A downtown tunnel could speed up Portland’s MAX light rail. (RMTransit)
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116 Replies to “Sunday Movie: MAX Tunnel”
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A downtown tunnel could speed up Portland’s MAX light rail. (RMTransit)
This is an open thread.
Comments are closed.
It certainly would, but Portland does not have a prayer of a way to pay for one, and the Cavalry at the FTA will have their saddles “impounded” as soon as El Jefe works down to that line on his checklist.
“Portland does not have a prayer of a way to pay for one”
Has it even tried? First it has to add up the cost, then see what local resources are available. Portland doesn’t have the state-imposed tax limitations we have, although it may have others. Has it looked to see what large companies could contribute? This is just a short downtown tunnel, in the highest-ridership and most-transfer segment. It’s like DSTT2 alone, without all the extensions around it and their tunnels and waterways. And we built DSTT1 for $200 million back in the 80s.And Portland might consider cheaper cut-and-cover, which politicians here are allergic to.
Ok, a bunch of stuff to respond to here, so in no particular order:
1. Portland sidewalks are not wide enough to accommodate Chicago or New York style staircases in the sidewalk space. We’d have to use the DSTT model of demolishing downtown buildings and incorporating the station top into new building. This would be expensive. MAX stations use existing sidewalk space, which don’t require the same surface footprint.
2. There’s surface segments and there’s surface segments. Blue line trains run the median segment on Burnside from Ruby Junction to Gateway (≈5.5 miles) in ≈17 minutes.
3. Any downtown tunnel is going to have to be deep, due to existing infrastructure, soil conditions, and the depth of the Willamette through downtown. The trains will be faster, but station access will be slow. A trip from one end of downtown to the other may wind up being slower in a new tunnel for this reason,
4. MAX is an integrated system, so to say that the trains get more riders than the buses really doesn’t work. MAX riders do so for about 10 times the distance as the bus riders do, but there’s lots of places MAX doesn’t go. You can’t separate the two because many trips involve both. If you take away MAX, you also take away a bunch of passengers from the buses.
5. MAX has primarily benefited transit here through being cheaper than the buses it replaced. Stuff like the 15 Belmont from Gateway to downtown was every 3 minutes some years, and just eating operating hours. MAX allowed for better bus service by moving more people per dollar spent. MAX costs per passenger-mile, prior to the pandemic, about *half* what Link was at the same time, using shorter trains. Bus ridership in Portland would not be where it is now without MAX taking over some of the crowded routes.
6. Due to there being fewer buses on the transit mall (thanks to MAX), there’s actually been a decrease in travel time the length of downtown. Yes, MAX is slow, but still a significant improvement over what was there.
7. I would say Link actually does a better job of going to key places. Eg: MAX serves a nothingness at the highway 26 and 217 interchange. If Cedar Hills transit center were built about 1/2 mile further east, it would also serve a major hospital complex. Transfers from 9 Powell to MAX green line are awful, and shouldn’t be. Bybee Station on the Orange Line / 19 is perhaps one of the better stations for transfers, on two lines that aren’t that frequent. There is virtually nothing within the typical 1/4 mile from the OMSI station. Ok, so they put the railroad museum there, but the actual entrance to OMSI is over 1/4 mile north. Though, Gateway is vastly better than any of the Link transit center stations in terms of bus-light rail transfers, stuff like Milwaukie, which completely misses two frequent bus routes (70 and 75) by 5 blocks is a significant mistake.
“7. I would say Link actually does a better job of going to key places.”
This is true, Glenn. There are some obvious omissions like First Hill hospitals but Link hits lots of destinations outside of Downtown Seattle. Even First Hill isn’t that far if Downtown was flat (why a Jefferson St funicular is appealing to me).
Link connects to the stadiums, large theaters, SeaTac and UW (classrooms, performance halls and sports facilities) now and will soon connect to Downtown Bellevue (including the hospitals east of 405) and Microsoft. It connects to a reinvigorated Northgate, bustling anctivity districts like Capitol Hill annd U Dustruct. Link fully connects soon to Downtown Redmond. Lynnwood, KDM and Federal Way can redevelop. Students from Franklin and Roosevelt high schools use Link too — and not necessarily just to go home.
ST3 destinations include both Emerald Queen casinos, maybe Bellevue College (station siting will be important), South Lake Union and Seattle Center as well as the Ballard and West Seattle destination districts.
Certainly Link station areas could evolve into residential districts with 20 story buildings — but people ride transit to get to a destination. So the destinations are a major key to making Link productive.
We may take the destination routing for granted — but ST could have skipped lots of destinations. Smartly, they did not.
Reece is right. Seattle’s system is much “better” than Portland’s. And he is also right that we have surpassed Portland Max in total ridership, despite being a much shorter system.
But Portland has something we don’t have yet, “coverage”. And that is partly why Portland built their system the way they did. Because cheaper line costs allow for more coverage, and that was the point of doing it the way they did.
Portland was also one of the first cities to show North America that the future is rail. They were very successful at that, even if they might want to rethink a few of their design decisions now.
So don’t fault Portland for running on the surface. It sort of made sense at the time.
And Seattle is fast catching up on coverage. With DRLE, Full ELE, and FWLE all coming online in the next 18 months or so, the Seattle region is about to make great strides in coverage. And in ridership too.
The future looks bright for Seattle transit. Finally.
And maybe someday Portland gets their tunnel.
The central Portland light rail section is certainly painfully slow and the bridge is carrying too many lines as Reece notes.
Dallas, Calgary and San Jose chose the slow Downtown surface street concept too. All are now also looking at eventual Downtown tunnels.
It could be that the concept is an inexpensive way to add light rail into the urban cityscape and generate local rail transit support. But if it gets too long or carries too many lines it can lose its effectiveness.
The main reason the light rail runs in a tunnel downtown is because we built a tunnel first (for the buses). Otherwise it is quite likely we would have run on the surface like those other systems. Our system probably would have been similar to what Dallas has, since both systems are focused on distance instead of ridership. Do you think — especially after the initial cost overruns — that they would have gone ahead and built a tunnel first thing? No way. They would have run on the surface and headed out to the suburbs. Just keep in mind they did build a tunnel and yet somehow managed to skip First Hill. First Hill! That is exactly the type of thing that they did with DART (skip the important destinations instead of making the line shorter). When you are focused on an arbitrary and silly goal (adding track from Everett to Tacoma) you are bound to make bad decisions along the way. We were just fortunate enough to have the bus tunnel, otherwise things would have been a lot worse.
“The main reason the light rail runs in a tunnel downtown is because we built a tunnel first (for the buses). Otherwise it is quite likely we would have run on the surface like those other systems. ”
I agree that the Downtown Tunnel was a better concept for Seattle.
Seattle is a unique Downtown though. It’s probably the steepest major Downtown in the US. San Francisco’s is on the edge of Nob Hill but the skyscraper areas are not steep (which is also the case for Pittsburgh and Cincinnati).
Coupled with that, the City itself is punctuated by both steep hills (and water bodies that push urbanization further out). There are a few paths that are more level but those corridors have been used for concentrated usage by cars and buses making adding rail pretty costly and politically difficult.
Since surface rail can’t handle the steeper grades it seems to me to not build a fully regional surface rail network is an obvious decision.
Seattle is steep but not when going north-south. No one is suggesting a train up Pine or Madison. But they are suggesting a streetcar from South Lake Union to the south end of downtown. It is pretty easy to imagine light rail from the UW to South Lake Union (via Eastlake) and then to CID (via 3rd) before continuing south on 4th until it reaches the tracks that are currently used by Link. At some point you would want to tunnel (or go overhead) and in the case of Link — with its obsession with the spine — it would do so in various places, but not necessarily downtown.
“San Jose chose the slow Downtown surface street concept too.”
VTA light rail is not the primary mode between San Jose and San Francisco; Caltrain and BART do that. So it doesn’t matter as much if VTA is surface through downtown San Jose.
“Seattle is a unique Downtown though. It’s probably the steepest major Downtown in the US.”
Jarrett Walker says Seattle has the most natural barriers of any city in North America. The city is really three penninsulas that meet at the Ship Canal and Duwamish Waterway. I found that hard to believe at first because you don’t usually think about them as separate units with most traffic going to the outside (from West Seattle and South Seattle to South King County, and from North Seattle to Snohomish County), but on further thinking it does seem apt for the geography.
Jarrett also observes that in central/south Seattle a bus route can’t go straight more than a mile or two without running into a cliff, waterway, or freeway. This has forced the bus network to make more turns and short runs, and people’s travel patterns have evolved similarly the past 130 years. North Seattle has more of a grid and people go every which way to commercial and activity destinations. South Seattle is divided into north-south islands: California, 35th, Delridge, 16th, SODO, Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, Lake Washington shore. It’s hard to travel east-west between them even in a car (because roads are limited), and none of the islands are large enough to support the level of commercial activity and size of businesses as in North Seattle, so they’re underdeveloped. (Redlining was an additional blow, but the isolated geography was the original and enduring culprit.)
@Al S,
“ the City [Seattle] itself is punctuated by both steep hills (and water bodies that push urbanization further out). “
Seattle is a city of drumlins, and the same geologic forces that made the drumlins also gave us our lakes and the sound, and then oriented the whole mess in a mainly north-south orientation.
But that hasn’t led to dispersed development. Quite the contrary, it has focused development. Just compare Seattle to Portland. Both have roughly the same population, but Portland doesn’t have the geographic constraints and is much more dispersed and has roughly half the population density.
The north-south orientation also leads to a mainly north-south orientation of main commute patterns. And that simplifies rail planning.
The much maligned (at least on this blog) so called “spine” is simply a fallout of the fact that Mother Nature gave Seattle a beautiful hourglass shape. Any high capacity transit system will generally be aligned with that shape and the resulting commute patterns.
Walker also points out that geographic barriers create bottlenecks that are good for transit ridership. If everybody has to cross at a bridge, there will be a congestion bottleneck, and transit with priority right of way will be more competitive and there will be more demand for it. That’s exactly what happens with the Ship Canal, Lake Washington, the region’s north-south orientation centered on a narrow isthmus at downtown Seattle, the cliffs on both sides of SODO, etc.
