Month: January 2025

Snow is expected this weekend, with mixed rain/snow on Saturday in downtown Seattle. Pure snow showers start early Sunday morning through Monday night, with a possible accumulation of less than half an inch every 12 hours. Tuesday through Thursday have a chance of snow showers. Lynnwood is similar. Boeing Field may get an inch Saturday evening. There’s a lot of uncertainty about how much snow there will be in the lowlands.

The National Weather Service has forecasts for each city. In each one there’s a “Forecast Discussion” link in the bottom left section with a long explanation. These are usually easy to read, although the one Friday evening is cryptic. Cliff Mass‘s weather blog has a detailed play-by-play and model images of the next few days. The Seattle Times ($) and King 5 have coverage.

Metro

King County Metro has a winter guide, a snow routes page, and the Emergency Snow Network (ESN) map. Note that Metro has three levels of service depending on the severity: regular service, snow routes, and the ESN. Some routes may be on snow routes while others are on regular service.

Continue reading “First Snow of 2025”

WSDOT is currently conducting an I-5 master plan study. The primary focus for the Seattle metro area involves converting HOV lanes into express toll lanes. While the current study won’t be finalized for another four years (until 2029), previous completed studies from 2010 to 2012 that provide a good starting point.

Continue reading “I-5 Toll Conversion”

At the future Marymoor Village Station this morning, Sound Transit announced the Downtown Redmond Link Extension will open on May 10, 2025. The opening will extend the 2 Line by 3.4 miles from its current terminus at the Redmond Technology Station to Downtown Redmond, with a stop near Marymoor Park south of the intersection of State Route 520 and Redmond Way.

The extension is mostly at-grade along State Route 520, climbing to an aerial alignment terminating in Downtown Redmond. The Marymoor Village Station is at-grade and includes a 1,400-stall parking garage, which the light rail actually passes underneath as it turns west toward Downtown Redmond.

Continue reading “Downtown Redmond Link Opening May 10”

WSDOT has been working on extending and completing the HOV lane system through the Puget Sound region encompassing King, Pierce, and Snohomish County. This article will provide a short recap of the existing freeway system as well as future extensions, though predominantly focusing on the HOV improvements for transit purposes.

Many of the existing HOV direct access ramps were built as part of Sound Move in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Recent I-5 and SR-16 HOV extensions throughout Tacoma will be extended on I-5 south to Lakewood.

Continue reading “WSDOT HOV Overview”

Planned disruptions of the Link 1 Line continue: Shuttle buses will replace train service between U District and Capitol Hill stations this weekend (Feb. 1-2). This weekend is focused on repairing the overhead wire near UW Station which was broken in October.

Transit and Streets:

• King County Metro’s Operators of the Month for November and December 2024 (Metro Matters).
• SDOT is kicking off a second phase of work using data from “smart” commercial vehicle load zones to improve curb space management (SDOT Blog).
• Predictably, the NE 130th Street Infill Station was officially named Pinehurst Station (Sound Transit). I, for one, hope “puppy dog City” sticks (reddit).
• As widely predicted, Amazon’s return-to-office mandate increased traffic; SDOT reports a 5-9% increase in vehicle counts in SLU and the Denny Triangle over January 2024 (The Seattle Times, $)
• WSDOT’s has delayed the next portion of its “Revive I-5” project (covering Downtown Seattle to Northgate) until 2026 (WSDOT Blog). The project will require temporarily closing down 2 lanes of I-5 at a time from 2026 into the 2030s, which is expected to increase delays for drivers in North Seattle. This delay means the closure will now start just after East Link opens across I-90 and doubles Link service between Downtown Seattle and Lynnwood, which may encourage more drivers to switch once the freeway closures start.
• A new study comparing videos of street scenes in NYC, Boston and Philadelphia shows urban pedestrians in 2010 walked a bit faster and socialized a lot less than in 1980 (Bloomberg CityLab).

Continue reading “Midweek Roundup”

Cross-platform interchanges allow much easier transfers between two lines heading in the same direction. Implementing a cross-platform interchange station at SODO station could help connect Line 1 and 3 much better. Though there are some complications to building a cross-platform interchange.

Continue reading “Improving SODO Station with Cross Platform Transfers”

A downtown tunnel could speed up Portland’s MAX light rail. (RMTransit)

This is an open thread.

On January 21, Sound Transit interim CEO Goran Sparrman identified Link’s ongoing reliability issues as an emergency, allowing him to issue a $1.5 million contract to HNTB to plan and design fixes to several problems with Sound Transit’s operational and network infrastructure.

The Seattle Times ($) summarized the problems identified by Sound Transit as “contributing to delays”:

• The damaged wire near UW Station, as the scheduled repair in December was delayed due to a telecommunications outage and is now scheduled for February 1-2;
• 16-year old wires in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) that need to be inspected and tightened, so much so that operators are being told to coast into some DSTT stations to avoid drawing power on the lines;
• Accumulated grime and other deferred maintenance on DSTT rails causing high voltages, although Sound Transit crews have reportedly started cleaning them;
• Flaws in ST’s dispatch control center network making disruptions difficult to fix;
• Mechanical problems with the new Siemens “Series 2” light rail vehicles including faulty valves and brakes;
• Signals falsely indicating the presence of a train where no train exists;
• Fragile software in Bellevue affecting power-outage recovery on the 2 Line; and,
• Mysterious power supply issues in the north end of the tunnel between the Northgate and UW stations, which have caused multiple disruptions.

Continue reading “Link Reliability Issues Declared an “Emergency””

The end of 2024 culminated in many King County Metro Bus projects such as new bus cameras, Lynnwood Link restructures, and RapidRide G. This article will briefly explore Metro’s 2025 and near future projects.

RapidRide

From the recent RapidRide prioritization reports, Metro plans to build the RapidRide I line (Renton via Kent to Auburn) by 2027 and the RapidRide J line (Downtown Seattle to U District) by 2027. Notably on January 15, 2025 the RapidRide I line received a $79.7 million dollar federal grant.

RapidRide	2023-2024	2025-2026	2027-2028	Beyond
G Line	Completed
H Line	Completed
I Line	Design	Construction	2027 Completion
J Line	Project Planning and Design	Construction	2027 Completion
K Line	Project Planning and Design	Design and Construction	Construction	2030 Completion
R Line	Project Planning	Project Planning and Design	Construction	2031 Completion

Continue reading “King County Metro’s Projects in 2025 and Beyond”

During a recent meeting, the ORCA Joint Board quietly approved implementation of a long-desired feature for the One Regional Card for All (ORCA) system: the ability to pay fares with a contactless (“tap-to-pay”) credit or debit card or a smartphone mobile wallet. This marks a major step along the slower-than-expected implementation of the “next generation” of ORCA payments, which kicked off in 2022.

Continue reading “Open Payments coming to ORCA”