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This is an Open Thread.

177 Replies to “Midweek Roundup: controversial amendments”

  1. “Today, the ability to live happily without a car is itself almost a luxury; the few places where it’s easy have become too expensive because we have built too few of them.” (Walker article)

    1. Mike Orr,

      Just who is this “we” who built too “few” of these walkable neighborhoods you speak of?

      Honestly, there are so many people who “want” to live in Seattle who just don’t have the money to really do so. What’s the plan “B” here? Because Seattle isn’t going to just sprout a huge supply affordable housing in the next decade or finish that light rail system.

      I’ve brought up the organization of “Strong Towns” before and I’m doing it again. I think “Strong Towns” certainly has a working template for urban renewal and it’s 100% opposite of what Sound Transit is. The change needs to immediate and community driven. Sound Transit is anything but that. Sound Transit is billons of dollars spent over decades with all the choices being made by a cabal of unelected people who may not even live in Seattle. Come on Mike, you must know those huge transit center mockups ST puts out look think something straight out the the USSR in 1972. Who wants to talk about transit and urban development that’s never going to happen in their lifetime? And likely never?

      Gosh, I’d say it’s time for a bunch of people reading this to get into the fight and quit bitching on the sidelines. Here’s the prefect place to do that.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4BByDJ9w-M
      and https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/545-Blaine-Ave_Marion_OH_43302_M46403-97206

      1. “Just who is this ‘we’ who built too ‘few’ of these walkable neighborhoods”

        The people who enacted the absurdly strict zoning codes which made them illegal, of course.

      2. @tacommeee

        Strong towns literally advocates for the opposite of what you desire which is single family zoning only.

        I don’t know why you keep quoting them.

      3. @tacommee

        sigh here’s an example since you don’t bother to check

        https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/10/31/the-6-zoning-reforms-every-municipality-should-adopt

        1) Eliminate minimum parking requirements—citywide, all uses.
        2) Legalize accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—and do it right.
        3) Reduce or eliminate minimum lot and unit size mandates.
        4) Legalize home-based businesses.
        5) Expand ministerial approvals as much as possible.
        6) Legalize multifamily housing in commercial zones.

        Does this sound like stuff you agree with? In fact i think you’ve argued against every single point here.

      4. Hey Tacomee, what’s the job market like in Marion, OH, or its surroundings within a reasonable commute? If it’s weak, do you think it would be reasonable to attempt to start a business based in Marion, OH, or nearby?

        The nearest city is Columbus, OH, over 50 miles away. Do you think that is a reasonable commute? There is no commuter transit available in the region, so that’s a 100-mile roundtrip commute 5 days a week.

        I just want you to understand what you’re actually proposing.

      5. Mars Saxman,

        Let me be the first to say that restrictive zoning has not helped spur growth in popular places in the USA. But changing the zoning doesn’t actually build anything, doesn’t finance anything. At this point, zoning is not holding Seattle back from building affordable housing…. it’s the combination of expensive land, expensive construction costs and a waiting list of future residents who are happy to pay more for housing than the current residents can afford.

        WL,

        I have to politely double down on Sound Transit being the complete opposite of Strong Towns. Strong Towns is about incremental and immediate changes to make a community better. Change in the here and now. Sound Transit is the “transit cabal” putting out press releases about shit projects decades past due, that are way over budget, and it this point, may never happen. Look at the Sound Transit revenues vs. the growing price tag of that second tunnel. There’s just no magic that makes that happen.

        Sound Transit build light rail to Federal Way…. a box surrounded by highway 99, I-5 and 320 that is 100% dominated by cars, with lots of traffic noise and pollution. That’s never going to be a walkable neighborhood. I’ll even double down and say if the actual residents living in Federal Way could have voted to use the Sound Transit money to build something of use in their City, that light rail line wouldn’t be there.

        Nathan Dickey,

        Yeah, employment is a honest issue here. But let me spin this back at you. How many of the jobs in Seattle pay enough to support a family? Or even a single person’s retirement? I think responsible people look at what they make and what the future holds for them and adjusts their life accordingly.

        Seattle owes you nothing. Housing is not a right, never will be. Let’s say I’m renting an apartment in Seattle at over 35% of my income and the rent keeps going up 5-9% and my yearly salary increase is 2-3%. Over 20 years, I’ll be worse off, right? Much of Seattle is on this exact hamster wheel and it might end with homelessness. And when it does, nobody is going to care.

      6. @tacommee

        One cannot incrementally build a rail project. Are we going to build one train station at a time? I mean even for housing projects in the suburbs for economies of scale they build thousands of houses at the same time not one at a time. It’s the same reason why larger apartments are easier to build than one or two townhouses at a time. As a builder you’d be aware of that as well.

        > But changing the zoning doesn’t actually build anything,

        If changing zoning doesn’t do anything then why are you so afraid of modifying it. It’s not even in a city that you live in. It’s absurd the lengths that you insistent on enforcing zoning. You keep talking about local control and then say every city in the Seattle metro region must bow to your whims of never upzoning

      7. “Sound Transit build light rail to Federal Way…. a box surrounded by highway 99, I-5 and 320 that is 100% dominated by cars, with lots of traffic noise and pollution. That’s never going to be a walkable neighborhood.”

        That’s be proven false elsewhere. The DC Metro has been the catalyst to turn multiple several suburban car-oriented neighborhoods just like Federal Way into dense, walkable ones. Skytrain has done the same in Vancouver.

        Federal Way even chose to call their 320th station “downtown” to make it clear what they want to get redeveloped there. They also allow up to 200 foot tall buildings there — much higher than what Seattle allows outside of the greater Downtown or UW areas. The shopping center owners ultimately hold the cards — but suburban retail vacancies generally are a worsening reality and that’s another incentive to redevelop those large tracts into something more walkable.

      8. But changing the zoning doesn’t actually build anything, doesn’t finance anything.

        Of course not. But changing the regulations allows companies to build a lot more than they currently build.

        At this point, zoning is not holding Seattle back from building affordable housing

        Actually it is. To be fair, the word “zoning” is doing a lot of work here. There are a lot of regulations that would not be considered zoning but they push costs up as well. For example design review. There may be other things holding us back but the regulations are by far the biggest thing.

        …. it’s the combination of expensive land

        Sorry, have to stop you right there. This is a common misconception. The price of land is irrelevant. I realize this is counter-intuitive. I think we all assume that if land is expensive, housing is expensive. But if land is expensive you simply build more units on that land. You really have three situations:

        1) The cost of housing is less than the cost of construction. This happens after a bubble or in cities that have collapsed (like Detroit).

        2) The cost of housing matches the cost of construction. This is what housing would cost if there was no zoning. It is also what it costs if zoning is not a big factor. You aren’t allowed to build big buildings in Quincy but it really doesn’t matter. Basically land is so cheap that the existing zoning is irrelevant.

        3) Zoning is the biggest factor in housing costs. This is the situation in Seattle and in many other cities now.

        I realize this idea seems counter-intuitive. But there is plenty of science about this idea: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf. It isn’t just that study, either. That study has been out for a long time and other studies have confirmed its findings. It is accepted science and economists essentially argue about side issues (e. g. the effect on upzoning a particular neighborhood).

        OK, so you also wrote about:

        expensive construction costs and a waiting list of future residents who are happy to pay more for housing than the current residents can afford.

        Again, it doesn’t matter how many people want to live here as long as the market is allowed to build enough homes for them.

        But construction costs definitely matter. As that paper explained, if zoning isn’t the big issue then construction costs are. It would take a while before the cost of housing actually matches the cost of construction as well. If you eliminated all zoning tomorrow it would likely take years before there was enough housing in Seattle to bring prices down. There is very little history of this in the United States. Most of the cities that have liberalized their zoning have done so very recently. Minneapolis is probably the best example. As of right now (according to Apartments.com) it costs $1,125 for a studio, $1,331 for a one-bedroom, and $1,638 for a two-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis. Obviously it varies by neighborhood. Studies have confirmed that without the change in zoning, rental prices would be much higher (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5347083). According to the same source, rents in Seattle are $1,520 per month for a studio, $2,119 for a one-bedroom apartment and around $2,807 for a two-bedroom apartment.

        So getting to Minneapolis prices in about five years seems quite possible. Is that affordable? Depends on your perspective. There will have to be public housing. Every city in the developed world has public housing. But public housing would also be cheaper to build (which means we wouldn’t have to pay so much for it). Thus with a combination of public housing (which we are already spending money on) and a change of zoning we will be like most cities in this country.

        Oh, and I think this is 100% consistent with the message from Strong Towns. They talk about a lot more than just zoning but they are definitely support liberalizing the zoning to allow for more organic growth.

      9. I think “Strong Towns” certainly has a working template for urban renewal and it’s 100% opposite of what Sound Transit is. The change needs to immediate and community driven. Sound Transit is anything but that. Sound Transit is billons of dollars spent over decades with all the choices being made by a cabal of unelected people who may not even live in Seattle.

        That is a bizarre segue as it has nothing do do with Mike’s comment. I think Mike agrees with Strong Towns (and just about everyone who mentions the importance of zoning) that the “trickle or the fire house” approach (https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/6/19/the-trickle-or-the-fire-hose) is bad. It doesn’t work. You need more widespread zoning changes so that a city can develop more organically.

        But it is hard to see Sound Transit being complicit in that approach. Sound Transit just spends way too much money on poorly designed transit projects. That is really here nor there when it comes to the Strong Towns principles.

        I guess if I had to make a connection it would be this: Marohn writes a lot about making iterative changes. It isn’t too hard to apply this concept to transit. What is the biggest problem? The buses don’t run frequently enough. So run the buses more often. This is an iterative solution. The same is true with speed. To a large extent the city is doing this. They are making the buses faster. If there is a failing — a place where they aren’t doing it the “Marohn” way — it is how we are doing it. Instead of just a bit of red paint here and there we seem fixated on projects (e. g. RapidRide). So it isn’t quite an iterative approach but it isn’t that far off, either. At some point though, a big project makes sense. For example a bus tunnel. To a certain extent that was iterative as well. It can be argued that at that point in our history, our biggest transit problem was that the buses were spending too much time going through downtown. When it comes to rail, ST could have taken the same approach. Before they built the rail line between the UW and Downtown it was one of the busiest places in America without rail transit. So if they had built that next it would have been iterative.

        So I guess in that sense, ST is not taking an iterative approach. They are focused on grand plans (e. g. rail from Everett to Tacoma) instead of trying to focus on the biggest problem remaining. But it really isn’t the grandiose nature of the project that is its failing — it is the focus. You could have some big projects in Seattle proper that are good values. Imagine this: We spend a lot of money on running the buses more often and adding red paint. What then? I think there is a very good case for Ballard-to-UW rail. It would be the greatest need at that point. If ST built Ballard-to-UW rail now (instead of ST3) it would in a sense be leapfrogging those improvements in bus service. But given the nature of the agencies (Metro/SDOT being underfunded, ST having a lot of money) that isn’t a crazy idea. At least the rail projects would be built in order. But that isn’t the plan. Instead we are building the mess that is ST3.

        It gets worse outside the city. For example, consider Pierce County. Federal Way Link is a given. What then? What are biggest transit needs for Pierce County now? I think you run the buses more often. You maybe add some red paint here and there. That is about it for the foreseeable future. Hard to see rail making sense for the area even if Pierce County is running buses frequently. So in that sense, Tacoma Dome Link — and Tacoma Link — are antithetical to the “Strong Towns” approach.

      10. One cannot incrementally build a rail project.

        Well, we can — although it may not be a good idea. The monorail is a good example. If it was designed to be expanded then it could sit there for years, waiting for the rest of the city to grow. Eventually it goes north and south with a bunch of new stations.

        There are some really small metros in the world but typically they are part of a bigger system. There is a network effect with a properly designed metro. Two stations means one trip combination. Three stations means three. Four stations means six, etc. Given the cost to dig it just makes sense to start with at least four stations if not a half dozen.

        This assumes you are building something independent. If you can leverage an existing rail line then you can build iteratively just as a bus tunnel is an iterative improvement. But an independent line should be a decent length (and have a decent number of stations) to be worth the bother. It should also have decent anchors (stations on each end).

        For Seattle, I think the shortest you could get away with is UW to Downtown. By the 90s we already had the bus tunnel. You just need the section north of there. I would probably add five stations and end in the U-District (where they end now). So three stations in the U-District and two between the UW and Westlake (if you can’t build a station at First Hill, at least build a station at 23rd & Madison). The line would be designed to be extended on both ends. This would be an iterative approach in that sense.

        But even that has its limits. You can’t backfill the stations if you end up skipping them. The decision to skip First Hill haunts us (just as some leaders said it would). I suppose you can try and rebuild that line but it costs a lot more. Building a subway is a “cut once, measure twice” proposition. The same is true for elevated and even surface rail. Of course the same is true for building new road bridges and tunnels as well. You can build things iteratively but there is a limit when it comes to major projects.

      11. All I’ll add is that everyone knows that housing is “affordable” in dying or stagnant midwest towns, but there are a myriad of economic, social, and environmental reasons those towns are “affordable”.

        Continuing to point out that folks should buy homes in these stagnant or dying towns while continuing to live in a major coastal metropolitan area is some ultimate hypocrisy.

      12. “Just who is this ‘we’ who built too ‘few’ of these walkable neighborhoods”

        The cities of Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue, Renton, and practically every US city both large and small. Why are there no highrises on Capitol Hill or at Roosevelt station? Why does zoning drop down to low-density at about 15th Ave E, a few blocks from Roosevelt Station, or a block away from California Ave W on both sides? It’s because zoning doesn’t allow it. There are plenty of developers who would have built it over the last thirty years if they’d been allowed. The same with Surrey Downs in Bellevue, or Lake Hills. And similar in Tacoma.

        If those units had been built, a lot more people could live in those cities, especially near frequent transit and walkable destinations, and the market rate of units citywide wouldn’t have risen as much. Then fewer people would need subsidized housing or be homeless.

        “Strong Towns” certainly has a working template for urban renewal and it’s 100% opposite of what Sound Transit is.”

        Sound Transit has little to do with it. Strong Towns is about zoning restrictions and housing construction. Sound Transit is about a light rail alignment. Most of the lots where Strong Towns type development exists or could exist have no conflict with possible Link alignment alternatives.

      13. Nathan Dickey,

        “All I’ll add is that everyone knows that housing is “affordable” in dying or stagnant midwest towns, but there are a myriad of economic, social, and environmental reasons those towns are “affordable”.”

        I spent a couple of decades living in Tacoma. Bought a house, raised a family, grew huge garden, volunteered at Lincoln High School, watched over 100 H.S. football games, went camping at Mt. Rainier and Ocean Shores every summer. You really think most people in Ohio live any differently?

        If Seattle wouldn’t have been blown up by tech companies in the last 25 years, it would be the same city as Minneapolis. So if the tech bros have jacked up housing prices so high you can’t pay… the right choice is to move to Minnie and just be happy, right? Because it’s absolutely crazy to think Seattle is going to change to fit your needs.

        I think there is this big lie that somehow changing zoning mixed with progressive socialist government is going turn the tide in Blue Cities across America. I don’t honestly see that happening.

      14. @tacommee

        > I think there is this big lie that somehow changing zoning mixed with progressive socialist government is going turn the tide in Blue Cities across America. I don’t honestly see that happening.

        The city approved offices, it can approve apartments as well. It really will not be the end of society to have apartments and townhouses.

      15. WL,

        I’ve never been against zoning changes.

        I’d guess we’ve built enough housing for everybody over the last 35 years. The problem is that back in 1950 we built lots of sub 1200 sq ft houses. By 1995 I was working on 3000 to 5000 sq ft McMansions. That’s 3++ 50’s style homes…often for 1 or 2 rich people. I’m not happy about it, but it’s the story of my career.