Portland’s lower density and overall population is because it’s a minor port and Seattle is number two on the West Coast. It’s not like Deattle was “smarter” than Portland. It got dealt much better hand.
Metro Seattle is two-and-a-half times the size of Metro Portland.
The “spine” is maligned precisely and rightfully because almost none of the population nodes in northern Seattle were built anywhere near where I-5 eventually ended up going and where the Link line tended to follow. There are two natural paths where development occurred and grew, one to the NW and the other to the NE, in no small part due to topography. Even north of Northgate, which is an exception due to the freeway’s construction, most of the density is along Aurora to Lynnwood or Roosevelt to Lake City / Bothell Way to Bothell, same as it has been for over a century. The scoping document for Forward Thrust specifically called out the spine and the freeway adjacent routing as something to be avoided at all costs. The metro area has grown, but the communities that were there in 1968 (and 1928) are still the major nodes.
Sound Transit, left to its own devices, would have avoided directly serving neighborhoods like Roosevelt and potentially even Capitol Hill (an early design had the line up Eastlake); to put the station actually IN Roosevelt was due to the effort of the community and the city.
Much of this was unavoidable and due to politics, but in a vacuum, best case system planning would have looked much like the Forward Thrust system with two shorter lines to the north (Crown Hill and Lake City as termini); one to the east much as Line 2 will be, just to Bellevue at first; a line to the SE towards Renton; and likely BRT to West Seattle – rail if extended to the airport. These would have been extended as necessary in each direction and perhaps additional lines built crosstown or along the eastside, but the core system would have made sense as the urban mass transit network as seen in most cities worldwide – relatively short, grade-separated, and frequent. Again, ST’s hands were tied due to politics, but to say the “spine” was the best solution is ignoring where things actually are and have been for decades.
@Scott Stidell,
Between the UW and Northgate the original leading candidate for the Roosevelt station was to put it adjacent to the freeway near the 65th St P&R. The neighborhood did advocate for a more central location, but detailed analysis also showed that a central location would have higher ridership, quicker trip times, and lower construction risk at roughly the same cost. At the end of the day the current location won out on technical merit.
Ditto for north of Northgate. A Hwy 99 routing was predicted to have higher cost, lower ridership, and slower trip times. East of I-5 there simply weren’t any good options, and community resistance would be higher. Tunneling on either route was out of the question due to costs.
So in both cases technical issues favored the current routing.
We can all dream about what a Hwy 99 routing might have done for TOD, but at the end of the day transportation is job #1 at ST. Future TOD potential is way down the list of considerations, and doesn’t score you any points in the FTA grant application process anyhow.
That said, the current routing is already generating a lot of TOD. What is going on at Shoreline South/148th Station is amazing, there are already 3 major buildings under construction in the North Shoreline//185th Station vicinity, and what is in the pipeline at Lynnwood City Center station is absolutely mind blowing.
So, in general, things are looking really good so far with the current routing. Now if we can just get DRLE, Full ELE , and FWLE open.
@Lazarus
“future tod”? what are you talking about, the existing sr 99 has much more apartments than the i5 corridor.
> At the end of the day the current location won out on technical merit.
Secondly the ‘cost savings’ of that not building on sr 99 was just redirected to spend on more elevated segments light rail on i-5 so they wouldn’t have to impact i-5 commuters with ramp reconfigurations.
The emphasis on following I-5 north of Northgate through matured suburban residential areas is a value choice by the ST Board at the time.
There is this belief that the best way to invest in “suburban” rail is to position park and ride lots and apartment buildings near stations rather than create or enhance communities and serve more destinations. This is a values choice. The planning could have begun by wanting to serve medical facilities and colleges and worked on an alignment from there. That did not happen.
From Northgate to Downtown, every Northgate Seattle station has a good destination nearby. That’s not the case north of Northgate.
Within Everett Link station areas, really it’s only Alderwood and Downtown Everett that have destinations within close proximity to the platforms.
That can be compensated by future TOD. The only problem is that TOD to the communities usually means apartment buildings. I don’t see any of them trying to create destinations near the stations.
Perhaps the ideal is to make sure that every other station has a great destination nearby. Park and ride garages are silly at every station. And apartment buildings aren’t much better if they’re at every station too.
The result is high train crowding at the peak hour at the peak direction but anemic daily ridership. Given the per mile cost of grade separated light rail and the high planned train frequencies it’s relatively wasteful as an approach.
The station areas should ideally have medical facilities, colleges, stadiums, performance venues, nightlife clubs and restaurants, casinos and places with high daylong activity. We need more hotels at Link stations too. Carfree life along the corridor can be encouraged by focusing on offering more destinations as opposed to just parking garage spaces and apartment buildings.
@Lazarus – sure, “technical issues” under the constraints ST was under (build the spine, serve communities at a suburban rail system’s distance with a weird hybrid urban/suburban system). I’m talking about the historical development of communities in the north Seattle+ area from the 1880s until today, which – in a perfect transit world – would have been served as I described and as the Forward Thrust plan laid out. Your description of what ST did under its constraints is accurate; that wasn’t my point. My point is the spine is not the be-all/end-all of good transit planning; were the political situation different or non-existent, it would have been the wrong choice and was called out as such decades before. A quick glance at a satellite map even today shows that; north of Roosevelt only Northgate is anywhere near I-5 until you get to Lynnwood (I’d have altered the Forward Thrust plan on the NE line to follow what ST did from Roosevelt to Northgate before diverting back under Victory Heights to Lake City rather than just direct rail from Roosevelt to Lake City, but other than that it’s a far superior system for a high capacity urban mode of transit.
I, too, am looking forward to the new extensions opening.
Seattle is a city of drumlins
Yes. Thanks Lazarus. I can never remember that word.
But that hasn’t led to dispersed development. Quite the contrary, it has focused development.
I think that is a stretch. The density is largely the result of arbitrary zoning and borders. If you look at a density map you can easily make-out the border between Seattle and Shoreline (although it has gotten fuzzier as Shoreline has grown). Various neighborhoods — like most of Magnolia, Queen Anne and Montlake — are relatively low density while places like Lake City have a lot of people. It has nothing to do with the physical geography and everything to do with the way the city grew and the limits they placed on development.
In any event you are correct — much of the development has been focused. Almost all of the density is within Seattle and within a subset of the city at that. The problem is that our metro has largely ignored it. Ash Way? Fife? That isn’t where the density is. But even that isn’t the worst part. A mass transit line doesn’t have to weave back and forth trying to serve the high density places. It can do what it does in Vancouver — serve a few dense places, encourage TOD and create a very good transit network. Unfortunately much of our subway line ignores all of that. It skips stations in the city — sacrificing both density and network integrity — in its irrational zeal to follow the freeway all the way to the hinterlands.
Here is an example station that was skipped: 23rd & Madison. This is a major transit interchange. It has been a major transit interchange for as long as we’ve had transit. That’s because of how the streets are laid out. Madison runs diagonal (to the cardinal grid). It is one of only two major diagonal streets that run east of Broadway (Rainier being the other one). But that’s not all. Because of the freeway, there is no contiguous east-west street to the north. 23rd/24th is a major north-south street. Again, there are only a few of these (and none to the east). Thus you could easily justify a station simply based on the geography. It is bound to work well with various buses.
But it also works for TOD! Look at the area. Do you see an major obstacles that would prevent future development? No, other than a tiny sliver that is the arboretum. Would people want to actually live there? Yes, of course. You are very close to the arboretum. You are very close to downtown, Capitol Hill, Lake Washington and the UW.
In contrast consider the various places where we will be building stations. Lynnwood Transit Center for example. There is practically nothing there. Maybe it could develop some TOD. Are there obstacles to development? Absolutely. About half the potential development is cut off because of the freeway and surrounding greenbelt. Is it the type of place you want to live? Not really. It is right next to the freeway! Yes, there is a greenbelt, but it isn’t a real park. It is nowhere near any attractions. You have the community college, but even that is a ways away. (In contrast going from 23rd & Madison to Seattle Central is not only closer but a much nicer walk.) The only thing it has going for it is the station. But even then those destinations are a long ways away. Only a handful of people jump on the train and get off anywhere north of Seattle — over fifteen minutes away (not counting the waiting and the time spent getting to and from the station). Oh, and even if you are headed to Seattle there is a freeway right there, making the station only really attractive for commuters.
Thus you have the gigantic parking garage. This is commuter rail at subway rail costs. It is designed so that people drive to the station and get to their job in the city. This is also a model that we know fails to build the kind of ridership that urban transit does.
To be clear, Lynnwood Transit Center does connect well with buses that come from the north (on the freeway). But that doesn’t explain why every other station north of Roosevelt is also by the freeway. That is just poor planning. One freeway station (connecting to the buses and even containing a huge parking garage) is fine. But a half dozen (or more) is not.
Seattle lacks coverage as well and there are no plans to significantly increase it. Worse yet, there are no plans to improve the connection between Link and the buses (even though the buses are clearly the most important part of our transit system and will always have more riders than the train).
Part of the problem is that we have never been quite sure what we are building. We are building light rail (like Portland) yet we spend billions on it. (Link is probably the most expensive light rail system ever built.) That is because it isn’t really light rail — it more like light metro with light rail trains. This is not the end of the world except it is somehow a hybrid light rail/regional rail system. Except it isn’t regional rail like that found in most parts of the world. It doesn’t take advantage of the existing rail system to keep costs down while service village centers (it is not S-Bahn). Worse yet, it runs next to the freeway — the worst possible way to extend your system. Thus it is both expensive (to both build and maintain) and not very effective. It manages to go farther from the city center than gigantic systems like the London Underground and Overground. It an extremely expensive, not very effective hodge-podge of technologies and models. The worst part is, there is a much better approach used by our nearest neighbor that is way more effective that we have simply ignored.
I’m not talking Portland, I’m talking about Vancouver, BC. Unlike Seattle, Vancouver has built a standard, run-of-the-mill, not-the least-bit-unusual metro. It has good stop spacing and good coverage. The only thing unusual about is that the trains are automated. But even that has become the worldwide standard. But it isn’t the automation that makes the system so effective — it is the integration. The buses and trains work together extremely well, providing what transit writer and professional consultant Jarrett Walker calls “an almost perfect grid”. The system allows you to get just about anywhere from anywhere quite quickly using the combination of buses and trains.
