A tale of two cities.

Redmond city planning led to massive TOD around Downtown Redmond and Overlake Village stations, and expedited the Link planning. (Yet Another Urbanist)

Kemper Freeman’s war on transit. (Yet Another Urbanist)

This is an open thread.

46 Replies to “Sunday Movies: Redmond & Kemper”

  1. It’s a disgrace that wealthy individuals like Kemper Freeman could influence the line 2 so much. I really wish Sound Transit was part of WSDOT instead of whatever it is now (tri county agency?). I like to think if it was part of the state government it wouldn’t be as easy to push around and the alignments would be better, not sure if that’s actually true. Maybe we would’ve had link 1 on Aurora instead of the crappy i5 alignment we have now and NIMBYs (Bellevue, Tukwila) would’ve been overridden.
    For example in Vancouver the Skytrain extensions are created and funded by the provincial government. The regional agency Translink is involved in the initial planning but the government takes over full control when its time to make final decisions and award contracts.

    1. Virginia has a state agency called Department of Rail & Public Transportation alongside VDOT. I think every state with substantial regional transit infrastructure should have something like that.

      2. Ask Philadelphia how having transit funded at the state-level works. Regional is the only way to go.

    2. You think that state agencies are more independent of special interests than county agencies?

      If WSOT had the responsibility to build out a regional rail network, I think it would have been MORE likely that Link would have followed freeway alignments as that is ROW already owned by that agency and therefore would have been considered “free.” Under the current structure, Sound Transit has to lease ROW from WSDOT, which at minimum forces ST planners & consultants to consider the ‘cost’ of the WSDOT ROW as comparable to leveraging other public ROW.

      1. Maybe not run by the government but at least vested power by the government. What do you think would be a way to strengthen ST besides more money? The only thing I could think of was having the state government plow over the NIMBYs.
        It’s bizarre how little help or involvement WSDOT provides for link (none, as far as I’ve seen)

      2. WSDOT and USDOT were gracious enough to allow ST to buy or lease all the freeway property on which light rail is operating or getting ready to operate. That includes the former express-lanes floating bridge.

      3. WSDOT allowed ST ratepayers to tax themselves to buy/lease freeway space. It incorporated BRT capacity into the 405 master plan by agreeing to share the HOT lanes with transit, but ST ratepayers would have to pay for the inline stations and the 85th interchange itself. So the state made several allowances without spending any money.

    3. There are different ways to organize transit found by looking at many states. I don’t think that it would work better if it was different because of that.

      Instead, I think that the main organizational issue is how ST is increasingly seen as the dominant transit operator with the local transit operators having to bend to it. When it started, it was seen more as an overlay regional transit service. Now it’s poised to carry about a third but not a majority of all regional transit trips.

      And as transit capital projects go, ST is easily using a majority of the transit capital funds the region has made available. This is where I think the organizational reforms are more needed. More pointedly, I think that the agency raising the transit capital dollars needs to be separated from the agency building the projects.

      A basic example: ST studies often focus alternatives on where platforms go. The discussion about how easy it is to transfer between train and bus is there — but the approach has been to treat bus transfers as a design afterthought once the station platforms are determined rather than the other way around. Yet many ST3 stations are intended to get a large share of riders from transferring bus riders. As it is, many of the dollars being spent are done to “mitigate impacts” by doing the ultimate (deep bore tunneling with deep vaulted stations) rather than run services that can also carry shorter trips. The bus operators are faced with designing feeder bus routes to feed the stations however they can. Vertical circulation is the first place where budgets get cut and that often affects bus transferring too.

      So we end up with things like no down escalators to the major transit center at Lynnwood, or forcing bus transferring bus riders to cross 110th as well as no down escalators at Downtown Bellevue. Or no Link station turn-around for buses of any kind in SE Seattle (both all MLK stations as well as Judkins Park station — except Mt Baker where it’s generally panned as being across Rainier Ave, mainly because it was there historically).

      And ST still never publishes existing station profiles to talk about what share of the boardings are bus transfers from what routes, and we don’t learn much about what’s expected to happen until the EIS in most cases if at all. What share of Ballard Link riders are transferring to/ from RapidRide D in SLU? Does any Board member care? Does anyone care?

