The science of stop spacing. (RMTransit)
Stop spacing and the power of density. (RMTransit)
This is an open thread.
This article will serve as an inauguration open thread for tomorrow, so any political-related comments go here. Monday and Tuesday will be two transit topics articles indirectly honoring Martin Luther King Jr, so comments in those should be limited to that. Wednesday will be the next news roundup and opportunity for political reaction.
Great videos Mike. So sad Reese is taking a hiatus from his RM Transit channel.
Stop spacing is a major issue in transit. While I love the frequency of SF Muni for instance, the stop spacing is horrible. The buses stop every 1.5 to 2 blocks, making it take forever to get across the city. Seattle is a little better, I think they’ve removed stops over the years. At least is seems that way.
This is the second of three RMTransit videos I’ve been waiting for since last summer. The first was the Cascades video that was released a few weeks ago. The other two were released around November but I didn’t realize it until December, and higher-priority videos kept bumping them. The third video will be next Sunday. Then that’ll be it for RMTransit unless I go through the archive and find some old ones.
Metro used to stop every two blocks. In the 2000s and 2010s it removed some stops (called stop dieting); e.g., on University Way, on the 8 and 3 between Melrose and Broadway, and on RapidRide conversions. Some routes still have the old spacing, like the 62 east of 15th Ave NE. In that case they’re probably kept because of the hills, since a hill cuts the walking distance in half.
The topic has many layers which can be complex issues themselves.
Many stops are placed so people can walk to them. That’s why signalized cross streets make sense for stops. Reducing stops may not help increase access if they are in the middle of a block or somewhere where it isn’t practical to cross a busy street. With so much of the US built atop a grid system at 1/2 or 1/4 mile level, adding stops at 0.4 spacing can run directly into this problem.
Then there is Reece’s point about our cities just being too spread out. I once had a transit expert theorize that no one likes to ride transit that stops more than a dozen times before they reach their destination. It’s even an issue for long rail lines — and will be apparent if some of ST3 projects ever get built. Tacoma Dome is to be the 18th stop from the ID for example if ST3 stations all get built including the infill ones. I think Everett will be about 20 stops from the ID too.
There are also property owners who don’t bus stops in front of of their building. They don’t want to see people loitering there. There are bus stops in Seattle that attract loiterers because they are shelters and someone can stay there for a long time without looking suspicious — yet these loiterers will never get in a bus. It is unfortunate because riders generally feel safer waiting for a bus in front of a busy glass storefront entrance than in front of a solid concrete block wall.
Consider too that low ridership bus route buses often get to skip stops. So a bus may pass by 25 stops but a bus trip may only actually stop at 8 of them. In those cases, why worry about close stop spacing? And ironically if a route’s adjacent land use changes to denser housing and more destinations, the bus begins stopping at more stops and that makes the speed much worse. So the route’s original stop spacing may be fine but densification may result in needing stop reductions — which seems counter intuitive when the number of possible stops gets reduced because the route gets busier.
There’s clearly no one right way to locate bus stops. So as long as it’s periodically examined by a transit operator, it’s probably fine.
“So a bus may pass by 25 stops but a bus trip may only actually stop at 8 of them.”
That’s how the stops on NE 65th Street work. The problem is that the driver still has to look to see if people are waiting, and the bus may slow down a bit. When people get off, they may spread it out to more stops. And the audio announcement cites every single stop, which can be distracting to hear so many announcements.
Pierce Transit had bus stops sometimes as close as a block apart. The 42 to East Tacoma has exceptionally burdened with too many stops. The reason behind this was old people and people with disabilities would ask their City Council person to get a “special” stop for them because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) walk to another stop. I think some of these people died and yet their special bus stop lives on!. PT has done some work talking stops out, but there still a lot of stops. The 42 has 30? stops between downtown and the 72nd ave transit center. To make things even slower…. there’s no shortage of wheelchairs, oxygen tanks and slow moving people “older than dirt” riding. They all know the driver…. and talk to the driver. Nobody is in a hurry here. Think of it like a nursing home on wheels with a few sullen kids from the projects riding in the back.
Maybe there’s a better way to run transit…. but transit will always be burdened with the slow, feeble and infirm. We’re all headed that way sooner or later.
The reason transit works pretty well in Seattle and not so well everywhere else in America may not be the transit system at all. It’s all the fit, single riders who are perfect for transit.Seattle currently has a lot of people like that. Start mixing in greezers in wheelchairs and baby carriages and transit just gets much harder.
“The reason transit works pretty well in Seattle and not so well everywhere else in America may not be the transit system at all. It’s all the fit, single riders who are perfect for transit.”
Metro is more frequent and has a longer span than 90% of cities in the US. ST Express is pretty unusual; most metros don’t have such easy access between cities. Some have all-day commuter rail like Chicago’s Metra, but even that is less frequent than 15-30 minute ST Express.
A typical American pattern is maybe a few routes with 15-minute weekdays, most routes every 30-60 minutes, and maybe ending at 7pm or not on Sundays or weekends.
Mike Orr,
Seattle is among the top cities with the fewest children.
