Upgraded Montlake busway and the bike/ped bridge (from WSDOT Earthcam)

Transit & Streets:

Land Use & Housing:

Commentary & Miscellaneous:

This is an Open Thread.

44 Replies to “Midweek Roundup: Etiquette”

  1. Interesting article ob lubk etiquette. My anecdotal obse4vations are bus riders are far more likely to give up seats for s3nior/disabled riders than are train riders. Might have to do with overall just not enough seats ob trains but still. U was recently unable to disembark at westlake be cause someone with a bike was planted firmly in the doorway . Had to ride to chs and carltch a train back. I am pretty obviously disabled. On trains I often have to ask if someone minds moving for me. This doesn’t generally happen on busesa. I try to board at the front or back ends of trains which seems to help.

    1. I believe that most bus riders also ride the train, and a significant portion of train riders avoid the buses. Those riding both are more aware of the *posted* (not unwritten) rules about certain seats/areas being reserved for seniors and riders with disabilities. Perhaps the posting on Link is a little too subtle.

      1. I rode the bus and train to the airport this morning. On the bus, I did sit in the “disability” section because it was the only way to avoid having to squeeze by lots of people with my large suitcase. Fortunately, no wheelchair got on, forcing me to move.

        Not ideal, but for the $80-$100 save by not lining the pockets of Uber’s shareholders, it was well worth it.

    2. My biggest observed etiquette problems are riders blocking doors when they aren’t exiting it’s usually accompanied by the with their eyes glued to a smart phone and maybe tying something — with earbuds on.

      Too many riders haven’t ridden crowded trains on a daily basis. They just aren’t trained to follow two basic rules:

      1. Don’t stand next to a door — even if that door is opposite of the open door — unless you plan to get off at the next station where that door opens.
      2. If you have no choice but to stand there, don’t be distracted by your smart phone with ear buds and expect to have to get out of the way. And you might have to step out of the train to let people out.

      It’s especially frustrating if the train isn’t close to full and there is plenty of room inside the train to stand.

      I’m rather blunt about being blocked, saying “excuse me” in a loud voice and sometimes even push their bodies a bit as I leave.

    3. I wonder how much this has to do the design of the train seating. Switching to fully longitudinal seating except in end sections could open up the space a bit and encourage everyone to stop crowding around the doors. I don’t even think that would decrease the number of seats, it looks like there is space to just rotate the current ones.

      1. One advantage of front facing seating is that large suitcases tend to not stick out as much and obstruct the aisle compared to sideways seating.

  2. I hung out at UDS for a half hour during peak-of-peak yesterday.

    The northbound train arrivals were a little uneven, varying from 6- to 10-minute headway.

    The trains before the summit of peak all had noticeable room for more riders to stand. The one at the summit (5:15) looked pretty full, but not crushloaded. It trailed the previous train by 6-7 minutes. The next train arrived 9-10 minutes later, and looked similarly crowded. One passenger who was looking for an open spot to his satisfaction missed getting on. The next train, ca. 9 minutes later, had noticeable standing space.

    I heard mumblings about the 4-minute slow zone at UWS, but not about the service reduction coming this weekend to repair it. ST bet against the Sounders hosting the MLS Cup, and got lucky.

  3. Can anyone here speculate on the implications of the delayed record of decision for West Seattle Link? Does this mean the federal govt might not provide funding assistance or might reduce it?

    1. It’s merely accepting the Final EIS. It’s not allocating New Starts money. New Starts money is usually stated in the budget proposed by the President and DOT and modified by Congress. Last year had some remaining money for Lynnwood Link but nothing for West Seattle and not much in generic funds available for later allocation. The next fiscal year budget proposal will likely be released in March 2025.

      A delay likely just means that there are further technical questions or concerns. It’s not been said what’s driving the delay.

      ST did throw some significantly new things like a cable-stayed bridge over the Duwamish that’s near the Boeing Field approach zone for example. These kinds of things should have been discussed in the draft EIS but weren’t added until this final EIS.