      I see the most needed organizational structural change is for capital funds to be raised and distributed by a different entity (split away from ST). And then for KCM, PT, CT and ST to be planned and operated as one integrated system. Conceptual integration was a bigger interest in the recent past and that’s how we got ORCA and three digit bus route numbers. Compare that to the growing list of terms for faster bus routes we now have — with each agency using different terms while one is using the same term for freeway-based routes and arterial-based routes (Stride), and none of these routes getting an alternative three digit number so a visitor can figure it out.

      Of course, the regional culture and legacy of referendum-based organizational structures (that accompany the referenda, locking the structures in for decades) won’t make such a structural change easily possible. Outside of a bipartisan consensus to develop systemic change that would also include putting up organizational modifications to the voters for each referenda already in effect, we are going to be left with what we have for the foreseeable future. Outside of an epic and tragic transit crisis, I don’t see that happening.

    4. Sound Transit is a regional entity covering part of King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties. The legislature authorized it, and the voters approved its creation. Its boardmembers overlap with city/county offices but it’s distinct.

      Ideally a large transit authority or transportation authority (whether state or regional) would propose an enlightened vision of comprehensive regional+local transit, based on transit best-practices and walkability, and it would have full authority and funding to implement it. That’s what Vancouver and German regions have, and why they’re able to achieve such excellent transit, ridership, and walkable cities. It’s because the authority is guided by transit best-practices, the governments and public support it in that, and it has the full funding resources and regulatory freedom it needs to implement it, and the governments push back against nimbys and car-oriented interests that threaten to diminish its effectiveness.

      In the US there’s a general suspicion of government and taxes and big cities, people think cars are American freedom and exceptionalism, and suburbs have “local control” over zoning and transit decisions. So what works in many places is hard to do here because of structural and attitude constraints. The state only grudgingly allowed Sound Transit so that the state wouldn’t have to be involved in addressing the obvious need for regional transit in a metro approaching 4 million. ST has significant tax resources but the local transit agencies don’t: the state caps their sales-tax rate, and allows exceptions on a case-by-case basis and denies many of them. Bus service should be doubled overall, but the agencies don’t have the resources, the state won’t allow them more than incremental increases, and voters are dubious about enough taxes to implement it. All sectors have various car biases, that lead to underestimating transit need and potential, or displace stations out of neighborhood centers because their impact is seen as negative rather than positive.

      Sound Transit does NOT have an enlightened transit vision. Its structure is such that it believes its mandate is an Everett-Tacoma-Redmond Spine, and to build whatever the subareas want. The subareas don’t have an enlightened transit vision and don’t fully understand riders’ needs, so they make decisions that sound good on paper but don’t maximize passengers’ convenience and walkable-destination and bus-feeder options. Freeway stations and a lack of down escalators are symptoms of this.

      1. Voters will have a significant opportunity to impact ST’s future course: the county executive election.

      2. Thanks for the explanation Mike. It really does feel like there’s no cohesive vision with ST like you say. It’s just build toward X endpoint (Tacoma Dome, everett downtown, seatac), do whatever the local governments will allow you to. So you have bizarre situations where the alignments are better in Redmond than in Bellevue, even though Bellevue is much bigger and closer to Seattle.

      3. The counties that created ST set the goal of Everett-Tacoma-Redmond. Sound Transit chose the mode: light rail. The reason it chose that is it’s street-compatible (like MLK): ST envisioned a primarily surface system like previous American light rails (Portland, San Jose, San Diego) to keep capital costs down. The downtown tunnel was a given because it was already there, and a tunnel to the U-District/Ravenna because of the Ship Canal and hills, but the rest would be surface where feasible. It never addressed the logic gap between a surface line (30-40 mph instead of 65-85) for an ultra-long line 35 miles to Tacoma. But after Rainier Valley, Tukwila objected to surface and got elevated, and Roosevelt wanted a tunnel and got it, and soon everything was grade-separated (except Bel-Red which reverted to surface). So ST backed into a mode designed for surface but then not doing surface. The mode is ST’s fault. But the projects are the counties/cities’ fault because they pressured ST to do them that way (Tacoma Dome, Everett/Paine, West Seattle, Issaquah). They could have asked for something else, or asked ST to research what a transit best-practices network would look like.

        A transit best-practices would look substantially like ST2 (Lynnwood, Redmond, Kent-Des Moines) but without the mistakes (missing stations in First Hill, Capitol Hill, Lake City or Aurora), a Seattle city subway (e.g., Denny Way, 45th), a station closer to the Bellevue TC bus bays, a greater emphasis on frequency (both Link and ST Express), etc.