Seattle does have a fair amount of senior citizens, but many of the poor ones are homeless. (average homeless age in Seattle is like, 48?), I’m not sure the homeless really use transit that much.
Seattle has a lot of single renters living alone.
Let’s just say Metro has the right demographics in Seattle.
“Seattle is among the top cities with the fewest children.”
And? Children need transit because they can’t drive. If Seattle had more children between ages 11 and 18, it would have more transit riders.
“Maybe there’s a better way to run transit…. but transit will always be burdened with the slow, feeble and infirm. We’re all headed that way sooner or later.”
You can say things without being abelist you know that.
“Let’s just say Metro has the right demographics in Seattle.”
Or you’re just being weird about people using walkers and wheelchairs on transit when its really a big nothingburger that you’re making to be bigger than it really.
If you need to use ableist rhetoric to make your point, then your point is honestly moot. You don’t need to disrespect wheelchair, old people, or pram users either. They don’t really slow down the bus when ramps take only a few seconds to deploy and retract. The only issue wheelchair or pram users face is on coach buses but that’s not their fault really and express busses rarely take that long to load and unload said users honestly. It’s only a problem if the lift isn’t functioning properly, which is a fairly rare occurance that I’ve only seen once or twice in my 15 years riding.
This is basically a nothing issue. Loading and unloading people off the bus rarely takes that long like you’re implying here. Dwell times with wheelchair ramp deployment is at most 60 to 90 seconds. Which is actually built into the schedule anyways as they know some runs will take longer than others and other runs will be faster than expected.
Mike Orr,
I wouldn’t argue with you about kids riding transit. Why Tacoma, Pierce Transit and the City of Tacoma didn’t make center of all public transit next to UWT… it’s really the epicenter for transit.
Transit can excel for people at certain phases in their lives, like college. Transit isn’t all that great for other phases, like raising kids under 5 or when you’re 80.
Seattle is kind of an outlier….
“I wouldn’t argue with you about kids riding transit. Why Tacoma, Pierce Transit and the City of Tacoma didn’t make center of all public transit next to UWT… it’s really the epicenter for transit.”
Because Commerce Street Transit Mall already exists
“Transit can excel for people at certain phases in their lives, like college. Transit isn’t all that great for other phases, like raising kids under 5 or when you’re 80.”
*Sees people in Seattle riding metro who are over 80 or raising kids under 5*
I think you’re just pulling whataboutisms out of thin air at this point and don’t really understand how transit works despite claiming you do.
Every time I took the Potsdam streetcar, half or more of the passengers were women with babies in strollers.
Why would simply walking to a transit stop be more difficult than the 10 minutes it takes to pack a baby into a car seat, fold up a stroller, etc?
Tacomee raises a good point about the demographics that ride the bus in Seattle. I ride the KCM all the time in the city, and it seems like it’s been years since a bus I’ve seen a wheelchair or a stroller. Interesting.
Both children and elderly need transit more on average. Youth can’t get a drivers license before 16, and 16-18 usually can’t afford a car. The elderly eventually lose their ability to drive, or they drive when they shouldn’t (can’t see well or react fast).
Re why they drive when they shouldn’t, that gets into walkability. Many of them live in residential-only areas where the nearest store is not in walking distance and transit can be skeletal or nonexistent. Our car-dependent suburbs and residential neighborhoods aren’t designed for a third of the people who live there, or for all stages of life, or for people with disabilities that preclude driving. It shouldn’t be that way: neighborhoods should be designed for everybody. That’s why walkability and a variety of retail everywhere is important.
Seattle is among the top cities with the fewest children.
Let’s just say Metro has the right demographics in Seattle.
Younger people ride transit at a higher rate than older people. I would cite some studies but you don’t seem to believe in studies so there isn’t much point.
Thus you have it backwards. The general lack of youth in Seattle is probably reducing ridership. Just yesterday I rode the bus with my two grandkids. They had a blast. But they are part of a fairly small demographic in Seattle right now.
I can relate that. Through my recent trip to SF, it occurred to me multiple times that I pushed the stop button for the wrong stop.
They have two stops placed in the same not-very-big residential block with one at nearside and another one at farside.
I pushed button right after the bus pulled away a nearside stop only to find out it would stop at the farside of the same block 400-ft downstream.
I like Reece a lot but I feel he is out of his depth here. To start with he gets the walking distance wrong. To quote Jarrett Walker:
transit planners generally observe that the walking distance that most people seem to tolerate — the one beyond which ridership falls off drastically — is about 400m (around 1/4 mi) for a local-stop service, and about 1000m (around 3/5 mi) for a very fast, frequent, and reliable rapid transit service.
So for something like Link people will walk up to a thousand meters. For a regular bus they will walk 400 meters (not 800). I would say that even most of our RapidRide are more like regular buses than “fast, frequent rapid transit”. Walking ten minutes on either end of your journey means you have spent 20 minutes before you account for travel and wait time. I could maybe see that for Link but I don’t see that for the vast majority of the buses.
