PubliCola interviewed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson: Part 1 and Part 2. Cascade PBS sat down with Tacoma Mayor Anders Ibsen, also at 6 months into his first term.
Transit & Streets:
- Pierce Transit puts expansion measure on November ballot. (Pierce Transit)
- Did you ride transit during the World Cup? Take Sound Transit’s survey.
- Sound Transit’s proposed transit service for next year (2027) is available for public review.
- OPINION | Neglected Traffic Medians on Rainier Avenue South Point to Inequity in the South End (South Seattle Emerald)
- Who Put 2,400 Eco-Blocks in Georgetown? Researchers Still Don’t Know. (South Seattle Emerald)
- Join the Renton Area Mobility Project Board and help shape the future of transit (Metro Matters). Submit your application here.
- Avoid the Squeeze: Take the Bus to Link Light Rail (Community Transit)
- Seattle’s first major roundabout opens near future light rail station in Pinehurst (SDOT Blog)
- Dan Strauss pushes for more Ballard bus service ahead of Seattle Transit Measure vote (MyBallard)
Land Use & Housing:
- Issaquah Councilmembers Push for Bolder Options as Housing Reforms Ramp Up (The Urbanist)
- King County, Kirkland Celebrate Opening of Contentious Supportive Housing Facility (The Urbanist)
- Zahilay and Wilson Partially Dismantle KCRHA Amid Rising Homelessness (The Urbanist)
- Eddie Lin Defends a Delay-Busting Bill (South Seattle Emerald)
Other:
- The Vashon Island Strawberry Festival is July 18-19. There will be a shuttle every 10-15 minutes between the island ferry terminal and the festival in the town center between 9:55am and 5pm, and less service before and after that. Metro’s regular island route 118 also goes between them.
- Tacoma Porchfest returns July 18-19. Hundreds of bands play for free in house yards north and south of 6th Avenue. Different time blocks are in different geographic quadrants so that listeners can walk between all the shows in the quadrant. The Seattle Times has an article on it.
This is an Open Thread.
Residential development news from Bellevue. Large, affordable residential complex planned for the northeast corner of 124th & 8th. It’s almost equal distance to Wilburton and Spring District stations at just under a half mile away. Spring District would be the easier walk.
https://getthewreport.com/the-state-of-real-estate/1000-affordable-housing-units-proposed-in-bellevue/
Wow, that’s a block away from the garden apartment my mom lived in from 1989 to 2022. The whole area is in the Spring District upzone. Her complex is a group of a dozen two-story buildings. At first we were told it would all be replaced with a large development and everyone would have to move out sometime, but it dragged on for years with nothing happening, and finally we were told that each building would be replaced one by one.
I was planning to use Spring District station, and guessed it would be 10-15 minute walk. Wilburton station would be up and down a hill. I was hoping Link would open while she was there, but her health deteriorated in 2022 and she had to move to an adult family home in Lake Hills.
I noticed that the article says that it’s for seniors.
I have to wonder what the retail will be. Right now, the nearest supermarket is Whole Foods — which generally isn’t considered “affordable” and is still about 2,000 feet away from the nearest point in the development (as is Wilburton Station).
In addition to whole foods, there is a Target, PCC, and trader Joe’s nearby. Of course, there is no transit that goes there, but a resident of this development can still easily get there if they walk or bike.
In fairness, there is Uwajimaya that’s slightly closer. The other stores however appear to be over a half-mile from the nearest corner of the planned redevelopment.
And this is a senior development. Many of these future residents will have mobility issues.
With 90K in retail space planned, it’s very likely that a supermarket will be part of the development.
Well, there is the bellhop shuttle, although, for those that are able to, a bike ride would be much, much faster.
The Bellhop shuttle service boundary doesn’t cover the development site. Of course, the boundary can be changed.
Yeah, I’m assuming the boundary could be extended. There’s no point in including land in the service area now that’s just a construction site.
Nonetheless, the entire trip is less than 5 minutes by bike. Just waiting for a shuttle is already longer than that.
Of course, the reality is that people living there are probably going to do what Americans usually do, which is buy a $50,000 car to drive half a mile to the grocery store, while feeling smug about saving $5.52 per grocery trip by using a further-away store with slightly better prices.
