New post on Page Two: Reader Jack Valko proposes The Burke-Gilman Subway
Monthly maintenance continues on the Eastside: Buses replace Link 2 Line trains between South Bellevue and Overlake Village stations after ~10pm tonight and tomorrow.
Local News:
- ST Board Chair Somers wants to finish the Spine at all costs (The Urbanist).
- Seattle CM Rob Saka wants to “audit” vision zero to an unclear end (The Urbanist).
- The embattled KCRHA is facing calls for dissolution after a scathing forensic audit (PubliCola). Regional leaders appear to nearing consensus on “winding down” the agency.
- Broken steel closes lanes of aging Tacoma Narrows Bridge (The Seattle Times, $).
- ST is expanding its paid parking permit program (Sound Transit)
- Crucial Ballard Link Deadline Pushed Back Yet Again by Feds (The Urbanist)
- Everett Transit and Community Transit Restart Annexation Talks (The Urbanist)
- Crosslake Explained: tracking wind and wave conditions on a floating bridge (The Platform)
- Pioneer Square to be walkable pedestrian zone for 6 FIFA matches (SDOT Blog)
- A rare “rave” review of Link from a Seattle Times reader ($).
Further Afield:
- Next year, Oregon will start taxing all electric cars about $0.02/mile driven as it adopts road use charge (Streetsblog USA). The tax is set at 5% of the fuel tax rate.
- Economic data since the 1800s indicates U.S. construction costs rarely fall (Construction Physics)
- Trump’s USDOT is launching the “Freedom to Drive” initiative, fast-tracking congestion projects instead of transit projects (USDOT).
- Cities in the US and Canada could consider aspiring to be like São Paulo (Next Metro, soft $)
- The death of the affordable car is stranding residents of car-dependent neighborhoods (The New York Times, gift link)
- How TransLink (Vancouver, BC) fit longer trains onto its short platforms (The Buzzer)
This is an Open Thread. Uncivil comments will be moderated.
The way I see things playing out probably play out for where they go with the ST3 realignment
– Tacoma Dome Link Extension ends up being pushed forward, but East Portland Station probably ends up deleted or deferred to save costs. Pierce also has a sizeable piggy bank, cooperative stakeholders (Puyallup Tribe, the cities of Tacoma, Federal Way, and Fife, etc), ST probably want OMF South open as soon as they can, and are far along enough in EIS planning that deferring the project wouldn’t make realistic sense.
– Issaquah Link will probably be moved forward, but they may move the alignment and timeframe around as to where it’ll go, when it happens, or what technology it uses, I can easily see it go to South Bellevue as a means to create a second Eastside line to boost frequency
– West Seattle Link will probably move forward as its the farthest along in planning for the Seattle projects compared to Ballard, ST probably biting the bullet and make it a third line in the current tunnel instead of it being a weird stub. Probably making it a West Seattle to Northgate line.
– Everett Link will probably end up being phased, 1st to Mariner and OMF North then to Everett Station at a later date.
– Ballard will probably still be in development hell for the time being as they figure out what is the path forward for it. This one unfortunately has a lot of stakeholders who are all pulling the project in different directions as to how and where thinga will be built. The lack of a unifying vision for the line makes it difficult to build it in its current form.
– Other projects i don’t have much of an opinion on because they’re either so far out that planning hasn’t materialized or interest in them is on the back burner to deal with the bigger fish in ST3.
West Seattle to Northgate would be an excellent idea, because the pocket can probably support ten minute headway turnbacks. It can’t turn trains in six consistently, though.
So that leaves a big question mark about Line 1. Anything beyond Northgate to Tacoma Dome runs up against the operator service standards, and there’s nowhere south of Lynnwood to turn trains except Northgate.
So, the overhead north of Northgate Station likely will have to be widened to four tracks, moving the southbound main west to create a two-track pocket in order to turn Line 1 trains there.
That won’t be easy or nice, but it would create an excellent opportunity to extend Line 3 (West Seattle) to Everett eventually. Two stubs running empty at ten minute “policy” headways north of Lynnwood and south of CID would be a good balance.
I think a better service pattern would be 1 Line from Northgate-Tacoma, leave the 2 Line alone, and make the 3 Line Lynnwood-West Seattle, essentially splitting the Link spine just like in ST3, but using the existing DSTT.
That’s what I said, albeit not as clearly. And, that’s the current plan with DSTT2 taking the 1 Line trains. That probably won’t leave enough service on the Spine within the City.
do SODO to Northgate very soon.
Interesting point re the turnback pocket at Northgate, Tom – thanks for bringing that to my attention. I do think this is something that would be operationally useful to address.
Functionally I would prefer a four-line system using the “spine” as the ST 2012 conceptual operating plan had it (i.e. no further construction than already planned):
– Everett to Sea-Tac Airport, 5 trains/hour (12 min headways) – 1 Line
– Northgate to Redmond, 5 trains/hour (12 minute headways) – 2 Line
– Northgate to Tacoma, 5 trains/hour (12 minute headways) – 3 Line
– Lynnwood to Redmond Technology, 5 trains/hour (12 minute headways) – 4 Line
This leads to overlapping service with the below segments having the following headways:
– Lynnwood to Northgate, 10 trains/hour (6 minute headways) – 1 Line + 4 Line
– Chinatown/ID to Redmond Technology, 10 trains/hour (6 minute headways) – 2 Line + 4 Line
– C/ID to Sea-Tac Airport, 10 trains/hour (6 minute headways) – 1 Line + 3 Line
-Northgate to C/ID, 20 trains/hour (3 minute headways) – all lines
Only the segments from Lynnwood to Everett, Sea-Tac Airport to Tacoma, and Redmond Technology to DT Redmond would have 12 minute peak service. All other stations would have 3 or 6 minute peak service.
In this scenario Ballard and West Seattle would be served by automated trains on 2-3 min peak headways as we’ve been discussing, eventually to connect via First Hill but at the least connecting to the core Link service.
Obviously this would require a turnaround of 3 minutes at Northgate, but I think the huge benefit of being able to provide maximum service in the core while still serving all stations with reasonable service (12 minute headways at the farthest extents is still far better service than most places would provide stations 30 miles from the center) is worth the expense of upgrading the turnback to four tracks as you note. It would also prevent the far more populous areas from Capitol Hill and the U District north from losing direct service to places like the airport – which is the current plan.
