Sound Transit has approved a new elevator for SeaTac east of Tukwila International Boulevard in Motion No. M2024-43. In a presentation to the Board’s Rider and Operations Committee (pdf) on July 18, Sound Transit staff outlined how the existing elevator experienced frequent outages and requires bus bridges to accommodate passengers to and from Angle Lake station.
The new elevator is located east of Pacific Highway and north of S 176th Street, just east of the existing elevator and next to the SeaTac Link Station passenger pick up lot. JTM Construction, Inc., would build the elevator for $5,939,318, which includes constructing a specialized curtain wall structure around the elevator, expanding the upper landing platform at the east side of the bridge over International Boulevard (aka Pacific Hwy, or SR-99), and tying the elevator systems into Sound Transit’s power and security systems at the SeaTac/Airport Station. The contract guarantees the existing elevator will remain open while the second elevator is under construction, and ST staff believes beginning this work now will ensure the second elevator is ready in time for the 2026 World Cup.
The additional elevator should both increase ADA accessibility to SeaTac Link Station plus the airport, as well as slightly encourage use of the passenger pick up lot with the decreased wait time.
Vertical Transportation maintenance
Additionally, Sound Transit recently signed a new annual contract with Schindler Elevator Corporation and Mid-American Elevator (pdf) to maintain elevators and escalators across the rest of their facilities. Currently there are 223 vertical transportation, or VT, assets in the system that require maintenance across their services, including: 101 escalators and 64 elevators at Link stations; 38 elevators at ST Express and Sounder stations and garages, and 20 non-revenue elevators. In the next five years, staff expect the number of VT assets to grow to 310 through ongoing expansions. As ST3 construction is finishing up in 2041, Sound Transit expects to have a total of 575 escalators and elevators to maintain across all their services.
In an effort to simplify administrative and other overhead costs, the new contract with Schindler merges three previously-separate VT maintenance contracts into one. The contract has an estimated annual cost of $73,610,000 plus taxes totaling $81,928,384 per year, extendable for up to 5 years.
Elevator and Escalator Modernization
In order to keep the older escalators and elevators from constantly breaking in the meantime, Sound Transit and its subcontractors have been working toward “modernizing” equipment throughout their facilities, including 35-year-old escalators and elevators in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel.
In a presentation to the Board’s Rider and Operations Committee on June 26, Sound Transit staff detailed plans to upgrade and modernize escalators and elevators (pdf) throughout the system, indicating progress on plans reported last year by The Urbanist.
Program Update presentation
The International District Station Modernization (pdf) has already started, with replacement or refurbishment of four escalators and four elevators one at a time. That work is expected to finish just before the World Cup in 2026, during which Sound Transit will pause efforts in expectation of large crowds.
After the soccer tournament, Sound Transit will begin work on other stations in the Downtown Tunnel. With 18 elevators and 32 escalators across the Pioneer Square, University Street, and Westlake stations, modernization of the the 35-year-old elevators and escalators is expected to be complete in 2033. Meanwhile, modernization of VT assets outside of Downtown would start in 2029 with no corresponding finish date. The estimated cost of the Downtown Tunnel VT asset modernization is $119 million dollars.
In late 2020, Sound Transit’s Board approved $8.7M to conduct repairs and safety upgrades on Downtown Tunnel VT assets even before the agency officially took ownership of the transit tunnel in late 2022. These efforts have significantly decreased both the average amount of time VT assets are out of service as well as reducing the time it takes to fix them after breaking. In their presentation on June 6, ST staff noted that they had decreased monthly out of service hours from 17,100 to 2,500, and decreased average return-to-service time per outage from 200 hours to 7 hours.
Remember when Link’s most common problem was broken escalators downtown or at UW almost every day or closed for nine months? Now the most common problem is trains reduced to 20-minute frequency due to “mechanical issue”.
This will only get worse, as the possibilities for single points of failure expand.
Cheaping out on switches will be expensive.
Does anyone know what festivities will be at the new stations in the morning when they open? Thanks.
Somewhat off topic, but We’ll have a post with a summary next week. In the meantime, ST has an events page, here: https://www.soundtransit.org/snocolink/events
Won’t ST own more elevators and more escalators than any other entity in our region by 2026, if not already?