He alludes to many of the issues but doesn’t really go into them. You have to consider walking distance from other transit as well. Alon Levy covers this and goes into great detail on the subject (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/04/21/stop-spacing-and-route-spacing/). But I think Jarrett Walker explains it more simply (https://humantransit.org/2010/11/san-francisco-a-rational-stop-spacing-plan.html). Note that Walker explains how “you can’t get there from here” is a problem in many suburbs with an easy to understand explanation and diagrams (https://humantransit.org/2010/05/culdesac-hell-and-the-radius-of-demand.htm). (Reece mentioned this subject but so quickly it could easily be missed.) Walker also mentions how parallel routes make a big difference.
Reece did mention express overlays and he mentioned why they aren’t that common (especially in other parts of the world): They use extra service hours. Speed is very important in its own right and it also leads to better frequency. But not if you are running both a local bus and an express bus. You end up sacrificing something.
It is important not to go overboard. It is easy to get excited and think “if 400 meter stop spacing is good, then 800 meter stopping would be great!”. For some it definitely would be. But quite likely it would be worse overall.
The big takeaway is that like most things related to transit, we (in North America) are doing it wrong. There is simply no reason for stop spacing in many North American agencies (100 meters) to be different than that of Europe (400 meters). There are bound to be exceptions and different approaches that make sense given the particulars of the area. But it is also clear that for much of North America we have an excess of bus stops.
I do think Reece nailed the reason for this. It is reverse NIMBYism. It is also a result of the way we view transit. Either it is a convenient way to get to work (for some commuters) or a way for desperate people to get around. Thus we have express service during peak (when the commuters ride) and very slow and infrequent service for when the poor folks are stuck taking the bus. This attitude not only applies to stop spacing but routing as well. The buses have to go downtown because that is where people work. Otherwise it doesn’t matter if the bus routes are infrequent or indirect. Basically everything is a coverage route and then people wonder why so few people ride the buses (especially after the pandemic).
Today I got curious if predicted RapidRide G improvements in travel time actually are being achieved.
I found these data points in the study on transit travel time improvements here:
https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/RapidRide/Madison/Appendix_B_Madison_Transportation_TM.pdf
The report shows westbound and eastbound transit travel times on page 5-6 in Tables 26 and 27. The graph is for the opening year. Westbound was supposed to fall from 15 to 10 minutes westbound and fall from 16 to 11 minutes eastbound during the PM peak travel period.
Next I looked at Metro’s revised schedules updated in December 2024 based on operating the service for several weeks here:
https://kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/metro/schedules/pdf/09142024/rt-g-line.pdf
The revised schedule shows westbound at 15 minutes westbound and 23 minutes eastbound.
In other words, the end result is no transit travel time savings westbound and a travel time increase of 8 minutes eastbound in the late afternoon.
The project expected a 5 minute reduction in each direction that didn’t happen.
Is there a lesson here?
The lesson is downtown is congested and cars encroach into the transit lanes. When cars jut into the late for turning right (I’ve seen this from 1st to Spring), or after turning left to get into a full lane (I’ve seen this on Madison between 5th and 2nd), it blocks the bus from crossing the street for the entire light cycle and it has to wait for the next cycle. I’ve also seen cars get into the center transit-only lanes.
I may have seen cars use the bus lane to pass other cars, although I’m not sure if that was with the G or only with the Pine Street buses at Pine & Bellevue westbound, where cars wait in the bus stop to pick somebody up or to pick up takeout food. This forces the bus to stop in the car lane, or makes the bus miss a light, or sometimes the bus drives by without stopping.
It’s taking two light cycles for buses to traverse the block on Pine between Summit and Bellevue. Sometimes this is because the next block is full, sometimes because left-turning cars leave the bus with not enough time to cross the street, and sometimes because Uber cars or private cars are treating the bus stop as a waiting zone.
By putting new stop signs on Pine Street in lower Capitol Hill, SDOT really slowed down buses using that street segment in the past 5 years. Plus the added density has added the number of pedestrians crossing there. Of course it’s not a RapidRide street.
The lesson is downtown is congested and cars encroach into the transit lanes.
I agree Mike. Some of those drivers are doing that legally. It was one of the big flaws with the plans from the beginning (and I wrote as much). They essentially have BAT lanes downtown, bus-lanes on First/Capitol Hill and the car runs in regular traffic as it nears 23rd. While there are several potential points of failure my guess is there are two big ones now: scofflaws and the downtown BAT lanes.
The problem with bus/BAT lane scofflaws is not unique to the G. We need better enforcement. We need cameras on the buses to automatically ticket violators (like they have in various cities).
But downtown is a problem even if people are playing by the rules (or at the very least close to them). I hate to sound like a broken record but the obvious solution is contraflow. The bus should go towards the waterfront on Spring and away from the waterfront on Madison. Unfortunately this would likely require another round of laying concrete. If you look at the slides (https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/TransitProgram/RapidRide/Madison/2021_1stTo5th.pdf) they added concrete where the bus runs but used asphalt on the other parts. The other problem is that there are bike lanes on Spring on the left side of the road. This means the bike lanes would have to be moved or you would have to add island bus stops (which would complicate things).
Of course there is a cheap alternative but it is dangerous. The buses could run going the other direction (as if they were in England). Since the buses have doors on each side that could be done very quickly and cheaply but it would mean that pedestrians who are used to looking left and then right would get hit. I think it is better to lay the concrete and deal with the bike lanes. This is not especially expensive. Much of the money was spent digging up the street and dealing with the sewer system. That work has already been done. It is more about pride. The city should have done it that way in the first place and now they are dealing with the results.
