the interiors for parking until there is market demand for TOD? This “interior street” approach seems to be what ST is increasingly designing at several new stations — but unfortunately without the parallel on-street parking and loading zones.
@Al S,
Link is an extreamly successful Light Rail system. Depending on what data you look at, it is top 4 or 5 nationally in total ridership, and almost always listed as top in ridership per mile. It’s a phenomenal achievement for a system that is so young.
Over the next 2 years Link will see a huge expansion of coverage and that will change those rankings somewhat. Link will probably become number 1 or 2 in total ridership, but might drop to number 2 or 3 in ridership per mile. Time will see, but that is still a huge achievement given where we started.
That said, there is nothing at all in the Link expansion plans that is anything like what Denver RTD has on their suburban periphery. I have actually ridden Denver Light Rail to Ridgegate Parkway Station multiple times. It’s surreal. Like riding a modern, high capacity rail system through undeveloped prairie. Like a 21st century transportation system in an 1800’s Western. There is nothing like that anywhere in the Sound Transit expansion plans.
And the data bears that out. Lynnwood is actually denser than Denver, and several times denser than Lone Pine where the Ridgegate station is located. All of our planned stations have significant development around them, at least in comparison to what Denver has.
That said, Denver Light Rail is creating new development even on its suburban periphery. The last time I was at Ridgegate Parkway Station there was significant new development underway. LR does produce TOD.
That said, one can argue that producing TOD in an area like Ridgegate Parkway is undesirable because it is nothing more than Transit Oriented Suburban Sprawl (TOSS). But that is a whole different discussion..
The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!
Where Seattle appears on this graph in 2027 will be interesting. Seattle will likely slip down on the chart. One of the things that strikes me is that — with the exception of East Link — we are opening stations in new extensions soon all similar to the Denver RTD model — lots of station parking in low density areas without walkable destinations in the midst of an ocean of more parking.
Yes, that is the irony. The very things that have lead to our (relative) success are essentially being abandoned. Our system is becoming a lot more like the ones that haven’t been that successful.
To be fair this only looks at U. S. systems and light rail systems at that. So it ignores systems in Canada as well as post-war systems like BART and DC Metro. They aren’t really analyzing overall systems. The information they provide is far more useful at the micro-level then the macro level. So they ignore the fact that our light rail system costs a lot more than other light rail systems, or the stations we skipped but should have served. But the stations we do serve are generally just a lot better than the ones that are typically served by light rail in the US. Places like Capitol Hill and the UW, as opposed to freeway stations. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since it really isn’t a light rail system (other than in Rainier Valley) it is basically a light metro system with light rail equipment.
Analyzing systems is far more difficult and ultimately pointless. Assume Vancouver BC has the best system on the West Coast or the best system for a city its size. So what? What matters is why. I think you come to the same basic conclusions: agencies should focus on quality more than quantity. If there is one consistent problem across the board it is this. The US has built miles and miles of track with very few riders (because they often have very few stations). This is almost always a bad idea, and it doesn’t matter if it is heavy rail (like BART) or light rail (like Denver or Dallas). It doesn’t matter if there are some good — arguably essential — aspects to the system (Bay crossing with BART, UW-downtown with Link) or whether the system is just very poor overall (various streetcars, Sacramento, DART). It is this aspect of the system that is the common thread.
It is funny because people often talk about BRT-Creep. This happens when a BRT system gets worse and worse and eventually looks very much like a regular bus. But folks don’t often talk about what I would call US-Metro-Creep. This is when a system that has plenty of potential gets worse and worse because they build the wrong thing, or the stations are in the wrong place (or are eliminated). This is very common as cities focus on long distance goals (Dallas to Fort Worth) instead of serving hospitals or college campuses (or just existing dense neighborhoods) along the way. They run in areas where the buses are fast, instead of where they are slow. They look only at the line itself, and not the overall network. Every system is guilty to some degree of this — compromises are inevitable — but many are much worse than others. This is what we should fight against, but most of the time people just shrug.
> Over the next 2 years Link will see a huge expansion of coverage and that will change those rankings somewhat.
