Month: September 2025

Average Ridership Per Trip

The plots below show the average weekday ridership by stop in each direction, color-coded by time of day. For a more detailed breakdown of how the plots are set up, please refer to the How to Read the Plots section of the article discussing Route 70.

Continue reading “Ridership Patterns for King County Metro Route 5”

CityNerd on the Pike Place and Pike Street pedestrianizations, interviewed by Kenji López-Alt. (CityNerd)

Why Americans don’t walk to school anymore. It’s about the sidewalks. (Evan Edinger)

This is an open thread.

Week Without Driving comes from our campaign to have those in charge of our transportation networks and investment priorities understand the needs of nondrivers in their communities — in particular involuntary nondrivers who can’t drive or can’t afford to drive. This includes everyone from youth too young to drive, to people whose anxiety makes driving unsafe or really uncomfortable, to folks like my parents who are aging out of driving and can only drive in certain conditions. It includes people like me who can’t drive because of vision disabilities, others with chronic health, mobility, autism, epilepsy and other disabilities, people with suspended licenses or without licenses, without access to a working vehicle, who can’t afford gas, who have to share a vehicle they can’t reliably use to get where they want to go.

Altogether, nondrivers are about one-third of the population — and we all share the need to be able to get places but the inability to do so by grabbing the keys and going. The Week Without Driving is about our needs and imagining communities — urban and rural and everything in between, that could work better for us. 

Join me, and thousands of others, by not driving next week. To get more involved, check out one of the many events in Washington State next week.

This is an open thread.

Local Transit News:

• Construction of RapidRide I is set to begin this fall (Metro Matters).
• After ventilation issues shut down light rail multiple times ($) over the past week, Sound Transit wants to increase planned maintenance to reduce unplanned closures (The Seattle Times, $)
• WSDOT announced another batch of major freeway closures starting this weekend (WSDOT Blog), so buses and trains may be extra busy.
• Metro Flex expanded to Overlake last week (Metro Matters).
• A previously-underused pedestrian bridge between Buckley and Enumclaw is very popular while the White River Bridge is being repaired (The Seattle Times, $)

Other Transportation:

• LA Metro extended the longest light rail line in the world with four new suburban stations on Friday (KTLA News)
• Buses would be much cheaper if they weren’t custom for every agency and could be built with non-American parts (Brookings)
• Transportation funding is at the heart of Congress’ latest budget impasse potentially resulting in another shutdown of the government (Transport Topics)
• Many cities are looking to heavy-duty ebikes for urban deliveries, but advocates disagree on whether they belong in bike lanes or car lanes (Curbed, $).
• Self-driving cars are going to make traffic much, much worse (Vox, $)
• How More Rail Could Take Trucks Off the Road (The New York Times, gift link)

Continue reading “Midweek Roundup: controversial amendments”

Copenhagen’s automated metro has been running for 20 years. (dronthego) It has 4 lines, each running every 3-6 minutes and operating 24/7. Ridership is an average of 344,000 per day. Two lines combine downtown for 1.5 minute frequency. Agency promo page.

A train ride from Halifax to Montreal on VIA rail. Worse than Amtrak in most ways. And clips of how much better it was in 1965. (Not Just Bikes)

This is an open thread.

Local Transit News:

• Sound Transit Outlines Promising Everett Link Cost Reductions, Bleaker Seattle News (The Urbanist). STB article in the works.
• Seattle eyes electric cargo bikes for greener deliveries (The Seattle Times, $)
• Sound Transit Leaders Plan to Give Fare Gates a Closer Look (The Urbanist)
• Beware, Seattle: Scooter accidents are on the rise (The Seattle Times, $). Nationwide study finds micromobility is replacing car trips across US; 40% of Veo riders don’t own a car; 28% don’t have driver’s license (Zag Daily).
• Growth, Gains and Greatness: One Year of RapidRide G (Metro Matters)
• Construction will close 57 parking spaces at Lynnwood City Center station (Community Transit Blog)
• Be a LOOKer! Stay safe and look both ways around tracks and trains (The Platform)

Continue reading “Midweek Roundup: growth, gains, and greatness”

CityNerd looks at South Lake Union, its walkability and bicycle lanes, the notoriously unreliable route 8, the wide stroads, and Big Tech’s hidden motives for “colonizing” downtown areas.

How are the Sunday Movies going? Do you like the mix of topics and creators? Are there other topics or creators we’ve missed that you’d like to see?

This is an open thread.

Sound Transit is in the early stages of building Stride 3, a new bus rapid transit service. It will run along SR-522 and Northeast 145th Street between Bothell and Shoreline South/148th Station. Additional right-of-way will be added along parts of the corridor to allow the buses to avoid congestion. One of the more controversial areas for such work is in Lake Forest Park. There has been both local opposition as well as high cost overruns in the area. This is a proposal for a solution.

Lake Forest Park Issues

One of the goals for Stride 3 is to provide bus lanes both directions along SR-522. At the same time, the various cities want to retain two general purpose lanes heading both directions. This means at least six lanes. While they plan on eliminating many of the center-turn lanes, they will still retain quite a few (e. g. northbound Bothell Way to 35th Avenue NE). Therefore, for much of the route they require seven lanes. In most of the street it is only wide enough for six lanes.

Thus Sound Transit plans on making the street wider. In some cases this won’t cost much at all. But it gets challenging as you go north. If you want to widen the street between 153rd and 155th you need a new bridge over Bsche’tla Creek. This involves a deep ravine and is thus expensive. Other work north of the creek would require taking some property and rebuilding a lot of the retaining walls. This has led to local opposition. This too adds to the cost, as it is likely residents will fight this in court. This relatively simple project already has a fairly high price tag ($581.5 million). This is in addition to the bus barn. The combination of local opposition and environmentally sensitive land could lead to much higher costs.

Continue reading “Fixing Stride 3”

Excerpts from the 1975 novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. Twenty years earlier in 1955, California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the US to form a sustainable environmentalist utopia. Since then there has been a cold war and little contact between the US and Ecotopia. Now an American journalist goes to Ecotopia to report on its conditions and the possibility of reunification. (There’s no possibility.) This article takes a look at Ecotopia’s transportation and urban forms, a retro-future vision from fifty years ago. The rest of the book has much to say about Ecotopia’s industries, economics, politics, education, and family structures, but this article won’t get into that.

William Weston flies to Reno, and takes a taxi across the border to Lake Tahoe. He has gotten special permission to bring an internal combustion engine into the country 20 miles to the nearest train station. He rides a train to the capital, San Francisco, and emerges from the main train station.

Continue reading “Friday Roundtable: Ecotopia Transit”