      1. Does WSLE actually require FTA funding in order to happen? I feel like the new administration wouldn’t be approving any funds for this. In fact if they get eyes on this project it might set back mass transit by becoming the poster child for “liberal waste”. I read somewhere that if Ballard link isn’t completed the cost per daily commuter is in excess of $1.3 million per person. I’m liberal and support mass transit but if federal funding isn’t supporting this that that’s a lot of money per resident.

      2. I assume that Sound Transit’s “affordable plan” includes federal funding, but you’re right, it’s yet to be seen how much funding the new government will assign for regional transit efforts. As the forecast for new ridership is low (in the range of 500 to 2500 daily riders), you can easily calculate how much the local taxpayers will need to pay for each new rider when the overall cost is $7b.

      3. > A delay likely just means that there are further technical questions or concerns. It’s not been said what’s driving the delay.

        I’m a bit more concerned about it. Generally Sound Transit seemed to imply in past meetings that they were expecting it to be approved.

        Generally a good rule of thumb is around $50~75k capital cost per rider

        > cost per daily commuter
        The current cost is $7.1 billion

        The ridership is generously estimated at ~7k for alaskan junction, ~5k for delrdige and andover stations combined, ~14k for sodo station* for a total of ~25k. Or around $284,000 per rider. *The sodo station ridership is assumed under the scenario ballard link extension exists.

        https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/0-WSLE-finalEIS-executive-summary.pdf

        If judged by it’s own merits without ballard link extension then the number of riders decreases further and the capital cost per rider tends towards $600~800k per rider.

      4. Those are deadly capital costs per rider, Wesley. If Trump’s DOT denies the project funds it will be one tiny benefit that balances the catastrophies that his election likely will bring, so I say, “Hooray!”, but only for this item.

        And, James, your sentence says,

        if Ballard link isn’t completed the cost per daily commuter is in excess of $1.3 million per person

        Don’t you mean “is completed”?

    2. February 2025 is after Trump takes office. Will the Trump FTA be allowed to fund blue area projects?

  4. Still no news on simulated service for the DRLE. From the removal of the progress reports until now it just feels like ST is hiding something (same for full ELE). The reports had said everything would be ready before the end of the year, so I find it odd that we’re in December and we don’t have any sort of date yet.

    Also, ST said they would start including the information from the progress reports in the pages for each extension, but that was apparently a lie. So, where’s all that info we lost? Major loss of transparency here.

    1. Yes I agree! ST has really done this surreal change to progress reporting — turning it from a detailed public status report with budget, schedule and status info to a mere PR fluff piece with pictures and vague language.

      I’m surprised that there hasn’t been huge public criticism about the change. With so many projects due to open in 18 months many actions by others like cities and other transit operators have to coordinate with opening dates. ST is really going silent at the last minute here.

      1. I’m not surprised. Only hard-core transit nerds and opponents care about these reports.

        The contractors may also be quietly fanning the flames, so ST commits to a date, the contractors play hardball, and ST has to shell out more money to convince the contractors to be done on time.

        ST made a mega-error error committing to a level of service on Sounder before bargaining with BNSF. It is a lesson not to be forgotten.

        And then of course, there was the rush to start service on the Pt Defiance Bypass.

        Never Again. Be patient.

      2. “ST made a mega-error error committing to a level of service on Sounder before bargaining with BNSF.”

        Are you talking about Sounder expansion or the 4th Avenue Shallow(er) Link alternatives?

        In 2016 ST included Sounder South expansion in ST3 subject to negotiation with BNSF. It didn’t commit to a specific level of service or reveal how much money it budgeted to avoid turning its cards over to BNSF before negotiations started, otherwise BNSF would have asked for exactly that amount for little service.