The results are quite astounding. Over 800,000 people a day ride the trains. This is third highest in English-speaking North America, behind only Toronto and New York City! The trains carry half a million riders — fifth in North America. Transit ridership is similar if not better than cities like Washington DC and Chicago — much bigger cities with bigger, more established transit systems. They are really an excellent model for North America that Seattle simply ignored.
It is easy to criticize Portland but Portland didn’t spend a fortune on those trains. We are. Yet we will get very little out of them. If we had simply built a standard metro we would have been much better off.
“It is easy to criticize Portland but Portland didn’t spend a fortune on those trains.”
Exactly this. Portland went the fast and cheap route.
Also Portland doesn’t have long distance termini that they have wanted to reach. Beaverton is only about 4-5 miles and Gresham is about 15. Milwaukie is about 6 miles and Clakamas is about 11. (Even Vancouver WA is just about 10 miles.)
Compare that to Federal Way at 23 miles, Tacoma at 34 miles and Everett at 29 miles. Even a place like Bellevue is 10 miles and Redmond is 15 (similar to Portland – Gresham).
So the glorified streetcar vehicle used in Portland moving at a slower maximum speed makes more sense for Portland.
To me, this is where ST didn’t fully think through things and made a poor choice. They chose a light rail vehicle limited in maximum speed yet wanted to reach destinations much further than Portland or Vancouver did.
If ST was able to have held the system to have its end points less than 15 miles like Portland the vehicles make sense. It’s mostly why ST2 has so much more value than ST3.
Finally I note that Link was planned using the DSTT as the strategic core. Yet DSTT2 has an opposite history as an afterthought — even not getting any early study prior to the ST3 vote. The result is now wildly bad cost estimates, design controversies and very long delays.
If anything, a second transit tunnel through Downtown Seattle should be conceived as n initial centerpiece to move higher speed vehicles through Downtown (rather than merely move vehicles at a streetcar speed). That should have been the centerpiece of the expanded system . Then we wouldn’t have things like Tacoma Dome and Downtown Everett planned on being such a slog (72 minutes and 65* minutes).
*ST proclaims just 60 minutes to Downtown on its Everett Link page — but the same page says 33 minutes to Lynnwood City Center and the Link schedules show 32 minutes (not 27 minutes) from Lynnwood City Center to Westlake.
Portland doesn’t have anything like Tacoma or Everett that are exurban-distance anchors. Beaverton/Hillsboro and Gresham are more like Lynnwood and Federal Way. Clackamas and Milwaukie may be more like Everett (?), but they weren’t the primary goal of the network, they’re add-ons, and other areas in between or lateral weren’t sacrificed to get to them.
“It doesn’t take advantage of the existing rail system”
We don’t have existing rail to use. The BNSF tracks don’t go to Lynnwood or Federal Way. The previous interurban to 99 was ripped out a century ago and no longer available. Yet Lynnwood needs fast/frequent transit somehow, and it’s larger than a village.
Borth Portland and Vancouver had the advantage of existing rail corridors. The MAX Banfield corridor was a legacy rail route with the right of way still there. So was the Skytrain’s corridor across eastern Vancouver.
In contrast, our legacy rail went along the Lake Washington shore, serving the U-District but bypassing Wallingford and Lake City, and doing nothing for 95% of north Seattle. The interurban on 99 was ripped out a century ago and houses filled in. On the Eastside the legacy corridor ran north-south along approximately 405, which was too far out of the way for Seattle-Eastside service where the bulk of ridership is. And it was single-tracked so it could only support a small number of trains.
“Also Portland doesn’t have long distance termini that they have wanted to reach. Beaverton is only about 4-5 miles and Gresham is about 15. Milwaukie is about 6 miles and Clakamas is about 11. (Even Vancouver WA is just about 10 miles.)
Compare that to Federal Way at 23 miles, Tacoma at 34 miles and Everett at 29 miles. Even a place like Bellevue is 10 miles and Redmond is 15 (similar to Portland – Gresham).”
Wait, wait, wait. So if we mapped that onto Pugetopolis we’d get:
Pioneer Square = Westlake.
Beaverton = Roosevelt (beyond U-District).
Hillsboro = you didn’t mention but could we say Shoreline?
Milwaukie = Columbia City
Gresham = SeaTac airport/Des Moines
That leaves:
Lynnwood = beyond Gresham, or three times Beaverton
Or going east:
Beaverton = Mercer Island
Clackamas = Bellevue
Redmond = Gresham
Or going northwest/southwest:
Beaverton = Ballard
Milwaukie = West Seattle Junction
Clackamas = Burien
Gresham = Des Moines or Renton (via West Seattle and Burien)
“this is where ST didn’t fully think through things and made a poor choice. They chose a light rail vehicle limited in maximum speed yet wanted to reach destinations much further than Portland or Vancouver did.”
Ironically, it was because ST wanted to be like MAX that it chose light rail. Surface light rail was the precedent in Portland, San Diego, and San Jose. (And maybe Sacramento depending on when it was built.) That was ST’s original goal: mostly-surface light rail to keep the capital cost low to ensure a yes vote. The downtown tunnel was already there, and the tunnel to the U-District was unavoidable because of the Ship Canal. But the rest would be surface, from Intl Dist around the northeast side of Beacon Hill to SeaTac and presumably Tacoma. The north end was more vague, but presumably along I-5.
ST chose light because it’s street-compatible for those inexpensive surface segments it envisioned most of the network would be. Boardmembers said, “Light rail can do all three: surface, elevated, underground.”
But after Rainier Valley went through design and got surface (because ST said it couldn’t justify the cost of elevated/underground in a flat area), Tukwila objected to the surface routing on Tukwila Intl Blvd and forced it to be elevated. Then all the other segments wanted it grade-separated too. Roosevelt asked for a tunnel, and luckily for it, that turned out to be cheaper than weaving up and down and around I-5’s foundations between 63rd and 93rd. And then everything was grade-separated.
But then Bellevue asked for a downtown tunnel and asked ST to take the money from elsewhere in East King, so Bel-Red got lowered to the surface. (It also asked North King to take on the cost of Intl Dist-Judkins Park.) But that was the last surface segment. The I-5 routing in parts of Lynnwood Link and Federal Way Link is technically on the surface but has no level crossings.
And now ST is so concerned about collisions in Rainier Valley and SODO that it has said no more surface segments.
But the technology is still light rail. And Link’s train/track spec is limited to 55 mph even though light rail can go up to 65 or 80 if the track is flatter, has gentler curves, and higher-duty trains.
“*ST proclaims just 60 minutes to Downtown on its Everett Link page — but the same page says 33 minutes to Lynnwood City Center and the Link schedules show 32 minutes (not 27 minutes) from Lynnwood City Center to Westlake.”
The 60 minutes to Everett is based on Lynnwood’s planning estimate of 28 minutes (actually 32), and before the Paine Field detour was added (adding ~10 minutes). Since the people who want Everett’s travel time down to 60 minutes are the same people who want the Paine Field detour (i.e, Snohoish city/county politicians), we’ll leave it them to decide which one they want more, since they’re mutually exclusive.
Another way to look at MAX mapped onto Pugetopolis.
Maximum extent 11 miles: Shoreline, South Bellevue, Tukwila.
Since it’s unacceptable to terminate short of downtown Bellevue, Redmond, Lynnwood, or SeaTac airport, we’ll have to extend that to 15 miles. So all the lines would go a bit further than Gresham.
“The 60 minutes to Everett is based on Lynnwood’s planning estimate of 28 minutes (actually 32), and before the Paine Field detour was added (adding ~10 minutes).”
I don’t really think the issue is how ST arrived at that number. The issue is that today they state 33 minutes to Lynnwood City Center on the previous bullet found on the Everett Link web page, and it’s 32 minutes on their schedule (pulled from their schedule — also on the web site). So it’s clearly a mistake on the Everett Link page.
We all type misspelled words and can type a wrong digit. I’m just calling out that it should say 65 minutes on the web page.
ST won’t know how many minutes until a final route is chosen.
“Clackamas and Milwaukie may be more like Everett (?), but they weren’t the primary goal of the network”
Clackamas is like Northgate Mall, only with little around it within walking distance and more hills so little chance of more dense development. It’s got a hospital complex that could be good, but because it’s also a major freeway entrance tangle for the suburban sprawl further east, it’s really not safe to walk from anywhere to anywhere in that whole area.
Milwaukie is more like Snohomish: an old downtown with a small walkable retail area and some hope of being a decent transit destination. It’s only about 3 blocks long though, and a huge amount of downtown space is consumed by two schools and a church. A bunch is parking, but nowhere near as awful to get around than the Clackamas area.
But yes: if you put the Link spine onto Portland, you’d have MAX running to Woodburn and Kalama.
Nits:
1. The Banfield wasn’t exactly a legacy rail corridor. It’s a legacy freeway corridor. Sure, the railroad is there, but the reason for putting MAX along the freeway there was to get decent speed on that section, plus they were going to completely rebuild the freeway anyway, removing all the old overpasses. So, it made sense to put MAX there.
2. The reason TriMet went with a 55 mph car was because that’s what Rio de Janeiro got for its Metro line.
After the mess with the Boeing light rail car for streetcar lines in Boston and San Francisco, TriMet put in their specification that they wanted a “service proven design”. Bombardier said “We can license this from our partner in Belgium and it’s been running in Rio for some years now.”
If you look closely at the Banfield line, you will notice even now some of the curves appear to be superelevated for a much higher speed than 55 mph. That’s because when the Banfield line was designed, TriMet wanted to be able to do 70 mph through there, if the equipment could be found to do it. 90 km/h is what they got, because that’s what met their specifications. It hasn’t been revisited for 50 years.
Here’s something I believe is true, but never talked about on this blog.
Transit ridership may not be an honest or true way to judge urban planning/or the quality of life in a city.
If we believe in the mythical “15 minute city” (and I completely do) with most the basic needs of neighborhood in easy walking distance, transit usage should go down, right? If I work from home on Capitol Hill or Wallingford…. just how often am I going to leave? Sure, having transit available is a good thing, but I’m not forced to use it. Places like Mexico City have high transit use… caused by really bad urban planning. The poor live in barrios miles away from any jobs or services and are forced to take long bus rides all the time.