With so many devices in ownership, is contracted maintenance the best approach in the long-term?
Probably not, but the Republicans will howl about “those lazy featherbedding workers” if ST hires permanent staff. That’s tax money which would pass through none of their contributors’ hands.
“Wouldn’t be prudent.”
The Democratic Party has majorities in both houses of the Washington legislature and every county council in the ST district. Each county executive is a democrat too, except for Pierce. Every statewide elected official is a democrat. Washington has not voted republican in a presidential election in 40 years and the democratic vote share has been growing and was the highest ever in 2020.
What do the republicans have anything to do with how ST does maintenance? They have absolutely no control over the organization.
“Wouldn’t be prudent.”
Is that a Dana Carvey playing George HW Bush on Saturday Night Live reference? Good heavens man, join the 21st Century. Bush Sr left office over 30 years ago. Let it go.. Trust me you gain nothing by complaining about dead politicians or what one party does in a region totally dominated by the other party.
They may not be in control, but they have very loud mouthpieces in The Times and Sinclair Broadcasting. They can whine a lot.
And I would point out that Nathan is making exactly the same point below.
Tom, I’m not naming political parties.
Fair enough; you didn’t. I have to give the Republicans credit for being “public” about it, but yes, the tendency is bi-partisan.
Let ’em howl, and then show the millions in savings. It’s not like Republican control much of anything in the region.
No, because public dollars can’t be spent unless some subcontractor is making 10-15% markup profit.
I’d be curious to know what the elevator/escalator setup will look like at 1 & 2 Line transfer spots like ICD Station after the 2 Line opens across I-90. For example, anyone arriving on the 2 Line from the Eastside to SeaTac Int’l airport will need to negotiate the crossover from a northbound to southbound train. It doesn’t seem like ICD Station is currently set up with a reliable system (maintenance-wise nor in actual #’s of elevators/escalators/in-tunnel walkovers) to accommodate those who are less able-bodied and schlepping along luggage while trying to make such transfers (without having to climb stairs). Does anyone know ST’s plans on enhancing features at these transfer points in the system?
ST has not released any consideration of improvements to transfer stations like ID/C with increased passenger volume with additional lines. The only information we have is that ST is planning to “modernize” the escalators and elevators, as discussed in this article.
I don’t think any of the alternatives under consideration for the Ballard Link Extension include new vertical conveyances between existing platforms and the surface at any current stations – maybe some at Westlake, but I believe one of the cost-cutting measures under consideration is to avoid building new vertical conveyances there.
Good question!
The short answer: Nothing.
No center platform crossover. There’s now a tail track where that would go.
No new escalators or elevators at International District- Chinatown Link station.
And getting to SeaTac from the Eastside will get much worse if 1 Line is moved to the proposed new tunnel after 2039 (probably more likely in the 2040’s). Either an Eastside rider will have to go up and over and down at ID-C and again st SODO, or they can go to Pioneer Square and change levels at least 3-4 times. Initially, ST even proposed a walkway underneath Link to connect all the platforms but that got forgotten pretty quickly.
And of course ST NEVER discloses how many thousands of riders are expected to make that transfer on a typical day. They would rather spend hundreds of billions digging another very deep station vault for only a few thousand riders instead.
Yeah I’m cynical that ST actually is designing Link for riders. It seems to be designed for real estate development schemes and neighborhood aesthetics instead.
Yeah, ideally, they’d do something else to make out of service train moves from the Eastside line to Central OMF, then build center platforms at all the transit tunnel stations. This would add vertical movement capacity and ease transfers, and increase the capacity in the tunnel.
Obviously, we’re not playing with an ideal deck.
Glenn, even a single center platform at Pioneer Square would be useful. That way the reversing pocket at IDS could remain, but people could make a relatively quick reversal at PSS. Yes, there are ingress and egress questions; there’s very little room in the middle to have an emergency stair and elevator.