      4. The word “enlightened” is doing a lot of work here. Seattle doesn’t need a Robert Moses. It needs local leaders who understand good transit, good land use, and how those are interdependent.

      5. I didn’t want to use the word enlightened but I couldn’t think of a better one to express “leaders with the best vision” or “leaders with a very good vision”. I have reservations about the Enlightenment, and this isn’t Eastern religious philosophy, but I couldn’t think of a better word.

        The problem with Robert Moses was his goal, not that his agency had a lot of power. The two problems with Pugetopolis transit planning are the goals and the excessive veto points. The leaders don’t have the right goals (that was the reason for my comment), and people who have even worse goals can stop a project or expansion, leaving us muddling along with transit that’s minimally functional but not robust — not like the metros that have excellent transit. I don’t want to be too negative: Pugetopolis transit is in the top ten for the US, so at least it’s not as bad as 90% of the country. But we should aim for better than that, and at least get to the average of peer countries.

        Also, this wouldn’t be one person’s vision (Robert Moses). It would be formed by transit experts, and championed by one or more major politicians. They would articulate the vision and explain how it would be a major benefit, and convince other politicians and the public to support it. That’s what other countries have: the politicians and the majority of the public support it. Our politicians don’t even have a highly effective vision to ask support for: they can’t get out of their “transit is a small niche that most people won’t use” mentality, so they never even offer a concept that most people would use.

        A benchmark would be less than 50% car mode share or car ownership, at least in Seattle to start with. Other cities already have this, so it’s possible. What do you need for that? Subways that go right to neighborhood centers. Buses that run every 10-15 minutes including weekends and evenings. Transit that doesn’t take an hour to go 20 miles. (150 to Kent when Sounder isn’t running; Link to Federal Way.)

      6. The biggest overall issue is cities with the most effective transit networks prioritize ped/transit/bike access first (in various orders) and cars last. So cars get what’s left over, rather than designing the transit network and streets around cars. Some guaranteed car capacity is provided for emergency vehicles, deliveries, carrying bulky items, disability access, and some amount for choice trips. But half the current car trips aren’t necessary, or wouldn’t be necessary if there were a viable transit alternative. (One that didn’t require waiting 30-60 minutes, or taking an hour plus maybe a mile of walking for a typical trip. That’s the latent ridership that won’t put up with the current network.) So Paris puts in BRT and bike lanes where they’re needed, even if it has to repurpose car lanes. Paris has a policy of removing some 100 parking spaces per year to make the city less car-oriented and make it easier and more pleasant to travel without a car. Seattle is having so much trouble just putting full BAT lanes the full length of Aurora, or on 45th where it’s four lanes. So we’re falling far short of Paris.

  2. And yet, which city will have higher ridership? Bellevue. Everything Bellevue is building in nearly 40 downtown superblocks is illegal in Redmond. If Bellevue’s highrise neighborhood extends east to at least Eastrail, as is proposed by the city, Bellevue Mall will be a lowrise destination at the edge of the walkshed and Kemper Freeman will fade to history.

    Overlake and Downtown Redmond will be great stations (and the city has laid good bones with Marymoor Village), but Bellevue will have simillar TOD around Spring District and Bel-Red stations. As dysfunctional as was the debate around the Bellevue Way alignment that resulted in the East Main station, give Bellevue (and KC Council) leaders credit for pulling the alignment away from the freeway alignment and properly leveraging light rail technology for at-grade operations.*

    *Everett and Tacoma’s great mistake was looking at Seattle’s RV alignment and saying “no, we can do better.” Hopefully those regional leaders can witness the success of Bellevue’s alignment choices before the cake is baked on Link elsewhere.

    1. Downtown Bellevue, despite the 40-story towers, is currently trailing Downtown Redmond in ridership. (This will likely change once the 2 Line crosses Lake Washington because many Seattleites work in Bellevue, but the point still stands.) Bellevue has prepared several other minor stations for TOD, but none are currently as pedestrian-friendly as Redmond. Even with future TOD, streets like NE 8th St near Wilburton and NE Spring Blvd near Spring District are far too wide to ever make pedestrians feel like they belong.

      That being said, yes Bellevue did a much, much better job than Lynnwood, Federal Way, and all ST3 alignments.