There is also First Avenue. The long term plan was to add an island bus stop there (for the CCC) but right now the bus stops curbside. I think you add an island bus stop there even if you end up running curbside buses on First someday. This is actually better for the buses. It means that they are less likely to bottom out as they make the turn. Again this wouldn’t be that difficult to implement or cost that much.
I should mention that Metro likely does build a bit of time padding into its schedules. So the RR-G buses may be slightly faster in the field. I could not determine the actual bus travel time from published Metro data so I used the adjusted schedules as a surrogate here.
You can’t base the travel time on the schedule. You are much better off using Google Maps. According to Google it takes sixteen minutes to get from Madison Valley to First Avenue in the morning (https://maps.app.goo.gl/UNZ5a8kN93xn29E19) and 23 minutes to get back in the afternoon (https://maps.app.goo.gl/KX82tyMW4n2gs6uQ6). The 16 minutes is exactly what they said it was going to be:
The proposed BRT system is expected to have a travel time of 16.0 minutes in the westbound direction during the PM peak hour, which is 5.6 minutes faster than existing local bus travel time in the westbound direction.
Note that is for PM Peak. The bus is actually faster than that at PM Peak (it is slowest in the morning). The chart on page 51 of the PDF shows the same thing. Note: I am referencing the number for the PDF. This is different than the number shown on each page.
It looks like eastbound is where it is not saving as much time as expected.
Pierce Transit has free rides to warming centers during the cold spell through January 22. Tell the driver you’re going to/from a warming center. List of warming centers and resources.
I added a paragraph to the article outlining the plan for political comments this week. Reactions to the inauguration tomorrow or the new administration belong in today’s open thread or Wednesday’s news roundup. Monday and Tuesday will be two articles on local transit, and comments should stick to that.
Historic buildings that were destroyed in the Los Angeles fires ($), in a variety of architectural styles.
A recent change in stop spacing is that with the conclusion of 11th/12th Ave NE repaving last month, the northbound 67 had two stops removed (at 47th St and 52nd St, riders now use 45th, 50th, or 55th), matching the existing southbound route.
To me, it’s interesting that stop removal happened in the U District core and 2/3 streets/stop is still the norm between Roosevelt and Northgate. Perhaps one nuance is that those suburban stops are (I think) used on average by less than 1 passenger per stop per trip, so consolidating them wouldn’t actually reduce the number of stops. It is effectively a flag stop segment where you can pull the cord to get off instead of talking to the operator.
When I lived on University Way it took ten or twenty minutes to get from 55th where I lived to Campus Parkway. In the 2000s SDOT renovated the street and Metro consolidated some bus stops, and now it moves faster. On 15th Ave NE there used to be northbound stops at both 42nd and 43rd. Those have been consolidated to one stop. I haven’t paid attention to Roosevelt Way.
That’s true. But, the effect on travel time is very minor. In general, if a route has low ridership and is blowing by most of its stops without stopping, having stops too close together isn’t really a big deal. If, over time, the route gains ridership, and the bus starts to bog down because it’s stopping too much, at that point, the agency should start to look into stop consolidation, but until then, the gain is so little, it seems almost not worth it.
There is one exception, though. When a stop requires leaving the road to detour down a side street or into a parking lot, then the stop is imposing substantial delay on the bus, just by being there, even if nobody uses it. Such stops should require a high bar to justify themselves, like half the bus’s entire ridership using that stop, and even then, a good reason why the bus *has* to detour, rather than simply serve an adjacent stop along the street.
All too often, these detour stops are added to routes without people bothering to question their necessity. For example, it’s a knee-jerk reaction that if a bus route happens to pass a park and ride lot, that the bus has to detour into the park and ride lot, even if it’s just some local bus that nobody in their right mind with a car would be trying to catch. For example, in the case of South Kirkland P&R, people who drive to the bus are going to be doing so for the 255, not the 250, and certainly not the 249, yet the 249 still makes a mindless detour into the P&R, just in case.
On the topic of access to a crosswalk, I feel like a bus stop without a crosswalk is nearly useless because, even if the bus is on your side of the street going one direction, you still have to be able to cross the street to get to the bus going the other direction.
There are some very weird cases, like this bus stop here in Houston(*), which I rode by few times times on the way home from the airport. Note that the correspond bus stop going the other direction is on the other side of the freeway. So, to avoid what Google estimates to be a 20-minute walk alongside a busy freeway with no sidewalk, it is necessary a northbound passenger must actually ride the bus a couple miles *past* the destination, then transfer to a southbound bus on the same route in order to reach this destination, which includes a Home Depot and a WalMart. While this is something I consider totally unreasonable to expect a transit rider to do, it’s also true that the transit agency had their hands tied, as they have no control over the freeway and its lack of crossing points, the excessively wide and fast frontage road, or the lack of sidewalks, they are simply given some money and a mandate to serve the area with buses. Under these constraints, the only option other than to do what they did and build a near-useless stop would be to delay the northbound bus by having it loop around the freeway to serve one mile of southbound bus stops. In this case, such a move would do more harm than good (by delaying everybody else on the bus, as well as increasing the route’s service cost, which would likely force a reduction in frequency), so they did the only option available, which was to put in a token bus stop that is extremely painful to use for any trip not one-way southbound.