On an urban planning and land use, Greater Portland is miles ahead of Greater Seattle. Portland has functional neighborhoods even though the City government is a dumper fire. Bellevue is not Hillsboro after all. Oregon also has reasonable growth plans to push more growth South into existing towns in the Willamette Valley without creating the sprawl of say, Black Diamond.
So Portland is stuck with a clunky old light rail system that still works OK. So is Prague. Portland also has huge problems with homelessness and education that need to solved, just like Seattle. And honestly, looking the problems of the Greater PNW….. does anybody believe that digging more tunnels under Seattle is a solution? Because it will cost a shitload of money. There’s never the “housing vs. transit” fight on the blog…. but believe me that’s a real problem. Same with failing roads and bridges, education and a plethora of other issues.
I see your point. It would be better to look at modal share instead of ridership. You would want to look at all the trips (not just commuting) as well. How are people getting around? Are folks walking, biking and taking transit or are they driving everywhere? I don’t know. Most of that data is based on commuting and a lot of it is simply out of date.
But since we don’t have easy access to modal share numbers the ridership numbers at least give us a clue as to what is going on. It is quite common for folks to live in a 15-minute city and want to go to different neighborhoods. That is part of what living in a city (instead of a town) is all about. I don’t think Vancouver’s very good transit numbers are the result of an overly restrictive growth policy nor do I think that Portland’s relatively weak numbers are solely the result of good urbanism. From about 2005 to right before the pandemic there was a steady rise in overall transit ridership for Greater Seattle. This was also when much of the city became more urban and “self contained”. Say what you will about the “urban village” concept, it actually achieved its goal (in establishing pockets of urban living with many of the features of a 15-minute city). Yet ridership just kept growing. In contrast Portland pretty much leveled off in 2005.
It is worth noting that the buses in Portland have always carried more riders than the buses and that the trains just don’t carry that many people. This is a somewhat different criticism. You’ve put money into the trains and they don’t carry that many riders. Again, they didn’t put that much money, but it is quite possible that ridership would be higher if they had focused on improving the buses first. It is quite possible that a lot of people just drive in Portland because their transit trip is too slow.
Ross Bleakney,
Max lines in Portland are just much shorter than ST light rail lines. Much of that has to do with better urban planning in greater Portland.
Federal Way wasn’t even a “city” until 1990. If you even call that place a “city” now. Decades of unfettered and unplanned growth made a place where it’s simply impossible to not own car while living there. Puyallup is actually a town surrounded by endless McMansions. The growth on the Eastside of Lake Washington? Much of it is the same. As the region has grown, there has been some urban infill in the old town centers…. but it’s very car centered.
Here’s the folly of Sound Transit. Build all the light rail you want, it can’t really change the nature of what’s already there to start with. Go ahead and change zoning so apartments can replace single family homes. There is still no walkable “15 minute city” in suburbia. Nor will that change in anybody’s lifetime reading this. It is what it is.
Why I never will support Sound Transit is committing all the tax money to some 50 year master plan just doesn’t serve the people on a neighborhood scale.
Trips between home and work are only about 20-25 percent of all trips made.
Early US urban rail systems prior to 1960 were intended to carry every type of trip — not just commuter trips. It’s only been in our lifetime (say after 1960-70) did this commute peak obsession drive urban rail projects. Hence the proliferation of parking garages at new rail stations and obsessions with two hours at peak direction being overcrowded yet lightly used the rest of the day (like Lynnwood Link Extension).
Work from home has now turned that on its head. The long distance trips using Sounder South is half of what it was even now. It’s partly why so many fewer trips are using rail systems in a place like Dallas too.
If urban rail systems are going to survive, ways to change the system concept from a commute focus to an all-trip focus need to be developed and implemented. Most stations need to have real destinations beyond just Downtown office space.
An example: We need to encourage medical office buildings to be near Link stations. We need to get universities to locate new classroom buildings adjacent to Link stations. We need to have vibrant commercial districts right outside of station entrances rather than a located a few blocks away on the other side of a parking garage. We need to co-locate public services like libraries and rec centers adjacent to Link stations. Grade separated rail systems with Taj Mahal stations are expensive and challenging to build — and should be much more than just a place to get on a train to work.
Al S.
Well, you got it half right. The only way to really have rail system that works is put in the rail and have the city morph around it. Portland’s Max is older and the City grew around it…. it’s slow, it’s clunky, but it also works pretty well to large extent. As stated before, the lines aren’t that long. Neighborhoods grew with rail already there.
Portland isn’t going to tunnel under downtown. Because it costs too much and MAX slow, but it still works.
Greater Seattle isn’t relocating libraries, schools or anything else to make light rail work. There’s zero money and zero political will to do so. I see Sound Transit as the problem here, not a solution. For the money that stupid 2nd tunnel is going to cost, we would build 10 miles of above ground light rail and put in roads and utilities for a new city of a 100,000 people. This new city would be the gold standard for walkability and transit. The crazy idea we’re going to shoehorn a subway system AND affordable housing into an expensive city like Seattle needs to go away. Neither is it possible to bulldoze half of Skyway and start over…..
“If we believe in the mythical “15 minute city” (and I completely do) with most the basic needs of neighborhood in easy walking distance, transit usage should go down, right?”
Yes, urbanists came around to this conclusion in the past eight years. They were influenced by pedestrian advocates like Donald Shoup, and the success of bicycle networks like The Netherlands, New York City, and Portland. Shoup’s argument is that 100% of people are pedestrians, even when they just walk to bus stop or their car. And walking is the only mode built into humans (that’s my phrase) and doesn’t require expensive equipment or infrastructure. Just low-cost sidewalks, intersection treatments, off-street trails, and cut-throughs (in cul-de-sacs).
Urbanists also converged in the same timeframe from “denser is always better” (i.e., highrises) to “4-8 stories is best”. This was based on Paris’s experience that even 2 stories can fit a lot of people if you don’t have excessive dead space in between, and The Netherlands’ experience that’s building all new neighborhoods at that level. It’s sufficient for walkability and transit and to fit everybody in a reasonable footprint.
However, walkability also creates other factors. If you have both walkability and frequent transit, then both uses increase because you can go to so many more destinations on either one or the other. You have maximum freedom to get to all those destinations, that you don’t have in current Seattle or the suburbs. High freedom encourages more trips, which leads to increases in both walking and transit ridership. It leads to an equalibrium where you need a lot of both: wide sidewalks and ultra-frequent transit, and ever-expanding transit, just to keep from over crowding.
“Places like Mexico City have high transit use… caused by really bad urban planning. The poor live in barrios miles away from any jobs or services and are forced to take long bus rides all the time.”
No, it’s because of the large population and huge area. Jobs and destinations are everywhere, and different people go to different things. Even if you assume a typical “the barrio is 5 miles from the nearest job center/large village”, that may force a minimum level of transit use, but it goes beyond that. Their job may not be in the nearest job center but in one further away or across the city. Spouses may commute to different jobs in opposite directions. With 25 million total inhabitants, there have got to be at least 8 million that don’t both live and work in the city center or commute from their barrio to the nearest job center. And 8 million is the size of New York City, or twice as much as Pugetopolis.
@Al S,
“ Early US urban rail systems prior to 1960 were intended to carry every type of trip — not just commuter trips. It’s only been in our lifetime (say after 1960-70)…..”
It was actually the combination of urban freeways combined with racism and desegregation that changed the nature of transit. Freeways produced individual mobility, and the combination of freeways and desegregation led to White Flight. Then, since many jobs were still located in urban centers, the transit systems morphed into peak commute oriented type commuter systems.
We are still dealing with the fallout of White Flight, and we will be for a long time.
“On an urban planning and land use, Greater Portland is miles ahead of Greater Seattle. Portland has functional neighborhoods”
I don’t know that Portland’s neighborhoods are more functional than Seattle’s. Portland does have more of a complete bus grid, making it easier to get between all the neighborhoods. And downtown Portland has the oft-lauded short blocks. But do Portland neighborhoods have a larger variety of retail and apartments and safety than Ballard, Wallingford, Columbia City, or the West Seattle Junction? Is greater downtown Portland as large and comprehensive as downtown-SLU-Uptown-Capitol Hill-First Hill-CID-Little Saigon?
“Bellevue is not Hillsboro after all.”
What does that mean?
“Oregon also has reasonable growth plans to push more growth South into existing towns in the Willamette Valley without creating the sprawl of say, Black Diamond.”
I don’t know about Portland-area growth or whether it’s adhering to its urban growth boundary more strictly. But the growth in Black Diamond or Maple Valley is not that many people or units. They’re not a new Kent or Renton.
And I thought you were a single-family growth advocate. Single-family residential-only neighborhoods are sprawl. Especially when combined with one-story big-box stores and strip malls with large parking lots and gas-station mini marts as their only form of retail. Sprawl is sprawl whether it’s in outer Kent, Black Diamond, or Snoqualmie. What we need is more middle/mixed density, in compact rectangular groupings and straight along existing arterials.
“If I work from home on Capitol Hill or Wallingford…. just how often am I going to leave?”
When I lived in the UW dorms and after college at 56th & University Way, I left the U-District once a month except for work. But even with a significant number of people doing that, there’s still a lot of people on the 44, 31/32, 67, Link, 271, etc. Because even a minority of a large population is still large.
“does anybody believe that digging more tunnels under Seattle is a solution?”
Only in the context that Seattle already has the biggest travel patterns covered: UDistrict to Lynnwood, Rainier equity area to SeaTac, Bellevue to Redmond (soon). If it didn’t have that it would need tunnels. The 71/72/73X to the U-District were melting down with overcrowding and unreliability, and no ability to fix it by widening roads or building a new busway. (Where? Around the hills? A new Ship Canal Bridge? Widening I-5? Cutting into the Eastlake hillside? Against which NIMBYs?)
“Portland also has huge problems with homelessness and education that need to solved,”
That has nothing to do with what transit we need. We need both transit and housing and education, not just one or two of them.
“Portland also has huge problems with homelessness and education that need to solved, just like Seattle. And honestly, looking the problems of the Greater PNW…..