> And of course many of the ST3 stations (excepting those within Seattle city limits) are similarly located to the one in the Denver area too.
I agree with Al, the ST2 stations will start Link’s journey as a highway light rail (as all of the avenue alternatives were dropped). It’ll be interesting to see if the development is built up around the federal way, lynnwood link and east link extensions.
> That said, there is nothing at all in the Link expansion plans that is anything like what Denver RTD has on their suburban periphery
star lake station is basically pretty similar. Montlake terrace thankfully they’ve built apartments nearby so it’s better. Also we’re talking about the station locations not the ride in between.
@Ross
> It is funny because people often talk about BRT-Creep. This happens when a BRT system gets worse and worse and eventually looks very much like a regular bus. But folks don’t often talk about what I would call US-Metro-Creep.
I call it “train to nowhere”* aka political pushback against avenue alignments means people choose freeway or old freight lines* that are far from density.
Recent examples would be the noho to glendale brt where it could choose between the freeway or avenue. Or the Minneapolis blue line extension deciding between the avenue or the freight corridor (far from housing)
* perhaps a better catchphrase would be “train through no where”? “bypass transit” might be more accurate?
@ Lazarus:
I would agree with your assessment that nothing ST is planning appears as bad as these RTD stations are.
I am concerned that some ST3 stations could turn out more like these RTD stations though. The ones in TDLE, Everett LE and 4 Line could drift that way if the station layouts aren’t given focus from the outset.
I do think we need to highlight “problem poster child” stations from other regions to make it obvious to leaders what not to do. We often point to successes elsewhere but not the failures. This video represents a basic educational case study about site layouts for leaders and tangential stakeholders that static PowerPoint presentations and reports can’t convey.
“The link in Ross’ article shows Seattle performing better than other US light rail systems. It appears to look the best!”
Link is an unusual light rail, with extensive tunnels and elevated sections, and 10-minute frequency instead of 15-30. That makes it look like the best, but only because you excluded all the higher-quality metros. If you put all city subways/trams on the same scale, Link is below average. The Vancouver Skytrain, DC Metro, Chicago El, and Toronto Subway blow the socks off Link, but since they’re not “light rail” they’re not counted in a light rail comparison.
Most American light rails are like MAX, 95+% surface, with a downtown bottleneck slowdown, or are mostly along freeways like Denver, and each line runs every 15-30 minutes. That’s why Link looks so much better.
But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I would agree with your assessment that nothing ST is planning appears as bad as these RTD stations are..
I agree. But it is worth noting that the study I referenced spends a few paragraphs on freeway stations. One of the key points they make is that even if TOD occurs, it may not come with much ridership. So a station like 148th for example may have a lot of new apartments around it, but not that many will take Link. This is in contrast to a station like Capitol Hill. That is because on Capitol Hill there is a feeling that you can do anything without a car. Thus a lot of people around there don’t have a car, or rarely use it. At 148th, however, that isn’t the case. It is a long walk to anywhere. So people in the area own cars and typically use them for most trips. With the freeway right there, it makes it even more convenient. So someone who lives in Capitol Hill might take Link to Beacon Hill, then a bus to the V. A., while someone who lives close to 148th just drives.
But wait, there is another issue, which goes back to what I mentioned. You have to consider the overall network. 148th may not get many walk-up riders, but it may get a ton of riders who transfer from the bus. It will be the closest station to Shoreline Community College (and the only direct transfer). Eventually it will be the main way that the north lake suburbs connect to Link as well. From a walk-up standpoint it is poor (because it is next to the freeway) but from a network standpoint it is very good.
This makes this part segment very different than what has been built before. We lost opportunities within the city to create a very good network (imagine a station at 23rd & Madison) but are doing fairly well in the suburbs. It took a lot of effort but 130th Station is another example. Of course just about any location along that east-west corridor would be better (Bitter Lake, Pinehurst, Lake City) but it still connects to the east-west buses (and thus serves all those areas, albeit indirectly). The same is true for every Lynnwood Link Station. 185th connects to local buses as well as Swift Blue. Lynnwood is the terminus, and has a connection to HOV ramps at that. This means it will not only connect well from east and west, but from all the buses coming from the north. Mountlake Terrace may be the only stop that gets more riders on foot than by bus (even though it will get some by bus).