        Changing zoning doesn’t stop the construction industry from focusing on only the top end of the market. It’s really not about zoning. It’s about how much new housing can be produced and the demand for it. People, good people, have just been pushed out of the Greater Seattle housing market. But it’s a free market!

      16. @tacommee

        It is literally not legal to build those smaller townhouses without zoning changes. You keep saying zoning changes aren’t required but at the same time zoning changes are required to build it.

  2. Exciting rapidride I construction starts

    Itll start to form a grid of rapidrides in south king with the rapidride F and A

  3. I don’t recall seeing any sort of time frame in which ST said they would announce their ‘everything is on the table’ reconsideration.

    Could we be waiting for months?

    My guess is that everything isn’t really on the table, and that whatever they come back with it will look something like what it looks like now, but a lot shorter. ST really needs a revolutionary rethink, but based on past history I don’t think the organization will be able to do that.

    1. I suspect that ST is wanting to release the Ballard Link EiS before getting serious. Maybe Everett EIS too.

      And I have the same fear that ST won’t pursue anything but shorten the lines. Their path of least resistance is unfortunately to build West Seattle Link and DSTT2 as far as the County buildings or maybe Westlake and that’s it with the funds — along with stopping near Everett Mall. They may be weighing dropping a West Seattle station rather than dropping a DSTT2 station.

      These outcomes would be a worst case scenario for SE Seattle and SeaTac riders. Not only would everyone be required to make a long transfer to go further than The Downtown core, but the 1 Line trains wouldn’t even get to SLU.

      The ST decision making process is deeply flawed. They don’t appear to care about actual riders or productivity . They mostly just want to smile for the cameras at groundbreaking. They’ll blame inflation rather than their own consultants and ridiculously low contingencies about the much bigger price tags, and give a hollow apology for not building as much as they promised.

      When this saga played out in Toronto, the province had to be the boogeyman. Similarly, it may actually take state legislative intervention to change the direction that ST is going with this.

      1. Oh my…. We have been looking at this all backward.

        Cancel Ballard Link, and build a stub tunnel to what- James?

        I guess so they would follow their service model and put west Seattle into the current tunnel, and what was to be Tacoma to Ballard into a stub that ends at James!

        Omg that would be horrible. I imagine most people wanting to go farther north, or south as the case may be, would transfer at sodo.

        It would give them an excuse to build that monster station at sodo I suppose.

        Well I am still convinced Dow will prioritize rail to west Seattle over all else, and this would do it.

        Blech….

      2. My prediction is this:

        EVLE and TDLE: the Board considers “phasing” each but ends up building both as currently planned, finishing in the 2030s.

        WSLE: Seattle refuses to cancel the line, and instead WSLE is “phased” to be built to Delridge by 2032, punting Avalon or No-Avalon to the future.

        BLE: Seattle’s reps convince the Board to “consider” alternative routes but determines implementation would be too slow, too risky, and ultimately would likely cost the same as building what’s already planned. Instead, BLE is “phased” to be built to Smith Cove by 2039. DSTT2 built as planned by indefinitely delaying the 4 Line (see below).

        4 Line: The Board’s most controversial move is to delay the 4 Line indefinitely and either improve the 554 or built it as Stride “S4”, and budget is raided (with approval by new King County Exec Balducci) to build BLE. Riders could transfer to 2 Line at South Bellevue and Bellevue Downtown. CKC is regraded for easier conversion to light rail in future (like LA Metro’s Orange Line).

        Funding: Sound Transit considers putting ST4 on the ballot in 2028, but doesn’t as polling is iffy on passage. Instead, Seattle puts a transit funding measure on the ballot in 2028 and it passes. Seattle’s measure uses the Enhanced Service Zone authorization to increase revenues within it to backfill project costs after bids come in too high for the shortened WSLE (and continue refining BLE) but also to build fare gates at grade-separated stations and to improve at-grade crossings in Seattle.

      4. @ Nathan:

        I don’t disagree with that possible political outcome — except the BLE costs are so staggeringly high that ST probably won’t be able to even get as far as Smith Cove. They’ll be really lucky to get to even Denny. Those Downtown Seattle stations are monstrously deep and complex to build.

        Keep in mind that everything was depending on Federal contributions. And West Seattle Link with a partial BLE only as far as Westlake or even just James will have such bad performance metrics that FTA is likely to stamp a big red NO on the grant application. There could be a fighting chance for FTA money if ST instead put all the Seattle funds on an automated line from Ballard to Downtown — but there’s currently no movement to even put that on the table.

        The reason that FTA even created performance metrics for funding in the 1980’s was because many similar politically popular but unproductive rail transit projects (with fantastic ridership forecasts created by algebraic manipulation) were expecting funding. The ST Board has not even dared to approach the productivity aspect. They’re still in denial. They don’t speculate about benefits of new link extensions or ask staff for a deep dive. They don’t focus on how much effort is required to transfer either — and how long transfers dampen ridership. They’re acting like elementary school kids drawing lines on a map instead and they’ve been on this track for at least a decade. .

        We may need to shame the Board in public repeatedly. We may need to get the state auditor involved. Unless enough Board members wake up to their negligence, Seattle transit is doomed for 50 years.

      5. I would guess an ST4 would “finish” BLE and WSLE, implement several “upgrades” to DSTT1 (including fare gates, signals for reliable 3-minute headways/automation, maybe platform barriers?), further improve at-grade crossings, and build a new control center in SODO/rebuild OMF-C. Outside Seattle, it might improve track signals for semi-automation, build an expanded Sea-Tac station to connect to Seatac’s planned expansion (part of its “Sustainable Airport Master Plan” currently under EIS), and maybe build more BRT in Pierce and Snohomish Counties, maybe expand T-Link in Tacoma? I think a ST-wide ST4 would fail because there won’t be enough worthwhile projects for Snohomish County and Pierce County to support it.

        ST3 built in the ability to maintain whatever taxes ST needs for operations after the major projects are done, so there’s no true “need” for an ST4 to maintain whatever’s been built.

      6. ST thinks it could afford $12B for BLE, but it’s looking at ~$20B (As much as it pains me to say it, Daniel T was right). The 4 Line is “affordable” at ~$7B. If ST truncates BLE to Smith Cove and raids the budget for the 4 Line, it could get to Smith Cove. The section north of Smith Cove including the tunnel to Ballard is probably $2-3B.

        BLE won’t start construction until after 2028, and in 2029 we’ll either have a new president or be embroiled in a civil war, so Federal funding is going to be impossible to predict.

      7. The Board’s most controversial move is to delay the 4 Line indefinitely

        You think that would be the most controversial move? Seriously? Ending a line at Delridge is OK but delaying a line that is routinely questioned by even the biggest proponents of light rail expansion would be controversial? Get real. The sh** will hit the fan quite quickly with the scenario you described.

        This was just one of the problems with ST3. There is no fallback position. Not the way they planned it. The fundamentals aren’t there for West Seattle Link. Everyone knows that. But what a lot of people don’t know is that West Seattle is supposed to come next. And that’s only because it was supposed to be the cheap project. A lot of people think this is taking so long because of “the Seattle process”. They also think these cost overruns will mean higher taxes. They haven’t quite wrapped their head around the fact that things are being delayed because they cost more. Good luck explaining that we simply can’t build what we planned.

        The only way out of this mess is to make bold changes (no second tunnel, automate the line from Ballard) and/or abandon West Seattle Link. I don’t see any world where we build West Seattle Link (in whole or in part) while not building Ballard Link in its entirety. That would be a disaster politically. The monorail had a lot of things wrong with it but at least they understood that you build a train to Ballard before you run a train West Seattle.

      9. Yes, practically abandoning a major project to build a different project would be far more controversial than building the MOS for WSLE and delaying construction to Avalon/WSJ.

        ST has never outright cancelled a major Link project. They’ve practically cancelled bus improvements and parking garages, but never a rail project. Meanwhile, building the wrong segment of a starter line first is their M.O., so it’s practically expected.

        I meant politically controversial, not technically controversial.

    2. it will look something like what it looks like now, but a lot shorter

      The problem is that “shorter” is terrible in a lot of cases. To be clear, shorter isn’t bad for Everett Link. It isn’t a great value, but extending to Ash Way or Mariner (with a station by the mall) is at least sensible. Extending south of Federal Way is silly but then Tacoma Dome Link is silly. A shorter version of Issaquah Link would be what, Downtown Bellevue to Bellevue College? Actually that isn’t that bad either. In all of these cases the projects are reasonable even if the cost per rider is extremely high and we become the laughingstock of the transit world.

      But then you have Seattle. Keep in mind, West Seattle is supposed to be next. Build to Delridge? That is ridiculous. Delridge is meant as a feeder station — the type that is added because it happens to be “on the way”. This means only one station in West Seattle. So we are talking five, maybe six billion for one station that would be ignored if Metro decides to keep running the RapidRide H Line to downtown. That is a horrible project.

      But wait, there’s more. Do we build a second tunnel? If so, that doesn’t give us much money left for Ballard. So Ballard Link consists of a train to … Smith Cove? There is nothing in Smith Cove! If it wasn’t for the fact that adding a station there costs next to nothing and there is really nothing else along the corridor for miles the station wouldn’t exist at all. But fine. It is a terrible terminus but it is only one station. You also have the Seattle Center Station. That’s good except that basically replaces the monorail for a lot of the trips. You also have another feeder station (this one for buses from Aurora) and a station at Denny. This means billions of dollars spent and you are left with crap.

      This is different than past truncations. When Link ended in Tukwila we at least served Rainier Valley. When Link made it to the UW (and didn’t get to the U-District) it clearly fell short. We even dropped First Hill. It was only two stations but those two stations were outstanding. It transformed transit in Northeast Seattle. In either case, pausing (while we wait to expand) was fine. But pausing with stations at Smith Cove and Delridge (after spending a fortune) is just nuts.

      1. I can understand the Smith Cove thing, if you look at Link as being built to meet the desires of Expedia and Amazon rather than actual transit users.

        I don’t see the same political push by influencers for Delridge Junction Link. Nucor Steel and/or West Seattle Corporate Center don’t strike me as having that level of influence.

      2. My hope is that the ‘everything is on the table’ comment was real. Combined with the word that they were looking at not building DSTT2 and putting all the lines into DSTT1 provides a path that, with some courage, ST could go down to build something that would truly add utility and good service to a lot more people – than simply truncating and building these super deep stations with lousy transfers.

    3. Don’t hold your breath.

      I don’t think “a lot shorter” will, in the long run, be politically acceptable to Seattle residents. The whole idea of a skeletal rail system that most people in the city transfer to by bus (if they use it at all) is eventually going to become political poison.

      But a lot of the compromises necessary for an extensive system (less grade separation, less road capacity, more construction impacts, etc) are still assumed by most (both voters and politicians) to be unnecessary. I actually feel encouraged that some of the people in charge are starting to realize that changes are required, but I believe it will take years to work this out.

      1. Christopher Cramer,

        Yeah, I agree with you. It’s not like the Sound Transit numbers are set in stone. I bet the costs are even higher than the current projections.

        When the costs of public projects double, it’s the citizen’s duty to call out the government.

    1. Nice, yeah I always thought it was absurd that metro was still trying to electrify when it could spend millions on other brt projects

      1. Metro didn’t have a choice. King County ordered Metro to replace the entire bus fleet with battery buses within N years, and gave it dedicated budget money to work on that, and didn’t give it budget money for “other BRT projects”. The county was under state pressure to do this.

        With the deteriorating revenue and federal situation, and STB and transit activists saying, “Higher bus frequency/coverage will get some drivers out of their cars and reduce emissions more than the difference between diesel vs battery buses”, the state relaxed its pressure, and now the county is doing the sensible thing.

    3. The rest of the article is interesting as well.

      With Seattle’s counterpart sales tax measure set to come up for renewal in late 2026, many transit advocates had been pushing to take the city-controlled measure countywide, but all signs point to that opportunity not coming together, with the King County Council instead only considering a 0.05% sales tax for Metro that could be approved by a council vote.

      So basically most of the county will have terrible transit but maybe Seattle will have something decent.

    4. Electrification is an absurd goal.

      Building transit faster will help climate change far more.

      Build the transit first before electrifying.

      1. Trolleybuses are also a cheaper way to electrify without needing to build new types of bases and we already have drivers and mechanics trained to work on them.

    5. With a narrow focus on carbon emissions, I don’t think it’s an automatic given that increasing service reduces emissions more than electrifying buses. Sure, more frequency means more people will ride, but you have to calculate how many new riders the improved frequency brings (e.g. not counting those that would be riding anyway), then subtract the emissions from all the new bus trips. A diesel bus has about the emissions per mile as 10 cars, which is not negligible, especially since increased ridership from increased frequency is usually not enough to directly increase the number of passengers per bus. Then, after calculating the amount of net emissions reduction, you’d have to compare that against emissions reduction from bus electrification.

      I don’t know how the full carbon math would work out. But, I can say that the ultimate purpose of transit is not to reduce carbon emissions, it’s to move people. And, since the goal of transit is to move people, of course, increasing service furthers that goal, while electrifying buses does not (unless it reduces operating costs, allowing the same operating budget to fund more buses).

      If transit were really just about reducing carbon emissions, we wouldn’t be running routes with fewer than 10 people on board, and many of the lower-productivity routes we do run might run less often, and late-night service might not exist at all. For example, if reducing frequency on a service from 15 minutes to 20 minutes causes 3 out of 30 riders per hour to switch to cars, but eliminates one bus per hour, emitting the equivalent of 10 cars, that’s a net reduction in greenhouses gases, even though it causes 3 riders to switch to cars! The fact that nobody who runs a transit agency thinks this way illustrates my point – that the purpose of transit is not really about reducing carbon emissions, and never was.

      1. Even supposedly “lightly-used” coverage routes get 10+ riders per hour. I’ve seen that repeatedly on the Snoqualmie Valley Shuttle, 906 (the Southcenter-Fairwood route), and the 226. When people see a bus empty or with only 1-2 people on it, it’s often only for that moment, or for the ten minutes they’re on it, and they don’t see the people who board/alight before and after that. The 906 is 30-45 minutes end-to-end, and the Valley Shuttle is 65 minutes, so if they get 10-30 people in one run, that meets the 10/hour threshold.

      2. Per Metro’s 2024 system evaluation report in appendix H:
        Route 906
        rides per platform hour peak: 11.9
        rides per platform hour off peak: 20.1
        r/ph night 6.6
        r/ph saturday: 26.9
        r/ph sunday: 22.3
        This is a short, east-west bus route along 180th – 43d – Petrovitsky between Southcenter and Fairwood that runs with half hour headways, and is critical for people who take it, because any alternative would require a detour up to the Renton Transit Center and a transfer to something else. I’ve used it, and my only complaint is that I’d like to see it have shorter headways than it does!

      3. I with it were more frequent, so that I wouldn’t have to time my going to/leaving IKEA around its 30-minute pulses. But that’s how I feel about every route. Transit best practices is to have every bus/metro route running at least every 15 minutes. Except maybe if you get way out to Snoqualmie, or rural express connectors, where 30 or 60 minutes may be more appropriate. If you want the majority of people to take transit, it has to have a minimum of convenience, not something where you have to wait and sacrifice a lot to take it. Transit is competing with driving, which doesn’t have waits like that.

      4. I don’t think pointing to the rides per platform hour and saying that’s the number of car trips each bus trip replaces is quite accurate because the car trip in question is normally much shorter than one hour. A more accurate metric for calculating whether a bus route is actually reducing emissions is the average number of passenger-miles traveled per bus mile, which is basically fancy of counting the average number of people on the bus at any given moment the bus is in service. For example, let’s suppose a bus route is one hour, but every 12 minutes, two people get on and two people get off. One bus hour has carried 10 passengers, so it may look like the bus is breaking even on emissions vs. everyone in separate cars, except it’s not really because the car trips in question would be only a short distance, not the entire route.