Being a near-daily rider of the 2 Line from Northgate to DT Bellevue it’s anecdotally pretty clear – at least in the early-ish morning when I ride eastbound – that few if any other riders are actually making the journey all the way from Northgate or beyond to Bellevue. If a 1 Line train shows up at Northgate first I am usually the only one left waiting on the platform for a 2 Line train; the train car is usually almost empty at Pioneer Square before it starts filling up again at C/ID and Judkins Park. It’s actually technically faster to take Link +271 to DT Bellevue from Northgate, and definitely faster to take the bus from Lynnwood to DT Bellevue (I have a co-worker who lives near the Lynnwood TC/station and does exactly that – but he certainly loves the train to events in Seattle!). Even with that, the plan above still allows people in Lynnwood to take the train all the way to Redmond Technology at nearly the same headways (12 min) they have now (10 min) – the Lynnwood passenger would see no difference unless they were making the unlikely train trip all the way to DT Redmond, where they’d have to transfer anywhere from Northgate onward.
I went to the ST townhall in Tacoma to listen to Mello and Walker’s thoughts on Monday. SRO, and half the crowd was orange vests. Dow was in the back. The full Pierce delegation was there.
Mello seemed terrifically ill-informed. No acknowledgement that this is a zero-sum game. No understanding that building the second tunnel in Seattle will directly impact what can be built in Pierce. No discussion of working with other sub-areas with common interests to develop a majority coalition (S. King, Snoho, maybe East) to look out for our interests over Dow’s West Seattle literal self-serving.
Just kumbaya: “The entire board are working well and hard together!” The mantra was Build the Damn Trains, with t-shirts being sold. The Pierce delegation was the deer in Dow’s headlights.
We will get to Tacoma Dome. But I suspect not much more. Maybe Sounder to Dupont since ST owns the tracks.
The mayor of Everett seems to have taken an Elocution class from Trump University. “Our beautiful South Everett neighborhood” comes straight from The Master.
To the substance, “the Fix” is in, folks. Seattle’s 75% “Yes” has labeled North King as “the sucker” to the concrete and construction interests in Pierce and Snohomish Counties.
Sound Transit is about to eclipse DART and BART as a cautionary tale of the catastrophes produced when suburban politicians with no experience in transit theory are turned loose in a roomful of money.
?
First of all, are Link construction firms located in Pierce and Snohomish Counties?
Second, I can’t believe the Pierce/Snohomish politicians are making Link decisions based on feeding concrete and construction companies. They must have some inkling of the need for transportation in their counties. I think they’re pushing the Spine based on a flawed assumption of what would improve non-car transportation access and ridership. Somers’s statement about “our Southwest Industrial station that is serving Boeing and aerospace and 35,000 people that work in that industry in that area and commute to work every day” sounds more like he misunderstands that most of those jobsites are too far to walk from the station, and many of them don’t live near a feasible Link path to the area, rather than outright lying that that commute access doesn’t matter and what really matters is creating projects for construction companies.
I view Link as different from DART and BART, and those systems are different from each other.
With 79 mph max speed, BART is remarkably fast. If BART was 55 mph max like Link it would cost about 1/3 more to operate and the farebox share would be a third lower.
BART’s current problem is that the farebox percent of the operating budget dropped from 70% to 25% and they don’t have a backup source. However that still beats out Link currently at 12% or DART currently at 6% or worse.
The thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is that Link’s farebox percent can’t get better without a sea change in how the extension stations can be more productive. The capital cost shortfall with ST3 is real — but there’s not discussion of the ongoing operational costs at the Board level.
Most of the ST3 extension stations outside of Seattle were chosen because they mainly connect existing parking to the system. That means that the stations will get used like a Sounder line but at the cost of operating frequent light rail all day and into the evening — crowded trains for two hours in one direction but empty the rest of the time.
That’s the great irony of Ballard and to a lesser extent West Seattle. They may be significantly more expensive to build per mile at the outset — but the boardings per mile and thus the farebox revenue per mile as ongoing costs are much better than Everett and Tacoma Done and Issaquah will generate in their current incarnations and max speeds.
Link is a bit like “Central BART” between Daly City and Rochmond/Concord. It is going to be like SR580 BART once The Spine is completed.
It’s ironic if the Ballard EIS is being held up because the feds are concerned ST’s recruitment is too inclusive demographically, and then the next administration would likely reverse that policy.
I see CT is planning on replacing the 424 with the 908, which will go to Bellevue, instead of Seattle. The question is, will it continue to run only two trips, morning and evening, or will it run all day? Note that, if the 908 does not run all day, the quickest transit route from Monroe to Bellevue becomes a minimum of 2 hours, one way, for what, in a car, would be maybe a 30 minute drive. And, if you don’t have a car, using Uber as an alternative would cost close to $100/trip.
According to Ride Schedules, the 908 will run 5 trips morning and evening not all day. The 908 also according to Ride Schedules is scheduled to begin June 15, 2026. Both Ride Schedules and Pantograph (which surprisingly has the 908 already) show that the 908 will stop mid-route at UW Bothell (which I wasn’t expecting).
So it seems like CT is adding a UW Bothell stop to the 908 since I suggested that it should be truncated at UW Bothell in an email and they said that it will be done once Stride opens.
But can’t it be truncated at Woodinville P&R/UW Bothell and have riders use the 256? It seems very odd that Metro abandoned the 257/311 for the 256 (which is basically the 311). That way you have a two-seat ride like the transfer in Bellevue and not lose any time via the UW Bothell deviation, the extra time spent to Bellevue, the wait time in Bellevue, and let’s not forget the 28 minutes from Bellevue Downtown to Westlake oh wait let me do some research…
CURRENT SCHEDULE:
Snohomish P&R to 2nd/Seneca (Symphony Station) – 95 minutes via the 424
PROPOSED SCHEDULE:
Snohomish P&R to Symphony Station – 105 minutes via the 908 + 2 Line
I estimated travel time via current schedules on the 2 Line, 424, 522, 532, and the 535… THAT IS 10 MINUTES ADDED!!! Let’s blame the UW Bothell deviation and the transfer in Bellevue. Yes I didn’t count the wait time (which would probably throw in another 5-10 minutes to the trip counting the walk to the station bringing the total travel time to 110-115 minutes)… Oh wait you also need to walk up to 2nd/Seneca from Symphony Station which adds another 5-10 minutes including the walk time and the time to ascend from below ground…
So the total travel time is now 121 minutes!!! That is 26 minutes wasted which is enough to eat a good breakfast Downtown while waiting for your shift to start and take a break. People attack the idea of truncating Tacoma buses at Federal Way when this idea is worse!