Does anyone know the exact length of the platforms in Pioneer Square and University/Symphony? There’s probably room for an elevator at one end right agains the end wall, but the FTA is going to want a stair as well, and that would be hard to include. Perhaps they’d be OK with a pedestrian crossing to the platform which has trains departing at the other end. After all; there is a pedestrian crossing at the Rainier Avenue end of Judkins Park and that exposes people to entering trains only about fifty feet beyond a curve.
I’ve wondered about the idea of a surface crossover at one end of the ID/C station, too, Tom. Because the south end of the platforms open up to what appears to be usable space, there appears to be room for the small ramp to the track level to allow for such a crossing.
I believe that the Judkins Park pedestrian crossover is just one track and it’s the westbound track so it’s leaving the station. However, East Main and Overlake Village do have riders crossing both tracks at once. Of course there are many places along MLK that do that too when trains are moving pretty fast.
There is one other feature of ID/C that I think is very important. The platforms are wider than the other DSTT stations. Plus, there is a gap between the Union Station building and the platform where new escalators or elevators or stairs could be added on one side.
The construction scenario that I see would be for ST to build new stairs that may even have a switchback first. Then tear out the existing stairs for another escalator and maybe elevator.
Sadly, this should have been planned a decade ago as part of the East Link project. I don’t understand why this was not discussed and implemented.
That kind of neglect for transferring passengers with vertical movement seems to be ingrained into ST design culture. Hence ST does not design for cross-platform transfers at strategic locations — even at SODO which is not an underground station.
ST finally did switch to center platforms for Capitol Hill to Roosevelt. I don’t remember if Northgate is. We pushed for ST to convert Intl Dist to center platform, and it said it would consider it in ST3 but then it didn’t.
Northgate is a center platform. Since Central Link opened, ST has only built side-platforms for a few new at-grade stations on East Link (East Main, Bellevue Downtown, BelRed, and Overlake). Lynnwood Link and Federal Way, which are all-elevated, are all center-platform.
Nathan, most East Link stations have center platforms too:
Judkins Park
Mercer Island
South Bellevue
Wilburton
Redmond Technology
Marymoor
Downtown Redmond
I think only 5 have side platforms.
If you want read more details it’s in the motion https://www.soundtransit.org/st_sharepoint/download/sites/PRDA/ActiveDocuments/Motion%20M2023-76.pdf
But yes as Nathan they are not adding additional elevators or escalators but replacing the existing ones.
All of the downtown stations will struggle with handling the capacity increases. Having only one escalator at each end of the platform is a design decision that makes absolutely no sense to me in any context other than they just never believed that the light rail would succeed in the DSTT in the first place.
I wish the ST3 funds were being spent downtown by improving the current stations and lines rather than whatever is being forced onto them by the board now.
Yeah, Anonymous, it’s always been a huge ST omission to ignore the DSTT station flow as ST expands. ST will brag about someday carrying as many as 250K riders a day yet believes that there is no need to look at Downtown station flow.
Notice that even in 2023 the topic is fully ignored even when Dow and Bruce forced the Board to move the transfer point to Pioneer Square. They think that all they must do is just to show a path.
It’s a value judgment that pervades the agency and Board culture. The focus is to look pretty and then to run trains — but never to make it easy to use a station, especially for transfers. ST will put anticipated project ridership projections in every summary but never reports how many riders are traveling from another rail line at a station even in the minutae of the technical reports.
And I have concerns that when ST has to empty a few consecutive trains Downtown for whatever reason the platforms will be unsafe. There are already backups at escalators after trains drop off passengers at 80 K on a weekday.
The elevators were clearly intended to be just for ADA and luggage. Everyone else was expected to use the escalators or stairs. The downtown elevators are interminably slow like many were then, so you had to wait for them to crawl up and down and leisurely open their doors. I always assumed that was for wheelchairs, but the elevators since U-Link are faster. I always avoided the elevators to save electricity, but I started using them two years ago when it became painful/awkward to walk up or down stairs, and I use them at Roosevelt to transfer to a bus so that I won’t just miss it going up the escalator, especially since the next bus may be ten minutes late or not show up.
“ The elevators were clearly intended to be just for ADA and luggage. ”
I think the elevators pre-date ADA.