@Al S,
Even the best designed systems will have high ridership stations and low ridership stations, and that is true today of our current Light Rail system.
Stations like SoDo and Rainier Beach will never generate the ridership that West Lake or CHS do. But that is nothing to wring our hands over. It’s just a fact, and we still have one of the best Light Rail systems in he country even with SoDo Station.
And, if your metric of goodness is ridership per mile, don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership. Even the worst performing Denver stations do better than that. Because, you know, it is hard to underperform “zero”.
But, even with those 5.5 miles of zero ridership, we still lead the nation in ridership per mile. Not bad.
But let’s step back. We are in a pretty darn good position if the worst thing we have to worry about is dropping from #1 to #2 in ridership per mile. If that is our biggest worry about the future, then we are in pretty good shape. Because a lot of LR systems in this country will never be anywhere near as good as that.
And remember, back in the ‘80’s we had nothing in Seattle. No mass transit at all. People pinned their hopes on the bus tunnel, but the results were so underwhelming that the citizenry almost imeadeatly changed course and created ST.
And the rest is history. Pretty good history.
RTD is fine within Denver as it follows a lot of street and freight rail corridors from Union/Downtown down to I-25/Broadway with a brief sky bridge over Kalamath & Santa Fe in the Santa Fe Arts District & Baker in-between 10th & Osage and Alameda Stations. It’s once it hugs I-25 that it becomes a problem. Louisiana-Pearl is probably the worst as it sits under the overpass bridge and gets all the worst of highway noise. If they had put up a noise barrier, it’d probably be “less awful”. Colorado is the only halfway decent station on the SE section as it tunnels under Colorado and Evans to be in a below grade trench away from the highway next to a transit center and office/entertainment complex.
> But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I argue the opposite. The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only. We should instead accept some at grade crossing in order to actually reach places where people live
> People pinned their hopes on the bus tunnel, but the results were so underwhelming that the citizenry almost imeadeatly changed course and created ST.
> And the rest is history. Pretty good history.
lol pretty revisionist history that is not how it went. Again I’m not sure why you keep thinking there’s some hidden war here. If anything the largest debate in the 2000s was whether light rail would run on avenues or freeway alignment not about buses or not.
Without the bus tunnel there would be a lot lower support for transit and Link probably would have ended up copying Portland with an at grade alignment downtown or we would have done some weird freeway only alignment
Lastly people used the st express busses practically more than or at same ridership as the link light rail until the pandemic. Of course post pandemic we need to adjust to the ridership patterns now but hardly “underwhelming”
I’d agree that comparing Link to most other systems is a bit like having a minor league (light rail) club staffed with major league (Metro-style stations with subway grade lines) players. Link is put into a fluff league in the statistics.
In this case however, Denver RTD did build a glass and steel palace similar to Link on fully separated tracks like Link. I actually think that is one of the lessons – more grandiose stations and tracks don’t automatically make them more successful.
And I would opine that Lynnwood and Federal Way stations would end up like this County Line station if they weren’t at the end of the line and didn’t have all those bus routes planned to feed it. Once TDLE presumably opens, the three Federal Way stations will all perform badly unless the station areas fundamentally transform.
I’m always amused at how ST never discloses how many of the Everett or Tacoma Dome extension riders would have still been on Link (boarding at end of line stations) if they didn’t happen. Just Like ST hasn’t told us how many Lynnwood Link riders are already boarding at Northgate.
“don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership.”
Why does that matter? It’s an industrial area. Non-workers go through it to get to the airport. The workers aren’t likely to take Link, and they can’t bring their bulky equipment on the trains. The industrial area has to be somewhere, and that’s where it’s established.
I also disagree it generates zero riders. It generates all the riders who go through it. If Link didn’t go to the airport or South King County, people wouldn’t take it there. Not stopping in an industrial gap is unimportant. Just like it’s unimportant that there are no stations on the Mercer Island Bridge. Link still has to go to the Eastside anyway, or there’s a gap in transit mobility. We can’t move Bellevue next to Madison Park, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on the Eastside, so they need to be connected to the other large city across the lake.