To be clear, 5 round trips is still an improvement over 2 round trips.
As to why not truncate in Woodinville and ask people to take the 256…even in rush hour, the 256 is a half hourly bus. Due to long distances and unpredictable traffic, a connection would be impossible to time. That would leave riders stuck in Woodinville with random wait times of up to 30 minutes. Link is literally the only service that is both frequent enough and reliable enough for a forced connection to not be a huge pain.
The time difference vs. the 424, I think, is mostly due to the connection overhead and additional miles traveled by taking I-90 rather than 520. Still, the fact that penalty is only 10 minutes is a testament to how good of a service Link is. And the fact that, in return, you get far better service to Bellevue, plus 3 extra round trips makes it a good tradeoff overall.
Route 256 is weak on several margins.
“The time difference vs. the 424, I think, is mostly due to the connection overhead and additional miles traveled by taking I-90 rather than 520. Still, the fact that penalty is only 10 minutes is a testament to how good of a service Link is. And the fact that, in return, you get far better service to Bellevue, plus 3 extra round trips makes it a good tradeoff overall.”
The penalty is actually 26 minutes, have you seen what I said on the transferring and walks? Yeah, better service yeah I get it but are you sure people will be okay with that?
“Oh wait you also need to walk up to 2nd/Seneca from Symphony Station which adds another 5-10 minutes including the walk time and the time to ascend from below ground…”
It doesn’t take anywhere near that long to ascend to the surface. What time it does take, you make up by skipping stoplights downtown.
The wait for the bus is needed regardless. The only additional wait is.for the train, 0-10 minutes, plus 2 minutes to enter/exit the station.
The bus also often falls behind schedule, while the train follows its schedule, so you can’t just go by schedules to compare travel times. For instance, the bus always gets stuck in traffic on I-5 and the Portage Bay bridge.
Of course, some folks will still object. They want a one seat ride to downtown Seattle above all else. Those people can still get their one seat ride to downtown by driving directly to Link, or the 256. What riders the CT bus loses from that, it will gain back by people taking advantage of the additional departure times and service to Bellevue, people for whom the old 424 would not have worked at all for. I expect it will definitely be a net benefit.
Man that’s ridiculous!
The region built Lynnwood Link and then is building Stride! It’s just 31 minutes from Lynnwood City Center to Westlake and 58 minutes to Bellevue Downtown. Stride 2 is supposed to reduce that down to 35-50 minutes to Downtown Bellevue (ST makes it hard to find the estimated travel time). Surely a bus can get from Snohomish to Lynnwood in well under an hour.
Monroe to Everett on the 271 is nearly an hour. Add to that the 512, then, either Link or the 535, and you get 2+ hours to reach Bellevue.
Snohomish is a little bit better (~15-20 minutes), but not by much.
The problem is that SR-522 between Monroe and Woodinville has no bus service outside rush hour, leaving no transit alternative except to detour all the way to Everett. Which, on top of general bus slowness and transfers, makes for a ridiculously long trip.
“The problem is that SR-522 between Monroe and Woodinville has no bus service outside rush hour, leaving no transit alternative except to detour all the way to Everett. Which, on top of general bus slowness and transfers, makes for a ridiculously long trip.”
I’M GETTING NOSTALGIA FROM WHEN SR 522 DIDN’T EXIST AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET FROM MONROE TO SEATTLE WAS TO GO THROUGH EVERETT!!!
Is it a problem that can be eased by revisiting how Route 109 operates — like taking the route a few miles down I-5 to Lynnwood City Center and adding more runs?
I see service to Monroe needing a different solution than service to Snohomish.
It’s admittedly hard to figure out the best way to provide commute versus daylong service — and how often a route should stop for long trips versus short trips. But to me Link has introduced new opportunities for route connectivity than can be useful or problematic depending on what’s planned. If Lynnwood City Center is supposed to be the closest regional transit hub by travel time (connecting to 1/2 Lines + Stride 2 + Swift + STX), then that’s where I’d first point.
The solution depends not just on the point of origin, but also the destination. An extension of the 109 to Lynnwood TC may be sufficient for Snohomish to downtown Seattle, but it still leaves in place Snohomish to Bellevue requiring a long bus ride in the wrong direction, requiring a backtrack on another long bus ride, or take the train and add even more detour. A bus that goes south down highway 9 to Bothell and connects with STRIDE there would be better. But, of course, the service hours for such a bus would cost money, and have to be paid for somehow. On highway 9, there isn’t a good place for bus stops, such such a bus means it’s not add coverage, it’s just a shortcut, which inevitably leads to be beggars cannot be choosers mindset, that, if you choose to live out there, you should either suck it up and deal with 1h45m trip to Bellevue, or go buy a car like everyone else. Somehow, we have to get past this.
“An extension of the 109 to Lynnwood TC may be sufficient for Snohomish to downtown Seattle, but it still leaves in place Snohomish to Bellevue requiring a long bus ride in the wrong direction,…”
So what’s the purpose of Stride 2 getting riders faster to Downtown Bellevue from Lynnwood TC?
Lynnwood TC is no further out of direction than going to Monroe or Downtown Everett.
The issue is that Snohomish to Lynnwood is an hour long bus ride that leaves you no closer to Bellevue geographically than right back where you started. This, in addition to the Lynnwood to Bellevue travel time.
By contrast, a bus down highway 9 connecting to STRIDE in Bothell likely puts the total travel time for Snohomish to Bellevue under 1 hour. It’s the same STRIDE bus, but removing the long detour cuts the travel time in half.
Just to be clear, Snohomish nor Monroe are in the ST tax district. So it’s a CT issue but not an ST issue.
Its biggest value is probably serving the same section between Bothell and Bellevue as 535.
For people from Snohomish/Monroe, if CT doesn’t work with Metro to make 256 wait for 908 at 132nd Ave flyer stop, a transit trip from Snohomish to Seattle by 908 is probably not feasible. Commuters better off driving to Everett and take 510.
“For people from Snohomish/Monroe, if CT doesn’t work with Metro to make 256 wait for 908 at 132nd Ave flyer stop”
Which the 256 should most certainly *not* do, as doing so would render Woodinville-Seattle commutes do unreliable.
“Commuters better off driving to Everett and take 510.”
Which is the reason ST is keeping the 510 to Seattle to minimize transfers and to supplement the N Line.
““Commuters better off driving to Everett and take 510. Which is the reason ST is keeping the 510 to Seattle to minimize transfers and to supplement the N Line.”