I don’t see why groceries would be a concern. There are 5 grocery stores within a 20 minute walk and the proposed development is located on the B line, which provides access to another dozen or so grocery stores. There are also plenty of options available via car.
Have you ever walked more than 5 minutes with 3+ bags of groceries? It’s miserable, especially in rain or heat.
That’s why I think we should be planning our “neighborhood center” zones around grocery stores – everyone needs groceries frequently and unless you live within 5 blocks or so it doesn’t make sense to walk there.
When you’re doing grocery shopping on foot, you don’t carry grocery bags. You take a backpack. You also go more often so that everything fits into the backpack. Bulky items like paper towels and toilet paper, you order online and have delivered to you, so they don’t clog up the backpack.
@Delta
I walk to the grocery store very regularly. The closest one to me is 15-20 minutes away. I also regularly get groceries on my way back from the office, which involves a 15 minute walk plus a bus/train ride.
My grandparents are in their 80s, do not drive, and also regularly walk to a grocery store 15 minutes away from their retirement home (along and across an incredibly unpleasant 8-lane road by the way).
I really do not understand the hand-wringing about walking to the grocery store. It would be great if there was a closer option, but this seems completely reasonable to me. People all over the world manage to walk to the grocery store.
“People all over the world manage to walk to the grocery store.”
Grocery stores are closer to their house. That’s what we’re trying to get in Pugetopolis. Currently only a small fraction of people can live within walking distance of a grocery store, and those homes tend to have the highest cost per square foot because so many people are competing for them.
“When you’re doing grocery shopping on foot, you don’t carry grocery bags. You take a backpack. You also go more often so that everything fits into the backpack.”
If the store is a few blocks away you can do that. Usually even if it’s close, it’s half a mile or a mile away. The overhead of going back and forth multiple times to fit everything in a backpack is too much. People often need a backpack and a bag, or a backpack and two bags, or a rolling cart. I can fit everything in one backpack maybe a third of the time or less.
@Mike Orr
My grandparents have a rolling cart they use. I typically use a backpack or a tote bag. I also have a few foldable totes I bring and use as needed.
I’ve lived in other cities where driving is less common (in South America and east Asia) and it’s not atypical to walk 10 to 15 minutes for groceries.
Yes it would be great to have more small grocery stores throughout our neighborhoods but that seems like a non-issue for this development. In fact there’s a small Persian grocer less than 10 minutes away by foot.
First, almost everything can be delivered and I think FM and SW will both do it for free with a min $25 order. It’s hard not to spend $25 at the grocery store. And then there’s Amazon and Fresh. Rolling carts are a bit more of an issue w/o level boarding and this location doesn’t’ have good Link access w/o a bus transfer. However, a senior living complex of this size will be running it’s own shuttle service. And then there’s Access which I see commonly waiting at FM in Bellevue; a really costly way to provide “access”. But even without the complex providing transport someone unable to make a 15-20 minute walk for groceries probably needs help with other household chores. My mother-in-law has someone come by twice a week to help and they usually make a grocery trip at least one of the two days.
The problem with lots of small stores is they have to have big prices to be profitable. That’s especially true in a high rent district like Wilburton. That said, with the amount of planned “retail” space in this lower income senior oriented development I’d be shocked if it doesn’t include a food bank. Most likely there will be on sight dinning service available for those people unable to cook, let alone shop for themselves. And we’re not talking about dragging home groceries for a family of teenagers. Plus, most likely aren’t trying to work in shopping around a 40 hr/wk job.
The location has the advantage of being between where NE 8th and Bel-Red Rd are only a few hundred feet apart. So the 226 on Bel-Red will take you to the Safeway on 140th and get you close to the Freddy Kroger. Or you can B Line it to 148th and transfer to the 223 to avoid the walk. There’s also a good Asian Family Market on the SW corner of 20th & 148th and a great little Indian grocer in that same complex. Taking the B Line to Crossroads you’ve got QFC, Grocery Outlet and the India Metro Hypermarket (amazing place). You can also transfer at Crossroads and catch a 245 to Walmart in the old K-Mart plaza. The B Line gives you several ways to transfer to East Link that would likely be faster than walking to Spring District or Bel-Red Station. There are few places in Bellevue that actually have this great of a transit footprint. And with this development and all the rest that’s going in there will be many more places in walking distance on Bel-Red that aren’t flooring stores or auto repair shops. There’s also good (not great) access to KP and Overlake which is import for senior focused housing. There’s also lots of dentists & other clinics on Bel-Red and 116th.