But, still the fact that the streetscape made this tradeoff necessary to begin with, I consider, an abomination.
(*) (https://www.google.com/maps/@29.9200353,-95.4128904,3a,75y,200.5h,81.29t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sKeRXRi93Fw2hBxmNbPV6Lw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D8.714479036171653%26panoid%3DKeRXRi93Fw2hBxmNbPV6Lw%26yaw%3D200.49519227276815!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D)
Where is the bus stop in the regular map view? It looks like West Road and Fallbrook Drive have underpasses that must have at least one sidewalk. Are there no bus stops there? Is it two miles between those exits?
Looking at the picture, it seems it’s not quite as bad as I thought. The closest underpass is West Road, so the walk is about half a mile. Still, it’s not good that the streetscape doesn’t allow for a northbound and southbound bus stop in the same place.
It also looks like the lack of sidewalks could be worked around by cutting through the WalMart parking lot, since the underpass, itself, actually does have a wide sidewalk. Of course, the entrances to the parking lots, themselves, have no sidewalks and are full of turning cars, but there’s nothing you can do about that.
Another fun picture of pedestrian apathy (1). This one, again, is Houston, but it’s a more urban neighborhood than the previous picture, and is located right along the route between a residential neighborhood and a shopping center, so this the way that someone who lives in one of the houses would take to go grocery shopping. It’s not obvious from the picture, but, just ahead, on the far side of Endicott, is a huge grocery chain (H.E.B.), followed by a Target. To the left, on the near side of Endicott, is a gym, and behind the camera, is a cluster of houses, with the house I grew up in being of them.
Some things to note:
– Endicott St., itself, lacks any sort of marked crosswalk. Note that traffic is usually much heavier than shown in the picture, making the street very difficult to cross on foot, with the widening of the street from 2 lanes to 4 north of Indigo not helping anything. Note that this lack of a crosswalk has been essentially the same since I was a child, and was never fixed, in spite of the shopping center itself having undergone multiple rounds of renovations, including the construction of a brand new parking garage for the H.E.B.
– Even after you do manage to get across Endicott, about 5 crucial feet of what should have been sidewalk next to the entrance, has been replaced with (not very good) landscaping (2).
– The back wall of the gym is very ugly, to the point where it’s clearly obvious that the owners of the gym did not think that any of their customers might approach from that way. Rather they expect everyone to approach from the other side, where the big parking lot is (3).
– However, even the neglected back part of the gym, still has a parking lot(4) with about 15 marked parking spaces, in spite of the fact that the much more inviting front parking lot is much bigger, and the spaces in the back parking lot seem to pretty much never get used, as far as I can tell when I walk by. This is a telltale sign of overly-excessive parking requirements, is the back parking lot is of no economic value to the gym, so they would not build if it city wasn’t making them.
– Continuing east along Endicott for one block, you reach Beechnut, which is where the transit is (5). This is actually a pretty frequent route, running every 15 minutes 7 days/week. Here, marked crosswalks exists, and Google street view even shows a person walking. However, the crosswalks are partially rubbed out, and the crossing is not exactly the safest, with very high volumes of turning traffic. You can see in the picture, for example, that while Nissan to the left, just behind the big GMC SUV, has its right turn signal on, which means that the woman in the crosswalk is right in that car’s path. Hopefully, the driver saw her. While not shown in the Street View picture, right turn on red from Endicott to Beechnut is also an issue, as cars block the crosswalk, and of course, crossing Beechnut to access the westbound bus, you have to contend with both right and left-turning cars coming out of Endicott and/or the driveway on the other side.
– Moving back west along Endicott to a big west of Indigo (picture #1), you can see the entrance to the parking lot on the other side (6). Notice how the sidewalk in front of the stores abruptly ends a few feet before the road, with a landscape bed to discourage walkers from cutting across the grass. I guess that means you’re supposed to walk in the driveway and hope nobody turning into or out of it hits you. However, moving a few feet further west, you can see that they actually did build a pedestrian ramp, which is good for access houses to the south, but has to walking in the wrong direction if you’re trying to reach Indigo or the bus route to the north. And, of course, there’s still no crosswalk.
– Moving further west, we finally reach a stop sign with a marked crosswalk (8). So, it is possible to safely cross Endicott, it just requires considerable out-of-direction travel for the pedestrian. Note the big, barely used parking lot behind the store – yet another sign of overly-zealous city-imposed parking requirements.
– And finally, even more parking back behind the stores (9) in order to allow the shopping center to legally comply with the city’s parking code, which, I guess, said that the already-huge parking lot in front of the stores wasn’t big enough.