    2. “Bellevue (and KC Council) leaders credit for pulling the alignment away from the freeway alignment”

      It was Bellevue that pushed ST to change to a freeway alignment, so you’re saying we should congratulate Bellevue for backing down from its own demand and obstructionism.

      The initial default alignment was Bellevue Way. That still would have been the best. It could have had stations at BW/Main, BW/NE4th, and the transit center. That would have served the largest cross-section of residents, shoppers, workers, and visitors for a myriad of trips. Bellevue Way was/is the closest to an “urban village” with a balanced set of apartments, retail, and jobs.

      But Kemper railed against the Bellevue Way alignment and pushed for alternatives further east (simultaneously while pushing to cancel Link entirely). Under pressure from the Bellevue city council ST studied several alternatives along 112th, the Eastside rail corridor, and 405. Surrey Downs objected to 112th, so that was another factor favoring the ones further east. An environmentalist threatened to sue ST if it crossed Mercer Slough other than underground, so that argued for 112th (since Bellevue Way had been discarded by that time).

      Kevin Wallace, the city councilmember mentioned in the video who pushed for a 405 alternative (which he called the “Vision Line”) — there’s another thing about him not mentioned in the video. 116th was all car dealerships then, and Wallace himself owns several of the parcels. So he stood to benefit directly if ST bought lots on the west side and had a station close to future development on the east side. Since then, development has occurred, and the “Ballard Blocks”-like complex with Trader Joe’s et is one of them. I don’t know whether Wallace owns that lot, or which lots specifically are his.

      Bellevue’s insistence on studying a dozen alternatives and obstructionism caused planning to be extended by a year. So one year of the multiyear delay is because of that.

      In the end Bellevue got a few better councilmembers, and the city approved the current alignment: along 112th (overriding Surrey Down’s objections but not upzoning it), a tunnel in front of city hall, no station in the tunnel, and a surface segment in Bel-Red to help pay for the tunnel.

      1. It’s obvious to anyone who has spent time in DT bellevue that Bellevue way is a far superior routing. The current routing misses the 3 most popular attractions in Bellevue (park, mall and main st) which Bellevue way would’ve hit

    3. “Bellevue Mall will be a lowrise destination”

      Height isn’t the only factor. A wide variety of people buy a wide variety of things at the Bellevue Collection and surrounding stores, to cover a wide variety of needs including necessities. Residents on Bellevue Way can walk to these stores, and could have walked to a Bellevue Way Link station to go to Seattle or Redmond or elsewhere. And there’s the Downtown Park, which is a regional destination.

      It’s hard to conceive of a highrise district between 108th and 116th that could do all that. Most of the TOD we’re getting does not meet all those needs. The actual development around 110th is office-heavy: it doesn’t have much housing or retail. One small Korean lunch place and a few similar like that don’t count as “much retail”, even though it’s good they exist. That office-highrise approach is looking especially foolish after covid changed working patterns — Amazon built a highrise next to the station, and is now unsure what it will do with some of the floors and whether the company will remain there. What other company could go in that could utilize the building as much as Amazon and generate as many transit trips? Will the buildings have to eventually be converted to housing or retail, a difficult task? The fact remains that those highrise offices meet less of Eastsiders’ total overall destination needs than the retail on Bellevue Way does, but now we’ve put the station in an almost “white elephant” area. And with the Bellevue Way alignment we could have had both stations, so we wouldn’t have had to choose one neighborhood or the other.

      Urbanists used to think highrises were the best way, but some counterexamples have changed that perception. Paris, Boston, and Edinburgh pack a lot of people and walkable destinations in just a few stories. The Netherlands is now building all expansion neighborhoods at the 7-story model, not highrises. When you get up to 40+ stories, the space the elevator shafts and stairs take up creates diminishing returns in the amount of usable space. Splitting a highrise into two midrises is a minor scaling issue compared to splitting it into hundreds of detached single-family houses.

      1. Lincoln Square, on the east side of Bellevue Way, is better than the old mall. It follows Vancouver’s good practice of several floors of retail in the large box with multiple towers of housing and offices above the podium. Bellevue isn’t just offices that are dead after 5pm any more (though the 2 blocks immediately around the TC are all offices, much like some of the blocks in downtown Seattle).

        Netherlands neighborhoods is good density, but downtown Vancouver is better density, particular in a CBD that is a top 10 job center in the entire west coast. Bellevue downtown is a La Defense in Paris or a La Part-Dieu in Lyon. Edinburgh is the 9th largest metro in the UK, perhaps a transit network Bellingham or Spokane could aspire to.