“Federal Way wasn’t even a “city” until 1990.”
But Federal Way has been privileged for transit going back to the 1980s. That seems to be because it’s on I-5, so it’s the “right place” for the most express buses and Link and a large transit hub, because it’s the largest city on I-5 between Seattle and Tacoma. Never mind that Kent and Auburn are larger and more central, what matters is the Interstate highways.
“Puyallup is actually a town surrounded by endless McMansions. The growth on the Eastside of Lake Washington? Much of it is the same.”
You’re forgetting about downtown Bellevue, downtown Redmond, and the Bel-Red area in between. That’s like Chicago’s North Side or much of Manhattan. (Not Mahattan’s highrise center, but all the area around it, including the new residential district east of the World Trade Center that emerged after 9/11. That’s all 8-10 stories, not 15 or 100 stories.) Saying the Eastside is just a few small towns with mostly McMansions and therefore shouldn’t have a subway trunk, is inaccurate.
There’s also the growing central Kirkland area. Link doesn’t address that, and Stride 2 will bypass a lot of it, but it has grown to the point that it needs a significant transit solution of some kind, not just the 255 and RapidRide K. And it’s continuing to grow.
“Here’s the folly of Sound Transit. Build all the light rail you want, it can’t really change the nature of what’s already there to start with. Go ahead and change zoning so apartments can replace single family homes.”
Sound Transit doesn’t control zoning. That’s the counties, cities, and PSRC. The apartment upzoning would happen anyway with or without Link. Because that’s the policy of the cities, counties, and PSRC.
> Go ahead and change zoning so apartments can replace single family homes. There is still no walkable “15 minute city” in suburbia. Nor will that change in anybody’s lifetime reading this. It is what it is.
If you genuinely believe this, I suggest you get out of the way of the people trying to make changes within our lifetime.
“There is still no walkable “15 minute city” in suburbia.”
Actually, Downtown Bellevue is a 15-minute city, and it already was in the early 80s when I was in high school. People from Bellevue High School walked to Safeway, Bellevue Square, their homes, jobs, activities in various buildings, the library, etc.
When I moved from east Bellevue to there, it was a breath of fresh air. In east Bellevue the closest businesses were a lone 7-11 a half mile away, and a small 3-business supermarket plaza a mile away in a different direction.
And Northup Way east of 156th did not have streetlights or sidewalks, and had a ditch next to the street. I found that out when I walked one might past the small supermarket to the movie theater, and it was pitch black. The only light was car headlights when they passed, so it was hard not to stray into the road or into the ditch. I may have stood still between the headlights until the next one. Fortunately, all that is gone. Northup Way now has streetlights, sidewalks, and the ditch is gone.
> If we believe in the mythical “15 minute city” (and I completely do) with most the basic needs of neighborhood in easy walking distance, transit usage should go down, right?
Tacommee have you never been to San francisco or new york or any european city? transit usage goes up when it is much more walkable to go from place to place.
This isn’t even unique to urbanist advocates. You can somewhat see it even with car oriented places like large malls or even strip malls. It is exceedingly annoying to have to find a parking spot and then have to repark it for each shop that one is visiting for. The main concept is just extending it to not only retail but with housing and other amenities.
Wesley Lin,
I’ve been to many cities in both Asia and Europe. I also understand there’s the Europe tourists see and well heeled White people live in and there’s another Europe with back streets crammed with immigrants and refugees who struggle. Places like Hamburg Germany have huge ugly apartment blocks full of Turkish families who ride bad transit to their bad jobs…. maybe that’s just the way life is.
New York City and San Francisco are not the solutions. Can you afford to live in either? Who cares if they have good transit? are they walkable? If you make something like 200k a year maybe they are? I don’t have that sort of money so I don’t think about it much. You want Seattle to become “San Francisco North?” I think that already happened.
Renting a one bedroom in one of Seattle’s more transit rich, walkable neighborhoods costs around what? $25,000 a year?
As soon as you have a “15 minute city” with reasonable housing prices and 70% home ownership… I’m all in. But holding up NYC or San Francisco as what the rest of America should aim for?
@tacommee
you didn’t address what I said and just went straight to the housing crisis. Which again we have talked about in previous threads.
> As soon as you have a “15 minute city” with reasonable housing prices and 70% home ownership… I’m all in.
Do you even know what the 15 minute city measurement means? It just means trying to add in or approve for example library or shops if one doesn’t exist in that area yet. By that metric are you going to say “cities with sewers are expensive” therefore don’t approve new sewers being built to maintain affordability?
“As soon as you have a “15 minute city” with reasonable housing prices and 70% home ownership… I’m all in. But holding up NYC or San Francisco as what the rest of America should aim for?”
The reason Wesley mentioned Europe, New York, and San Francisco is they’re good examples most Americans are familiar with. There’s also Japan, China, Colombia, Mexico, etc but fewer people are familiar with them. A city with good transit/walkability is better than the same city with bad transit/walkability. Housing prices, ethnic mix, and housing quality are separate independent issues. The reason transit-rich/walkable areas in the US are so expensive is there’s not enough of them to go around for everybody who wants it. If all cities were transit-rich/walkable throughout most of the city, there would be no price premium on it. So the solution to expensive San Francisco is not to give up on San Francisco, but to make more cities transit-rich/walkable. It’s certainly not to make San Francisco transit-poor and non-walkable because rich people live there. All cities should be transit-rich and walkable, both expensive cities and inexpensive cities, both mostly-owned and mostly-rented cities, for rich and poor and white and nonwhite alike.
Where are there affordable “15 minute cities”?
There are plenty of areas near major college campuses across the country that operate as 15 minute cities. Just go to Bloomington or West Lafayette, Indiana for example. Many of these campuses have their own free university transit system or a great local transit system.
If you also want urban light or heavy rail there are cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Minneapolis/ St Paul, New Orleans, Cleveland and Atlanta that have rail stations near vibrant and complete neighborhoods. Many of these cities have interesting and big urban park systems too. It may not be as cheap as West Virginia (although Morgantown also has 15 minute city features), but it’s much cheaper than Seattle is. And of course the weather may not be to your liking.
Admittedly, Seattle’s temperate climate, scenery, variety and job opportunities are hard to beat. We are spoiled in that regard. But if you are willing to sacrifice something you should be able to find 15 minute city happiness all over the country.
“Places like Hamburg Germany have huge ugly apartment blocks full of Turkish families who ride bad transit to their bad jobs…. maybe that’s just the way life is.”
You can say things without being classist or racist, you know.
“There are plenty of areas near major college campuses across the country that operate as 15 minute cities.”
How’s Pullman, Ellensburg, Bellingham, Cheney, and Olympia?
My experience is that the number of trips involving transit that can be dependably taken in 15 minutes or less, door to door, is vanishingly small, even in cities with very good transit systems. Of course, many cities have a lot of car-free trips in 15 minutes or less, but, in practice, trips that short tend to be walking or cycling, not transit.
A little bit of an explanation why: If a bus or train runs every 10 minutes (very frequent), the worst-case wait time is already 10 minutes, so just 5 minutes combined, walking to/from the transit, you’re already up to 15 minutes. And, in the case of rail transit, the access time includes time going up and down the elevators or escalators, not just walking to the station entrance.
Again, this is not to say that transit is unimportant – it is very important for longer trips, but practically speaking, the places that you can reach without a car in 15 minutes or less from your home are the places you’re just walking to. (Which can still be a whole lot of places, if the city is designed right).
It’s “coverage” in one sense but not in another. Portland’s surface alignment allowed it to build a five-line system to many more neighborhoods and cities decades before we have anything like that, so it’s more possible to take MAX from anywhere to anywhere than with Link. You can’t take MAX everywhere, but you can take it to more quarters of the city and suburbs. On the other hand, the slow downtown segment (20 minutes from end to end) partly defeats the advantage of having rapid transit rail, as it’s not really rapid. We need solutions that really work well, not watered-down solutions that benefit a bit but don’t give the mobility freedom like Washington DC or London.
But it’s NOT coverage in the sense of serving low-volume areas with few destinations, like Metro route 37 or 131. MAX goes to major destinations that would be in any subway network. So saying four of its five lines are coverage can be misinterpreted in anti-transit ways, as if they shouldn’t have built them.
“Portland was also one of the first cities to show North America that the future is rail.”
And replacing a proposed freeway with light rail. And having the federal government pay for most of it.
> And Seattle is fast catching up on coverage. With DRLE, Full ELE, and FWLE all coming online in the next 18 months or so, the Seattle region is about to make great strides in coverage.
I semi-agree though I wouldn’t quite call it “coverage” but perhaps “suburban coverage”.
> But Portland has something we don’t have yet, “coverage”. And that is partly why Portland built their system the way they did. Because cheaper line costs allow for more coverage, and that was the point of doing it the way they did.
I think we should have covered west seattle and ballard with portland’s model.
“I think we should have covered west seattle and ballard with portland’s model.”
Yes I think that is what the public was thinking about a decade ago. Then ST decides to go for full grade separation instead. It’s why the costs for both projects have skyrocketed. It’s not inflation as much as it is those involved having expensive tastes.
Even the DSTT2 segment and its wildly deep stations could have looked at being more surface running. We could have had a Third Ave streetcar spine with two car trains and two or three branches at each end. It would be cheaper and less disruptive to built — and for riders the hassle of going so deep to an underground platform eats into any travel time advantage for going underground. I think even the CID would be receptive to the idea. I’ll note that central Boston has few bus lines in it as the system forces people mostly into trains even in places like Cambridge and Brookline ehhch are just a short distance from Downtown Boston.
Certainly the water crossings and grades are factors in the current design — but honestly the projects are way overly built for the demand to West Seattle or beyond Seattle Center.
For all the flaws and weaknesses or our transit system it is clear we at least built things in the right order. Building the bus tunnel first saved riders a huge amount of time long before we had rail. It also meant that a key piece — arguably the most important piece — was largely done. Not only has Portland built things in the wrong order, but it isn’t clear that Portland has built the right things. It is quite possible that a busway (or series of busways) would have been more effective. (Although to be fair it may have also been more expensive.)