        Of course, this crude analysis does under-estimate the impact of the bus in other ways. For example, if the would-be passenger doesn’t actually have their own car, then their “car alternative” might entail large amounts of deadheading, whether their ride be Uber or a family member. Similarly, if the person ends up buying a car because the bus isn’t frequent enough, the emission overhead of just having the extra car is huge. And, of course, there’s the land-use impact (a functional transit system allows homes and businesses to get away with denser development and less parking than would otherwise be possible). But, these second-order effects can be difficult to quantify, and often take years to show up.

        But, the point is, it is not an automatic slam dunk, obvious as it may seem, that adding more bus service is one of the most effective ways to reduce a city’s carbon emissions. It needs to be studied and measured, and it’s going to very from city to city, depending on the baseline state of transit and local land use.

      5. @asdf2, also, let’s not forget that the worst emissions from a car come when it’s just being started up. So, if a bus (whose engine is running more or less steadily for long periods of time) replaces more trips, it’ll be better than it looks merely in terms of passenger-miles.

  5. I guess with the Ballard link cost overruns even at best it’ll likely be a smith cove truncation instead. It’ll still serve as a pretty good way to reach lower Queen Anne and to Capitol Hill. I guess the 24/33 and other bus routes might all terminate there instead

    1. The basic problem is that ST3 estimates $8.8B from North King Link Capital and $4.2B for all areas capital.

      https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/project-documents/st3-system-plan-2016-appendix-a.pdf

      With West Seattle Link it’s now running about $8B (up from $7B just this month). The speculation for DSTT2 + Ballard Link is expected to be around $20B. I frankly think it’s got to be higher given the extensive deep stations through Downtown.

      So being generous suggests that only about half the combined corridor is affordable. Maybe it can be pushed to 60-65 percent.

      Objectively, the segment from Westlake to Ballard as an automated line is going to perform best. However the board is gung ho for West Seattle.

      So that’s why when I read about the escalated costs I see these four combos as the only ones that are “affordable”:

      – Alaska Junction to James
      – Delridge to Westlake
      – SODO to Seattle Center
      – Westlake to Ballard (automated line)

      I see the Board currently committed into the first or second spending option. But the better value is the third or fourth spending option.

      I’m just not sure how to get enough Board members to stop this. The non-Seattle reps will avoid questioning Seattle’s choices. And I don’t see any Seattle elected official ready to cancel West Seattle even though it offers the least benefit.

      The only way I see this outcome changing is for rider benefits and productivity to be the goal. Arguing for the third or fourth option will be drowned in politics unless objective performance measures are made central to the decision.

      1. Al, the ST3 budgets went out the window 4 years ago – you have to look at the long-range financial plans: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-Adopted-Budget-and-Financial-Plan-03242025.pdf

        ST estimates over $51B in revenue from 2017-2046 for North King, $19B of which they allocate toward capital expansion projects in that time. WSLE and BLE are indicated as “affordable” at about $4B and $11.4B, respectively. The 4 Line is “affordable” at $4B. So, it seems to me if they take the 4 Line budget and shunt it to North King, they could build WSLE to Delridge and BLE to Smith Cove.

      2. Nathan Dickey,

        Nope. Not going to work that way. Two word for you….

        Cost overruns.

        At this point all the ST projections are just trash.

      4. I guess there could be a fifth “discontinuous” option — Delridge to SODO scaled back service with a shortened high frequency, automated line between Smith Cove and Westlake.

        Still, this appears to be all that can be afforded. I had hoped that just cancelling the DSTT2 segment would save enough money – but even that now looks to me to be too expensive.

        While there could be minor adjustments to this, this appears to be the general choices that ST must make.

        And even a Seattle only ST4 will have to be quite ambitious to generate enough funds to add only a few more stations.

      5. “The non-Seattle reps will avoid questioning Seattle’s choices.”

        Snohomish and Pierce boardmembers are questioning Seattle’s choices. They’re saying Spine completion should be fully funded before Seattle’s non-Spine projects.

      6. Tacomee, you missed the point. Try again?

        Jas, yes, if Katie Wilson wins in November, it will be very interesting to have her on Sound Transit’s Board and Executive Committee in 2026.

        Al, I agree that DSTT2 seems to be blowing the BLE budget, but apparently the BLE DEIS is in the FTA’s preliminary review before it comes out to the public. It may be another month or two before the updated cost breakdowns become public.

      7. jas,

        How on earth could a new Seattle mayor change any of this? I’ll go one step further…. Seattle’s next mayor is going to be handcuffed by City budget issues, so does it even matter who wins?

      8. “ Snohomish and Pierce boardmembers are questioning Seattle’s choices. They’re saying Spine completion should be fully funded before Seattle’s non-Spine projects.”

        I wish Snohomish and Eastside officials would come out against the escalatorpaloozas at Pioneer Square and Westlake. The layouts will force all the riders to SeaTac to drag luggage through a few city blocks and several escalators in a 3D maze.

      9. sound transit might just move forward with everett and tacoma link first since the ballard link and west seattle link designs are impossible to build

      10. “How on earth could a new Seattle mayor change any of this?”

        She’d be an ST boardmember. If Wilson wins, it’s likely that pro-real-transit city concilmembers would also win, and some of them might be on the ST board too. And if they change the tune on North King’s direction, some other boardmembers might agree with them.

        “Seattle’s next mayor is going to be handcuffed by City budget issues, so does it even matter who wins?”

        ST’s budget is separate from the city’s budget.

      11. “How on earth could a new Seattle mayor change any of this? I’ll go one step further…. Seattle’s next mayor is going to be handcuffed by City budget issues, so does it even matter who wins?:

        Your right. The money supply will trump all. I only meant that, because ST has a history of deferring to what a city wants to do, having a mayor, and ST board member, whose internal guidance on policy decisions could be coming from an authentic place, might introduce uncertainty into ST’s process. In that context ‘wildcard’ seems to be the appropriate term to me.

      12. “I wish Snohomish and Eastside officials would come out against the escalatorpaloozas at Pioneer Square and Westlake. The layouts will force all the riders to SeaTac to drag luggage through a few city blocks and several escalators in a 3D maze.”

        This could, and should, give added weight to the idea of not digging a second tunnel. If the board remains wedded to trains to west seattle then let the train connect at sodo, and all is good.

        Is there a way to connect at sodo and keep the existing station, without having to build a new station? Not building that station would be a huge cost savings too.

      13. “ Is there a way to connect at sodo and keep the existing station, without having to build a new station? Not building that station would be a huge cost savings too.”

        Several STB posters including me say yes. A few caveats to that:

        – I think that ST would still need to build an overpass at Lander for traffic though because so many Link trains would cross Lander (and Holgate too).

        – Handling the pedestrian path on Lander, and in and out of the Link station would also be needed. Maybe that can be done with dropping the pedestrian crossing under the Link tracks or adding more prominent crossing gates on Lander (as opposed to make people walk over the Lander overpass and enter the station from that bridge).

        – A new track siding may be needed north of the platforms. That would allow for a place to hold West Seattle stubbed trains. The resulting scheduling would be for a train from West Seattle arriving first and then running onto the siding , followed immediately by a train from Beacon Hill to pick up those transferring riders. The train driver would then reverse the West Seattle train while at the siding and hold until just after a southbound train towards Beacon Hill passes by them — and then immediately follow that train with a train back to West Seattle. It’s much easier for a rider to wait say 2-3 minutes standing on the same platform than it is to go up and then back down again (the current plan) in a trek that takes just as long (if not longer if someone has luggage, a bicycle or a wheelchair).

        The existing switches into the existing OMF could even be used with the West Seattle Link mainline running above the OMF to curve along Spokane Street (just two blocks further east). The current plan is to build new access tracks to and from the West Seattle mainline tracks into the OMF anyway so ST is already modifying the OMF layout anyway if they build West Seattle Link.

        Of course, ST has never put forward any scenario to keep just two platforms at SODO (with tail tracks to reverse any stubbed trains). Thus, the concept has not been analyzed for constructibility and cost. Instead , every alternative has an overbuilt SODO station requiring multiple escalators to transfer in the same direction. ST seems to want to design stations that cost more as well as take longer to navigate when transferring. Of course, their design consultants see it as a great way to increase their fees! It takes real fortitude for an architect to propose to build less.

      14. I don’t think many people realize how long and extensive the construction would be to build the DSTT2 transfer stations — assuming that they funds are there to build them.

        The station at the county buildings was planned to be possible by using the existing building footprint.

        The station connecting to Westlake is another matter. It will really require closing street blocks for extended periods of time. ST has seemed to keep this topic away from the media . They nay be avoiding the controversy until they can find funds to build the station.

    2. I wonder would we truncate the rapidride D at smith cove or have it continue. Also route 31 would probably be rerouted to terminate at smith cove

      I think most of the other buses routes wouldn’t change like the 2/13 and 4

      1. There is nothing in Smith Cove. There is no existing layover there. Turning around and finding a comfort station may not be trivial. Truncating there would be unprecedented. The 106 doesn’t truncate in Mount Baker despite there being an actual transit center there (and a real neighborhood with a nearby high school). Buses don’t stop just a little ways from downtown, especially when there is nothing there. For a bus like the D it would three-seat rides to get to Uptown from 24th NW (in Ballard).

        They might send the D to downtown via Western (like the 24/33). That’s about it. That would mean a faster route from Ballard to downtown but a slower route from Ballard to Uptown. But the bus would still get stuck in traffic because of the bridge. It would still be delayed serving Dravus. Of course they might fix all that by the time the train gets to Smith Cove but that would just make the train project look even worse (why bother?).

        The 31 and 32 are long overdue for a reroute. This might get Metro to shift things but it largely irrelevant. The 32 overlaps the D for much of its route. If anything, shifting the D would make the case for the 32 stronger. In my opinion the 31/32 should share the same pathway from the U-Village to Interbay. Specifically 20th Avenue West and Dravus. At that point they can branch. If you did that, then riders (right now) could take the RapidRide D from Uptown and then transfer to either bus. A train line to Smith Cove really doesn’t help.

        A line to Smith Cove wouldn’t change the routing much and it wouldn’t change transit much.

      2. The WSBLE DEIS described a Smith Cove station including a new bus layover facility within the footprint of the former AAA/Staples office: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HmYaVNrwrQ7JXNAt5

        I expect even after BLE gets to Ballard, Metro would continue running the D through Interbay to Smith Cove as it serves many residences and businesses along 15th Ave W that would be poorly served by BLE.

        As a former regular on the D, its slowest segment is between Smith Cove and Belltown (Uptown/LQA). It would still be a significant improvement for Ballard riders to transfer at Smith Cove, especially the bus lanes on 15th Ave W were BAT-only 24/7.

        EDIT: see page 4 of this presentation dated Winter 2022: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/west-seattle-and-ballard-link-extensions-station-planning-progress-report-smith-cove.pdf

      3. I expect even after BLE gets to Ballard, Metro would continue running the D through Interbay to Smith Cove as it serves many residences and businesses along 15th Ave W that would be poorly served by BLE.

        I seriously doubt that. It would be crazy to send that bus over the bridge. Imagine you are headed to Ballard High School from downtown. You take the train to Ballard (of course). But then you are delayed another ten minutes because the bus is stuck trying to get across the canal. It is pretty easy to argue that the main reason we are building Ballard Link is because of that crossing.

        The RapidRide E would end in Ballard. That is why it is so important we continue the fight to send the station west. Ending at 14th is just not good (for the same reason that walk-up ridership from 14th isn’t that good). In contrast if the bus turned on Market and ended at the locks (where the 44 lays over) it works out quite nicely. Whether the station is at 15th or 20th, riders have a straightforward transfer. But people along 15th connect to the heart of Ballard (“Downtown Ballard” if you will). Thus riders actually get something out of the truncation.

        If a bus turns around at Smith Cove it is quite likely an extension of the 8 (or something similar). If 15th needs a shadow then it would come from Magnolia. I would send most of the buses over Dravus towards SPU, Fremont and the UW. But I could see a coverage bus that backfills Emerson along with the gaps in Link coverage along 15th/Elliott. The tricky part is avoiding overlap but covering all the corridors (but that is always tricky with Magnolia). But part of the route would include this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/VaYEMcWPHourxhys8. Depending on the rest of the route that might only run every half hour (since so much of it is coverage). It is also possible we just abandon the (poorly performing) stops by Fisherman’s Terminal and send all the buses over Dravus. This might work out well if they end up adding a new bridge there (as part of the project to replace the Magnolia Bridge). The new bridge would have dedicated bus lanes.

        If you build Ballard Link to Ballard, truncating buses coming from the north at Smith Cove doesn’t really add up. If you are trying to save service hours you don’t send them that far south. If you do send them that far south (because you want to cover that area) then you just keep going.

      4. Two questions:

        1) Are you sure there’s enough space at 24th/Market to layover the 44 and the D?

        2) Are you thinking Metro would send no buses across the Ballard Bridge once BLE opens? If someone’s trying to get to the Fisherman’s Terminal from Ballard, you’d have them walk across the bridge?

      5. I’ve thought about this some more. If the train went to Ballard the only reason a bus would layover at Smith Cove is to cover this particular bus stop at 3rd West and Mercer. That is because the shadow (coming from Magnolia) would cover all the stops along Elliott and 15th West but not that one. Is it worth it for the bus to go from Uptown to Smith Cove just to serve that one stop? I don’t think so. If the Ballard Station ends up in 14th there will be bigger gaps. For example this bus stop here on Leary would likely go away. The 40 wouldn’t serve that section of Leary but be forced to turn on Market and head towards the station at 14th. I suppose the RapidRide D could backfill it by doing a crazy button hook. In contrast an extension of the 8 to serve that 3rd Avenue West bus stop is much easier.

        Thus there isn’t much reason to add a bus layover. Maybe for an access van or something of that nature but otherwise it just isn’t worth it to truncate buses there.

      6. “ you thinking Metro would send no buses across the Ballard Bridge once BLE opens? If someone’s trying to get to the Fisherman’s Terminal from Ballard, you’d have them walk across the bridge?”

        There’s no bus that does this now. At minimum you have to take the 40 to the 31. There’s no safe pedestrian route from the D to Fisherman’s Terminal unless you go all the way south to Dravus.

        I would imagine the 40 would still cross the Ballard Bridge, so you’d still be able to take the 40 to the 31.

      7. If I remember correctly from my time in the Community Advisory Group reviewing the WSBLE DEIS back in 2022, the expectation is that regardless of whether the Ballard terminus is at 15th or 14th, Route 40 would divert from Leary up 14th Ave and then down Market street to serve the station. 14th would become a bus/bike/pedestrian street (probably branded the “Ballard Brewery Boulevard” or something hokey like that).

        The “crazy button hook” actually seems like a kind of reasonable reuse of improvements to Leary Way there if Metro really doesn’t want to send the D across the Ballard Bridge. But I still think there should be some sort of bus service across the bridge. It’s a long hike and there are a lot of kids from North QA who get on/off the D at Emerson on their way to Ballard High School.

      8. The 40 goes across the Fremont Bridge, not the Ballard Bridge. The D is the only all-day bus that crosses the Ballard Bridge today.

      9. 1) Are you sure there’s enough space at 24th/Market to layover the 44 and the D?

        No, but but there is plenty of space along the way to park. We know the buses can turnaround (which is the tricky part) and if anything, there would be more comfort stations to the east. (I have no idea where the drivers go to the bathroom.)

        2) Are you thinking Metro would send no buses across the Ballard Bridge once BLE opens?

        Correct.

        If someone’s trying to get to the Fisherman’s Terminal from Ballard, you’d have them walk across the bridge?