        Bellevue should of course upzone the entire city for good density, but don’t settle for midrise in the downtown.

      2. “Bellevue should of course upzone the entire city for good density, but don’t settle for midrise in the downtown.”

        I didn’t say Bellevue shouldn’t continue its highrise plan. I said that height doesn’t necessarily translate to higher ridership or non-driving mode share compared to a midrise alternative that serves a larger cross-section of the population and a larger number of their total trip needs.

        I agree that Bellevue should upzone all its single-family areas to at least lowrise, just like Seattle should, especially the shoulder areas near Link/RapidRide stations. I’ve been saying that for years.

      3. Agree with Mike.
        Density is not the answer to everything. 108th Ave NE is a very good example of good density but bad cityscape. There is nothing to walk to although it is physically walkable and accessible to transit.

        Often time the density we see is not driven by needs for denser development but desire for landmark and high-rise office/residential space. If you truly want density, midrise in a widerspread area always works better than concentrated supertall CBD because you simply cannot have a transportation system digest the traffic of extreme density.

    4. “Bellevue did a much, much better job than Lynnwood, Federal Way, and all ST3 alignments.”

      Bellevue decided to grow into a dense downtown as far back as the 1950s. I wasn’t aware of this in the 70s and early 80s when I grew up there: everything was still 1-2 stories (except one or two token midrises at 108th). But the densification that became visible in the early 90s and exploded in the 21st century goes back to decisions and planning since the 1950s.

      Redmond had a similar long-term densification trajectory. Lynnwood and Federal Way are coming at it very late.

      1. Lynnwood and Federal Way also lack the rent levels to justify high-rise.

        Lynnwood has good zoning, give it time. Federal Way needs to be more ambitious, but at their current rent levels doesn’t matter.

      2. Lynnwood and Federal Way don’t need highrises. They just need more housing and walkable destinations near their Link stations. Lynnwood could have built it in the 2000s and 2010s so it would be there now.

      3. Between Lynnwood and Federal Way, the latter station area has more potential. Everything south of the Lynnwood CC platforms is wetlands followed by I-5. The only viable walkable redevelopment areas are north of the platforms.

        Downtown Federal Way Station doesn’t have that kind of wetlands near it (Star Lake is more constrained than Lynnwood is though). Plus the giant commercial tracts provide plenty of land for something ambitious. The toughest negative is 320th itself, which is a high-speed car sewer that’s pretty scary to walk across. There is a proposal to make it easier but it’s really only at one spot and the street will double as the entry street for cars.

      4. Lynnwood had a fair amount of potential but was wasted. Eg: if the bus platforms were on the bottom floor of the parking garage, there’s 5 or so blocks of land that could be redeveloped. Or, put the bus bays closer to directly under the station so it’s not necessary to walk so far to get to the buses.

    5. “Bellevue will have simillar TOD around Spring District and Bel-Red stations”

      The recent TOD around Spring District is office-heavy, so there’s not enough housing for all the jobs, so people will have to commute from Woodinville and such even if they don’t want to. There’s only about two retail establishments: one pub, and a small golf-supply shop. That’s not enough retail for all the people in the area.

      King County’s regional growth center (RGC) threshold considers only the zoned job capacity, not housing. It’s assumed an urban village should have both jobs/housing/retail, but only jobs qualify for the growth-center status that bring PSRC grants and make it must-serve by Sound Transit. That’s why the Spring District, Totem Lake, and western Issaquah achieved RGC status in the 2010s but Lake City and Ballard didn’t. The suburbs just zoned enough job capacity to qualify. Lake City and Ballard have a more even balance of jobs:housing (which makes them better urban villages), but therefore they didn’t have enough jobs to qualify as RGCs. Bellevue looked the other way while the Spring District developer built a jobs-heavy neighborhood, and the neighborhood has a long-term imbalance and stunted ridership potential because of it. So downtown Redmond will blow past the Spring District because it’s designed better and more balanced.

      3. “So downtown Redmond will blow past the Spring District because it’s designed better and more balanced.”

        I find both Downtown Bellevue (except in the park or in the mall) and the Spring District to frankly feel more sterile. The streetscape and building orientations seem much more friendly and enticing to pedestrians on sidewalk. If I’m on the street in Downtown Bellevue or Spring District it’s only because I’m going somewhere, while I feel some pleasure just walking in Downtown Redmond.