I don’t think Portland would have been able to get a bus tunnel like Seattle got. At the time, not even Los Angeles had a transit tunnel. The opposition was insistent that only truly big cities could make those types of transit capital infrastructure investments work.
I don’t think they’d have been able to take parts of NE Holladay or E Burnside for a busway like they did for MAX.
I don’t know enough about Portland’s transit system or politics to know how much different it is than Seattle. The bus tunnel had a lot of backing from the suburbs while many leaders in the city wanted a transit mall. But either way there was support for something. Downtown business leaders understood that you just can’t expect everyone to drive into the city — the buses were very important. Having those buses stuck in traffic cost Metro a ton of money and delayed riders.
It was also designed so that it could eventually be converted to rail. That was another selling point. There were plenty of people who still wanted a county-wide subway system but there were also plenty of people that didn’t want to touch the subject (after Forward Thrust). I don’t think a completely (or even mostly) surface rail system was ever considered. It really doesn’t make sense for us. Thus the fact that we ultimately used light rail (a mode designed very well for surface travel) is a bit ironic.
Your comment about “truly big cities” building tunnels makes sense but it seems funny in the overall scheme of things. Compared to a full-fledged subway serving most of the city — or even just the main section from the UW to downtown — it is much, much cheaper. That was one of the big selling points. It would have been quite reasonable for the city and state to get together and run a subway line from downtown to the UW. This was one of the busiest transit corridors that was still served by buses. It would help both the university and downtown — the main economic engine for the region and the state. It could be later extended (in various directions). But (at least initially) it would have been very expensive and done little for the suburbs. In contrast the bus tunnel did.
And there’s far smaller cities than Portland in Europe with a city center tunnel.
Unfortunately, trying to get the majority of people, even now, to support that level of investment is an uphill battle. At the time? It was a real undertaking just to get what we did.
Bielefeld has a downtown tunnel, population 340K. I had a German exchange student from Bielefeld (100 miles from Düsseldorf) in my college class in the 90s, and one day he he proudly said, “Little Bielefeld is getting a subway!” That’s a U-Stadtbahn, or a network like MAX getting a downtown tunnel.
Portland’s city population is 630K, or almost twice as large. Portland’s metro population, which MAX serves, is 2.5 million.
Tom Terrific,
True! Portland has bigger fish to fry than a train tunnel.
As far as growth, I’d roughly model Seattle’s next 10 years about the same as Portlands’s last 10. Both cities have a big housing crisis, public education crisis, homeless drug addict crisis and 2 State governments running on empty.
Seattle seems pretty penned in to completing the Sound Transit brochure of 2016, but Portland would have to pass a vote to start digging a tunnel…..
The new Regional Day Pass prices proposed to roll out on March 1 bring our fare system closer to TriMet’s.
But consider if ORCA accounts were to have the option of automatically purchasing and activating an RDP at first tap of the day (excluding Washington State Ferries), so long as there is no other pass relevant to that ride already loaded.
Or, the Portland area HOP card option of automatically changing up a day pass after a certain number of taps?
Are you talking about their day caps and month caps, which they don’t call “caps”?
Various agencies are describing the newly-priced Regional Day Pass as similar to day capping. However, our pass would essentially cap the fare for a day at the cost of two Metro/Link/STX rides. It takes three rides to reach the TriMet day cap.
Portland does not have ferries, a commuter heavy rail, or a profit-driven-overpriced monorail to mess up their systemwide fare alignment. OTOH, Portland does not have the possibility of going into negative e-purse on distance-based Sounder as a justification for charging $3 for a card or account. I can see charging something for the card to avoid them being treated as disposable. But for a plastic-free account? That seems counterproductive. Or is TriMet going cashless?
Given the existence of services in the ORCA Pod which are unlikely to lower their fare to $3, and so the unlikelihood of day capping being feasible here, do you have a second-best option that is feasible here and better than an option on each ORCA-account to auto-purchase a Regional Day Pass with the first tap of the day?
“It takes three rides to reach the TriMet day cap.”
It’s actually two.
https://support.trimet.org/hc/en-us/articles/4417251761051-How-much-does-it-cost-to-ride
The reason I don’t call it “fare capping” is because it isn’t quite that. If you pay a TriMet ticket twice with the card, you get a TriMet day pass installed on the card instead. However, if you board one of the CTran express buses to Clark County, an extra fare still applies.
I call it a day pass because the TriMet card readers say “Day Pass” when you tap.
CTran has chosen “fare cap” though:
https://support.trimet.org/hc/en-us/articles/4417251761051-How-much-does-it-cost-to-ride
The big thing is not having to buy and load the pass onto the card in advance.
We don’t have the monorail, but instead we have WES and the aerial tram. The tram has stopped accepting the HOP card and now charges $8.50 for cash fares. WES and Areal Tram used to require a day ticket, minimum, but has since switched to the same fare structure as the rest of TriMet. So, if you tapped on at them, you’d be charged $5 (the day ticket price at the time).
It seems like there should be a way to get ST express to be recognized as a premium service and a higher fare cap applied, like they do here with CTran express.
Thanks for pointing out the evolution of TriMets’s day pass.
ST Express may soon have little reason to charge a premium fare, if ST Express 594 ends up being the only Tacoma-Seattle express-ish bus route, and only runs off-peak. In the meantime, ST Express will not be charging a premium fare, as the fare is set to drop to $3 on March 1.
I live in Portland, and take MAX four days a week. I’ve ridden extensively on the different lines so I can give an “on the ground” perspective comparing it to Link.
A downtown tunnel would be great, but I don’t see it happening for a long, long time, if ever. And in fact, street-running through downtown has the silver lining of making it very easy to do intra-downtown trips because you don’t have to schlep in and out of a tunnel.
My biggest gripes about MAX are the ways the existing system doesn’t get leveraged to its full potential. So many of the suburban stations are still surrounded by parking lots after all these years, only a few of them like Orenco Station have decent TOD. These stations also often lack even sidewalks nearby – for a while I commuted to the westside Millikan Way station and had to walk on the side of the road to get to work from there!
There’s just no good justification for that kind of laziness/oversight. What is the point of a built-out rail system if you can’t even walk safely from the station to your destination?
You also see a glaring lack of pedestrian bridges on those MAX freeway stations. Like at the Clackamas Town Center station if you want to get to the other side of the freeway, you have to walk down a trash-strewn pathway and then cross some huge intersections. A worse experience then, say, crossing the bridge over I-5 at Northgate.
To my understanding, Seattle is doing a better job at all of these points. Just a little perspective that may cheer up anyone who feels gloomy about Link!
Thanks for posting!
I’ve been visiting Portland and riding MAX for years and it’s amazing to me how well much of the system fits seamlessly into some neighborhoods…. and then how completely terrible it is on other places.
I don’t see speed as the real problem in Portland, it’s connectivity issues, pedestrian issues and a lack of housing. Tearing down parking garages isn’t cheap and brings a great deal of political baggage, but that’s Portland’s next step. That and those empty office buildings downtown. Tear ’em down and build some housing.
I wish it was easier to get to Hillsboro Stadium from downtown on transit…. it’s like a 2 hour plus adventure to see a baseball game.
“I don’t see speed as the real problem in Portland”
Speed is mainly a problem on the Steel Bridge segment, the speed restrictions became of it being an old bridge create bottlenecks on keeping to the schedule if one train is late or delayed elsewhere. Hence why Trimet has looked into tunneling the East-West line from Goose Hollow to Llyod Center. I’ve ridden the MAX during rush hour, it can sometimes take forever to get from Rose Quarter and Old Town/Chinatown, which is on the other side of the Steel Bridge. It’s an important thing that should be done in the future, but not the biggest priority. As they have improved speed elsewhere in Downtown by deleting redundant stations that just slow down the ride through Downtown.
Zach B.
Maybe slow transit is just life in the city?
Let’s say Portland did come up with the billons of dollars to bore a deep tunnel under downtown. Sure, the train would move faster, but there would be the hike up (and down) to the subway station. Same trip times…. billions more in costs.
But trips from the east end to the center of downtown or the western side of downtown would be faster, and vice-versa for the west end. Trips from the western end of downtown (Goose Hollow) to the eastern end (Lloyd Center) would be faster. That’s the impetus for a tunnel. It’s hard to take seriously the argument that bad transit is good. Germany builds downtown tunnels because it increases transit’s effectiveness, public satisfaction, and economic productivity and opportunities. That’s what happened in Seattle with the downtown tunnel too.
You’d have to count up the travel time of the speed improvement vs the station access hinderance: you can’t just assume the station access would cancel it all out, because maybe it wouldn’t, or maybe it wouldn’t for some stations or trip pairs. If it doesn’t work for just taking it one or two stations within downtown, well, that’s what buses and walking are for! The same thing happens with DSTT: it doesn’t make sense to ride Link from Westlake to Symphony, but it does from Westlake to Intl Dist or Capitol Hill, and it really makes a lot of sense if you’re going from Westlake to U-District or Westlake to Beacon Hill or further.
Trimet engineers and planners have pointed to the Steel Bridge being a problem for MAX operations for years. It carries 4 MAX lines (Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow) which means it carries 16+ trains per hour at peak times or a train going across the bridge every 3 minutes and 45 seconds. Which means there’s little wiggle room for delays with such headways. Get a train delayed there or elsewhere has a cascading effect on the rest of the system in terms of delays elsewhere. Add in the speed restrictions on the Steel Bridge down to 25 mph, which means that the MAX is a slow crawl through the city center.
Trimet recently is in the process to close 4 different stations in the city center, Kings Hill/SW Salmon, Mall/SW 4th & 5th Ave, and Skidmore Fountain. With the process being complete in August 2025 with the closure of Skidmore Fountain. Which is supposed to speed up operations in the city center and eliminate redundancy as some were only a block apart from one another.
Trimet believes that will move the needle somewhat and will fix many problems in the short-term, but they do see the tunnel as a possibility in the long term for operations because they know other problems will arise in the future as the Steel Bridge keeps aging. And this isn’t unprecedented either, as Germany’s Stadtbahn systems generally have a city center tunnel section for consolidating train traffic underground and out of the way for operations efficiency and speed.