(1) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6866337,-95.4649059,3a,75y,81.84h,82.59t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1srzK-FpdeO8rbBehf2BxLvw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D7.412958922345496%26panoid%3DrzK-FpdeO8rbBehf2BxLvw%26yaw%3D81.84434869665016!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(2) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.686579,-95.4647025,3a,75y,77.2h,85.39t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sEsT49l4v8nPpnV_F421nJQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D4.607658742441416%26panoid%3DEsT49l4v8nPpnV_F421nJQ%26yaw%3D77.19981543244431!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
3) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6876739,-95.4646835,3a,75y,268.75h,92.58t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sSn38Ss8S0wXVAA4QHhfxaw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.577482812535308%26panoid%3DSn38Ss8S0wXVAA4QHhfxaw%26yaw%3D268.74792583342463!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
4) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6867627,-95.4646765,3a,75y,249.25h,96.57t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sDFnhgdTRvwcJDbhcf5UzNA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-6.570305209398867%26panoid%3DDFnhgdTRvwcJDbhcf5UzNA%26yaw%3D249.25013156341072!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(5) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6889812,-95.4647171,3a,75y,1.57h,81.89t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s2aUQVV7h5cPyX6sVDGTcyg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D8.11101406462852%26panoid%3D2aUQVV7h5cPyX6sVDGTcyg%26yaw%3D1.5746233394492606!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(6) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6858763,-95.4643238,3a,75y,136.52h,85.88t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sy1DsHsZeawST1qPm6Dg79g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D4.121571944664765%26panoid%3Dy1DsHsZeawST1qPm6Dg79g%26yaw%3D136.5210057569359!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(7) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6856039,-95.4642771,3a,75y,48.76h,88.02t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sdpS6ORXgTj6pvEoZ6z6PKA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D1.976501689221564%26panoid%3DdpS6ORXgTj6pvEoZ6z6PKA%26yaw%3D48.7576560849479!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(8) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6848422,-95.4639224,3a,75y,0.28h,89.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sGIHzratCBJEnVr3bKP0nyA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.3898146070786481%26panoid%3DGIHzratCBJEnVr3bKP0nyA%26yaw%3D0.27642305502335773!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
(9) https://www.google.com/maps/@29.6849591,-95.4628684,3a,75y,222.13h,94.99t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s_yS-uMAT-1e8YMm0ciAbzQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-4.992027329429305%26panoid%3D_yS-uMAT-1e8YMm0ciAbzQ%26yaw%3D222.12591192160818!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
At least there will be plenty of parking on Black Friday and just before Christmas. That’s what large parking requirements are tied to, the busiest day of the year.
Northgate Mall used to have one or two parking lots on the south that were never used, and one of them had developed plant growth in the cracks. It was replaced by the Thornton Creek mixed-use development.
I’ve been there on Black Friday and on the Saturday before Christmas many times. Even then, almost nobody parks in the back lot. Even if the main parking lot is full, drivers will circle around and wait for somebody to leave, rather than park in the back lot and walk.
But, the main takeaway from these pictures, I think, is apathy towards pedestrians. It’s not like somebody is making a deliberate decision to not have more crosswalks on Endicott because of the impacts on traffic flow. After all, when nobody is crossing, the impact of a crosswalk on traffic flow is precisely zero. And even when somebody is crossing, it’s only a few seconds of delay. Rather, it’s that nobody is bothering to even ask the question because the fact that somebody might want to walk to the store simply never even occurs to anyone with the power to do anything.
To the extent that they think about pedestrian mobility at all, it’s about compliance with general policies, not about the experience of an actual pedestrian on the ground. For example, since Endicott does have sidewalks, they have satisfied the policy requirement for providing pedestrian access through the neighborhood, so that’s considered the end of it. The task of looking for low hanging fruit, where a tiny change to the streetscape, a crosswalk here, a patch of sidewalk there, that makes a big difference to pedestrians, while being barely noticeable to drivers, that task simply doesn’t exist because it doesn’t even occur to anyone over there that it should exist.
There are some parts of Seattle where similar apathy issues exist here, but least Seattle has a process by which members of the public can open suggestions, which actually does help a lot. But, there is still stuff that slips through the cracks. For instance, Denny Way still has intersections with a crosswalk on only one side of the street, a stroad design that should have no place near a city center with lots of pedestrian traffic. Overall, pedestrians here are in much better shape than Houston, but there is still room for improvement.
I read from somewhere that when transit agencies make decision regarding service plan, they sometimes were advised to adopt either frequency or coverage approaches systemwide under the same service hours planned.
Frequency means more service with fewer stops. Coverage means more stops (one stop per block) but fewer buses. The idea is that if you run faster (with fewer stop), you might be able to run more trips with the same service hour. The debate is whether you want passengers to walk shorter distance and wait a little bit longer at stop or you want them to walk longer distance and wait for a little less.
I personally prefer better frequency with fewer stops, but I think I can relate that some folks who are not comfortable to walk long distance may prefer different.
It also has something to do with the performance measure each transit agency follows. In some cases, more stops show better “score” than better headway. That’s why some system has tons of stops.
It has to be a balance of both. Jarrett Walker advises agencies to choose a percent of available hours for coverage and put the rest into performance (frequency, consolidating high-volume corridors, having enough standby buses for reliability, preventing crowding etc). Metro’s performance metrics do that.