        The negotiations finished several months, ago and ST got a rate for additional Sounder runs and/or moving some peak runs to off-peak. It then had public surveys to decide what service to add. The majority of feedback preferred more off-peak runs, potentially including evening or weekend, shifting some peak runs to off-peak, and canceling plans to lengthen platforms. Now we’re waiting for a final decision what ST will do. The maximum possibility is only a handful of more runs, so don’t expect half-hourly service.

        4th Avenue Shallow is still a planning concept, so I’m not sure what if anything ST should have done with BNSF.

    2. sound transit discussed this in the mid november meeting. it is still slated for spring next year (2025) and they hope to announce an opening date in janauary

    3. They discussed this back in November sometime. They are still on track for a January announcement regarding the opening date.

      ST previously announced back in April that fit and function testing was starting. On the normal schedule that would imply that DRLE should be open about now, but I think ST has had their hands full with getting LLE open and working to keep (get?) Full ELE on track.

      Small as DRLE is, LLE and Full ELE definitely take priority. So it is understandable if ST slow walks DRLE a bit and gives those other projects priority over resources.

      But the people of Redmond have been waiting a long time for fast, reliable transit service. The excitement for DRLE is building. Hopefully they won’t have to wait too much longer.

    4. What is “DRLE”? I know “WSLE”, “BLE”, “ELE”, “TDLE” (Links), and “ILE”, but I have not run across “DRLE”. Did you mean “RLE” (“Redmond Link Extension”?)

      1. Ah, never mind. Since Redmond Technology Station is actually in Redmond, “DRLE” means “Downtown Redmond Link Extension”. My apologies for not getting that more quickly.

      2. I understand your confusion. I think it is a good practice for everyone to spell out the full set of words and then use the abbreviation after it (the way they would in the newspaper). For example, I think everyone is quite familiar now with the problems in South Korea. But if you started your comment (or article) with “Continued unrest in ROK” you will likely confuse a lot of people. On the other hand if you wrote “Continued unrest in the Republic of Korea (ROK)” and then later referred to “ROK”, it is quite obvious what you are writing about.

        This is for something that is dominating the news; something that everyone knows about now. In contrast, very few people are aware of the extension, let alone its abbreviation. Writing “Downtown Redmond Link Extension (DRLE)” or just “Redmond extension of Link” would have made the paragraph much easier to understand.

        It isn’t limited to this particular instance, either. Acronyms like “BLE”, “LLE” and “ELE” are not well known. This only furthers the notion that this blog is for the handful of nerds that understand such things. It makes it less welcome for newcomers. So you make a very good point. It is a good idea to avoid such jargon, especially three-letter acronyms, as internet searches are often pointless (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLE_(disambiguation), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELE). There are going to be transit concepts that will take a while to understand (which is why links to articles and books are helpful). But it is quite understandable if you leave out the reference when referring to something like “headways” (“Headway” is actually defined on this website and is easily defined using an internet search). But devolving into local jargon that confuses even experienced local transit followers is not a good idea.

      3. I’ve tried to get people to stop using obscure project acronyms and station acronyms without explanation but people keep doing them. Some people say it’s obvious and everyone should know them. But it’s not obvious when “-S” means station, “-LE” means “Link extension”, and “DR” means “downtown Redmond” — why are you including bureaucratese terms in the acronym and assuming everyone will immediately recognize “DR”? It took me a few minutes to figure out “DR” and I was about to ask in the comments. I was thinking, “‘DR’ can’t be Federal Way or Ballard or anything I can think of, so what can it be? What do we have that’s ‘DR’?” Readers shouldn’t have to go through these hoops or consult third-party sources: it’s up to the writer to make themself understandable if the term isn’t in the “Definitions” glossary in the sidebar.

        The only one I use is “WS/BLE”, because we use it a lot and “West Seattle” is a giveawa, and “B” is something related to “WS”, so that leads you to “Ballard”.

        Oh, and I use “TIB” for “Tukwila International Boulevard station”. That’s easily recognizable and doesn’t have an “-S” (so you don’t go looking for “Tukwila International Boulevard South station” or wonder why sometimes stations have “-S” in the acronym and sometimes don’t. And its not “Tukwila International Boulevard Station station”.