That’s primarily people who live in Everett, nearby around it, or from the north (Marysville/Skagit County). Not people from Snohomish town or Monroe. One, those towns are small and have only a few people, so they can have only a few commuters. Two, Everett is out-of-direction for them. Three, as asdf2 has outlined, the transit alternatives from Snohomish or Monroe to Seattle via Everett take so long they’re not really viable. That’s a gap in the transit network.
Those cities’ transit mobility are primarily the responsibly of Communtity Transit, those cities, and the county, because they’re outside the Sound Transit tax district. Relevant factors include:
– Community Transit should have more frequent routes and a full-time span from Snohomish and Monroe to Everett, Bothell, and Lynnwood somehow.
– Community Transit’s sales-tax rate is at the state’s cap, so it can’t raise taxes for more service hours without getting permission from the legislature. Adding service to Snohomish and Monroe may mean taking it away from higher-priority corridors.
– The cities and county could help with a solution, funding service that CT’s base revenue can’t, the way the Seattle Transit Measure supplements Metro’s service in Seattle.
– The ST district boundaries are lopsided and should maybe be revised.
By lopsided I mean, Snohomish County has the smallest percent of its “urbanized” area in the ST district: Marysville, Arlington, Lake Stevens, Snohomish, Monroe, and Maltby are out. Snohomish County should have either included Marysville/Arlington in the district, or not have allowed the fastest residential/industrial growth to occur there.
King County is in the middle: Redmond, Issaquah, Renton, Kent, and Auburn are in. Covington and Maple Valley are out. Maybe they should have been included given the residential growth there. Snoqualmie is appropriately out, since it’s envisioned as a rural agricultural area.
Pierce County has the highest percent of exurban land in the ST district: Spanaway, Orting, Sumner, and DuPont are in. That appears to be savvy Pierce politicians including land intended for exurban sprawl that ST would subsidize, when it should have excluded them and had more infill development instead. None of these are even industrial centers so they don’t have the jobs justification: they’re where low-density housing and strip malls go to die.
re Urbanist Everett Link discussion.
Why should the spine have scoliosis? (Everett Boeing deviation).
Why should not the spine serve downtown Everett? RossB has discussed extending Link further north.
Is the SR-99 alignment best for land use? I-5 would be the worst.
If Somers wants NKC to chose between WSLE and BLE, I hope they chose BLE.
Is not ST3 the future? Is not this the time to consider better options?
Did Somers say anything about the DSTT2? That is the ST3 project with the highest cost and that degrades rider experience with long transfer and access times.
1. Direct service to the Everett Industrial Center is, supposedly, a response to international firms choosing not to site offices in the Industrial Center due to a lack of mass transit service.
2. For the same reason Tacoma Link won’t serve downtown Tacoma.
3. SR-99 alignment is not a selectable alternative.
4. ST3 is the future unless ST wants to go back to voters ST-wide. A vote to reduce ST3 while not reducing taxes, or to increase taxes with nothing new to show for it, is unlikely to succeed.
1. What of bus service?
2. Poor ST Board decisions?
3. Why not?
4. The ST Board made many changes to Sound Move without going back to the voters. They may have used a super majority vote on the Board. With ST3, the voters approves a stream of taxes; the estimated cost of the projects on the ST3 list has expanded greatly; the forecasted ridership has declined; the tax revenue is reduced; the DSTT2 would provide worse service.
“Why should the spine have scoliosis? (Everett Boeing deviation)”
I’ve long pointed out the misguidedness of the deviation. It would work better as two branches in terms of travel time. But the Snohomish delegation thinks that someone will somehow drive to Downtown Everett and take Link to their job in the spreading-out employment district in SW Everett with free parking. Even worse, areas near airports are height restricted so high-rise densities are not possible.
Branching would also make reversing trains lots easier. Right now, ST proposes a three track Mariner station to do that. It works but it’s not as effective.
The ST Snohomish delegation has such unrealistic expectations about light rail that it’s hard to know how to educate them. They’re still in the “be nice to ride sometimes” mode when the stars occasionally align for them — and are too stubborn to see it as a public service that needs a significant level of ongoing demand to be viable.
“Branching would also make reversing trains lots easier. Right now, ST proposes a three track Mariner station to do that. It works but it’s not as effective.”
WHAT!? THREE TRACKS!? Thanks for letting me know, I really think Everett Link shouldn’t go to Paine Field (which is job oriented). I would really like light rail to go to a higher population area of South Everett (which includes Silver Lake, Eastmont, and Twin Creeks). Let’s not forget Everett Mall is being redeveloped which is an opportunity for TOD as well as Hwy 99.
But anyways we need light rail to Everett NOW.
“Did Somers say anything about the DSTT2?”
I think he has spoken against changing it. He doesn’t want to interfere in North King alignment decisions, for the same reason he doesn’t want other subareas’ boardmembers pushing to eliminate the Paine Field detour or the northern Everett tail. If DSTT2/Ballard is not affordable it can be phased or deferred, but he won’t be the one to suggest changes to the alignment or stations.
So all the boardmembers are reverting to their longstanding position of trying to keep everything in their subarea. The Enterprise Initiative was a chance to get beyond that and make strategic ST3-wide decisions, but that seems to be failing, and the only thing left is to determine what order to put the lego pieces in, because they won’t give up any or modify any. But they know that pieces at the later end may get chopped off, so putting a piece later makes it less likely. But it lets boardmembers tell their voters they tried to keep everything in their subarea and didn’t willingly give up on it or let another subarea get something when they didn’t.
Somers basically single-handedly shut down the DSTT2 deferral study.
But that cannot be sound, as the outer subareas are to cover a significant portion of the DSTT2 (49 percent). All subareas would benefit from its deletion.
If the TDLE were also deleted, the ST bus service between Tacoma and Seattle via FW Station would provide more capacity to complement the DSTT. The TDLE billions could be used to improve intra Pierce County service, especially within Tacoma that is denser and has a walkable street grid.
If all sub groups continue to hang on to their projects, will the Enterprise Initiative stall?
To me, the telling scoliosis problem is this: if two trains are leaving Lynnwood City Center Station at the same time, the southbound train would reach Westlake 2 minutes before the northbound train reaches Downtown Everett!
As an aside, ST on its Everett Link page says it’s 33 minutes from Lynnwood City Center to Everett on its web site — and 60 minutes from Downtown a Seattle to Everett. That is a difference of 27 minutes. However, their published schedules say that the trip is 31 minutes rather than 27.