        That’s one option. Another is to do the same sort of thing some riders have done for a while — take a bus and then transfer. A transfer at Dravus isn’t much different than a transfer at Emerson. But as I mentioned, I’m not sure Fisherman’s Terminal even justifies a route. In contrast, the area to the east does. Think about standing in the middle of the street at 15th & Emerson. To the west you have very little. It is almost all industrial (look at all those railroad tracks). You have to go quite a ways (to Fisherman’s Terminal) before you even get low-density retail (look at all that parking). The only place that has much of anything is towards the southwest and by then you are close to the Interbay Station. Now face east. It is a completely different story. There are a lot of apartments on the side of the hill. This area should have buses running every fifteen minutes if not more often. Those riders would transfer at Dravus (to the train) instead of Emerson. Of course Ballard Link makes fewer stops than the RapidRide E but that is the nature of Link. It adds a lot of transfers. It used to be you could take the 41 from downtown (a major transfer point) to a lot of stops in Northgate. Now you take Link and make a transfer. This would be similar.

        I wouldn’t rule out a bus going across the bridge. Folks have talked about sending the 17 to Magnolia for a really long time. There is potential merit there, especially if Magnolia grows and we are running buses frequently there. You want most buses to go to the UW and one bus to go downtown but at that point I could see going to Sunset Hill instead of just laying over. But I could also see the 1 branching with one branch going to Gilman, 15th and Magnolia. There are a lot of options. But if we build Ballard Link I think the core routes will avoid the Ballard Bridge.

      10. >(I have no idea where the drivers go to the bathroom.)

        The operators of the 44 use the restroom at the Ballard NW Senior Center. They also get snacks from the 7-11. If the D terminated somewhere around 28th and Market, it seems like SDOT/Metro could build a comfort facility somewhere along the underdeveloped block northwest of 28th and Market.

      11. If someone’s trying to get to the Fisherman’s Terminal from Ballard, you’d have them walk across the bridge?”

        There’s no bus that does this now.

        I assume Nathan’s point is that someone could walk from Fisherman’s Terminal to 15th and then catch the RapidRide D. My point is that there are very few people doing that. Those riders would instead take a bus to the Interbay Station and then Link north.

        But I still think there should be some sort of bus service across the bridge. It’s a long hike and there are a lot of kids from North QA who get on/off the D at Emerson on their way to Ballard High School.

        So what? There are lots of riders that miss the 41. It used to be that you could take that bus from all over Northgate and it would get right on the freeway. Then it would quickly get them downtown right into the tunnel. As long as the express lanes were in their favor it was fantastic. In this case we are not talking about a freeway but a drawbridge that routinely delays the route. Of course it sucks that you have to take a bus and now transfer — join the club. It just isn’t worth it to run a bus for so few riders especially since it would make it a lot less reliable.

        the expectation is that regardless of whether the Ballard terminus is at 15th or 14th, Route 40 would divert from Leary up 14th Ave and then down Market street to serve the station.

        Yes, which is another reason why the Ballard Station should be at 20th. In terms of walk-up ridership or bus integration, 20th is ideal (while 15th is worse and 14th is the worst). Put the station at 20th and the 40 doesn’t change. You still cover Old Ballard via Leary. The RapidRide D goes to the heart of Ballard. For RapidRide D riders who aren’t transferring to Link, this is ideal.

        The “crazy button hook” actually seems like a kind of reasonable reuse of improvements to Leary Way there if Metro really doesn’t want to send the D across the Ballard Bridge.

        Except it is a crazy button hook. Yes, it covers those areas but you can get off the bus, walk and then catch the bus again. You spend a huge amount of service hours on a routing that is fundamentally weak. Not because there aren’t people there, but because of the turns (https://humantransit.org/2013/08/translink-high-and-low-performing-routes.html). I just don’t see it.

      12. If the D terminated somewhere around 28th and Market, it seems like SDOT/Metro could build a comfort facility somewhere along the underdeveloped block northwest of 28th and Market.

        Yeah, there are bound to be a lot of options. I know that folks have talked about ending buses in the main part of Ballard. A bus (coming from 15th) wouldn’t have to head towards the locks. But you would want it serve the main part of Ballard.

      13. “If the D terminated somewhere around 28th and Market, it seems like SDOT/Metro could build a comfort facility somewhere along the underdeveloped block northwest of 28th and Market.”

        There are two different restrooms available at te Botanical Garden/ Chittenden Locks. Neither is directly next to a bus layover area — but both are a mere few hundred feet away. So maybe instead of building from scratch, Metro could just coordinate with the Army Corps of Engineers to create a Metro-only comfort station out of the existing ones there.

      14. D is slower than any other Elliott routes because it runs on Mercer St. I think if light rail goes to Smith Cove, D should probably skip all stops between Denny and Ballard Bridge so it can better serve Ballard and let other routes take care of it.

    3. I guess with the Ballard link cost overruns even at best it’ll likely be a smith cove truncation instead. It’ll still serve as a pretty good way to reach lower Queen Anne and to Capitol Hill.

      Capitol Hill? Did you mean South Lake Union?

      There are a lot of ways to build a train to Smith Cove just like there are a lot of ways to build a train to Ballard. But the three most likely are a new tunnel, a branch from the old tunnel or ending the new line at Westlake. Assume that is with a new tunnel. What does that give you?

      Some riders would be better off. But many riders would be worse off. The stations downtown would be worse. The addition of Denny, South Lake Union, Seattle Center and Smith Cove stations do not make up for the loss of Capitol Hill, UW, etc. Riders would have some good new one-seat rides, but not a lot of them. There is practically nothing in Smith Cove. The Seattle Center Station has potential but the preferred alternative puts it very close to the Monorail. The “South Lake Union” Station is next to Aurora — it is a relatively desolate area. A Denny Station adds value. But overall the number of one-seat rides would likely go down. Which brings up the issue of transfers.

      People who are used to their one-seat ride (Northgate to SeaTac, Othello to the UW) will transfer at SoDo. This should be a reasonably simple transfer but neither train will be frequent. In the middle of the day it will be mean transferring from a ten minute train to a ten minute train. They may time it well (but I wouldn’t bet on it). Riders from the north looking to take advantage of this new line would transfer at Westlake while those from the east would transfer at CID (maybe) or Westlake. Either way it would be a time consuming transfer. Whether you came from Bellevue or Northgate, it probably wouldn’t be worth it to take the train to Denny. Maybe for some trips but a lot of people would just walk. A lot of other people would take a bus (that would get them closer to their destination). Thus the catchment area of the Denny Station (an otherwise very good station) shrinks for trips involving a transfer. Riders heading to the Seattle Center would definitely transfer, just like they transfer to the monorail right now. Again, depending on your destination the catchment area shrinks because of the monorail. That leaves the South Lake Union and Smith Cove stations — these have very little nearby.

      Then there are bus transfers. This gets to your other comment. I don’t see any buses terminating at Smith Cove. It is too close to downtown and there is too little there. As I wrote below, the only significant change I see is the RapidRide D following the path of the 15 to downtown. This is a minor change with a minor benefit. The South Lake Union Station should really be called the Aurora station as the whole point is to connect to the Aurora buses. For those heading south it has little impact. Riders heading downtown from Licton Springs or Greenwood will just stay on the bus. If they are transferring to Link (e. g. to get to Rainier Valley) they make the transfer a little bit sooner. It would be faster for getting to Uptown. But depending on their destination it may not be faster than taking the future Metro 8 (let alone a future bus that crosses Harrison).

      There would be a lot of fundamental problems with such a line. You reduce the number of one-seat rides because you poached the 1 Line while the train-to-train transfers are poor. Some of the trips that would make sense are so close that riding a bus is just about as good. The only trip that is far enough away to be clearly better by train has an existing alternative (the monorail). That leaves you with very little and yet the cost is enormous.

      To be clear, this is assuming a second tunnel. Sharing the tunnel changes the dynamic (as does building an automated stand-alone line). If you share the tunnel then same direction transfers become trivial. Even reverse direction transfers are easy. You open up the possibility of more intuitive pairing (e. g. East Side to Smith Cove). You might have awkward timing and you probably eliminate the prospect of smaller, more frequent trains to the north but it is clearly better than building a second tunnel.

      A stand-alone automated line to Smith Cove is not great. All the transfers occur at Westlake and these likely won’t be great. About the only thing it has going for it the increased frequency. But without Ballard and Interbay you have a lot fewer one-seat rides. It is basically the monorail with a couple extra stops.

      But no matter how you cut it, ending at Smith Cove just doesn’t add much.

      1. Yeah it would seem to be less productive to build an automated stub from Westlake just to Smith Cove. Its main purpose would be to provide a last-mile way to get to Seattle Center and South Lake Union (Westlake Ave area) from Elliott/ 15th without going all the way Downtown. And maybe serve as the hillside portal from an automated line.

        The alternative has not been studied so we are being speculative here.

      2. I agree Al. It is very difficult to tell what will happen. But it would not surprise me if they study a branch and find out it would save them quite a bit of money (compared to a second tunnel). Folks would be thrilled (of course) and think that is the ideal solution. An automated stub line is never seriously considered.

        That doesn’t solve the problem through. West Seattle Link is still really expensive, even if you interline south of SoDo. That does setup a potential showdown though: West Seattle Link versus Ballard/Interbay. In other words, assuming interlining, what do we build:

        1) A line from Ballard to downtown but no West Seattle Link.
        2) West Seattle Link and a line from Smith Cove to downtown.

        The second would lead to an uproar from Ballard — people would threaten to secede. Even Magnolia would be pissed. Keep in mind, by ST’s own measurements, Ballard Link is a much better project than West Seattle Link. Not only that, but a line from Ballard-to-UW is a much better project than West Seattle Link. So instead of either line to Ballard we build a line to West Seattle? WTF?

        But I suppose it could happen. It wouldn’t be hard to massage the numbers for the Smith Cove line to make them look great. The problem (all along) has been the particulars of the stations, not the region. It is a very urban area but you have to do it really well or you lose out. But I’m sure you can assume the best with the computer models and have eye-popping numbers for the Smith Cove spur. West Seattle is much harder of course. It would be the height of hypocrisy for ST to claim that a Smith Cove line benefits Magnolia and Ballard greatly even though it doesn’t go all the way to Ballard. The argument would be that Ballard is like Everett and Smith Cove is like Lynnwood. Absurd of course but to a region that doesn’t really follow the particulars it at least sounds good. Of course there would always be the promise of more. Don’t worry, Ballard — you will eventually get your train but for now you are getting closer. So yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me but it also wouldn’t surprise me if people raise pitchforks over the idea and try put Dow’s head on a spike (metaphorically speaking or course).

      3. “2) West Seattle Link and a line from Smith Cove to downtown.”

        Even from Smith Cove as an automated stub line, I don’t fully think the funds are there to go any further than Delridge on the West Seattle Link project. Maybe Avalon Ststion funding could be eked out too but that’s it.

        And I fully agree that the SLU/Ballard project in whatever incarnation north of Westlake would likely be a better value than West Seattle Link. Nowhere in West Seattle will have buildings even half as tall as SLU has. This is at the core of why I wish the ST Board would switch from making project decisions via backroom political maneuvering to making project decisions based on performance measures.

      4. Even from Smith Cove as an automated stub line, I don’t fully think the funds are there to go any further than Delridge on the West Seattle Link project.

        Yeah, you are probably right. I expect things to proceed in this order:

        1) They study the idea of branching to Ballard (instead of a new tunnel). It is feasible. This saves a lot of money.

        2) But it isn’t enough money to actually build everything else we wanted to build. There are various ideas bandied about. End at Delridge or Smith Cove. Get rid of some stations. After a lot of debate it becomes clear that the best option is to just live without West Seattle Link.

        3) They build Ballard Link as a branch of the main line. They don’t build West Seattle Link (or a new tunnel). Money is tight but not too tight. The stations are as bad as people feared. The train adds some value but isn’t like UW/Northgate Link. Nor is it what they should build (an automated line to Westlake).

        It really is striking. The cheapest option is also the best — it is the one that would increase ridership the most. Don’t branch, don’t build a new tunnel, don’t build West Seattle Link. Build Ballard Link with smaller, automated trains that end just short of Westlake Station (close to the surface). Run to the west of Old Ballard and then curve east, heading towards a future extension to the UW. Put the Ballard station at about 20th. Connect the Spokane Street Viaduct with the SoDo Busway. Run the buses a lot more often. Even with the extra money spent on the buses and the bus ramp, you still save quite a bit of money.

      5. I agree that the cheaper option is how it should go. I, for one, would love to see it turn out that way. Most importantly everyone would benefit! A rare win-win.

        However, the inertia of the idea of a train to west seattle will be a powerful force to overcome at Sound Transit.

      8. How about running Link to Fisherman’s Terminal and a gondola to Old Ballard along 20th Ave? A gondola would be much cheaper than a tunnel under ship canal. Such line would be more direct than any bus and even a Link station along 15th Ave.

  6. Article is paywalled, but how would self driving cars make traffic worse? If anything, most road traffic is caused by incompetent driving (human factors). Traffic would improve. That doesn’t mean it’d still be a perfect solution.

    If all cars are self driving, there’d be very little traffic on freeways and certain local roads with fewer lights. Still, public Transit is a preferred mode in dense areas, as self driving cars trying to drop people off in a high density stop is clearly inefficient and would cause traffic. Parking is already horrible .

    I can envision the future of transportation being self driving cars taking people to local destinations without high traffic (kind of like Metro Flex), and also being used to connect to mass transit. Some would also go on freeways, but generally not for a commute unless the destination is isolated.

    We also should look into self driving transit. Small buses and trains. Minimize labor cost.

    1. > Article is paywalled, but how would self driving cars make traffic worse? If anything, most road traffic is caused by incompetent driving (human factors). Traffic would improve. That doesn’t mean it’d still be a perfect solution.

      > If all cars are self driving, there’d be very little traffic on freeways and certain local roads with fewer lights.

      People really overstate the phantom traffic. The largest generator of traffic is just too many cars. A freeway lane can handle 2000 cars per hour. Even with self-driving cars it doesn’t fix that. If i-405 has more than 6000 cars northbound or southbound in one hour, it will become bottlenecked, there’s no way around it.

      Regarding self-driving cars creating more traffic, there’s been a couple studies done (they used a “dedicated human driver” as a substitute for self driving). Some saw people skyrocket in miles traveled per day with some going to double or triple the amount. People just started using self driving car for delivering laundry to laundromats without them but also picking up and dropping off children. for avoiding parking some even hard the car just drive circles after dropping them off for a movie/restaurant. On the other hand it also means a lot less parking required, and as you noted also we could have driverless transit as well.

      It’s a bit unknown how exactly self-driving cars will pan out, if it’ll cause a wave of even more traffic with a bunch of cars driving around without humans, or if it’ll allow for a lot more transit and less stringent parking requirements

    2. “how would self driving cars make traffic worse?”

      1. People taking more trips in them.
      2. More ride-hailing leads to more taxis.
      3. Instead of parking or paying for parking, people may tell the car to go home and come back later (turning 2 trips into 4), or to zoom around until they’re ready to return (driving empty the whole time).
      4. People switching from transit to riding in autocars.
      5. Some cities want to replace bus routes with autocars because they think mass transit is obsolete or undesirable. Some cities have already done it with Uber, leaving out people who can’t afford the higher taxi fare.

      Even if autocars can travel close together, one bus takes the space of two cars yet usually transports 10+ people per hour, and a bus can fit 50 or 75 people. Ride-hailing taxis usually transport 2-4 people per hour, because of all the time deadheading between trips and idling.

      If autocars are feasible, than autobuses are feasible too. But many of the politicians and manufacturers pushing autocars aren’t interested in autobuses: they think mass transit is obsolete. Some are hoping they can replace their entire transit network with a new generation of autocars/taxis.

      That’s how you get mega congestion.

    3. Self driving cars would make travel much worse because it lowers the perceived pain of sitting in traffic. People are much more willing to sit through an hour’s worth of traffic if they aren’t driving.