The 226 is half-hourly, or 20 minutes peak hours. So it’s not very convenient unless you can time it, and watch when you leave the store. The place I was going to was between the B and the 226. At first I used the B, but eventually I switched to the 226 eastbound (from Bellevue TC) because small routes are pleasant in some ways (fewer people means low stress), and the Bel-Red corridor reminds me of my childhood (it’s little changed). And I was only going once a month rather than every week or more. But westbound I always took the B, so that I wouldn’t have to wait for a long time at a bus stop with no bench to sit on and no shelter.
“the India Metro Hypermarket (amazing place).”
That place angers me. It says hypermarket (like a Walmart superstore), but when I went in it was pretty small, and I was looking for something to eat on the go but it didn’t have it. The word hypermarket seems misleading. How is the place so amazing?
“There are few places in Bellevue that actually have this great of a transit footprint.”
It’s better than east Bellevue if you don’t live near 156th (B or 245).
The Hypermarket isn’t that small. I think it’s an old drug store (Bartel or Rite-Aid?)). It’s geared more toward staples and bulk quantities in a way like US Food. It has an amazing selection of spices, pasta & varieties of rice along with shelves full of ethnic food I can’t even recognize.
I hope KC Metro reorganizes the bus routes around the Bel-Red and Northup corridors. Currently Bel-Red gets a lot more ridership than Spring District and at least the DART 249 should go there via Northup/20th. The 226 needs a bump in frequency and maybe a detour to Bel-Red (130th – Spring Blvd – 134th EB). There’s more there than a P&R; four major residential blocks with more on tap.
Everyone who says how close the grocery stores are, the block uphill from 120th the 124th is extremely steep. Senior citizens with groceries will not be walking or biking up that block. The 120th intersection is also pedestrian unfriendly.
My impression was it’s a food/retail desert. The closest is a convenience store and small pho restaurant west of 124th on the south side. I could walk to Uwajimaya and Whole Foods and did sometimes, but she’d have trouble walking to the convenience store, and it was probably all crap there. She drove to Safeway at 140th or Fred Meyer at 148th, and in the later years a volunteer drove her and helped her shop.
I often wished it weren’t so residential-only there, that it were a 15-minute city with a supermarket and other retail within a couple blocks. But Bellevue has only a few of those areas, and when you find a Section 8 opening, it’s not likely to be near one.
The news report refers to it as a “senior living community”. Will these folks be walking 0.5 miles to a Link station? Will they be using transit very much anyways? I am a young senior, 62 y/o and use transit a lot. My dad is an old senior and never leaves his complex. I am unclear if this is a good TOD.
RapidRide B stops there, and has 15-minute service full-time to downtown Bellevue, Crossroads, and Redmond. The other apartment I was referring to was northeast of there, so closer to Link and further from the B. It’s a good location for TOD because of the B station and 8th being the primary arterial. My complaint was that there should be more retail throughout the city rather than isolated to islands. Especially along the primary arterials. But given that all of Pugetopolis is like that and most of the US, it’s a pretty good location for TOD relatively, and you’ve got the B there so the arterial is properly served.
I’ve often thought that maybe there should be a north-south route on 124th going to the station, and/or on 120th. Some of the early marketing on the Spring District area suggested there would be. Although it’s hard to figure out what an entire route from end to end would look like. The only thing south of there on 124th besides houses is the Bellevue Botanical Garden, a school, and an entrance to the woods on Main Street. A route could turn west there to downtown Bellevue.
“With 90K in retail space planned, it’s very likely that a supermarket will be part of the development.”
I missed that part. That would help fill the retail desert. Every neighborhood should be a 15-minute city.