It would mean that a two-way bus route between Everett and Lynnwood would make sense.
I think an audit of Vision Zero is badly needed.
The problems of serious traffic injuries and fatalities can’t keep being attributed to a lack of mere striping and sign and speed cushion changes. My perusal of the data suggests than there are way too many incidents when it’s dark compared to traffic volumes at that time of day — particularly late evenings. Meanwhile, SDOT continues to pursue safety projects on street segments with no history of serious injuries and fatalities.
To me, that points to other causes and solutions. Is it blind spots on the street created by glaring LED lighting? Is it that people drive because late night transit service is so limited? Shouldn’t SDOT be using better reflective pavement paint (current paint becomes almost invisible when wet)? Are crosswalks sufficiently lit? Aren’t most accidents caused by drivers breaking several laws at once — so rather than change more things Seattle should instead enforce existing laws better? Shouldn’t SDOT be focusing more on reducing incidents on problem street segments? An audit seems like a good first step.
I’d like an audit comparing Seattle with peer cities. I recall that Helsinki recently achieved Vision Zero with similar population and worse climate.
“ SDOT be using better reflective pavement paint (current paint becomes almost invisible when wet)”
Yeah moving from another state, I think the quality and choice of pavement marking in WA is very questionable.
It is very strange that the pavement marking here doesn’t seem as reflective as I saw in Florida and Georgia even on a dry day. I’ve been wonder if it has anything to do with the environmental concern with some of the material that makes paint more reflective.
Another weird thing is west coast states all seem to be crazy about Botts’ dots (the button shape raised pavement marker). I personally think they are not as good as modern pavement marking paint and should only be used as a supplement to painted pavement stripping.
Seattle and WSDOT right-of-way uses a lot of concrete pavement material, which has less distinction from white striping. In some state, they would so a black border around the skipped stripe to make white paint more noticeable on concrete surface.
KCHRA, which has some truly shocking accounting practices, has a board made up of various local elected officials. One member of the board (Girmay Zahilay) said he was surprised to learn that KCHRA was operating without a treasurer for months. It’s probably not even fair to blame him for not knowing; he has a lot of other duties. This governance model – the same as Sound Transit – is bad. We should stop using it.
From the first linked article:
I get the decreased cost of not having an operator. I can see how maybe it improves reliability and allows tighter scheduling. How does it allow “much smaller station footprints”?
Automated trains can run much more often than crewed trains. So, you can run half-length trains twice as often to achieve the same capacity as a crewed train. Half-length trains mean half-length platforms, and half-size stations.
I suspected that was the (flawed) rational. Building a mini station doesn’t save much money unless the cost of purchasing ROW is astronomical. It’s not the length of the platform that matters as much as the escalators, elevators, shelters, gates, etc. Then you build a mini station and find out later you need to expand. Now it’s 4X the cost at least vs what you saved and a bunch of out of service time when the reason the station is closed is because demand is high. Dumb and dumber?
Half-size stations may not be exactly half the cost, but the savings are still significant. There are significant materials savings, construction effort savings, and property savings. If anything, the property savings might be the least significant since you still have to buy the ROW for the alignment which is most of the horizontal station area.
It still seems penny wise and pound foolish. Either it wasn’t worth doing in the first place or you need to expand and then it becomes way more expensive. I’m thinking of Judkins Park where you’d just have a nominal saving from shortening the platform but still have to have the long walk from the station to 23rd and to Rainier. Or the opposite, East of nowhere Main in Bellevue where you could shorten the platform but why? The other problem with the mini stations is you’ve already maxed out your headways. So again you’ve built a system that can’t scale. Which if it never needs to probably means it never should be built in the first place.
I’m not anti automation. It’s worked great at SEA for as long as I can remember; which in the words of Don McLean was, a long long time ago. Pair this with likely increased capital costs for signaling, sensors, design, etc. and I don’t see how it accelerates building anything. In fact, it probably increases the capital cost (more expensive trains to be sure) and decreasing operating cost isn’t what’s hold up completion of ST3.
The situation where shorter platforms saves the most money is when the station is underground. Underground, every cubic foot you add to the station footprint means that much more digging needed to build it, and digging is expensive.
Judkins Park station, being on the surface and in WSDOT ROW is not a good example. In fact, if you wanted access from both 23rd and Rainier, you wouldn’t be able to shrink the station size anyway, even if the trains were shorter.
The Ballard line is different because you’ve got underground stations in SLU and Queen Anne, plus Westlake. That’s where the savings would be from making the trains shorter and platforms smaller.
Half size stations at 2 minute frequency would already be 2x the capacity of Line 1/2 (assuming 8m frequency). In fact it’s more capacity than Line 1/2 could ever run; to my understanding they’re capped at 6m frequency
So when I said maybe in my original post I’m dubious that these increase frequencies are even possible. Unless you have automated humans getting on and off the trains it doesn’t really work. Just today I watched multiple bike passengers trying to load through the same door on a STO train. Doesn’t work! Either the train doors close and drag half a bike down the line or it doesn’t and the whole schedule goes to shit. It’s going to happen. SEA is a lot different in that it deals with just passengers going to flights not general transit. And for example Issaquah doesn’t need really less than 8-10 minute headways so no advantage gained. You could just build mini stations anyway since this stub wouldn’t need any more than 2 car trains… ever.
And if you build an automated stub line you end up having to build separate maintenance facilities like with the increased cost of the trains does the opposite of what’s needed to complete ST3 which is to reduce capital cost.
More of a poison pill than a silver bullet from what I’m seeing.
2 minute frequencies is not unique and works all over the world. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in Seattle.
Even 3m frequency would be 1.5x the capacity of the existing lines.
An extra maintenance facility in Interbay is still far cheaper to build than DSTT2.
The longer the train, the longer it takes to pull in and out of the station.
Even BART with trains more than 50 percent longer than Link schedules 3 and 3/4 minute headways every day. And they were doing that before a new signal system and with longer distances between car doors.
Even ST3 promised 3 minute headways at peak times.
Shorter automated trains will enter and leave more frequently as the shorter trains need less time to pull in and out of a platform.
It takes more aggressive dispatching and operations to have more frequent trains but it’s done around the world.
A-ha, and even if all true doesn’t address the issue of ST3 running out of capital budget. Automation is just a side show. ST3 is seriously out of money after completing East Link; decades past due and billions over budget. The only thing automated trains add is reduce operating cost. That’s great but it doesn’t address the current issue of ST3 failure to be in any way able to deliver to voters what they have been paying taxes for.