Also, Boeing Access Road station is in ST3, for better or worse. Another potential station at 133rd is in ST’s concepts.
“The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only.”
AHEM. Skytrain stops all over Vancouver and Surrey. BART has stops on Mission Street. The DC Metro stops in all sorts of neighborhoods, and at a shopping mall. We need to build transit right, and not throw away half its potential by putting its stations at freeway exits. That may mean paying more, but the benefits are worth it. An effective transit network maximizes the most people’s non-car mobility, and allows them to work and shop and go to medical appointments easily without an expensive, dangerous, space-consuming personal tank. That work and shopping boosts the economy. Those medical appointments, social trips, and visits to parks improve public health, and reduce mental-health problems that society would otherwise have to deal with.
> Skytrain stops all over Vancouver and Surrey. BART has stops on Mission Street. The DC Metro stops in all sorts of neighborhoods, and at a shopping mall.
Bart was done using cut and cover which people now refuse.
Same with the dc metro. Out in silver line was done mostly freeway alignment with a small elevated section in dc as well
“don’t forget that between Rainier Beach Station and TIBS there are approximately 5.5 track miles of Link that generate exactly zero ridership.”
Why does that matter?
It is a bad sign. To borrow a couple software terms it can be considered a “bad smell” or even an “anti-pattern”. It doesn’t mean that it is fundamentally bad, but it is suspicious. Remember the basics. An ideal metro has urban stop spacing (every 600 meters, give or take) and quite a few stops. Ridership comes from the various combinations (a network effect). Capitol costs are based in large part on the distance, while operational costs are based almost entirely on it. Thus having a long system with very few stations is less efficient. Making matters worse, long distance lines require more time to travel. People take fewer half hour trips than fifteen minute trips.
In this case there is another problem, which is that there is a long stretch that is not especially fast compared to driving. By itself this is bad. But the combination means that it doesn’t compete well with driving.
That doesn’t mean that they should have added more stations along the way, but it does mean there were definite flaws with the choice. That doesn’t mean they should never run a train there, but it does mean it is quite likely there were much better choices in other places — places where you could put stations close fairly together and you would get a lot of ridership between them.
> But the same things that make Link better are what argue that it should have been heavy rail instead, because those things cost more with light rail than with heavy rail or automated trains, and you don’t get as much capacity for the cost.
I argue the opposite. The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only. We should instead accept some at grade crossing in order to actually reach places where people live.
The other alternative is just build a smaller system. Quality over quantity. American mass transit systems are famous for being really long and really bad. In many if not most cases they would have been much better off with a much smaller but better system. Focus on the really high density areas and the areas that are very difficult to access by car (or bus). Capitol Hill to the UW; Ballard to the UW; places like that. Supplement with lots of buses, even if the buses are crowded during rush hour (which actually isn’t the case anymore).
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for surface rail. But it is basically a niche system (despite US agencies treating it like it is the default). It makes sense if you have enough density, but not enough density to justify grade-separation. Link in Rainier Valley may fit just that niche. But a hybrid system has weaknesses. You can’t automate the system, despite a huge amount of money spent on miles and miles of elevated (and underground) track. South of downtown it varies from being high speed (with very few stations) and then low speed. This isn’t that bad except the low speed section is not a major destination (it isn’t downtown). A hybrid system has its flaws — it should really be one or the other. If the line kept going to Renton (and there were a lot more stations) then maybe that would work. But with so little of it running on the surface, I think it would have made sense to just elevate or bury the tracks in Rainier Valley.
“To borrow a couple software terms it can be considered a “bad smell” or even an “anti-pattern”. It doesn’t mean that it is fundamentally bad, but it is suspicious.”
That’s ridiculous. There’s an airport nearby where hundreds of thousands of people travel and work every day. We’re tying to get more of them onto transit. You’re more concerned about not going through an industrial area or not having stations there than about serving a major transfer point? So we could have airport Link only if we convert the industrial area into housing? Then where would we put the industrial area?