As for cost of the tunnel proposal, all I can say is it doesn’t really matter in the end quite frankly. I honestly don’t care about cost that much because it’s hard for lay people like you, me, and others here to truly quantify it in a realistic manner compared to an engineer, designer, or planner who have to deal with and look at spreadsheets, costs, negotiate contracts, etc in their line of work. I put more trust in people who have to do the actual work of transit planning than sone random person at a city council meeting complaining about it. Hence why I rarely if ever give my opinion towards cost, because it really isn’t my place to talk about it.
“Trimet engineers and planners have pointed to the Steel Bridge being a problem for MAX operations for years.”
I experience MAX trains slowing down to a crawl to cross the Steel Bridge whenever I’m there.
“Maybe slow transit is just life in the city?”
You know, Germany has solved this problem. It’s not inevitable, it’s not un-American to fix it, we’re not too poor as a society, and it’s not incompatible with raising kids or wanting to live with a house you own with a yard.
I terms of coverage, the Portland MAX really isn’t even all that great. Outside of downtown, the vast majority of destinations are accessible only by bus. Within downtown, MAX and the streetcar cover the area pretty well, except Portland downtown is small enough that you can just walk everywhere and (except for disabled people) don’t really need motorized transport at all. Last summer, for example, I spent a week in downtown Portland, and made several trips between PSU and the Pearl District. Every one of those trips were on foot. Yes, the transit system could have done it, but between the slowness, 5 minute average wait time, and short distances, it wouldn’t have been any faster. The only MAX trip I made the entire trip was between downtown and the Arboretum, and even then, I only rode it one direction and walked the other.
In a nutshell, I think one of the problems with Portland transit is that they spent too many resources trying to compete with walking in a small part of the city, rather than competing with cars on longer-distance trips to other parts of the city.
Most people are not as ambitious walkers as you, and the Pearl District-PSU trip you described takes about half an hour on foot but only ten minutes by Max. So I’m going to disagree with you on Max not being useful for intra-downtown trips; also because of my experience taking such trips on weekdays as part of my daily commute. The downtown trains are usually fairly full of passengers, especially when they run 1-car trains.
I will again double down on my point that Max’s weak points are not in coverage, but rather in utilizing the existing stations to their fullest potential. This is a system that has 60 miles of track, and 97 stations! That’s a lot for a relatively small metro area. But so many of these stations are either hard to walk to and from, or just don’t have much going on nearby compared to the average Link station. That is why more people don’t take Max.
The orange line would have been so much better if somehow the Bybee station would have been in Sellwood rather than in the middle of…um…nothing.
So many missed opportunities like that, and some of the new Link stations are going to be like that as well.
In the case of your specific example about 10 minutes on MAX vs. 30 minutes on walking…the actual difference is less than it seems. It might be 10 minutes to ride the MAX, but you also have to walk to the station, wait for the train, and walk from the station to the final destination. So, if walking to the station takes 5 minutes, walking from the station at the other end takes 5 minutes, and waiting for the train takes 10 minutes (all fairly typical numbers), then the door to door travel time using MAX ends up being the same 30 minutes as just walking all the way, directly from origin to destination. If you actually need to be somewhere at a certain time, and are able to walk faster, walking pulls ahead (unless you happen to see a train coming at exactly the right time). This phenomenon is even stronger when comparing with the Portland Streetcar, which move more slowly than MAX. I’ve seen YouTube videos of people racing the streetcar on foot, from station to station, the entire length of the line, and winning rather easily.
Going back to the discussion about transit service, I think MAX stopping regularly through downtown is fine, as these stops serve a lot of overlapping trips where one end is in downtown, the other isn’t. Similarly with bus routes that stop regularly downtown. What I have issue with is really the Portland Streetcar, which cost a huge amount of money to build, and it’s entire purpose is intra-downtown trips. Sure, it has some value, but that huge amount of money necessary to build it and run it is money that would have been better spent simply running the regular bus routes more frequently.
Btw anyone have any suggestions for (transit or transit adjacent) article ideas they’d like to see?
I’m curious what kind of frequency and pricing is being contemplated for high-speed rail and for higher-speed Amtrak, and which will do better job of reducing wait+trip time, at what likely price.
I’m curious if there are any transit improvements planned for I-5. Specifically for Tacoma-Seattle, but curious about the whole Everett-Tacoma corridor. I remember there being talk of tolling and perhaps ramp reconfigurations?
There’s a couple articles I’m working on for the I-5 corridor. Namely hov to toll conversion.
> whole Everett-Tacoma corridor
Currently wsdot is undergoing a i5 master plan study. https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-studies/i-5-study I’m like 99% confident it’ll suggest converting the hov lanes to toll lanes. beyond that though is more complicated with the reversible express lanes in downtown seattle and whether they will add new hov direct access ramps (from center of freeway to enter/exit)
For the I-5 lid you might want to read at https://lidi5.org/ I checked it briefly and while interesting there’s not much to do about transit. but I could write about one if there’s enough interest
Toll lanes would be amazing. HOV lanes seem to fill up very quickly (perhaps due to low compliance?).
Briefly looking through the studies it looks like they haven’t gotten to the point of identifying projects yet. I wonder if it would be realistic to add center exit lanes on Yesler (perhaps with a mini-lid, like 80th/I-405 on Mercer Island?). Could potentially be sold as “emergency vehicle exit lanes” for Harborview and the surrounding hospitals as well.
> Briefly looking through the studies it looks like they haven’t gotten to the point of identifying projects yet.
they had more detailed studies in the 2012’s already that studied it. https://app.leg.wa.gov/ReportsToTheLegislature/Home/GetPDF?fileName=I-5_ExpressLanesReport_063011_web_6b0cc9e9-ed6e-4d31-8947-c401ebd1fa17.pdf
It’s discussed more in the article.
> . I wonder if it would be realistic to add center exit lanes on Yesler (perhaps with a mini-lid, like 80th/I-405 on Mercer Island?)
for the downtown core that’s somewhat unnecessary as the seneca exit ramps are already in the center. And also with the existing reversible express lane entrance/exits
There were talks back in 2008 about an airport way hov exit/entrance ramp. this was supposed to tie in with the sodo busway.
for the north side wsdot did briefly consider an denny way hov ramps, but I don’t think it was too seriously considered.
Anyways for the i-5 lid planning (2020~2025+) they’ve been semi considering closing some of the ramps and consolidating the ramp usage to other ramps. that would provide space for a lid.
the i5 master plan is somewhat complicated though as it is taking into account the “future of i5”, a potential high speed rail and also an i-5 lid. I really don’t know how it’ll play out with so many competing items.
Toll lanes would be amazing. HOV lanes seem to fill up very quickly (perhaps due to low compliance?).
I think the problem is just HOV-2. There are enough people who have two people in the car that it really doesn’t achieve much. It is a bit faster, but not like HOV-3. There is a dramatic difference on 520 between the buses and the regular lanes even if some of the people driving in the HOV lanes are cheaters.
If toll lanes work I’m definitely for them. I would first introduce HOV-3 lanes (since it would require a trivial amount of work) and then get working on HOT lanes. The main reason to add HOT lanes is that the state is running out of money for maintenance and the backlog of existing projects.
Ah I didn’t realize the Seneca exit is a center lane exit. It would be nice if there was a center southbound onramp as well but traffic into Seattle always seems much worse than coming out.
On compliance: I’ve (anecdotally) noticed that something like 1/4 of cars on the 520 HOV lane are 1-person. Maybe another 1/3 to 1/2 are 2-person. I think that most people don’t even realize it is a 3+ lane. Non-compliance numbers seem to rise when traffic gets worse (which is when the HOV is most needed…).
It’s probably still worth making it HOV 3+, but I think ETLs would be much more reliable
generally the etl compliance is much higher than just changing it to hov 3+ though there are some companies talking about automated hov fines using camera recognition.
ive thought about a consolidated article about photo recognition being used for bus lane, auto pedestrian detection for walk signals and hov compliance would be fun.
There were talks back in 2008 about an airport way hov exit/entrance ramp. this was supposed to tie in with the sodo busway.
Yeah, it was an official WSDOT project, but I can’t find the link for it. It was unfunded but they had a cost estimate. Basically it would tie together the SoDo busway and the HOV lanes of I-5 (making buses like the 101 significantly faster during rush hour).
I think it died and got removed from consideration with West Seattle Link. Thus West Seattle Link will make transit from the southeast worse in a couple ways. First the folks in Rainier Valley (who ride Link) will have to transfer to get to Capitol Hill, the UW, Roosevelt, Northgate, etc. Second the folks from Renton will lose the SoDo Busway. So not only did they lose the chance to get a faster ride to downtown, their trip will be slower than it is today. To be fair it is possible that Fourth Avenue South becomes as fast as the SoDo busway is today, but I really doubt that will happen. It may be faster (for buses) than it is today but there is only so much room and plenty of other considerations (like freight and pedestrian safety). The SoDo busway is well suited for fast transit travel — Fourth Avenue is not.
@ross
It was called the i5 direct access project. Estimated cost 80 million dollars, around 130 now with inflation or maybe 200 million with the cost increases
It’s actually not completely shelved. I see it in the other projects like the sr 509 extension it still talks about it
I think that most people don’t even realize it is a 3+ lane.
I disagree, otherwise it would move much, much slower. Same goes for the HOT lanes on 405. If people thought they were like the HOT lanes of 167 (and a two-person carpool could use them any time of day) then more people would be in them. A lot more.
I really don’t mind HOT lanes but it is important to remember that they are basically HOV lanes. To quote WSDOT (https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/roads-bridges/hov-lanes):
The I-405 Express Toll Lanes and SR 167 HOT Lanes are a form of HOV lane that can also be used by non-HOV drivers who choose to pay a toll. Drivers who do not qualify as a carpool have the choice to pay a toll for a faster trip when they need it.
The only significant difference is that if you have a “Good to Go” flex pass you need to set it to “Carpool” — otherwise you will be charged (https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/Toll-Instructions-FlexPassInstallation.pdf).
In any event it is quite likely that there are plenty of people who cheat. But no so many that HOV-3 lanes (whether they are HOV-3 or HOT-3) look just like HOV-2 lanes.