“ST3 is seriously out of money after completing East Link”
It’s really not Bernie. The vast majority of funding for East Link comes from ST2, only a very small portion came from ST3 and that was for the Redmond Tech-Downtown Redmond extension. It being built and used means that repayment is already happening and will be paid off in due time as bonds are paid off in the coming years.
“It’s not the length of the platform that matters as much as the escalators, elevators, shelters, gates, etc. ” That is simply not true for underground stations, where the volume of the station is the primary driver of cost.
RE: Loading delays, higher frequency drives different passenger behavior. NYC experienced this, where lower frequency led to greater delays because riders would rush/squeeze on to a train because they did not want to wait for the next crush loaded train; the primary success of Andy Byford at MTA was solving train delays by improving frequency and, more importantly, convincing riders that the next train was going to be on time.
Regardless, frequency is always important.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/25/frequency-ridership-spirals/
“ST3 is seriously out of money after completing East Link”
Bizarre take. ST can easily build out most of ST3; the problem right now is it cannot build all of ST3 in a timely manner.
“ST3 running out of capital budget”
The constraint is ST’s debt limit. It will scrape the ceiling in the late 2020s and 2030s. That limits the amount of checks it can write each month. That forces projects to slow down, and the board should be concerned with prioritizing what’s most urgent to do now and what can wait or be downscaled. Currently we’re facing a situation where the board is likely to make bad choices, or not make any choice. In the latter case, when the constraint comes, ST would have to decide which contracts to sign on a last-minute basis, when it could be ad hoc with no strategy.
Bernie, platform doors set back a couple of feet and turnstiles which lock when a train arrives are the way to control door-jammers.
I was talking with someone at work today that uses Link to commute from Federal Way to Judkins Park. It’s a 1 hour 20 minute commute. That includes 5 minutes for him to get from his house to FW station and 5 minutes from JP to our building. Figure 10 minutes waiting for the next train. That’s an hour from boarding to getting of at JP. ST Trip Planner suggests getting off at Mt Baker and taking the 48 to JP with a trip time of 1 hour and 1 minute. That adds another 4-5 minutes walking from the west entrance to the Darigold building and doesn’t allow anything for the train to bus transfer except the 4 minute walk from Link to the crappy transfer at Mt Baker (about the same as the crappy transfer at IDS because the bus tunnel doesn’t have center platforms. Transfering to the bus also doubles the cost of the trip for zero benefit. This is an epic fail in part due also to the stupid number of P&R stations that were baked into the project.
Yeah that’s about right, Bernie.
Frankly, ST’s unstated goal was and is to win referenda. It wasn’t to provide a well-designed system for riders. Even today, very few Board members commute daily on Link. One result is little emphasis on convenient station layout — and things like escalators are the first project cuts that ST puts on the table. Another result is long extensions with vehicles that run only 55 mph max speed when stations are two or more miles apart.
And many in our transit-supportive populace are too naive to recognize the deficiencies.
To be fair, I think the freeway express bus frl. Federal Way to downtown Seattle is still running. So, you could take that and transfer to the 2-line downtown. Of course, this option is only actually faster if the bus does not get stuck in traffic.
Not only do you have the issue of the bus getting stuck in traffic but you also give up the frequent headway and extended operational hours of Link. Some of the worst of the traffic backup on I-5 is as you enter DT. So what if the bus exited at MLK allowing people to transfer to the 1 Line. And/or have the bus continue on MLK to DT Seattle providing more frequency for the 7/8/48/etc. through the Valley. That of course would be ideal for my co-worker and avoids the ugly transfer from 1 to 2 Line DT for everyone else trying to get to the eastside. I’m not sure what the trip time would be vs I-5 at different times of day or which route through RV would work best. This also could serve as a “proof of concept” for building Issaquah to interline with the 2 Line east of MI and then Interline west of Judkins Park with the 1 Line to SEA. If the service was good I can see eastside frequent flyers transferring at Judkins Park to get to the airport.
Wouldn’t it be faster to transfer to the 7/106?
Unfortunately I don’t think Link will ever be comparable to driving from south King or Pierce. It’s just too far of a trip, and I-5 is relatively fast even with unreliability introduced by traffic.
Obviously you’ve never had to do this as a commute. Looks great in the car commercials!
I mean relatively as in relative to Link.
Still faster than Link. That’s how pathetic our transit is!
All they have to do is add express buses / bus only lanes
And more Sounder style lines with fewer stops and higher speeds..half the people on the road will go for it especially during rush hour
Link even gets beaten out by buses like the 101/102/150/162/177/193 (and the ST ones) by a crazy amount. There is little reason to use Link for commuting purposes.
The entire South Link segment south of Rainier Valley is useless except for the airport…
Although ST is keen on forcing commuters to ride Link anyways (aka back to their car) by deleting routes like 162, 177, etc. KCM is waiting for the day to delete the 102 (despite it performing one of the best of all commuter routes with 18 riders per hour with so few trips) once Stride comes out.
I get duplicated routes. Federal Way doesn’t need so many buses when the ridership is so poor. But they should be keeping commuter routes with no alternative.
It’s heartening to see not everyone on this transit oriented site is still drinking the Kood-Aid that ST can do no wrong. After the better part of a decade saying the board selection process needs to change I’ve changed my focus to just the whole organization needs to be put to bed and have a do over. Like the DT Bellevue tunnel, it can’t be fixed.
“It’s heartening to see not everyone on this transit oriented site is still drinking the Kood-Aid that ST can do no wrong”
No one is saying that, let’s not put words in people’s mouths because yourself and others have sour grapes for aspects of ST projects. It’s unproductive to the conversation at hand to be honest.
Unlike other local transit advocacy groups, many STB posters have a critical eye when comes to transit. There are blind ST advocates but they often get checked.
I think that either by living with ST as a customer or having visited and ridden many rail systems around the country, many posters here on STB get the concept of value whether that’s in travel time or projected ridership.
It pained me to see a complicatedvpolitical place like LA offer multiple rail technologies in their EIS (EIR) or study multiple corridors that may be up to two miles wide, and discuss the nuances of travel time and projected ridership when choosing alternatives.
https://www.metro.net/projects/sepulvedacorridor/
https://www.metro.net/projects/kline-northern-extension/
Then I look where I live and read ST only varying alternatives by two blocks for station locations and every rail alternative is a manually operated Link train. These aren’t alternatives; these are design refinements in the same alternative.