      Self-driving cars already exist in the form of private drivers. From my experience in countries where private drivers are more common (China, India, among others), it’s fairly common to see them running small tasks inefficiently. Think: driving to the mall during the peak hour, or picking up something from the store 30 minutes away, or whatever else. The time commitment isn’t as big of a deal to the rider if they have a comfortable seat in the back.

      1. We had a Sunday Movie about transit in India, which has little transit beyond the train/metro lines, and is instead dominated by e-rickshaws and two-wheelers and cars — all of them stuck in gigantic congestion.

      2. Good points john d.

        I wish the folks on this forum would lose their euro obsession and look more to Asia. Europe is a bunch of small, declining, decandent countries that were basically destroyed during ww2 and then rebuilt on the backs of US taxpayers. Asia (ex Japan and South Korea, which may see their population hit close to zero this century) are the future. Sometime in the next decade China is likely to implement a quarantine on Taiwan. The US will be either forced into a humiliating retreat to Hawaii or into a losing war. Either way the only semi foundries that matter in the world will fall into Chinese hands.

      3. “Asia (ex Japan and South Korea, which may see their population hit close to zero this century) are the future. Sometime in the next decade China is likely to implement a quarantine on Taiwan.”

        What does that have to do with how American cities should organize their transit and land uses? What transit/walkability features do Japan, South Korea, and China have that Europe doesn’t have, that Pugetopolis should emulate?

        Most Americans have stronger familiarity/cultural affiliations to Europe than to Asia (as I do), and American cities more like European ones I would think, and European-type solutions would be more familiar and easier to get the broader public to accept than Asian-type ones. Asian-type solutions (especially in China) depend on a top-down government that can decree a very large solution and fully fund it and ignore any opposition, all of which are impossible in our Pugetopolis/US political structure and prevailing public expectations (like nimbys, anti-tax people, and “local control”-minded suburbs having a lot of clout).

        Even if Europe is declining, its transit, land use, human-minded culture/joie de vivre, and constituent-prioritizing governments on average are still a good place to live in (in my view as an outsider). Brits have been lamenting for decades that they feel poor and are falling behind, but I look at their infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods, and what it’s like to live in that environment, and I think, “That’s not that bad” and I wish we had some of those things. Or like how the UK’s national rail network used to be derided as “the worst passenger-rail network in Europe”, but when I rode it in 1998-2002, it was ten times better than Amtrak or the local regional/commuter rail networks, so I’d be very happy to have “the worst rail in Europe” than what we have. So even if the UK continues to decline, it’s still doing pretty well by some measures, and would be a nice place to decline in, and it still has worthwhile lessons for American cities. And the same for the rest of Europe.

      4. People compare themselves to European countries because the economies are similar. But “they do that in Europe” is usually shorthand for “they do that in much of the developed world”. This means Japan, South Korea, Uruguay, Argentina, etc.

        The developing world (whether in Asia or otherwise) is much more of a mixed bag. A lot of countries have terrible traffic problems. Most of the people can’t afford a car. For example India has 45 cars per 1,000 people; Pakistan has 40; Bangladesh has 37. Most of the people in the Indian subcontinent (and much of the world) rides motorcycles, scooters, bicycles (what are usually lumped together as “two-wheelers”). These won’t be automated anytime soon. Hard to see self-driving cars helping in the least. Just like here, automated buses might help.

      5. Mike Orr-

        My point is on the subject of cities and urban organization there are other models than Europe that one can learn from. Cities in Asia are huge and dense. Outside of Japan, they are quite old (Japan, like much of Europe , got the opportunity to totally rebuild in the mid 20th century courtesy of the USAF).

        I would think the fact that many of them are socialist and communal would naturally appeal to the leftists in Pugetopolis. Narcissistic and individualist behaviors are generally suppressed by society as well as government.

        Most of the “nice things” that Europeans have they have not paid for; like us they are addicted to deficit spending, but worse they have radically underfunded their militaries, relying on us to defend them. For better or worse, those days are over. I won’t continue this thread so feel free to respond or not respond. Just try to have a slightly open mind, it might help your cause.

      6. “My point is on the subject of cities and urban organization there are other models than Europe that one can learn from. Cities in Asia are huge and dense.”

        Again, what specific suggestions from Asia do you see, that Europe doesn’t have? You’re right that we should look at what works in Asian cities, and we do. The last generation of STB editors had people with Asian ancestry who gave firsthand accounts of the cities’ metros and overall transit and land uses and zoning. And I know people who’ve spent 1+ years in Asia. But I can’t think of any of the current authors who fit into either category, so we have limited experience with Asia, mostly YouTube transit documentaries.

        It doesn’t help to vaguely say Asia has things Europe doesn’t that we should imitate, without saying what those are. Maybe there aren’t any.

        “I would think the fact that many of them are socialist and communal would naturally appeal to the leftists in Pugetopolis.”

        You don’t understand most of the transit fans here then. It’s not about the country’s political ideology; it’s about what kinds of transit/land use patterns are most conducive to an effective and convenient life anywhere. Some of those examples can appear in multiple countries with very different ideologies and structures. For instance, some of the best examples are in Scandinavia/Finland, and they’re not socialist/communist/communal.

        “Most of the “nice things” that Europeans have they have not paid for; like us they are addicted to deficit spending, but worse they have radically underfunded their militaries, relying on us to defend them. For better or worse, those days are over.”

        The point is that having a comprehensive transit network and walkable cities, themselves make cities/countries more resilient and have a better economy. That allows their citizens to be the most productive, which generates the most wealth, which generates the most tax revenue, which keeps deficits down. And it means that suddenly losing access to foreign oil wouldn’t devastate the country, because their comprehensive public transit doesn’t use that much oil to begin with, far less than if everybody resorted to cars because they had American-level transit or no transit. And it means they’re not contributing as much to worldwide carbon emissions, which means there won’t be as many devastating heat waves and hurricanes and tsunamis as there would be if fewer countries had that comprehensive transit/walkability infrastructure.

        The US ENCOURAGED Europe to depend on the US militarily after WWII, to prevent the mismash of intra-European wars that had been happening for centuries and led up to WWI and WWII, and to recruit Europe as allies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. That probably needed to be adjusted after 1991, 2000, or 2010, but that in itself is not a reason to dismiss Europe as having “big deficits that don’t include defense”, or that Europe has nothing to teach us or is hopeless because they have big deficits.

      7. Even when comparing to Europe, we really need to be careful.

        The anti-transit advocates sometimes bring up statistics that show transit use dropping in Europe – because of a bunch of ex-Eastern Block countries that had few resources and investment for some decades.

        Even just going to one country, France has an assortment of philosophies. After some decades of replacing tram lines with buses, a bunch of cities have decided to put trams back. A couple French cities never got rid of their old tram lines.

        I think it’s important to learn from anywhere and everywhere.

        I really like the Busan Skycapsule contraption in South Korea, and would love to know more. However, it was built as a tourist attraction and all the information I’ve seen about it discusses it from a tourist perspective, and nothing about the technical aspects of how it works, and if the device has ever been adapted to urban transit. However, much of the information seems to only be available in Korean, which makes it difficult to learn more.

      8. Another thing about those big European deficits (and I’m taking your word that they’re big on average): the European and US deficits cover only government spending. But Americans have to pay privately for many basic things that are subsidized more in Europe. If you compare public+private spending together, Americans spend more but get less quality for it. E.g., healthcare, where Americans spend twice as much, and the high inequality means many people do without. The private expenses mean Americans have less money left over after they’ve paid them, and, not surprisingly, they have higher private debt. So you can count public+private debt together too, and the differences in spending and debt narrow between the US and Europe. You might also add something for the Americans that are going without, since that’s an unmet need, and it harms both them and the rest of society (who have to deal with the mental strain this causes, and people sleeping on the sidewalk in front of them, and government effort that wouldn’t be necessary if this level of poverty and neglect and abuse didn’t exist in the first place). (By abuse I mean right-wing politicians blaming the victims, gratuitously/sadistically harming them, and telling lies about them.)

      9. “Most Americans have stronger familiarity/cultural affiliations to Europe than to Asia (as I do), and American cities more like European ones I would think, and European-type solutions would be more familiar and easier to get the broader public to accept than Asian-type ones. ”

        While I agree that Asia and North America have their differences big time and it is hard to copy idea from another continent, I think the cityscape in many places (especially Bellevue) in Puget Sound has more influence from Asian cities than you think.
        Unlike US east coast, I think PNW is equally influenced by both Europe and Asia.

      10. When people refer to “Europe” they often just mean the EU countries. Obviously there are major differences between these countries but it isn’t like Asia. China and India are dramatically different than South Korea and Japan. Hell, North Korea and South Korea are dramatically different. If you refer to “Asia” then you have to be a lot more specific before anyone knows what you are talking about. It would be silly to say “Asia has great public transportation” when the biggest country by population (India) does not. Public transportation in the wealthy countries of Asia is very good. It is also good in China (because of more recent investments). Asia is a land of haves and have-nots. I’m too lazy to do the math but my guess is more than half are “have-nots”. People in these countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines) don’t have a lot of money to spend on transit. They mostly have whatever is left-over from when they were colonies and that typically isn’t a lot.

        In contrast the various EU countries are similar to the U. S. in terms of wealth. Yet their transit is much, much better. Even some of the poor, former Soviet countries have better transit (at least the USSR did that). This is why transit advocates often mention “Europe” as a model. But again, they could easily mention Japan, especially since there are a lot of similarities between Japan and Europe. At the same time, there are similarities between a handful of countries in Asia and Japan (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea) and Japan. It is just a lot easier to say “Europe” instead of “Developed countries in Europe and Asia” when discussing such things.

      11. @NoneOfThe Above,

        Do you not understand that the Pentagon has multiple missiles targeted on those Taiwanese foundaries today? They will never allow those ASML etching machines to fall into the hands of Chairman Xi, even if it means killing thousands of South Korean technicians.

        Yes, it is inevitable that Taiwan will fall to the bureaucrats of Beijing, and the people of the island will suffer egregiously as a result. But “the fabs” will be rubble when the Red Army reaches them.

    4. Without road pricing, self driving cars would drastically increase the number of vehicle miles traveled. Imagining everyone who currently rides transit to downtown during rush hour, instead, taking their personal self driving car to the office, getting dropped off and having the self driving car then drive itself empty back to the owner’s driveway (or, worse, circle around downtown streets all day). That is how widespread self driving cars will make traffic worse.

      1. I did mention in another reply that we would ideally add congestion pricing and a ban on dropoffs in city/dense areas including for self driving cars.

        My suggestion is using self transit to replace transit in certain parts of suburbs and rural areas. Essentially instead of DART service, just have self driving taxis drop them to the spine in an area that wouldn’t experience long lines of people trying to drop themselves off, or a larger transit center built with that capacity

        It’s inefficient but necessary to give service to some people, and can be valuable off peak when there is no congestion and transit is not operating. Of course I’d prefer transit where possible.

      2. And transit can one up self driving cars. If transit is faster and cheaper, people will take it. So what’s the worry about all this induced demand?

        Keep the self driving cars in their own lane, and buses/trains mind their own business.

        People will pick the one that is better for them. If that means they prefer waiting in traffic, so be it. But if we want to increase transit ridership, we can do so without forcibly banning cars. Just make the transit option appealing and cheap.

      3. Another thing is a LOT of suburb parents drop their kids to school, and then drive to work. Walking and buses are preferred. I think schools should restrict parking/dropoff, as this is a source of a lot of traffic in the region. Self driving cars won’t help here, due to the long lines

        Instead, Automated School buses could also be expanded to Metro routes where parents and kids could ride together. Kid goes to class and parent heads off to their local transit center which takes them to work via express bus, light rail, or express bus + light rail.

        It effectively knocks out two birds with one stone. Peak hour suburb demand with solid coverage + school bus service.

        School buses are also an outdated concept. Kids can only go to school and get home at one time. There should be ways to get home from school at many times of the day. Some kids stay for after school activities and sports… But have no bus home. Parents have to go and pick them up. A safe efficient Metro bus just makes more sense, kind of like how Bellevue and Lake Washington does for some high schools.

      4. When personal autocars become common in suburbs, it will be just as easy for Metro Flex to switch to them. Metro flex is expanding because avant-garde constituents demand it instead of more coverage bus routes even though it’s less cost-effective. So the same political forces would probably push Metro to make them driverless.

      5. You can’t eliminate drop-offs in dense areas or anywhere: that’s what enables people to transfer to transit or do errands without parking there. There need to be drop-off places for the same reason that there need to be scooter-corral areas for shared scooters.

        I will mention that at the Pine & Bellevue bus stop, cars regularly stop there to pick somebody up, pick up take-out food, or wait there for somebody to arrive. This often forces buses to go around them, honk and wait for the car to move, or occasionally bypass the stop. And when it takes 2-3 light cycles for a bus to cross the two intersections at Summit and Bellevue, with left-turning cars in front of them taking up a quarter of the light-cycle time and sometimes making the bus miss the light, additional delays caused by cars in the bus zone compounds the problem.

        Yesterday I got off at Westlake Station, and there was a car at the bus stop with four people loading luggage into it. The bus honked, and when the people were still to busy to move the car, the bus went around it. I was afraid it would skip the stop and I’d have to walk further to my transfer. But the bus went around the car and stopped at the front end of the bus zone, which was long.

      6. “And transit can one up self driving cars. If transit is faster and cheaper, people will take it.”

        That’s why we need comprehensive transit like in Europe or New York, so that it’s obviously faster and better than driving. That’s how to get driving and car-ownership mode share down below 50%. We have that for only a few select trip pairs. Try looking at a bus trip from Ballard to Capitol Hill, Fremont to Capitol Hill, or Ballard to the U-District, and wonder how it can possibly take 45 minutes to an hour to go just three miles in the inner city with “excellent bus service”, but it does, because of the waiting and congestion and transfer overhead and unreliability. That’s the kind of thing that makes transit a hard sell to ordinary Americans.

        “So what’s the worry about all this induced demand?”

        Different people have different motivations. Some people really don’t want to ride a bus/train with strangers or possibly homeless people and violent criminals (whether real or imagined). So as soon as Uber or shared scooters became available, they flocked to them. The same would happen with robotaxis. See the Sunday Movies 9/6 about how Musk is building hyperloops and dedicated car-chauffeur streets because he doesn’t like the idea of riding mass transit with strangers. This may not be the majority of people, but it’s enough to make a noticeable difference in congestion (higher) and transit ridership (lower), because that’s been happening ever since Uber started in San Francisco.

      7. at the Pine & Bellevue bus stop, cars regularly stop there to pick somebody up, pick up take-out food, or wait there for somebody to arrive. This often forces buses to go around them

        That’s why it makes sense to put cameras on the buses and automatically give out tickets. It isn’t just BAT lanes. People block areas that are clearly marked “No Stopping” or the bus stops themselves. I guess Seattle is in the “pilot phase” for this (https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/community-programs/red-light-cameras/transit-only-lane-enforcement) even though other cities have already adopted this policy.

    5. I’m only going to be at this place for an hour, I’ll make my self-driving car circle the block 100 times while I wait because that’s cheaper than paying for parking.

    6. I think these studies you’ve pointed out still fail to understand what causes traffic and have not been done with self driving cars.

      Very few human drivers can truly substitute a self driving car. Self driving cars can communicate with each other eventually. There would be algorithms.

      At the moment, yes, They don’t work to fix traffic as there will still be human drivers and no communication with other self driving cars. But once every car is self driving and the system works with each other, it will be more viable.

      Most traffic is caused by human drivers leaving inadequate space with the car in front of it. It causes merging to fail, sudden stops, etc. if every car is automatic and in sync with each other, there can be a much better flow. Especially if a computer algorithm can pre chart the destination. Did anyone make a study with a computer simulation of these flows? I’m fairly certain it’s possible and roads could be designed around it.