Looking at the Seneca/Spring I-5 exits more closely, it looks fairly promising for service to downtown Seattle. Seneca is a center exit, and Spring has bus lanes (recently built for the G line) right up to the freeway on-ramp.
@Ross Bleakney
I’ve specifically noticed this during the peak afternoon hours, when most cars are single-occupant and traffic is at its worst. I suspect that HOV 3+ is better than HOV 2+, but not significantly so.
ETLs likely have higher compliance because you need to buy a special pass in order to use them for free. I really dislike the system (tolls already incentivize carpooling since you can split the toll) but maybe it was the only way for it to be politically palatable.
@WL — Do you have a link? I can’t find it (via Google). I did find this though (via Wikipedia): https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/800m-for-tunnel-option-shifted-to-other-projects/. It has this:
Interstate 5 bus ramps: Ramps from HOV lanes to Sodo, for faster express-bus travel, $100 million.
I assume that is the SoDo busway (I don’t know what else it would be). That article also has this:
Spokane Street Viaduct: Transit ramps to Sodo busway, wider lanes, safety improvements, $130 million.
They already did some of the other work (I think). But that gives a good baseline for what we’ve been talking about for a while now (connecting West Seattle buses to the SoDo busway as an alternative to West Seattle Link). That was a while ago which means costs would be a lot higher.
@Ross
> They already did some of the other work (I think). But that gives a good baseline for what we’ve been talking about for a while now (connecting West Seattle buses to the SoDo busway as an alternative to West Seattle Link). That was a while ago which means costs would be a lot higher.
Fyi you don’t need to build a new ramp. the 4th avenue s one could already be used. aka like so: https://your.kingcounty.gov/kcdot/transit/SETP/SODOTransitReport.pdf
seattle already studied using 1st avenue (with lander overpass already built) or 4th avenue (with the spokane street to 4th avenue ramp already built). it could also be combined with the sodo bus ramps.
All of the infrastructure for these potential transit paths were already built. It’s just missing the bus lanes on 1st or 4th to connect it together.
I recall using the bus lanes for the Spring St. onramp before while on Trailhead Direct buses. Unfortunately, the lights are timed to prioritize cars, so unless traffic is really bad, being in the bus lane actually slows the bus down.
I suspect that HOV 3+ is better than HOV 2+, but not significantly so.
I disagree but I don’t have any data to back it up. I can’t find the average speeds of the various roads (and their HOV/HOT lanes). Looking at Google though the 520 bus has the same time at 6:00 pm as it does at noon (from the Evergreen Point Freeway Station to the UW). In contrast from Mercer Island to 4th and Jackson (also non-stop) it is six minutes slower at 6:00 pm. Some of that may be the surface streets but I doubt it is just that. In the past I’ve found 520 buses to be significantly faster than I-90 buses even though cars on I-90 are often slower.
ETLs likely have higher compliance because you need to buy a special pass in order to use them for free.
But it doesn’t cost much ($15). If you plan on regularly cheating it is a bargain. If you don’t plan on regularly cheating chances are you don’t regularly cheat.
Hov 3 lanes are just very hard to fine tune to versus demand. Aka general lane might be 2000 hov 2 maybe like 1500 and then hov 3 might be all the way at 400
I think wsdot proposed hov 3 during peak times and then hov 2 all other times. Or sometimes a varying time frame tailored per highway but it gets pretty complicated. The tolling allows a lot more vehicles to use the lane but ensuring it doesn’t become full.
> The only significant difference is that if you have a “Good to Go” flex pass you need to set it to “Carpool” — otherwise you will be charged
I don’t have any hard evidence but I think it’s still a pretty larger deterrent
Fyi you don’t need to build a new ramp [from the Spokane Street Viaduct to the SoDo busway]
Yes, but it would be faster if you had them. Right now if wanted to access the SoDo busway from the Spokane Street Viaduct you have to use the ramp on 4th if you are going eastbound to northbound (https://maps.app.goo.gl/fgf7tdxWsvf9Hwwy8) and the 1st avenue ramp for southbound to westbound (https://maps.app.goo.gl/WjARykhBNWpBJyuz9). Neither is terrible but there is a reason why Metro doesn’t do that right now. Most of the time it is faster to just go on SR 99.
First thing to do is add a southbound to westbound ramp from the SoDo busway. This would be similar to the ramps connecting First to the viaduct. You would probably have to take out the building there (Interior Environments) that is worth about 7 million (according to the latest assessment). Other than that it is a pretty straightforward and simple ramp. Going the other direction you would split off from the Fourth Avenue exit ramp. The simplest (and cheapest) approach would be to go over the railroad tracks and then swing around north and end right up just south of the busway. You would buy up this land here between the railroad and the warehouses (where the crane is): https://maps.app.goo.gl/EV4jgbdeBLWnS31h6. That would have a ramp (used only by buses) and a small stretch of busway. You would have to cross (lower) Spokane Street, but you wouldn’t have to cross the railroad tracks. You would only cross the street heading to downtown (just as the existing buses currently only cross it going away from downtown). You avoid the biggest potential for delay (which is the railroad tracks).
We are probably talking somewhere between $100 million to $200 million. For perspective the street work for Stride 3 (on Bothell Way) will cost over $500 million and involve far fewer riders and buses.
I think wsdot proposed hov 3 during peak times and then hov 2 all other times.
That is how 405 works.
The tolling allows a lot more vehicles to use the lane but ensuring it doesn’t become full.
That is the idea but it has had problems in the past. There are times when too many people use it. But if you raise the prices high enough it should work. You are basically giving excess capacity to those wiling to pay for it. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the HOV2 versus HOV3 dynamics.
One topic:
There has been a lot of discussion about the number of vehicles required for Link. They had miscalculated travel times with driver breaks, and spare needs. I believe that ST ordered more train cars but I’m not sure if they’ll arrive in time.
I’m curious what the current fleet situation is now. Will ST have enough rail cars in 2027 or not?
One interesting phenomenon I suddenly realized is that, the concept of driving to a park and ride to catch a bus or train is completely missing from Google Maps in 2025. They have car mode and bus mode, but no option to combine them.
Designing this would raise some interesting questions? For instance, do you route people in Sammamish to Issaquah Highlands Park and ride because it’s closer, or tell them to drive to Mercer Island to catch the bus because it’s faster?
I guess Google offers combinations even within the “transit” mode to solve the “last mile” problem (https://blog.google/products/maps/travel-your-first-and-last-mile-google-maps/). Their solution is to first present the transit options and then you can replace a leg of the journey with a cab ride. That isn’t necessary ideal, but given the complexity a reasonable trade-off.
It seems like park and ride trips would be simpler. One option would be to just present all the options and people could compare the time savings and decide on their own whether it is worth driving farther. Another is to restrict the amount of driving (which would be similar to the “less walking” option on transit). It does seem like “Park and Ride” would be a relatively easy option for Google to provide and in many ways simpler than the “taxi-cab and transit” combination. You are combining two elements that Google knows very well (driving and taking transit). You are only combining them once (starting with the driving).
It’s not explicitly stated, but I suspect the reason for prioritizing transit+taxi combos over transit+car combos ultimately boils down to money. A transit+taxi combos means you’re spending money, which means whoever is running the taxi system (e.g. Uber) has a strong business reason to want this feature, strong enough to be willing to pay Google a few million dollars to make it happen.
Whereas, driving your own personal car to transit is a trip that has no money in it. I suppose if commuter park and ride lots were privatized, then there would be money in it, but that would be an unviable business model, with ST giving away so much parking for free.
Big tech never explicitly says this, but their motivations in what they choose to do or not do almost always come down money, and in the case of maps, that means helping people find new ways to spend money.
This is also likely why Google Maps still has no “I’m a carpool, let me use the HOV lane” option. It would be a nice feature, but as one that doesn’t help people spend money, it’s of limited value.
@asdf2
> It’s not explicitly stated, but I suspect the reason for prioritizing transit+taxi combos over transit+car combos ultimately boils down to money.
Google maps has more options it’s just disabled/enabled per country level.
For instance in europe https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fthe-fact-that-google-maps-doesnt-let-you-combine-transit-v0-k1lbjmptgr0c1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D1125%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D67ae8b0688c6b4cba105eb3c6d2f83cf731d459d
google will suggest bike + train+ bus combos
For asia, there’s even moped mode for specifically moped directions.
> This is also likely why Google Maps still has no “I’m a carpool, let me use the HOV lane” option. It would be a nice feature, but as one that doesn’t help people spend money, it’s of limited value.
I don’t know why google doesn’t bring it to maps; but you can actually use it on waze (also owned by google). there’s an hov toggle. https://support.google.com/waze/answer/7490936?hl=en
The Transit App that had bus/bike pairings, which has made it my go to.
Martin, what’s the smallest German city with a tram and a downtown tunnel? Do you know about neighboring countries?
I watched the video. It’s the subway stations that really get expensive, especially in a dense urban area with a lot of water. Here’s a wild idea: Portland could more easily afford a bypass tunnel for one of the MAX lines with ZERO stations that just makes crosstown trips super efficient on at least one of the lines. Existing surface stations would remain. Tunnels would be bored, real estate costs/impacts would be minimal, operational savings could be significant. Obviously some transfers would be introduced for some trips.
Has anyone ever considered a downtown bypass tunnel for Portland?
That would be like our 99 automobile bypass. Buses can’t use it because it doesn’t stop at midtown where the most passengers are going or transferring. The only conceivable bus route is from West Seattle/Burien to SLU and beyond. Metro Connects has such a route from Fauntleroy to WSJ and SLU, but it’s a secondary add-on to the C or West Seattle Link. The number of people going from the south end to the north end is probably miniscule compared to the number going to central Seattle or transferring there.
Portland would need at least one station in the middle for downtown trips and transfers. You can say all the other lines will still be there, but they won’t have the advantage of faster travel time that’s was the purpose of building the tunnel in the first place. People don’t want to crawl 10 minutes to get from the edge of downtown to the center any more than they want to crawl 20 minutes to get from one end of downtown to the other or fully across downtown. The average American commute and what people consider reasonable trip travel time is 20-30 minutes, so the downtown segment eats up half of it and doesn’t leave much room for the rest.+
This guy. The same that said Seattle shouldn’t put link in a tunnel. I’m glad he retired because he’s all over the place.