“Under a proposal submitted to the City of Bellevue, the EverGlen Village master-planned senior living community would bring more than 1,000 affordable apartments to the Wilburton neighborhood. This redevelopment is led by Downtown Action to Save Housing (DASH), the affordable housing affiliate of Bellevue-based nonprofit Transforming Age. EverGlen Village would include five mass timber buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet… Once completed, the complex would feature 90,000 square feet of retail and community space… Located at the corner of NE 8th Street and 124th Avenue NE, the site sits within walking distance of the Wilburton light rail station. The development’s 8.13 acres span three parcels. On two of those parcels sit the 82-unit Glendale Apartments and the 84-unit Evergreen Court — both owned by DASH for three decades. In June 2025, DASH purchased an adjacent site containing a two-story office building for $5 million.”
OK, this is a lot larger than the one building I thought. Glendale Apartments is the one my mom lived in, and it is under DASH (it gets tax breaks for having affordable units). The building across the street is the Evergreen Court, and it’s senior apartments I think. So this development will spread to both sides of NE 10th Street. I didn’t realize the same organization owned all these complexes. It’s really large enough that it needs its own supermarket anyway, and the Spring District doesn’t have one so it needs one.
Even though this location might not be the most ideal location in terms of walkability … to a grocery store, to a Link station … I think it’s exciting when a large residential development is planned, especially within (just barely) a Link station area. I really look forward to when other properties will be developed, Like the Total Wine property across the street from Wilburton, or the cement plant across the street from BelRed.
Good retail will make it more walkable, depending on what the retail is. The RapidRide B connection is not to be sneezed at: it’s good enough to get from a secondary neighborhood to Link, and is an anchor for TOD. Ideally it would be raised to 10-minute frequency, but one thing at a time. My complaint was partly from not recognizing the retail or the size of the property when I was looking at the project page. The first thing that comes to mind now is, why didn’t they build it in the 2000s when they could have gotten some of the real-estate bubble money for it, and people would have had retail and more senior units thirty years earlier (since I assume it will take 10+ years to build).
Re: STM (latest from the Urbanist).
Bob Kettle says that it’s “too soon” to know what post-pandemic ridership trends will be is ridiculous. If you compare commute totals and ridership totals (as he does in his newsletter), you’ll wind up seeing that the Seattle area is adding non-commute trips relative to 2019 and it’s doing this faster than any other large transit system. By my estimations (referencing Census commute data and NTD UPT numbers), the Seattle metro area has added 7.5m non-commute based trips since 2019 while losing about 45m commute trips. The only other large system that has added non-commute trips is DC at just under 1m.
Note that this is mostly an estimate, and since Seattle’s transit system has had structural changes in the last 6 years, some of that 7.5m is likely attributable to more transfers relating to Link restructures. But either way, ridership in the Seattle area writ large is recovering much faster than commute ridership. Trips outside of commutes are easier to serve in some ways, but harder in others. It demands more general grid frequency but less peak-hour service. This is how Metro (and most agencies) have responded since Covid, and that was long enough ago now that we can actually be fairly sure that what we are doing is working fairly well.
But of course, Bob Kettle isn’t aware of these nuances because he doesn’t really care much about public transportation. Hence all the nonsensical amendments that seek to micromanage and generally undermine transit.
Kettle really doesn’t understand that folks are going to be much less likely to vote for a sales tax increase (0.150% to 0.225%) for zero increase in service. It doesn’t matter than the increase is marginal – an increase is an increase, so we should be maxing it out.
“A healthy transit and transportation system is absolutely essential for Seattle. As both a strong supporter and believer in public transit, I know how vital these connections are to our daily lives,” said Councilmember Kettle. “However, we must spend our public dollars strategically, rather than raising the sales tax simply because we can. Every day, I hear from neighbors about how living in Seattle is becoming less and less affordable.”
https://council.seattle.gov/2026/07/02/councilmember-kettle-proposes-transit-measure-alternative-with-sharpened-focus-on-service-needs-and-affordability/
I have a hard time believing that Bob Kettle actually thinks asking people to pay $15 more per year for worse service is better than asking people to pay $30 per year for better service. I think he has seen “affordability” as a winning buzzword and has recklessly tacked it onto a proposal that will not save his constituents any money, as getting around on transit is basically always the cheapest option.