      4. Instead of “DRLE” I’d say “the downtown Redmond extension” or “downtown Redmond”.

      5. @Mike Orr,

        The official terminology is “DRLE”. Although I sometimes find myself dropping the “D”.

      6. Several weeks ago, I referred to Lynnwood Chty Center Station as Lynnwood CC and got told that Lynnwood didn’t have a community college! (Let’s not even get into why it isn’t just Lynnwood Center or Central Lynnwood.)

        The one that frustrates me s Chinatown-International District. I’ve always heard mostly just ID. The I read CID. Then I read C-ID. Yet the Link station is International District/Chinatown Station or ID/C. Talk about confusing!

      7. “The official terminology is “DRLE”.”

        In other words, it’s a bureaucratic name. The public doesn’t have to use the bureaucratic acronyms and categories that government agencies use internally. We’re not its employees or officers.

  5. Anyone get caught in the myriad Link disruptions today?

    4:07am – Single-track Westlake-Stadium for “maintenance”.
    4:58am – 20-25 minute frequency for “maintenance”.
    5:09am – Resolved.
    5:31am – 20-25 minute frequency due to earlier “signal issue”.
    6:38am – Resolved.
    8:17am – 20-25 minute frequency due to earlier signal issue.
    9:01am – 20 minute frequency due to earlier signal issue.
    10:14am – Resolved.
    10:39am – 15-20 minute frequency due to blockage.
    10:47am – 15-20 minute frequency due to signal communication issue. (That’s a never-before-seen one, not just a “signal issue” but a “signal *communication* issue”.)
    10:52am – Trains turning back at SeaTac; transfer to get to Angle Lake.
    11:22am – 45 minute delay due to signal communication issue.
    11:40am – 40 minute delay due to signal communication issue.
    12:19am – 35 minute delay due to signal communication issue.
    12:44am – Resolved SeaTac turnback.
    1:02pm – Resume regular service.
    1:59pm – 20 minute delay due to signal communication issue, coordinating train movements manually. No estimated time to resume regular headways.
    2:24pm – Resume regular service, but trains delayed indefinitely due to signal communication issue and manual train coordination.
    4:54pm – Single-tracking at Shoreline North due to signal communication issue.
    5:17pm – 15 minute frequency due to signal communication issue.

    What is it with these signals?

    1. 1 Line trains are arriving about every 30-35 minutes beginning at 5:16 PM until further notice

      What is going on? There isn’t a day without tremendous disruption

    2. These things are continuing into the evening.

      “There isn’t a day without tremendous disruption”

      It’s every couple days. But this is unusual. This is three times the disruptions, and it seems like they keep fixing the signal and it breaks again within an hour. It’s possible this might continue tomorrow and longer.

      1. @Mike Orr,

        Man, you guys have all the fun. I rode Link twice today and didn’t notice anything unusual. Nothing.

        But I had zero wait for my trains. Each time I arrived at the platform the train was essentially there. So I didn’t get a chance to study the real time arrival info or listen to PA announcements. So i might have missed something.

        Maybe I’ll just go buy a lottery ticket…….

    3. I was on Link at around 9:00 this morning. OneBusAway showed some train delays and some bunching, but it wasn’t that bad, and the wait time was only 5-10 minutes. Once on the train, I cruised from UW to SeaTac as normal.

    2. I read the article about gondolas. It was ok, but I feel it should have stayed focused on how gondolas compare in cost effectiveness to other forms of public transportation, and refrained from pontificating about climate change. Granted, this is something I see over and over again in left-wing publications, such as the Urbanist, but it still grates on me.