      4. As of the most recent PSRC framework adopted in 2018, the RCG threshold does take into account housing. RCGs must meet a minimum “activity unit” density which includes both housing and jobs. They must also have a mix of uses with a goal of “a minimum mix of at least 15% planned residential and employment activity in the center.” Of course, this only applies to new centers.

        Source https://www.psrc.org/our-work/centers

      5. “As of the most recent PSRC framework adopted in 2018, the RCG threshold does take into account housing.”

        Good. But if it had been in place in 2007, Lake City could have been a PSRC growth center, and that would have given it more clout in Lynnwood Link alignment. The four alignments considered were Aurora, I-5, 15th Ave E, and Lake City Way. ST would have to justify not serving the Lake City growth center instead of the other way around, and then we could have gotten a station at 125th & LCW instead of 130th & 5th. Presto, the Pinehurst ridership issue vanishes. There’s a debate on whether Pinehurst would add net riders, but a Lake City station definitely would.

      6. “The recent TOD around Spring District is office-heavy, so there’s not enough housing for all the jobs, so people will have to commute from Woodinville and such even if they don’t want to.”

        I agree that there needs to be more TOD around Spring District station and one could argue that it is not really TOD development because that mixed-use is too self-sufficient to generate transit ridership, but what’s there is not office-heavy. I think it actually has very healthy balance between office space and housing.

        That superblock occupied by Meta is full of apartments on the side NE 12th. The retail scene there is depressing and you probably still need cars to run errands, but it sure zeros a lot people’s commuting VMT. A lot of Meta employees live there.

      7. TOD to me refers to the physical layout and location of the building. Does the front entrance have the shortest possible walking path to the nearest transit stops? Is the building located where a frequent transit stop is feasible, even if it’s not there yet?

        The contrast is transit-adjacent deveopment (TAD), which is equally dense, but you have to walk around two or three sides of the building and through a large parking lot to get to the entrance, or the building is located where a frequent route on a logical corridor can’t be close enough to conveniently use.

        “I think it actually has very healthy balance between office space and housing.”

        Where would you buy groceries if you lived in the Spring District? Can you walk to it? If you run out of eggs and don’t want to go all the way to a supermarket, where would you go? Where would you get your prescriptions filled? If you want to eat somewhere, does the one pub have food, or are there any other choices? Can you do anything else like dry cleaning or a bookstore within walking distance? A neighborhood must have at least the essentials and a few other choices to be well balanced.

        ” that mixed-use is too self-sufficient to generate transit ridership”

        In an urban neighborbood, even though you can walk to everyday essentials and you can ideally both live and work in the neighborhood — like UW staff and students — there’s still a lot of remaining trips out of the neighborhood on transit, and people coming from outside to go to the pub or shops or open space or work. New York City has lots of highly urban neighborhoods, but it also has the highest transit ridership in the US by far. Because people go to visit relatives, attend volunteer events, visit one-of-a-kind shops located elsewhere, go to regional parks, go to medical specialists, etc.

      8. “I think it actually has very healthy balance between office space and housing.”

        Yes I tend to agree.

        The problem with the Spring District development is that it doesn’t relate well to pedestrian life near a transit station. It has a wide Spring Blvd bordered by walls of shrubs and trees or monolithic buildings unprotected from the rain without entry doors and interesting shops and food. Street life is the metaphorical glue that makes a TOD coherent — and the street-facing aspect doesn’t really have much glue there.

        Contrast that with something like Downtown Kirkland with its many front-facing cafes and unique shops and it becomes really obvious to me that the Spring District site planners or developers with a profit motive don’t fully understand how to glue the various land uses together to make an appealing destination.

      9. One thing I see a few people do from the Spring District is take Link to the whole foods at Wilburton. It’s actually decently convenient. Once the other side of the station gets developed as envisioned in the long range plan I think that Spring District will feel much more cohesive and neighborhood like rather than a satellite to the Meta office.

      10. “It has a wide Spring Blvd bordered by walls of shrubs and trees or monolithic buildings unprotected from the rain without entry doors and interesting shops and food.”

        Yeah. The green space in the center is like a super courtyard of the development while it tends to surround the block with pedestrian unfriendly vibe. It’s like a walkable oasis inside and it has no intention to extend walkability to the surrounding area.