If you have only performance (e.g., no routes like the 27 or 249), then people in smaller isolated neighborhoods have no access to transit. If you have only coverage, then transit is unusable as an alternative to driving. You need a balance between the two. The proportion depends on the community’s needs, values, and political attitudes.
Stop spacing is not the only way to speed up buses. Transit-priority lanes allow buses to bypass congestion. Signal priority allows buses to make more green lights. In-lane stops like along Dexter or Roosevelt force cars to wait behind the bus instead of the bus waiting to merge back into the lane. Adding service hours to increase frequency is worthwhile in itself. Adding standby buses that can swoop in when a regular bus is delayed or breaks down improves reliability, and that can improve people’s wait times and certainty. So stop spacing is only one factor, and not necessarily the biggest.
A reliable bus running every 15 minutes is better than an unreliable bus every 10 minutes. The 62 and 131/132 are scheduled every 15 minutes, but every single day they’re often 10-15 minutes late. That means your wait time is not a certain 7-15 minutes but an uncertain 7-30 minutes, and you never know when to go to the bus stop because you can’t trust the schedule or One Bus Away.
What you describe there is true, Mike.
The only thing that I’ll add is that our transit agencies will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building theoretical simulations that give unreliable results when they could simply field test the operation in real time on the streets.
Just get a brigade of staff to put out cones and “bus operations test” signs, and emulate loading, unloading and signal delays. Then use stopwatches to see what happens.
The theoretical simulations of RapidRide G claimed to reduce the run times from 15-16 minutes down to 10-11 and yet Metro schedules suggest that the time savings did not occur. We gave out hundreds of millions to build the project based on saving travel times, and it hasn’t accomplished the 5 minute improvement travel time savings that the theoretical simulations said that it would.
We gave out hundreds of millions to build the project based on saving travel times, and it hasn’t accomplished the 5 minute improvement travel time savings that the theoretical simulations said that it would.
According to Google Maps it did. Now it is possible that Google Maps is wrong but they are usually fairly accurate. I really don’t think you can make a judgment one way or another without a real report.
What’s the deal with ST’s PR right now? A couple of days ago they posted pics of a Link LRV crossing the new long bridge on FWLE, and now they are posting video of the progress on Full ELE. But still not a single thing about DRLE progress?
DRLE is supposedly the next Link extension to open, but ST is talking about everything else. Not a word about DRLE. Why?
I don’t get it.
There was this service alert before the weekend: https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/service-alerts/beginning-january-17-sound-transit-will-be-conducting-operator-0
@Nathan Dickey,
That is really odd. No formal announcement, and no fluffy PR piece like for FWLE or Full ELE? Very strange.
It is also sort of odd that they have switched their language on the DRLE opening date from the more specific “this Spring” to the more generic “later this year”.
With Full ELE dead tow testing starting in Q1, and live wire testing starting in Q2, it is almost getting to the point where it might make sense to just delay the opening of DRLE and bundle it’s opening with Full ELE. I hope not, but we will see.
And these openings always have work underway almost up to their very opening dates – sometimes even after opening. Continued construction is sort of par for the course.
But hey, regardless of the actual opening date, this year is going to be a momentous year for transit regionally. Both DRLE and Full ELE should open, and then it is on to FWLE. Finally.
On another forum, someone shared photos of the Marymoor and DT Redmond stations, which seemed to still need some significant finishes, including concrete in a pedestrian plaza.
Can we stop with the unexplained acronyms? PR, ELE, DRLE. It takes time to figure out what they mean. FW is clear because nothing else except Federal Way has the letters FW together, but the others look generic. I had to use FWLE to figure out what you meant by the others. And no, it doesn’t help if these are official ST acronyms. We aren’t ST staff.
The much-anticipated proposal to make the temporarily-reduced prices for Regional Day Passes permanent is being fast-tracked. Sound Transit is taking input on the proposal it is sponsoring to the ORCA Joint Board to make the price of a Regional Day Pass $6 and the price of reduced-fare Regional Day Passes $2. ST is taking input on its proposal through January 31.
The $6 Regional Day Pass would cover the first $3 in fare per ride on all services accepting ORCA except Washington State Ferries and the Kitsap Fast Ferries. The $2 reduced-fare Regional Day Passes would cover $1 in fare for each ride on services accepting ORCA, with the same exceptions as the regular one. The new pricing would take effect March 1, at the same time that the ST Express regular fare will drop to $3.
Community Transit will also drop its reduced fares to $1 starting the same day, as well as begin honoring the Subsidized Annual Pass on both its public buses and paratransit.
Well…it has happened.
Early data is in and the Amazon RTO policy has led to a measurable increase in both traffic volumes and congestion:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/amazon-workers-slow-the-seattle-area-commute-after-returning-to-office/#comments
And it should be noted that, when your road system is operating at or near capacity, small increases in traffic volumes lead to much larger increases in congestion.
It’s particularly shocking that morning speeds on I-90 between Eastgate and Seattle are now averaging 15 mph. That is pretty darn slow. ST can’t get Full ELE open soon enough.
And all this is before WSDOT starts closing lanes on I-5 and locking the reversible lanes down to a single direction. That is going to cause a ripple effect in regional traffic that goes well beyond just I-5 and the surrounding streets.