Al’s right – although it seems the bus tunnel was designed around the same time as the concept of ADA was becoming nationally popular in the mid-80’s. I wonder if anyone remembers their mid-80’s Seattle transit history and knows whether elevators were included in expectation of ADA, or if there was socio-political motivation for adding those features in Seattle before ADA was nationally popular?
For those wanting to know where all the new escalators will go in the new downtown tunnel, a couple years ago someone from Vancouver BC went through and documented all that. This includes the “Escalatorpalooza” plan at Westlake:
https://seattletransitblog.com/2022/03/25/notes-from-a-vancouverite-revisited/
For what it’s worth – the pickup/dropoff lot at the SeaTac station there is IMHO the best-kept secret in Seattle if taking Link from the airport isn’t viable. It’s by far the fastest/easiest way to pick someone up from the airport assuming they’re okay walking there. No trying to navigate the cell phone lot or the arrivals area and getting yelled at every minute. I’m glad they’re improving accessibility to this place (but hope it doesn’t get too popular!)
I’ve seen suggestions for picking up airport arrivals from TIBS, too, which lets you skip some of the traffic around SeaTac if needed.
The Port really seems to neglect the daily traffic jams and hassles at SeaTac . They need moving sidewalks to Link, which could then also carry people to a remote pickup point — as well as lots of other improvements. The current free drop-off and pick-up loops have been inadequate for a long time, and the advent of texting has only made them more popular and congested.
But moving sidewalks might necessitate the removal of a few dozen parking spaces beneath the walkway, and that hit to the Port’s revenue is simply intolerable.
Will TIBS get three more elevators so each of the existing ones has redundancy?
Likewise, will Mt Baker get a couple more elevators?
I appreciate the urgency of getting the additional elevator at SeaTac Airport built first, considering it just moved into second place for monthly ridership.
Are there significant reliability issues for elevators at either of those stations?
Yes. If an elevator goes down, some riders have to take a bus or a train in the opposite direction to another station in order to access the line, which we hear about in station announcements all along the line.
ST has, at least in the past, deemed it acceptable for each elevator to be out of service up to 5% of the time, even if there is no backup elevator. The standard should have been that there be at least one working elevator to each platform requiring elevator access over 99% of the time, which is achieved by redundancy, not installing a single platinum-grade elevator.
What I’d like to see, where possible, is to have the redundancy be a pedestrian ramp. Here’s a picture of the Overlake Village station pedestrian bridge. There are no elevators or escalators from the upper bridge to the lower platform. (Yes, I know the ped bridge and ramp aren’t ST-owned). Why couldn’t stations like Mt Baker or SeaTac have ramps as the redundancy, instead of just more elevators and escalators?
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6370846,-122.137475,3a,75y,226.22h,85.26t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sOOhKoabWfbI9jSB2CMbvEw!2e0!5s20180617T000000!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
I’ve wondered — instead of making riders climb over light rail tracks at SODO Station — if there is a way to make the transfers work with ramps to a tunnel under the tracks. Walking under tracks can feel less safe, but the vertical distances can be cut in half.
I’m not sure what the slope ratio is allowed. I believe cars can be forced to deal with sloped steeper than those for pedestrians,
The maximum slope per ADA is 1:12 (~8.3%), with landings required every 30″ of elevation change. Since landings typically have to be 60″ long on each end, the actual steepest allowed ramp grade ends up being somewhere around 6%. So, for 10′ of elevation change, the shortest ADA ramp is about 160′ long; for 20′ of elevation change, you’d need 315′ of ramp.
Mount Baker’s platform is 35′ above ground; that’d require 545′ of ramp with 15 landings (per ADA).
Yeah, the only way a ramp even begins to make some sense with Mt Baker is if the vertical distance is interrupted by a mezzanine that connects to an elevated walkway system connecting Beacon Hill to the East side of MLK. Going all the way down to street level on a ramp would be a very long distance. It’s just too long to walk all the way down.
Is the Overlake Village pedestrian bridge ramp built to ADA specifications? Is it in compliance?
I miscounted the minimum number of additional elevators needed at TIBS. It just needs two, from the bus level all the way to each platform. That would be a significant accessibility improvement.