Then I attend public meetings and talk to the “staff” who are almost always not technical and are instead hired PR consultants. And then a two hour structured meeting has 60-70 percent of the time lecturing everyone like they’re stupid about the topic, followed by a requirement that you can only sit at one session topic and that you may get two minutes to give feedback — which subsequently never gets documented even though the scribe writes it out with a marker at the meeting. They’re so afraid of gadfly comments that they ignore the other really good ones that are made.
The only way I see things changing is reform at the state level. ST is not going to change how they treat the public. The leadership team is hired because they won’t challenge the system. It’s going to require outside intervention.
The change that I think are needed are these:
1. All design choices get feedback from a review board of riders. Not stakeholder but riders. They should include disabled people, seniors, foreign born residents, drivers, security or police reps, and maintenance experts too. If the committee votes to recommend revisiting a choice staff should go back and do directed refinement. It’s literally like designing a park but ignoring those who will use it.
2. All tax revenue distributed for a transit project should be collected and managed by a different entity than the sponsoring transit project builder.
3. ST should be hiring its own staff. Contracting out to the bus operators for operations ends up creating an accountability void with senior executives because operations management doesn’t have to be a skill that these executives must have.
4. ST needs to stop its insincere public feedback process. They don’t want to record any dissent! With this attitude they miss the opportunity to improve on their designs. Every public feedback method should be designed to uncover ways to enhance projects for the users, and not just to legitimize the fact that they had a public meeting like it’s a painful and useless checklist requirement.
I could go off lots more on this. I love transit as a rider! It pains me to see ST creating structurally financially unsustainable transit lines within ST3. Stringing the park and rides together is a terrible plan for a rail transit lines! But I’ll stop here because I sense that I may have already lost many readers — especially elected officials. .
Aren’t 2 and 3 the opposite takes? So ST should outsource its capital projects but bring all operations in house?
And 1 and 4 are probably opposite takes as well, because I’m not sure why you think a “board of riders” will have a productive influence in a way that the EIS process and existing public feedback does not.
Finally, the primary problem with the high cost of public works (transit and otherwise) is a political system that is incapable of saying no to special interests. Your feedback is ST should ignore all special interests except for the ones you agree with.
2 and 3 are not opposite. 2 is about having a different agency distributing money and ST would have that money once allocated. 3 is about hiring internal staff for operations.
1 and 4 are actually complementary. Improving feedback at two points in the process are the goals of each one. ST doesn’t do that today. They aren’t contradictory at all. And properly structured feedback is valuable to achieve better projects.
All four items address what I see as this obsession at ST with avoiding healthy checks and balances. If ST is literally spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars we shouldn’t wake up one morning to read that ST can change its mind on what’s being built that makes rider experiences worse.
Wanting better rider experience is not a selfish goal. There may be outcomes that don’t align with my views on certain aspects of the project. However at least there’s a process. These are all about process! And the processes I’m putting up for consideration here would lead to forums where rider concerns could at least be aired. That doesn’t happen today (beyond a parade of speakers at an open forum time at a Board meeting who get summarily ignored).
I’m at a complete loss on the purpose of an agency that does nothing but distribute money, aside from creating jobs and paperwork to resolve the coordination problem it would create. Are you trying to recreate the PSRC? The FTA? The legislature? All of these entities allocate funds or funding mechanisms to ST for specific projects.
Managing capital spend across demands and the ebbs & flows of tax revenues and the bond market is one of the primary functions of ST, which I can attest to because I was literally on that team when I worked at ST. The Finance function works closely with the operations and capital delivery teams at the agency to figure out ST’s short, medium, and long term spending requirements. What do you think ST staff actually does?
“I’m at a complete loss on the purpose of an agency that does nothing but distribute money, aside from creating jobs and paperwork to resolve the coordination problem it would create. Are you trying to recreate the PSRC? The FTA? The legislature? All of these entities allocate funds or funding mechanisms to ST for specific projects.”
How ST does or delegates operations, construction, and studies are an implementation detail. The purpose of Sound Transit is to provide regional transit in the tri-county area. It doesn’t matter as much whether it does it in-house or outsources it. There are details about whether one part would be better in-house, but those are secondary issues.
The reason Sound Transit exists is Pugetopolis needs more all-day intercounty expresses and regional-center-to-regional-center expresses than Metro, Community Transit, and Pierce Transit could provide. The reason they can’t is twofold:
– The state severely caps their maximum tax rate: it’s not much more than their current service, and allows only a few small capital projects per year (e.g., one or two RapidRide lines), not enough for subway lines. The state could lift these caps, but it doesn’t want to.
– Each agency has local priorities that get ahead of all-day expresses and intercounty expresses. Metro couldn’t bring itself to fund more all-day expresses or Snohomish County-to-Seattle/Bellevue routes when its higher priority was a coverage route in Juanita or southeast Seattle for constituents there. So express services got the short end of the stick, and most of them were peak-only to downtown Seattle, which is useless if you’re traveling off-peak or reverse-peak or to another center. Sound Transit doesn’t have these local priorities, so it can focus on filling in the unaddressed express/limited-stop gaps in the network.
Ultimately, the reason the state created Sound Transit was it recognized Pugetopolis was growing so much it needed regional transit service, but the state didn’t want to get directly involved in alignment decisions or in operations or in funding it with statewide taxes, so it delegated it to Sound Transit.
@ AJ:
ST is projected to be billions of dollars in the hole. They blame inflation but much of the problem is either scope creep (like a bored tunnel in West Seattle) or lowballed initial estimates (like not assuming right of way needs).
ST3 gave the agency a huge sum of money for 30 years. ST wants to extend that now and has already voted once to extend the end date.
There are plenty of other models that put an agency firewall between long-term tax referendums and a transit builder like ST. California is a good example.
I get that you prefer a world where ST can tax and build unchecked for decades. That’s the authoritarian way to run things.
The Board is not an effective check on ST planning and project development. That’s clear to me but maybe not you.
Finally, ST is providing funds for other transit and access projects that other agencies execute. There is already this funding firewall when it comes to other agencies spending money provided by ST. So it’s actually done here already!
If you find yourself writing “California is a good example,” just pause and reflect.
The anglosphere is much worse than the rest of the world in public works, in particular megaproject and in particular transit projects. The USA is worse than the rest of the anglosphere, and then CA is worse than most of the USA.
Outside of perhaps Hong Kong, the NYC 2nd Ave and BART San Jose are the most expensive per mile subways even build in the worse. The Cal HSR is known globally as a boondoggle, plagued by bad process and bad execution.