We need Full ELE to open, and open soon. Hopefully ST can get it done.
We also need to make the buses faster. Let’s face it, Link will never carry as many people as the buses. There will be major destinations that will take decades for Link to cover and others that will probably never be covered. Link definitely helps but for the region to have a good transit system we will have to continue to rely on the mode that has done most of the work (with less of the money) — the buses.
Right now there are three problems with our buses:
1) Not enough service.
2) Poor routing.
3) They are stuck in traffic.
For the first there is an easy solution — spend more money on service. The second is more complicated. I have lost faith in Metro planners. They had every opportunity to make major improvements to our outdated transit network but they have done very little. I think we need Jarrett Walker’s team (or someone similar) to give us a major overhaul.
The third requires work inside the city and on the freeways. I-5 and I-90 should have HOV-3 lanes like 520 (not just HOV-2) lanes. This will continue to be important even after Link expands. Riders from Issaquah have to get to Mercer Island (or South Bellevue) to connect to Link. Riders from north of Lynnwood have to get to Lynnwood. Link is a poor substitute for express bus service for the vast majority of people coming into downtown from the south.
But the city needs to step up as well and improve the bus corridors. Link only serves a small subset of the places people want to go. The only way to get there is to slog your way in a car (which is what many people do) or transfer to a bus. The bus should not be stuck in traffic trying to get there. We need to spend the money to make the necessary improvements for surface transit.
And also fund the service to keep frequencies decent in the evenings. Right now, the unfortunate reality is that, even with good bus lanes, it is faster overall to just slog it into the city in a car to have the car available for the return trip, rather than cruise into the city on the bus, only to be stuck with a 20 minute wait at the bus stop for the ride back.
Is it known how the roughly 50,000 Amazon SLU employees get to work? Percent that walk, drive, take public transit, and take Amazon buses? I’d like to see how that’s broken down.
“It’s particularly shocking that morning speeds on I-90 between Eastgate and Seattle are now averaging 15 mph.”
That’s me in the 550 when I go to or from Bellevue in the late afternoon.
@Mike Orr,
“ That’s me in the 550 when I go to or from Bellevue in the late afternoon.”
If you are sitting on a bus going 15 mph on I-90, then Full ELE is going to be an absolute godsend to you.
Hopefully they are no no more delays.
Some of that may be construction related. Right after Eastgate freeway station, the HOV lane ends and cars have to merge. I sat in a pretty big backup there on Saturday, and, it being a weekend, cannot be blamed on Amazon RTO. I’m sure on weekdays, it’s worse.
I don’t know that it goes all the way down to 15 mph but it probably gets down to 30. That happens regularly when I travel in the PM peak. I’ve complained about it in blog comments before. Some usually says, “But I-90 has HOV lanes.” But the 550 doesn’t use them, at least not except for the approach to Mercer Island P&R westbound. It sits in the regular lanes and lets HOV-lane drivers pass it. I don’t know why; somebody said it has something to do with where the bus stop exits are. And it can’t use them on Bellevue Way, where congestion can get up to a standstill.
Yes, the full 2 Line will be great. It will probably cut half an hour from my one-way travel time, going from Westlake to Redmond Tech and transferring to a bus to Lake Hills, or from Westlake to South Bellevue and transferring to the future 226 to 164th.
ORCA is moving to allow joint payments (credit cards), anticipated to launch before 2026: https://info.myorca.com/wp-content/uploads/2025-01-14-Approve-Open-Payments-Change-Order.pdf
Article coming on Thursday, with additional details.
The opening of downtown Redmond extension should make events at Marymoor Park much easier to reach by transit. Today you basically have to take the B line or the 545, then walk a mile and a half. Many Marymoor Park events are in the evening, leaving the walk back in the dark.
The Link station, once it opens, should get you much closer.
@asdf2,
“The opening of downtown Redmond extension should make events at Marymoor Park much easier to reach by transit.”
Absolutely. Can’t wait to go watch the Seattle Orcas play a little cricket. MLC baby.
I don’t go to Marymoor that often, and I almost never go to Redmond. But I look forward to spending a little more time there once DRLE opens.
This is an exciting year for transit locally.
I still want to explore the Marymoor Village station area and see how long it takes to walk from there to the park’s football fields. From the 545 stop on West Lake Sammamish Parkway, it takes 40 minutes. I’ve also gone to Marymoor for Cirque du Soleil, but only in a car due to the distance from the bus stop.
Yeah. Finally some evidence of real progress on DRLE. A video from Eastside Transit:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhyMfRvbJg
I’m not really sure what the video shows, but it is nice to finally see it.
Still no indication from ST of a timeline though. And the subject hasn’t shown up on any of the meeting agendas either. Very strange.
But at least we have proof that it is in fact happening. Very good news.
Ha. And Eastside Transit has now put up the companion video. This is a Link LRV leaving Redmond Tech station heading onto DRLE and towards the new Marymoor Village Station:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8MzpzZ6E6eg
At the start of the video you can see a RR-B bus sitting at the light. It will be interesting to see what happens to RR-B ridership once the 2-Line goes all the way to DT Redmond.
Progress!