      Regardless, I do agree that self driving cars will cause induced demand and problems in that regard. But that’s fine.

      Keep the bus lanes and transit systems, so transit remains a viable option. Keep those cars out of the way. Add tolls or taxes to make the car a bit more expensive. Some people will choose to use the car and they can have that option. But there should be no obstruction to using transit and transit should be cheaper and just as reliable in many scenarios.

      1. > Most traffic is caused by human drivers leaving inadequate space with the car in front of it. It causes merging to fail, sudden stops, etc. if every car is automatic and in sync with each other, there can be a much better flow.

        No I literally talked about that above. That is not actually where most traffic comes from. People just like to talk about that aspect of traffic because it sounds like then it isn’t because of too many cars.

        The primary bottleneck is still too many cars per lane.

      2. And I can guarantee you, this can increase transit ridership if our leaders do this right (which they’ll not… But I’m saying as a hypothetical).

        Many people are not willing to take multiple buses to get to their nearest light rail station 10 miles away in 1 hour. You can’t convince Americans to move to higher density housing – we already have our lifestyle and we want larger homes in smaller less dense communities.

        A self driving car changes the issue of slow transit for outer communities. It drops them off near a shared medium density community bus station (that can justifiably operate all day) that connects the light rail as an express rather than taking too many local deviations. We rely on the self driving service to do those local deviations,.saving all transit riders time.

        Self driving drop off and parking should be banned/limited from light rail stations (except by permit for rural folks who absolutely have no viable transit service)

        That means less cars on the road and better transit for everyone. And we can just delete parking. Deleting parking and banning drop offs in certain areas that meet a certain density threshold will essentially clear up all our roads.

      3. During peak congestion, yes it’s too many cars.

        But traffic should still be able to continuously move (perhaps a bit slower) if we have better drivers. Especially when traffic is only moderate.

        The full stops are caused by incompetents. Especially on local roads you can alleviate traffic by driving a bit slower and leaving space, effectively keeping the car moving the entire time rather than suddenly stopping and causing a chain reaction of delays. Automated cars wouldn’t have as much of a delay by the way.

      4. > Most traffic is caused by human drivers leaving inadequate space with the car in front of it. It causes merging to fail, sudden stops, etc. if every car is automatic and in sync with each other, there can be a much better flow.
        I don’t think that’s true. That might be the hair trigger that Cascades into a traffic jam, but even without that there would still be traffic because traffic is a geometry problem.
        Imagine a lane of cars going 70 mph at minimum safe distance, which is what , like 80ft? So you can fit 13.33 cars in 1000 ft, and you have some number X cars per hour of throughput. Now imagine you have a busy on ramp, like from Denny Way Those new cars can’t just merge straight in because the cars in the lane are already at safe following distance. Add cars and they have to slow down because you cut the following distance in half. Now you have 26 cars, but they are going 40mph to maintain safe following distance. You have slightly more cars per hour, going much slower. The number of cars per hour doesn’t increase exponentially with the density of cars however, there is a maximum value to this, and that maximum value can decrease when things happen like rain which decreases minimum safe follow distance. (Good thing it never rains here).

        Now actual traffic modeling is more complex than this, and freeways tend to have a bimodal flow, where there are 2 possible patterns and one has slightly higher throughout and higher speed, but managing that bimodality only gives a few % more cars per hour. The fundamental problem is geometry. Seattle’s population has doubled since 1990 but our number of lanes hasn’t. Where did all the extra cars go? Some went on our roads, which is why our traffic is worse now, but most others aren’t there because just as induced demand can add cars with more capacity, we have reduced the amount of driving per person because traffic got worse and transit got better. People make shorter trips, and take transit more. I need a damn good reason to drive all the way to Ballard. But Northgate? Easy, I’ll just hop on the light rail.

      5. Here’s a compromise I just thought of. Keep a light hand on autocar regulations, in exchange for adding full transit-priority lanes the entire way on all highways, 5+-lane streets, and as many 4-lane streets as feasible if a bus route uses them (including incremental transit expansions).

      6. “Most traffic is caused by human drivers leaving inadequate space with the car in front of it.”

        While getting cars closer together can increase capacity, it really only works to significantly increase capacities and speeds on freeways. For any street or road with signals, it often the pedestrian crossing time that defines the capacity. That’s because the busier streets that get congestion are often much wider — meaning that it takes longer to walk across so red lights linger longer.

        There is also a time of day aspect. As we’ve seen many jobs no longer require specific 8 to 5 schedules, workers are traveling at other times or they are putting in some work days from home. Of course many jobs still require onsite presence, but those often have start or end times not in the middle of the peak commute hour.

        I think the best aspect of automation is probably collision avoidance. Every time a lane is blocked from a collision, heavy traffic backs up very fast.

      7. Even if autocars can increase thoroughput by driving closer together consistently and not making sudden moves that force other cars to make space around them, it’s dwarfed by the basic geometry of personal cars, which Jarrett Walker at humantransit.org has documented extensively. Ross can probably find the best article that explains this.

        A regular car like a Corolla seats 4 people but takes the space of 8-10 seated people for the hood and trunk. Usually it has 1.3 people onboard (33% of available seats). It requires a shared car length of 1-2 cars both front of and behind it to avoid collisions. We’ll assume this footprint is 2 phantom cars (or 16-20 missing seats).

        When parked in a parking space it needs 1/4 car length on all sides (1 phantom car), and 1 shared car length behind it to get in and out (1/2 phantom car). The size of one parking space is comparable to a small bedroom or living room. So an apartment building could have an additional studio or 1 BR apartment for every few parking spaces in the garage.

        Each car traditionally needs 1 parking space at home, 1 at work, and .3 shared space at a supermarket. That’s 2.3 total parking spaces per car. People’s driving patterns are more complicated now: they may take transit to work but drive everywhere else (subtract 1 space), but if they drive to a P&R for work, that’s their 9-5 space (re-add 1 space).

        Taxis have fewer parking requirements but are driving on streets all day, so they use more street capacity than personally-owned cars.

        The average American “car” has become as big as an SUV, so the amount of space it takes up is somewhat larger. It burns me up when an SUV takes 1 1/2 street-parking spaces (making 2 spaces unusable for others), so a disabled person can’t park there and has to circle the surrounding blocks looking for a space, or give up on going to that destination.

        If we now compare a regular car to a bus, 2-3 cars fit into the bus’s length. The cars have a combined seat capacity of 8-12 people, but usually have 4 people. A lightly-used coverage bus route gets 10+ passengers per hour. A moderate arterial route has a load of 10-20+ people most of the time. A workhorse route like the E has some 50+ people in the middle of the route. A packed articulated bus has 55 people seated plus some 50 people standing, up to a maximum of around 125 people. All that in a space of a typical 4 car passengers.

        If all cars suddenly became driverless, the number of car trips wouldn’t decrease. In personally-owned cars, the driver is a passenger, so they would remain. In taxis, the driver would disappear, but it would still have 1.3 passengers, and the car’s footprint wouldn’t change. There would be some unknown increase in car trips, driving around empty until the owner is ready to return, and transit riders switching to robotaxis. There would be some decrease as cars travel closer together consistently. But probably less than the other factors.

      8. We’re ignoring the safety issues of autocars misinterpreting the situation and running over pedestrians and animals, or suddenly stopping because there’s a kleenex in the lane in front of them. And operating erratically or even refusing to run in rain or snow. At some point these mishaps may accumulate enough to turn regulators and the public against autocars.

      9. > We’re ignoring the safety issues of autocars misinterpreting the situation

        ehh the waymo cars seem to be doing well. Im fine with self driving cars from a safety standpoint

        > But traffic should still be able to continuously move (perhaps a bit slower) if we have better drivers. Especially when traffic is only moderate.

        People just keep misunderstanding traffic. what happens is they all watch that those repeated youtube videos about that one study done about the circular traffic about phantom traffic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE14E9FQ4As and etc…

        it’s really not the main bottleneck of traffic. this is like the drink one red wine for better health study and then people then use to justify drinking like 5/10 cups of wine a day. or the peanuts for cholestrol and then they eat like a bucketful.

        this phantom traffic thing is literally only about moderate amounts of traffic and even if completely eliminated would like many increase throughput by like 5~10% or something. If such a small increase could have solved traffic then all the freeway widenings in the past going from 2 to 3 lanes aka 50% more capacity or say 3 to 5 lanes would have completely solved it.

      10. it’s really not the main bottleneck of traffic.

        I agree. The main problem is that they are too many cars for the road and the cars take up too much space per person. Look at this picture (I’m sure you’ve seen it or variations of it before): https://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8ac970c-popup. Look how much space the car takes up. But also notice that the cars are literally bumper to bumper, four lanes wide! Even if it was possible to drive 60 mph like that (and it really isn’t) the bus takes up way less space. Think how many buses can run — with a considerable gap — to equal the space of those cars. You can easily get eight times as many (probably twelve) with buses compared to the science-fiction type world.

        The sort of thing you describe will help but it is similar to adding another lane (at best). Keep in mind the other issues. You still have to leave gaps so that cars can merge. You still have to deal with debris on the roadway and inclement weather. You are still going to have congestion if you have too many cars. To be fair, the same thing *can* happen with transit. Every system has capacity limits. It is just that with transit the actually capacity of the roadway is much, much higher.

      11. While getting cars closer together can increase capacity, it really only works to significantly increase capacities and speeds on freeways.

        Good point. Look at a crowded roadway that is not a freeway. It takes several light signals to get through. When the light is red, the cars are bumper to bumper until the next intersection. If someone wants to join the flow then someone else needs to be generous enough to let them in. But that means that someone in that same lineup of cars has to wait even longer to get through the light. This sort of thing is quite common. Automating makes no difference at all.

      12. It’s not the road capacity you need to be concerned with, outside of highways, it’s the intersection capacity. The roadways usually have plenty of capacity. One lane in each direction is usually sufficient. It’s the intersections that can’t process cars fast enough that causes urban traffic.

      14. “It’s not the road capacity you need to be concerned with, outside of highways, it’s the intersection capacity.”

        The road capacity isn’t there either.

        Take a look at traffic stopped at one of those intersections some time. There’s maybe 1 out of every 20 cars with more than one person. This means each lane holds about 7 people per northwest block, or about 140 per lane per mile.

        That’s for stopped traffic, which is as much density as you can put into a traffic lane. Add any motion at all, and the capacity goes down.

        There just isn’t enough space to move thousands of people that way very efficiently,

      15. I think it is to early to assert Self-driving is definitely bad and causing induced demand.
        I actually think this technology might make it easier to introduce a price tag based on self-driving service usage to manage travel demand. The real question is whether the industry will be ethically regulated so that the access to self-driving is priced to optimize traffic rather than profit. If demand management can be introduced in this scheme, you might not need a physical bus lane at Denny Way and there won’t be bus lane or HOV violator which is definitely a good thing for public transportation.

      16. I think it is to early to assert Self-driving is definitely bad and causing induced demand.

        I don’t think anyone is saying that because right now it is irrelevant. The number of self-driving cars on the road is tiny. What we are saying is that self-driving cars — when they finally become common — have their drawbacks. It is quite common to read articles that suggest the end result will be positive. I think it has the potential for that but only if we regulate things properly. It is worth noting that a lot of people considered social media as being nothing but positive. Now there are complaints about its role in everything from mental health to authoritarianism (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/nobel-peace-prize-winner-maria-ressa-how-social-media-pushing).

      17. Agreed, Glenn. I was just suggesting people look at the right metric. The reason those cars are stopped is the lack of capacity of the intersection, not the road. Unimpeded by the intersection’s capacity constraints, 1800 cars could move through a single lane every hour.

        What this means for autocars, it probably depends. They will likely, as some point a year or 20 years in the future, be able to navigate an intersection better than even the most savvy and experienced cabby in NYC. And they will likely know exactly what all the other drivers are thinking. So those intersections might increase their throughput on the margins. But in dense urban areas, cars and often the minority of road users, so we want to regulate now to protect the rights of other road users, particularly non-motorized users, before the autoauto-menschen start stealing capacity from the public right of way in the name of “efficiency” and asking forgiveness later. Likely after a massive demonization campaign for other uses (I foresee scooters being a popular boogeyman) on the order of the jaywalking space-grab that worked so well 80 years ago.

  7. The Busan Sky Capsule (two links, South Korea) is a 2km railroad with 4-person “capsule” trains. It looks like it goes from the city to the beach. The capsules look like mini vintage streetcar cars. Travel time is a 30 minutes, so it’s ultra-slow for sightseeing. Cost for 1-4 people is 40,000-50,000 won ($28.38-$35.48) one way. Your party is guaranteed a private car even if you’re 1 person.

    There’s also a Haeundae Beach Train on the same route, so some people take a capsule one way and the train the other way. The train has four stops vs the capsule 2 stops. It’s unclear whether the train travels further or the capsule bypasses intermediate stops.

    1. My first thought was it’s PRT (Personal RapidTransit), but it’s more of a cross between PRT and the Seattle Monorail. It has small-group sized cars like PRT, but a fixed 2-station service like the monorail. Multi-station PRT like Morgantown, PA has simultaneous one-seat rides between any different or same station pairs.

    2. It’s very much set up for tourists, but the really small profile, frequent service, etc makes me think it could be set up to provide transit a bit like a gondola (which also has cabins). One of the videos I saw shows spare cars stored on a siding, so switches are apparently possible. Maybe intermediate stations are possible, but just not needed on a line that already has a light rail line directly under it?

      The track is so low profile and narrow compared to most anything else I’ve seen (about half the width of the monorail right of way) it seems like it could be useful technology for non-tourist uses. Eg: speed the drive cable up a bit, provide intermediate stations, etc.

      The poles supporting the track are so small you could put them pretty much anywhere. Like a gondola, the cars seem very quiet.

      I’m thinking of something along the lines of a C shaped route connecting Seattle Center to King Street Station along the waterfront. Places like Pike Place Market, Bell Street Pier, the ferry terminal, etc already have elevators and stairs. By making it elevated, you could get to Seattle Center from the waterfront without dealing with long trains blocking the Broad Street crossing. You also wouldn’t have to deal with the traffic at King Street Station: just build the station for this directly above the bus and taxi congestion area, entering into the station plaza, using the existing elevator and stairs for those going down to Amtrak.

      1. “a line that already has a light rail line directly under it?”

        Is that what the Haeundae Beach Train is, a light rail line underneath the capsule track? From the descriptions it sounded like a regular train on the same track as the capsule.

      2. It’s separate from the rest of the network, and it operates a bit like a streetcar only it’s separated from street traffic. It seems like this would be called light rail here.

        The Siemens cars used on Link are compliant with UIC standards to operate on mainlines everywhere that standard is followed, so Link would be a “regular train” in many other countries.

        As it’s separate from the main network, operates using different equipment than the main line, doesn’t operate in the street, and is too lightly built to be a metro, it seems like the proper USA term would be “light rail”.

      3. By light rail are you referring to the capsules or the train or both? Do the capsules and the train share the same tracks, or does each have its own set? The scenes in the video showed most of the capsule tracks as elevated and grade-separated, but with some segments on shared streets like a mixed-traffic streetcar, or at least one turn in the middle of a street or plaza which may be in the city center.

      4. The capsules and the light rail train operate on the same right of way.

        It was once a two track railroad, but got removed from service. The “beach train” is the single track light rail- like service built on one track. The space occupied by the other track is now a pedestrian path. The Skycapsule ride is built between and above both, supported by very small columns.

      5. Here, this video shows both. The beach train is a bit more like a light rail car adapted to tourist service with large windows and seats facing one direction. Maybe battery powered? It doesn’t seem to have either 3rd rail or catenary. It’s in the second part of the video:
        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wbN2ffs8lso

      6. I think the big takeaway for me is that South Korea (like Japan) are masters in cuteness. Hello Kitty ain’t got nothing on those trains. They are adorable.