Your frame of reference need to expand beyond the west coast.
As for your other points
– Yes, absolutely scope creep is a part of the problem. But that’s a political problem, not any agency problem. It is a political decision to stick with Link, to prioritize West Seattle, to exclude elevated operations – these are not staff-led decisions. The Board is not passive here.
– No to outsourcing operations. The approach with buses and Sounder is fine because buses are a commodity and Sounder is so niche. The streetcar is 100% in house but I don’t see anyone excited about how great T-Link operations are. For Link, however, I found the outsourcing to KCM both a point of friction and a source of inflation. It introduces an additional layer of management and communication and has all the same problems of misaligned incentives as outsourcing to a private vendor does. KCM has the a “profit” motive same as a private entity – they want to maximize what ST pays for a given level of service. Furthermore, ST pays for King County council overhead, and as Link grows, KCM grows, increasing ST’s share of KC council expenses (hooray overhead accounting). King County will never allow for Link to be directly operated by Sound Transit because it will blow a hole in the County’s overhead budget (IT, etc.), ~20% IRRC.
By US standards, though I think sound transit is very good I don’t know if you guys have seen any of Nanderts videos recently but in LA the short story there is major corruption, taking place. Their board is being influenced by members who have said publicly that they’re abstaining due to conflict of interest. They have political in fighting, with the mayor to try to cancel an extension just because one of her opponents wants it built. I do think there’s a lot that could be improved with sound transit, but at least the board members are fighting for their constituents (or at least they think they are) here. It could be much, much worse.
Nandert highlights how data doesn’t support possible LA MTA decisions. But most of the outcomes have been a victory of data over favoritism.
Here the Board doesn’t even discuss the data. ST buries or doesn’t report the data. Everyone is just supposed to go along. It’s a recipe for future corruptiiin here.
It’s looks pretty shady when a group funded hugely by donations from engineering and construction companies (TCC) calls for the ST Board to not delay or expand options and instead start spending billions ASAP, doesn’t it?
I agree Al. Of course I don’t like corruption. People have written songs about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD9sNKTLVR8). But at the end of the day what matters is results. A corrupt organization is by definition going to be less than ideal. But if they actually get the job done (like in Chicago back in the day) they are tolerated. In contrast a squeaky clean but incompetent organization can be just as bad. Maybe Sound Transit is the latter. Maybe everyone was simply trying to do the right thing, as they saw it. Whatever. I really don’t care why they have failed. I only know they have.
There is also a motivation that is less obvious than corruption but similar: Localism. Favoring your little neck of the woods above everyone else. Combine that with a big dose of incompetence and you basically have West Seattle Link. The project is meant to serve one relatively small part of the city well before areas that could benefit a lot more from a similar investment (that’s the localism). It is meant to be a grand gesture for that area but it really won’t help riders that much (that is the incompetence). Is there corruption too? I don’t really care.
A more apt term is parochialism. West Seattle Link is parochial: it’s spearheaded by one powerful politician who lives there, who’s now the ST CEO. He put his thumb on the scale and prioritized it first before Ballard, disproportionate to its merits. Ballard/SLU has much higher ridership would shift more of Seattle’s overall mode share.
Mayor Mike McGinn similarly put his thumb on the scale for Ballard-downtown, even though Ballard-UW would cost less, have higher ridership per mile, and would even have competitive travel time for Ballard-downtown trips with a U-District transfer, because Ballard-downtown is the long side of the triangle.
“It’s heartening to see not everyone on this transit oriented site is still drinking the Kood-Aid that ST can do no wrong.”
That’s a strawman; many writers and commenters on this site have regularly pointed out ST’s failings. And I distinctly recall Ross pointing out flaws in ST3 before the actual vote (as did others). It’s never been “ST can do no wrong.” Maybe you’re thinking of Seattle Subway, or some other org. There are certainly some commenters that might feel this way, which are probably balanced out by those that think everything ST does is wrong. The truth lies somewhere in between.
Morning: bike from beacon hill.
Evening:bike to mt baker.
40 minutes max.
That is a really long trip from one fairly obscure location to another. Trips on a subway line that long usually take that long, if not longer. The only time a trip like that is significantly faster is if the trip involves a regional rail system. These typically involve areas with a lot of density, even if they aren’t that big. They also tend to have hard borders. You go from a fairly well defined town to farmland fairly quickly. Thus you can don’t have many stops because you don’t need that many. You connect one small town after another with each other and the big city. They also have old railway lines they can leverage. This reduces costs dramatically.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t really match that. Federal Way has a very small center. Even with the growth there aren’t that many people within walking distance of the station. It also doesn’t stand out. It is just one of many such places that go on for miles. The borders are really soft. It isn’t clear where Federal Way ends. The same is true for every city or town along the way. If you skip stations you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. Sure, it benefits Federal Way but it also hurts some other area that is very similar. The other area might have more ridership potential as well, simply because it is closer to the city. For example, getting rid of the TIBS station would make the trip from Federal Way a bit faster but it would make the trip from Tukwila terrible.
To make matters worse, there is no existing railway to leverage. So instead they try to leverage the freeway right-of-way which ends up still costing a bundle and resulting in poor stations.
It is a failure because it bound to fail. You can’t square the circle. OK, you could double track everything and run faster trains but that means spending even more money on even fewer riders. It will take a long time and years of investment (in far more cost effective projects) for something like that to be worth it.
The better option is to just leverage the existing infrastructure (freeways) and improve them for buses. Change HOV-2 to HOV-3. Then run more buses.
@Ross,
I agree with the HOV-3 conversion if it’s done as tolled HOT lanes. Just changing the signs will negatively impact far more people than it helps. The GP lanes will become significantly worse. And overall that’s most likely bad for the environment since so many vehicles will be stuck idling in traffic. You also create a huge impact on freight mobility and trade works that have to drive to their job sites. This cost, environmental and economic are paid by the region as a whole with no benefit except the relatively few that and reasonable use transit. HOT lanes OTOH actually collect revenue (sort of like a bus fare) and allow high value trips (plumbers, electricians, grocery delivery, etc.) to benefit the same way transit riders do.
If you go back to 2007, Ben Schiendelman who started Seattle Subway was one of the main members running Seattle Transit Blog. Back then anything you posted that criticized ST was treated as hate speech. It took too long (kind of like ST itself) for people to realize the ST tax money was not providing good value and that it never will with the way the board is currently selected. It’s heartening now to see people not just calling it out but providing rational ideas to improve it.