      11. Spring Blvd and the open space are one of the positive highlights to me. I don’t find it too wide where Link runs through the middle of it, and I saw it under construction walking from 124th on Bel-Red to the 550 terminus. All the streets are excessively wide there — why did Bellevue feel the need to widen 120th and 124th to 5 lanes when 23rd in Seattle only has 4? — so I wouldn’t single out Spring Blvd.

        When Spring District station opened I walked south on 121st to see the station area and encountered the open space. I like it; it’s nice and parklike. Someday I want to try taking the 226 from Lake Hills to 124th and walking to Spring District station via that park. I’m guessing it will take 10 minutes or less. Those are public sidewalks, and I don’t feel out of place walking on them. It’s no different than walking around Mountlake Terrace. The street layout is a little cul-de-sacky: the streets don’t go all the way to 12th or 120th, but this is typical of Bellevue, and doesn’t negate the walkability and park ambience it does have. You should see those office parks and buildings on Northup Way/20th if you want to see something much worse.

        The biggest problem I felt in exploring that area was the lack of retail, not the street layout. In evaluating whether I’d want to live there, I wouldn’t want to be where there’s just one pub and a small golf shop. I don’t golf and I only drink on special occasions, so I’d want more than that.

      12. I walk to the Spring District (and back) from DT Bellevue quite frequently at lunchtime; it’s 20-25 minutes from my office. It’s not unpleasant but it’s very sterile; as you point out, there’s not much “there there” (shops, restaurants, etc.). It’s self-contained with nothing much nearby to walk to even if you ventured out of the neighborhood – Whole Foods is about a 15 min walk but the Wilburton station is right there (Uwajimaya is also about a 15 min walk but no rail). There seems to be some sort of dining hall/commissary in one of the buildings that was full but I assume that’s for employees. Other than that, there’s a couple of cafés, a small brewery, and a mini-mart/Korean/ramen place – not too much more. You could easily take the train to Redmond and shop at Mayuri or H Mart or a bunch of other places, but then why not live in the more vibrant Redmond to begin with?

        I actually really like the station itself but the neighborhood is weird. Telling is the fact that on the station plaza there’s a building that would be perfect and well-located for retail or dining/café, but it’s been vacant since it was built. The whole thing seems to be a modern version of “I owe my soul to the company store,” with less coal mining.

  3. Apologies if this has been discussed to death already, but am I correct in understanding that the figure of 24,000-27,000 projected daily boardings on the West Seattle Link Extension was arrived at by adding up the projected boardings at the 3 planned stations in West Seattle (Alaska Junction, Avalon, Delridge) plus all the boardings at both Sodo Stations (people who walk to each Sodo station combined with all the transfers between the 1 and 3 lines occurring at each Sodo station)?

    1. Thanks for flagging this!

      ST has scrubbed ridership forecasts from many of the West Seattle materials. So it’s hard to find the exact wording that they use or define it.

      Looking at the West Seattle FEIS transportation technical report from last year, I see your question and legitimate confusion:

      https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/16a-WSLE-FinalEIS-AppendixN1-transportationtechreport-main-body.pdf

      I think most of us merely add the three West Seattle station boardings together and multiply by 2 to get to the segment total ridership. The FEIS does list boardings by station in 2042 but confusingly only as segments.

      What’s rather confusing is whether those riders headed to West Seattle board at SODO or board before SODO and are already on the train. The FEIS lists all those who board at SODO on either line (existing and new) but does not report the number of riders already on the trains as they pass through. It takes careful reading to get what they’ve reported and more importantly not reported in the document.

      And of course the FEIS never discloses what the mere stub ridership will be as far as I can tell. Every alternative analyzed assumes DSTT2 is open! Because DSTT2 is hugely underfunded and cannot open by 2042, it opens up the entire EIS to scrutiny because it’s silent about showing the impact of just the stub operation — really the only demonstratively financially feasible operation that could be built by 2042. It may be too late for someone to sue over this blatant omission as the FTA submitted a Record of Decision — but I’m not an attorney and one could find a way.

      (It’s worth noting that the ridership impacts of rerouting of the 1 Line are also not disclosed. 1 Line will lose riders thanks to the awful rail-rail Link transfer setups.)

      I even suspect that the ridership forecasts are scrubbed from the web site because some attorney working with ST sees a legal vulnerability by disclosing it. Normally, ST prominently proclaims these things in extension materials.

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