        The video cracks me up. Half way through you can tell he is thinking “this is silly” or maybe “I should have brought a date, all this cuteness is just wasted on me”. But then he snaps back — “I’m making a video! I’m cute. It’s all good :)”

        And it is. I like the video of the woman whose job it is to point down as a way to tell people they should go down the stairs now. I can just imagine myself smiling and giving her a thumbs up as I turn. I thought the coastal train might be more mundane but it is quite nice as well. Bench seats facing the water? Wow! That would be the star of the show if not for the cute little trains. I’m not a beach guy and I don’t particularly like crowds but now I want to go there.

      7. In July 2024 we featured Japan’s craziest trains, including a Hello Kitty train, Pokemon train, star-gazing train, first-class-only train, bicyclist-paradise train, and art deco train (where each car has a different Japanese-inspired decor).

      9. “Amtrak and Sound Transit just need to come out with a Taylor Swift themed train!”

        Didn’t CT already do that with buses? 😂

    3. It is like Gondola or arial tram in Ski resort. There is no intermediate stops. You can try to think it is just like the elevator of Space Needle.

      1. As built, it’s that way. If you look at the end station, it’s clear they’ve a way to switch cars off it. So it looks like they could have intermediate stations if they needed.

        However, they’ve got the beach train to actually do the heavy passenger movement, so don’t need to.

  8. For the love of the transit gods, will Metro PLEASE rename the I-Line to another letter? It may be confused with the 1-Line on paper/print/signage.

    1. At least it doesn’t intersect!

      Of course you make a good point. Unfortunately Metro doesn’t care. They probably would say that RapidRide letters came first.

      Metro and ST also prefer white numbers in round balls, adding to more confusion. And ST operates lettered lines too (N; S; T) adding to even more confusion.

      I’ve longed for some regional approval process on transit route branding. But there’s no interest in doing anything. No transit operator wants review of the branding that they use.

      The next unclaimed RapidRide letter is “L”. A lower case “l” also looks like “I” or “1”.

      1. At least it doesn’t intersect!

        Yeah, I think that is the main thing. As long as you don’t overlap it really doesn’t matter. The Metro 1 runs in Queen Anne. The RapidRide I Line will run in Renton, Kent and Auburn. Hard to see anyone getting them confused.

        Now if a future “L” line manages to overlap either of these buses it would be confusing.

        Of course all of this branding is silly. Metro is nowhere near running out of numbers. I suppose there is value in designating certain routes as “off-board-payment” but isn’t that what the “RapidRide” (and different colors) is all about? Why not just use numbers, like “RapidRide 120” instead of “RapidRide H”. That makes things very easy for existing riders. Your bus just got “RapidRided” but it still has the same number. You can still pay in the front if you want to (but you don’t have to). In some cases (RapidRide G) you would come up with a new number but again, we have those available (16 seems like a good choice for a bus on Madison).

        The only advantage to using letters is that they could, potentially, serve as a mnemonic. Do they? Not really (although Metro is saving “R” for Rainier Avenue). Even that may end up being confusing (“I thought “R” was the bus that went to Renton”).

        This is just one of the many problems with the whole “BRT” concept. Too much time spent on marketing and too little spend on just making the buses better.

      2. “I suppose there is value in designating certain routes as “off-board-payment” but isn’t that what the “RapidRide” (and different colors) is all about?”

        No, as I keep telling you. RapidRide is not just off-board payment, or even primarily that. The most important thing is guaranteed 15-minute minimum frequency every day until 10pm. The second most important is street-lane improvements to speed up the bus. The third is the next-arrival displays at stops, both to tell you how long you’ll want and as a countdown to help dispel impatience. The fourth is the fat red line on the map that tells people this route is guaranteed frequent and faster than a regular bus. So visitors can just use Link and the RapidRide lines unless they’re going to somewhere none of them serve. But they serve most of the biggest destinations and neighborhoods in Seattle and the county, and when RapidRide is built out more it will serve more of them.

        You will say Metro has other frequent routes, but only a handful are frequent evenings, and others on Sundays. You can’t tell from the route number whether it’s full-time frequent or not, but you can if it has a route letter. Some routes became more frequent in the 2010s but lost it in recessions, whereas Metro protects the RapidRide lines so that they’re the last to be cut. The route letter tells you it’s a route Metro protects, so it’s OK to move to that neighborhood and not have to worry about the route deteriorating substantially. It may affect whether you go to the neighborhood in the evening; it did to me once West Seattle and Aurora got RapidRide and their evening service went from 30 minutes to 15. RapidRide lines increase ridership faster than most regular routes, and now they’re almost all of the top ten.

        The reason RapidRide lines have letters and red buses is the federal BRT grants require a distinct brand. Those grants aren’t available for non-BRT upgrades.

      3. You are missing the point. Obviously RapidRide buses are better than average. So what? We don’t have a special brand for the 7 even though it is more frequent than most of the buses (and many RapidRide buses). There is only one reason to have the branding and that is to signify to riders that you don’t have to pay in front. That’s it. But again, that is accomplished with the RapidRide colors and the RapidRide name. To then use letters on top of it is just silly.

        If not for off-board payment, the branding would be complete bullshit. It would be different if the buses were expresses. If I’m standing on a bus stop it is quite helpful to know if a bus stop is going to run express or make all the regular stops. But that isn’t the case with any of the RapidRide buses. They are all regular buses. In fact, it is the 15 that is the express — not the RapidRide D. Think about that for a second. Riders in a hurry, trying to get downtown as quickly as possible — they shouldn’t bother with the bus that has special colors and letters (to signify it isn’t a plain-old, ordinary bus). No, they should take the plain-old ordinary bus because it running express.

        The whole thing is just marketing and political bullshit. We should do various things to make the buses run faster and more often. But the silly, arbitrary designation (BRT) and different colored buses seems designed to tell the public “These buses are really good — the other buses are crap” which is a terrible mindset (and quite often, not even true).

        You know who does *not* have special BRT buses? Vienna. That is because (according to Wikipedia):

        Entire bus system includes many BRT features such as stop distancing, place name signs on all bus stop signs, all door boarding and an entirely proof of payment, off-board fare collection system.

        This should be the goal for Seattle, not an alphabet soup of “special” buses. Obviously we won’t have as good a bus system as Vienna anytime soon but we should aspire to that.

      4. Let me put it another way. Imagine I’m downtown and I walk to a bus stop. As I arrive I see several buses heading to the stop. Most or in the regular Metro bus colors. But I also see a RapidRide bus that is colored differently. What does that signify to me, a rider (i. e. the customer)? Does the bus go outside the county? No. Does it run express? No. The only difference is the boarding. I can get on the bus at any door. I can pay in the front, the middle or I am savvy enough, before I board. This has value. It is handy to know I can board like I would if I was catching a bus (any bus) in San Fransisco.

        What then, is the point of the letters? Why designate a letter instead of just using a number? It really doesn’t help — it adds confusion. The numbering is designed to give riders a clue as to where the bus is headed. Buses in the 100s head south. Buses in the 300s head north; the East Side gets the 200s. If the bus never leaves the city, it gets a two digit number. We even group numbers to try and create similar numbering for similar trips. Take the 65 or 75 to Lake City. But the letters really don’t mean anything. The two West Seattle RapidRide buses are C and H. They aren’t close to each other and other and don’t have anything to do with West Seattle. I see the point of the “RapidRide” brand and special buses but I don’t see the point of the letters.

      5. @Ross

        ehhh have we had any other american city pull off implementing those brt feature for their ‘normal’ bus routes?

        im fine with rapidrides, i think you’re hitting the limits of political reality here. for example, people aren’t quite willing to say do property takings (even small ones) for a normal bus line. but wrap it up for a rapidride and now making property adjustments for the rapidride i is fine.

        besides, they can just downscale the rapidride brt budget and it effectively accomplishes the same concept

      6. ehhh have we had any other american city pull off implementing those brt feature for their ‘normal’ bus routes?

        Sure. San Fransisco has off-board payment for all of there buses. Many cities (including Seattle) have added bus lanes for regular buses. But I get your point — American transit sucks. We are obsessed with magical solution (Hybrid Metro/Commuter rail that is bad at both! Streetcars! Wait, BRT!) instead of just making improvements whenever and wherever we can.

      8. for example, people aren’t quite willing to say do property takings (even small ones) for a normal bus line. but wrap it up for a rapidride and now making property adjustments for the rapidride i is fine.

        I disagree. I don’t think it makes any difference as all. We are taking lanes for the 7 and 40 and it is just as difficult as it would be if the bus was RapidRide. I don’t think add BAT lanes on Denny would be any easier if the bus was RapidRide.

        Even with center running you don’t need the “BRT” designation. If Aurora is “reimagined” and they run the buses in the middle of the street (which would be great by the way) it will include buses like the 5 and 28 (i. e. regular buses). If the buses run in the middle of the street along Jackson (another great project) then all the buses will have to have doors on both sides. But I don’t see the 14 becoming RapidRide — that seems silly.

        This is another example of how this special designation can be counter-productive. Again, I see the value in certain circumstances for riders. If your bus is a limited stop express (like Swift) then it helps to know that at a glance. That could make a big difference. If you can’t implement off-board payment on a system wide basis (or even region wide basis) then I see the value in the special designation as well. But otherwise it just makes things messy. Consider that case in Jackson again. There are four buses that go along that route (7, 14, 36 and 106). Assume those routes continue along Jackson but they run in the middle of the street (this would be huge). The 7, 14 and 36 are trolleys. The 106 is not. So now you are buying a bunch of trolleys with doors on both sides. A big bus for the 14 is probably overkill, but that’s no big deal. You have to buy more “diesel” buses with doors on both sides but we are already doing that for the G. But wait, the G and the 106 are different colors. Eventually the 7 becomes RapidRide (and maybe the 36). So now instead of two different types of dual-sided doors (some trolleys, some regular) you have four. This is on top of the regular (buses) with doors on one side. Remember, there are four types of those (RapidRide, RapidRide trolley, regular, regular trolley). This reduces operational flexibility to a ridiculous level.

        This effects routing as well. I’ve heard from someone at Metro who said that simply swapping tails between the RapidRide D and 40 would be impossible. Not from an overall service standpoint, but because the D is RapidRide. We would need more red buses. Obviously you would need a little bit more (you would need to add RapidRide bus stops) but the point being, the special branding really isn’t doing us any favors. I get the value from a rider standpoint but I think it really isn’t worth it. What would happen if RapidRide buses like regular Metro buses? Not much, really. Ignorant riders would pay in the front. So what? Many do right now. Experienced riders would pay at the bus stop. It isn’t like Swift where you would take the bus and watch it skip your stop by a mile.

        The main reason they do all this nonsense is for grant money. But that is part of the problem. Costs are needlessly inflated so that the feds will chip in some cash. I get it — I understand why agencies do this — but it is also a big example of how messed up our system is. We have a city like Philadelphia with a collapsing transit system but we are chipping in for some special colored buses somewhere in Ohio (I’m guessing).

        The problem isn’t limited to the U.S. either. Check out these couple paragraphs from this outstanding essay:

        In private conversations with people involved in bus priority projects in Montréal, I have been told multiple times that the only two options explored are reversible peak-only curbside lanes interrupted at each right turn or full-scale BRT. Nothing in between. Apparently, painting center-running lanes, building a bunch of island platforms and reconfiguring a few traffic lights, all things that the city could plan and deliver on its own, would immediately qualify the project as a SRB (Service Rapide par Bus, the Québecois acronym for BRT), moving it into the bureaucratic pipeline of major projects falling under ARTM’s and Provincial PQI (the multi-year capital spending plan) jurisdiction, immediately making it into a dollar-burning, consulting firms bonanza multi-year planning process.

        However, bus priority measures exist on a continuum, from light infrastructure interventions as simple and discrete as bus bulbs and moving stops after intersections to fully grade-separated transitways. It makes no sense to draw an arbitrary legal threshold separating basic transit priority measures from a thing called “BRT.” Confining the use of center-running dedicated bus lanes to BRT projects because building a simple island bus stop suddenly makes them belong to a premium category of bus priority measures is silly. Still, this artificial threshold between BRT and non-BRT exists in many countries and shapes many bad planning decisions, often induced by the opportunity of pocketing federal or provincial funding dedicated to large infrastructure projects.

      9. And Van Ness BRT.

        I disagree with Ross’s characterization of what a red bus or RapidRide tells people but I won’t get into it again. The 7 is ultra-frequent, but the number gives no guarantee of that. Metro could call it 7F to indicate you can arrive anytime and it will be there in a few minutes, but it hasn’t tried that. The 7 is in process of being upgraded to RapidRide, which will also show that clearly.

      10. “We are taking lanes for the 7 and 40”

        But not for the 8. 44, 48, 60, etc.

        “I don’t think add BAT lanes on Denny would be any easier if the bus was RapidRide.”

        You underestimate the political clout of a RapidRide or Link designation. It doesn’t guarantee transit lanes (as we’ve seen on Eastlake), but the city takes transit priority more seriously and pushes back on the naysayers more. I can’t imagine the G could have gotten center transit-exclusive lanes without RapidRide.

        If it were just a route 12 upgrade, where would the political will and funding have come from? The 2, 3, 4, and 12 were neglected for decades until the RapidRide conversion improved the Madison corridor. People in the U-District had to wait years for Northgate Link in order to get any substantial improvement, including the 4-year gap between UW station and U-District station that stretched into 6 years. Or Eastside-Seattle Link, which was supposed to open in 13 years but is now stretching to 18 years. That’s over a decade without an interim stopgap upgrade (i.e., more ST Express), so people have to suffer almost two decades more with 30-minute evening/Sunday 550 and 30-minute weekend 554 as if it’s no problem. No problem for the administrators/staff perhaps, but yes problem for the passengers and would-be passengers. I’m having to go to Bellevue today even though I’d like the flexibility of going either Saturday or Sunday, but Sunday the 550 will be in a 30-minute mood. This between a Seattle that has reached 770K population and a central Eastside of 300K+, so there must surely be more than a few trips people want to take between them.

      11. You asked if other cities were adding “BRT feature for their ‘normal’ bus routes”. Again, the answer is yes. All the buses in San Fransisco have off-board payment. Kudos to them for doing something that made a huge difference to a lot of riders without going down the we-gotta-call-it-BRT road.

        But yes, San Fransisco is doing the same bullshit as other cities when it comes to “BRT”. Consider the 5 Fulton and the 5 Fulton Rapid. They follow the same pathway. But both buses have off-board payment. Both buses use the bus lanes. The only difference is that the “Rapid” (the “BRT” if you will) is limited stop. Again, I see the value in painting those a different color (as you could easily confuse the 5 and 5R). But agencies have been running limited stops buses for decades (without a special designation). San Fransisco is smart to plan the game and get the feds to chip in, but the idea that skipping a few stops suddenly changes a bus from regular to BRT is silly.

        The idea that you need the designation to provide those “BRT” features is simply not true, even in America.

      12. “But agencies have been running limited stops buses for decades (without a special designation).”

        Very few agencies have limited-stop routes. San Francisco and LA are two of them. San Jose has one or two routes. Metro conflates them under “Express” (routes with 2+ mile nonstop segments), so people have to look closely at the schedules to even see that the limited-stop routes are there (ex 7E, 9, suspended 15, 28). Those are only a few routes in a few corridors, and the 15 is unidirectional peak-only, so it doesn’t help reverse-peak or off-peak. I would have liked to taken it when I worked in Ballard and when another company had a retreat in Seaview Ave, but I couldn’t because it was going the other way. That’s unlike the San Francisco Rapid routes, which are widespread and all-day like Swift.

      13. “We are taking lanes for the 7 and 40”

        But not for the 8. 44, 48, 60, etc.