The corollary of not having low-ridership stations in an industrial area is faster travel time for the vast majority of people, who do go to the airport but don’t work in the industrial area.
“The high cost of complete grade separation means one is relegated to freeway corridors only.”
We know the cost difference for Lynnwood, Federal Way, and Tacoma. It’s not insurmountable. Federal Way costs the same on 99 vs I-5. Tacoma Dome costs the same on 99 vs I-5. Lynnwood costs slightly more on 99, but not that much.
It was ST’s bad decisions and priorities that put Link on I-5 there, not huge costs. A different agency would have chosen a better alignment.
It helps to put the station’s location in context. Map of Denver’s light rail network. The station is in the lower right corner.
https://cdn.rtd-denver.com/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1709062198/RTD_Rail_Map_Downtown_Rail_Reconstruction_Project_Feb_2024_Update_vux1fd.jpg
Denver resident here (although will be moving back to Tacoma again soon), County Line station is probably not the worst but it is C tier amongst rail stops in the RTD system in my opinion. It actually used to be worse from what long time locals have told me as the pedestrian bridge section to Park Meadows wasn’t built with the initial station in 2006 and was added later in 2008. And even when the Park Meadows side opened you had to go through turnstiles that the mall requested be put in to curb P&R drivers from parking at Park Meadows (even though their lot is never full at all even during the holidays). Wherein you needed to buy an exit ticket just to leave the station. It was convoluted and dumb and they turned off the turnstiles around 2015 or something and the turnstiles only getting removed in 2022.
I have used the station multiple times over the years living here to go to Costco or Park Meadows, as it’s one of the better malls in the region (Somewhere between Southcenter and Bellevue Square). So it isn’t a complete waste of a station to a degree.
The worst station in the system atm is Lone Tree City Center as it’s basically plopped in an empty prarie land with nothing built on it yet and is supposed to be part of the City of Lone Tree’s grand plan for a TOD downtown in their city with apartments and office spaces in the next two to three decades. So it’ll get less bad with time as will Ridgegate, which is seeing a bunch of apartment complexes built next to the station right now.
If you want my opinion for worst in the RTD system with actual stuff around it that’d be Fitzsimons or Red Rocks CC, which ironically are supposed to both serve colleges. They’re both at the edges of campus and don’t really serve staff or students on foot well. Red Rocks CC station is salvageable with time if the CC considered expansion of campus closer to the station. Fitzsimons on the other is just plain bad as it’s shunted to the northernmost edge of Anschultz Medical Campus and just takes forever to get anywhere on campus. If it had been put on Montview (like it should of been) was originally planned, it’d be less awful. But the infinite wisdom of CU Anschultz feared it’d mess with their “sensitive medical equipment”, so now riders are stuck with an awful station with a shuttle or having to take the 10/15/15L/20 at Colfax station to reach the campus.
I will say that RTD is trying to remedy the failure of some stops by proposing to convert P&Rs to TOD development. It’s just a slow process as building here takes forever to get off the ground (5 years minimum for a lot of big apartment complexes or towers). Like Central Park getting more TOD on current P&R lots, which is good as the Central Park where Denver Stapleton International Airport used to be is one of the fastest growing parts of Denver.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/06/21/housing-development-rtd-park-and-ride-parking-lots/
The most common comparison is with Houston versus Dallas for their light rail
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/texas-two-dramatically-different-transit-philosophies-emerge
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While both have enthusiastically embraced the transit mode, Texas’s two largest cities occupy extreme ends of two philosophies on how, exactly, rail-based transit should work.
Dallas has built its light rail system far and wide, stretching into far-flung suburban park-and-ride stations to bring commuters into the city center at high speeds.
The Houston system is small by comparison, with lines built in the already-dense city center, with trains arriving every few minutes to minimize wait times. It relies on express buses – not rail – to bring residents in from the suburbs.
The Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency, or DART, conceived of rail as a regional system that should cover as much area as possible without particular concern for reaching specific destinations, said Kyle Shelton, postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Officials with the Houston-area METRO agency, meanwhile, always have a destination or set of destinations in mind when planning their system.
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