      Also, as to the articles side notes about mining for EV batteries…like it or not, there is no viable path to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions without a vast increase in battery production. Not just for personal cars, but also for buses, trains, heavy machinery, grid-scale energy storage, even some use cases of shipping and short-haul airplane routes. Among all these uses, the marginal amount of battery material avoided by people who live along a gondola route choosing to forego car ownership is very likely, negligible. And EV batteries do not necessarily even need to have lithium and cobalt anymore either; Tesla has been selling cars with cobalt free batteries for a couple years now, and China is working on cars that use sodium as a cheaper and more abundant alternative to lithium.

    3. A podcast I listened to recently brought up a point that the machines that mine for raw materials for car batteries run mostly on oil, and batteries need a lot of different materials, not just lithium or alternative.

      1. That’s true. But, people have done the math and concluded that over a car’s lifecycle, it’s still a lot less emissions overall than a car that burns gasoline. I think the break-even point is something like 30,000 miles, and that figure drops every year as the electricity grid gets greener.

        However, there’s also another issue at play here: a car still requires the same amount of resources to manufacture regardless of how much it’s driven, so public transportation is only able to actually reduce the amount of mining resources to make cars to the extent that it’s able to induce people to forego car ownership completely – merely, leaving the car they have at home for their most common trip is not good enough. In a relatively affluent society, the bar transit needs to meet to meaningfully move the needle on car ownership rates is very high, and requires high-quality transit throughout the city, at all times of day, not just to specific places within the city during the weekday daytime. And, of course, transit itself is only one factor that influences the car ownership rate. There’s also land use, cost of parking, cost to register and insure a vehicle, etc.

        Put everything together, if the purpose of transit is really about avoiding both tailpipe emissions and mining to make EV batteries, there are probably better ways to go about that goal, as a high-quality transit system is really expensive to operate, an expense that must continue indefinitely. For instance, you could fund grants or loans to advance alternative battery technologies that are cheaper and/or have less environmental impact (e.g. using sodium instead of lithium), or efforts to squeeze more and more energy capacity into a given amount of battery materials.

        However, the above paragraph is *not* an argument that high-quality transit should not exist, for the simple reason that the primary purpose of transit is ultimately not about carbon emissions or minimizing the need for EV batteries. It’s about giving people the freedom to move about the city in a way that is cheap, available to all, regardless of disability or income level, unconstrained by availability of parking, and as unconstrained as possible by traffic congestion. All this is an end in and of itself, and is fully justifiable regardless of the impact it has on carbon emissions.

        While it is definitely true, of course, that a high-quality transit system generally does reduce carbon emissions on net, that’s an incidental side benefit, not the primary reason for transit to exist. In fact, many transit systems, including ours, have several individual routes or trips that are net carbon emitters, yet they still operate because they provide people mobility, and the purpose of transit is to provide mobility, not to reduce carbon emissions.

    4. Ha, funny. For those who aren’t familiar: https://seattletransitblog.com/author/matt-gangemi/

      Speaking of the article, I notices this:

      Gondola systems typically have just a few stations, located at the points where a high number of passengers will need access. In this way, gondolas are more like light rails than buses because of the low number of stops and high volume of use.

      Odd that the author signaled out “light rail”, as implying that light rail should be shorter than heavy rail. If anything it is the opposite. A light rail system is often long (think Stadtbahn) while a metro is often short. The author has to be an American, where light rail has become the standard now for mass transit (for rather arbitrary reasons).

      In any event, I think they are more like ferries, even though aspects of them are completely the opposite. Ferries tend to have long dwell times and are relatively infrequent (a ferry running every fifteen minutes is about as good as you get). Ferries can handle enormous loads — gondolas can’t. Ferries are one of the oldest forms of transport — gondolas one of the newest.

      But they are both relatively slow, and thus make sense when there is a geographic advantage to an aerial or water-based route. A lot of ferries went away as soon as land based travel became faster, but not when going by water is a huge shortcut. Similarly there are places where you can string together a gondola and avoid obstacles that would make surface travel much more difficult (and slower).

      Gondolas have the inherit advantage of being high frequency, which can make them plausible in edge cases. Even if they are just a bit slower than a bus, they can make up for it with frequency. Sometimes.

Comments are closed.