        Actually we added BAT lanes for the 48 (close to the Montlake Bridge). Those lanes are used by buses that come from 520 as well. Oh, and the buses on 520 run in HOV lanes. We also have bus lanes downtown for a huge number of buses. Meanwhile, are there bus lanes for the RapidRide B in Downtown Bellevue? How much does that bus have in terms of right-of-way?

        The idea that we can’t possible add lanes for buses without those buses being “RapidRide” is simply not true. The idea that RapidRide guarantees bus or BAT lanes the entire way (or even most of the way, or even where it is needed most) is not true. In so far as the RapidRide designation influences right-of-way, it is counter-productive. We shouldn’t have to wait for the 7, 8 or 40 to be RapidRide before we add bus and BAT lanes along a lot of those streets. I would love to see a lot of red paint by the Fremont Bridge. This would help 31, 32, 40 and 62. Should we wait until all those buses become RapidRide? Of course not.

      14. “But agencies have been running limited stops buses for decades (without a special designation).”

        It’s a curious but not particularly revealing discussion.

        On the narrow topic of SF branding, SF Muni has seemingly always used special designations for limited and express services. Its busiest route, Route 38 – Geary, has long historically had 38L (limited) on Geary as well as 38AX and 38BX for express runs in from/ out to the Richmond using parallel one-way streets (Pine and Bush Streets). Muni renamed 38L as 38R.

        https://www.sfmta.com/maps?field_map_type_value=route_map&title=38

        Finally, the change from 38L to 38R involved making the service more prominent. That means better frequency as well as more hours of operation. The old 38L used to stop running about 7 pm while 38R runs past 9 pm as well as on weekends.

        So coming full circle, there are basics of both frequency and hours of operation that should come with the term “rapid” in any system. Otherwise it would just be a regular route or a periodic “limited” or “express” route.

      15. Very few agencies have limited-stop routes.

        Yes, and very few should have them. Most agencies should just implement normal (international) stop spacing. If you also need a limited stop express on top of that, then you better have a lot of demand or an usually stratified and long travel pattern. The high demand is common during rush hour (or at least it was) which is why they were common (for Metro) back in the day. In general they are like express subway lines — even in New York they are rare. The same logic applies to both. You have to run both buses quite often to justify an express overlay. Otherwise riders really aren’t getting the benefit. Whatever time they save with an express is wasted because they have to wait extra. Distance also matters. Express trains for intercity travel have been common for a very long time. That’s because speed matters more in a lot of cases. Cities also tend to be very stratified. Boston is big. New York is really big. Nothing in between is. But those cities should have some service. Thus you run expresses and locals.

        That type of stratification and long distance is rare for a normal, city bus route. RapidRide Blue is a good example of where it makes sense. There is a big trade-off in that the 101 only runs every half hour and Swift runs every ten minutes. Community Transit is basically saying the stops served by the 101 are not that important. Given the corridor (and the length) that is a reasonable assumption. I think Swift Blue works. I am less enthused about Swift Orange. I think they would have been better off just running the buses more often.

        My point is that a limited-stop route certainly doesn’t mean a bus is “BRT” and my guess is MUNI is quite aware of that. But this checks the appropriate box and so they can call it “BRT” (which means money from the feds).

      16. there are basics of both frequency and hours of operation that should come with the term “rapid” in any system. Otherwise it would just be a regular route or a periodic “limited” or “express” route.

        And my point is the branding is meaningless. There is plenty of evidence that frequency matters. Speed matters as well. But I don’t know of any study that suggests it matters. Why would it? If your bus comes twice as often you are thrilled. If they change the colors and change the bus from a number to a letter do you care? Not really.

        Consider the last time we had a huge bump in ridership. What happened? We ran the buses more often. Seattle passed a levy that was supposed to backfill the expected cuts. But instead it went into running the buses more often. We also completed U-Link. This was big, but Link ridership (even with that extension) wasn’t that big compared to the buses. But Metro got aggressive with the restructure. They truncated the buses at the UW and ran the buses more often. Suddenly catching a bus to the UW was much easier. For a lot of trips downtown it was worse. But for some trips it was faster and for a lot of trips it was more frequent. Ridership went up. But it didn’t matter that riders were taking those same old buses (without even a number change in many cases) — what mattered was that the buses were running more often.

      17. “And my point is the branding is meaningless. There is plenty of evidence that frequency matters. Speed matters as well.”

        It’s a generally valid point in terms of ridership generation. Most riders look at bus schedules and try different combinations over time. Or they follow whatever transit map app tells them what to do.

        My point is however merely intended to clarify what SF did. SF Muni didn’t just rename 38L to 38R. It changed the schedules too. And second that Muni has long attached letters to existing route numbers rather than to create new route numbers. That’s all.

      18. @ross

        The problem is that transit agencies still need a project to make larger changes.

        For example reallocating parking spaces for bus lanes or say even installing tsp prioritize buses. Sure on rainier it might only take say “5 political will” but the westlake ave bus lanes weren’t that easy. It still had to be wrapped together as the transit plus project to get the bus lanes.

      19. “The idea that we can’t possible add lanes for buses without those buses being “RapidRide” is simply not true. The idea that RapidRide guarantees bus or BAT lanes the entire way”

        That’s like tacomee saying upzoning won’t guarantee more affordable housing to serve everyone. The purpose of upzoning is to reduce the upward pressure on market-rate housing so that increases will be more moderate or flatten. It doesn’t directly address affordable units; it just keeps the situation from getting worse as quickly. Likewise, it’s possible that non-RapidRide routes will get transit-priority lanes, but the likelihood is less. People need whatever gets them transit-priority lanes soon. If RapidRide is the most certain way politicians will do it, then do RapidRide. People are voting with their feet and flocking to RapidRide lines where they exist.

      20. for speed, the objective is all-door boarding and alighting; there are two placements of the fare transponders that could be used; on the ground, as was done for lines A through F; on the bus, as is done for TransLink Route 99B. Proof-of-payment fare inspection is necessary; it also improves security and reduces assaults on operators. So, a triple win: faster, more attractive, more fare revenue. Some use off-board fare payment as the method as that is what the first RR had. But we need it network wide. Where is it easier to maintain the fare processors: on the coaches on on the many bus stops?

      21. That’s like tacomee saying upzoning won’t guarantee more affordable housing to serve everyone.

        That is absurd. Holy cow, now I have to defeat two arguments and explain why they are different. OK, here goes. Upzoning doesn’t guarantee more affordable housing to serve everyone. It means that all other things being equal, housing will be cheaper. Or, if you are fond of Latin (or know a philosopher who taught you the phrase) — ceteris paribus, housing is cheaper with upzoning.

        In contrast, it isn’t clear that RapidRide actually achieves anything. What matters most is the people in charge of the city. Why is there so little right-of-way for RapidRide B? Because it is in Bellevue and Redmond. Why does the 7 and 40 have more BAT lanes than the RapidRide B? Because it is in Seattle (under the current administration). Why do people think there is a very realistic chance that the 8 will have BAT lanes within a couple years? Because there will very likely be a new administration in Seattle that is even more interested in BAT lanes. The same goes for RapidRide routes in the city. To steal the Chinese proverb, it doesn’t matter if the bus is green or red, we want to make it faster.

        It is essentially all up to the city. Oh, and if you think that Stride is somehow different, note that Shoreline isn’t going to add BAT lanes along 145th. Lake Forest Park won’t allow Sound Transit to take a lane. They won’t even allow them to take a turn lane! Clearly they don’t care whether it is “BRT” or not — they aren’t giving them a lane. Now if ST wants to pay to widen the road, that is a different story.

        The problem is that transit agencies still need a project to make larger changes.

        For example reallocating parking spaces for bus lanes or say even installing tsp prioritize buses. Sure on rainier it might only take say “political will” but the westlake ave bus lanes weren’t that easy. It still had to be wrapped together as the transit plus project to get the bus lanes.

        But it doesn’t! There are a bunch of things that can be done without wrapping it together as a big project and asking the feds to chip in. Think how many buses use this bus lane. Or this one: . Or how about this one, just up the street that allows a bus to take a left turn from the right lane: . These are all minor changes that end up saving a huge amount of time for riders. They don’t need to be wrapped up into a big project. There are really two reasons they do that: federal funds or because they want to do other work as well. Rainier became a big project because it involved adding sidewalks, crosswalks and a lot of other nice features that are a lot more expensive than some red paint. The work for the 40 (and even RapidRide G) became expensive because the also wanted to redo the plumbing (and repave the streets). (RapidRide G also involved buying new buses.) Look at a couple of the images from the construction updates. Does that look like a BAT lane to you? Oh, and which one is RapidRide?

        There are dozens of projects that SDOT has done that together make a huge difference. Just the other day they announced that drivers will no longer be able to turn right from northbound Westlake to Denny. This may seem like a little thing but little things add up. Even for the notoriously slow Metro 8 they added this bus stop and bus lane. Yeah, I know that might seem like spitting on a fire but as someone who has waited at that bus stop before I can tell you it makes a huge difference. You can see the 8 slogging its way through traffic and then it seems like it is shot out of a cannon. It moves very quickly while all the cars are standing still. Oh, and what is that anyway? Do my eyes deceive me? No — it is an actual, honest to goodness center platform. Wow! So does the Metro 8 now qualify as BRT?

        Of course not. But that fix, and the Denny/Westlake fix, and a bunch of other fixes is exactly what we should be building. It doesn’t need to be part of RapidRide or “transit plus” project. It just needs to be done. Bit by bit, it can and should be done. This is actually why I am optimistic for the future. I have lost faith in Sound Transit making a huge difference when it comes to transit. RapidRide projects are nice but not big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But if you look around the city you can see that we have been making progress (quite often quietly). If we can keep making those sorts of improvements but at a faster rate (and we can run the buses more often) then we can finally build a transit system that was as good as it was five years ago.

      22. Where is it easier to maintain the fare processors: on the coaches or on the many bus stops?

        I think both, which is what they have on the RapidRide routes. The coaches have fare processors. But many (but not all) of the bus stops do as well. All door boarding (and paying once you get on) is great but boarding having already paid is even better.

        In any event it is easy so see why San Fransisco did it. They are a fairly dense, compact city. If Metro buses never left Seattle I could see it but they do. To me the issue is more about the cost and cost effectiveness of fare inspection. Is it worth it to hire a lot of fare inspectors system wide? If not, how can you gear the inspection towards certain buses or certain areas?

      23. “But that fix, and the Denny/Westlake fix, and a bunch of other fixes is exactly what we should be building. It doesn’t need to be part of RapidRide or “transit plus” project. It just needs to be done.”

        You thinking it should be done doesn’t make it happen. It only happens if the people who have the authority to make the decisions want it and prioritize it. We have to package it up whatever way they’re most likely to say yes to.

      24. It only happens if the people who have the authority to make the decisions want it and prioritize it. We have to package it up whatever way they’re most likely to say yes to.

        OK, and I’m saying that the easiest way to do that is by ignoring RapidRide. Try and pass a levy that allocates more money for bus service. This is more important than all the RapidRide projects put together. But don’t stop there. Push for more right-of-way improvements. We have been doing a lot of these (in Seattle) but push for more. Look at other corridors that are shared with many buses. Third Avenue is the obvious one. Extending three blocks north (https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/06/14/third-avenue-transit-mall-delay/) is good but it really should go all the way to Denny. There are other corridors (e. g. Pike/Pine, Fremont Bridge). Even if you are focused on a corridor used by only one bus (e. g. the Metro 8) don’t wait for RapidRide. Whenever possible, don’t think big, think small. By that I mean, stop assuming that it is better to have a big project that gets additional federal money. Just do it yourself. Of course there are exceptions. If we want to buy a bunch of buses with doors on both sides then by all means, call it “BRT” and get the feds to chip in. But most of the projects don’t need that.

        Consider the alternative to that approach. Planning for RapidRide J started in 2014. It will be done in 2027. The bus will be marginally better. The changes largely involve a little bit of red paint and of course, off-board payment. Keep in mind, it won’t even go to Roosevelt (even though it was originally called Roosevelt RapidRide). So even though this is a big RapidRide project that took thirteen years to actually implement, it is still just an iterative improvement! Someday they will extend the bus to Roosevelt. Someday they will have center running buses. But this will all happen *after* it is RapidRide.

        The same is true for other routes. Not just center running buses but just ordinary BAT lanes. Look at RapidRide B. Where is the red paint in Bellevue? Does Bellevue (by some measure the second-most urban city in the region) even have BAT lanes? Lotta good the RapidRide did.

        Or consider Kirkland. Ideally we take over the CKC and run buses there. Of course they would be running under wire through there. Are the buses BRT? Who cares. That is like saying the buses in the old bus tunnel were BRT. That is just semantics. There is no particular reason to have off-board payment on the CKC. The special colors wouldn’t serve a purpose. What matters is the right-of-way.

        But right now that won’t happen. Instead they are focused on regular streets. That’s fine — you can’t win every battle. But the work is centered around one route: the RapidRide K project. But it isn’t an obvious high-priority corridor (like SR-99). It took a while before they even knew where the bus would go. So some streets will get some improvements (hopefully) but other streets won’t? Apparently they are supposed to wait until they convert the 255 to RapidRide (even though there are no plans for that). It just seems backwards.

        The county and Kirkland should instead work together to figure out how best to make the buses faster. If that is a big project (“The Kirkland Multi-mobility Project”) so be it. Fix the various corridors so that buses can run faster. Yes, that requires a lot of work in Kirkland. Locals need to fight for buses just like they do in Seattle. But the same is true with RapidRide! I really don’t see it as being much easier. Even if you are successful it takes forever (like the RapidRide J) when a piecemeal approach may very well lead to results much faster (like it did in Seattle).

    2. It’s still a theoretical problem rather than an actual problem. Average 1 Line riders rarely if ever go to Renton, Kent, or Auburn, so they may not even know or care the I Line exists. Average I Line riders will remain in its area or transfer to the 101, Stride 1 (S1), or local routes in Renton, Kent, or Auburn. They may not know or care what the 1 Line is called. They may take I+106+1 Line, those who do that can probably keep track of the difference. “1 Line” is very widely used with Link, while “I Line” is limited to station signs and the online schedule, while typical public usage is “RapidRide I” or “the I”.

      The bus’s outside display always has the destination, so something like “I (South) Renton” or “I Auburn (Station)”. Most RapidRide destination displays are very general, like “West Seattle”, “Redmond”, “Bellevue”, so the I may have “Renton” and “Auburn”. Link’s outside displays and platform signs also have the destination: “Angle Lake”, “Lynnwood City Center”, “Downtown Redmond”. People will be looking at the destinations as much as the letter/number.

      2. Yes, if it means more routes get full-time frequency and street-lane priority. That’s the important thing.

    3. I don’t think RapidRide will run out of letter anytime sooner. They really should just skip I Line or use some kind of Unicode special character “Ｉ”.

      1. The full vision in Metro Connects uses up most of the letters. Out of 26 letters, 8 are operating now, 4 are projects underway, 6 are next in priority after that. (We’re up to 18 now.) 2 will give South King County better east-west feeders to Link. (I’m not sure if both are included in the last group.) And a few more speculative ones that may become projects someday, or they’ll be moved to other areas and serve them.

      2. Current: A Pacific Highway, B Bellevue-Redmond, C West Seattle, D Ballard, E Aurora, F Burien-Renton, G Madison, H Delridge.

        Projects: I Renton-Auburn, J Eastlake, K Kirkland-Bellevue, R Rainier.

        Priority 1 candidates: 150 (Kent), 36 (Beacon Hill).

        Priority 2 candidates: 44 (45th), 40 Ballard/SLU, B+271 UDistrict-Crossroads.

        Priority 3 candidates: 181 Auburn-Federal Way, 165 Kent-KDM, B+226 Redmond-Eastgate.

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