Some of those “non-commute” trips are commutes (the same trip several times a week or month). This issue is it that it’s now more feasible to take transit for them, both with the off-peak frequency boost and longer early/late spans. It has become as easy to do a trip off-peak as peak-hours in some cases, so people are doing it.
I don’t know if there’s public data to parse out the sort of trips you are talking about, but I don’t think I’d use the word “commute” for that. That’s generally just reserved for regular trips to work or school. I would count a regular trip to the store, pharmacy, appointment, or what have you as “non-commute” and the point is both that those are trips Metro serves better now, and that they are trips worth focusing on.
Only 1/6th of trips are commutes. A system made up of even 50% commute trips is still really out of whack in that context, even recognizing that there are types of commutes that are easy to serve on transit. I think US transit agencies (and the industry at large) have spent way too much time, effort, and money on chasing commuters at the expense of everyone else, and that Covid just represents one aspect of this. The fact that a councilor would use “less trips are commutes, so we don’t need as much funding” as justification for lowering transit funding is reflective of this idea, and it’s one I really dislike.
Commute comes from communtation ticket, a multi-trip discount ticket. The ORCA equivalent is monthly passes. We used to get 10-pack tickets for the Vashon ferry because we often went there on weekends. In New York people get them for whenever they go to Manhattan: both for work or to visit a show or museum etc. The word you’re looking for is peak-hour. People who go to work five days a week commute regardless of whether it’s day shift, swing shift, or night shift.
No, the word I’m looking for is “commute” is the sense that most people use it and as defined by the Census. I’ve never heard of people referring to commutation tickets when talking about commute trips.
Peak-hour is not sufficient to describe all commute trips, as many people commute to work outside of peak hours. When someone says “50% of trips on Metro are commutes”, they are certainly talking about work trips, not paid-in-advance or in-kind passes, even if the latter is more to the spirit of the phrase as it existed in the late 1800s.
Yes, that has been my story. I retired and now take transit–Metro and Link more. I have frequent all day service on C-Line and then connect to Link. I am taking transit trips I would never have imagined (West Seattle to Lake Forest Park) and at times I would have never thought I would–like Sunday evenings. It is now much more possible.
Before RapidRide C, D, E, and the Seattle Transit Measure in 2012-2016, bus service dropped to half-hourly evenings to West Seattle (54?), Aurora (358), Greenwood (5), Broadway (49, 60), Denny Way (8), Ballard 15th (15), Ballard 24th (18), etc. I avoided going to those areas because of that. I lived on Ballard 15th for a while and experienced it, back when bus service had always been like that and more didn’t seem to be politically possible. When frequent evenings came to all those areas, it made me more willing to go to them for dinner or events or to visit people and spend money at the businesses there, or to potentially live there someday.
Yes, fall 2012 was a major service change with good improvement in Seattle.
A video got posted last night with additional information about Link and Ballard:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9XXaWhff7JU&ra=m
It hits on a lot of details. This includes the problem with deep stations, and how moving stations makes transferring more difficult. The creator does advocate for a study of an automated line that Kubly suggested.
It’s worth watching just to see diagrams of the mind-boggling, palatial stations deep underground. ST’s own PR avoids making the station designs widely known. For someone unaware of the station layout details, it can visually reveal why the designs are both so rider-unfriendly and so astronomically costly.
But deferring the second tunnel was not mentioned; it seems the best answer. Would a Kubly second tunnel also be deep and have split CID stations?
Reducing the length of stations makes it easier to build stations less deep. Keep in mind that trains today are the length of two Seattle downtown blocks and station vaults (construction sites) as planned need more like three.
Because ST refuses to add an automated alternative to its analysis, we just don’t know if shorter trains and stations can create shallower profiles or not. Observers generally believe that it can.
In ST3, ST promised to get to groundbreaking as soon as possible by allowing for fewer alternatives to shorten the environmental analysis. Of course, the problems with the ridiculously low initial cost estimates given to voters in 2016 destroyed that advantage logic. But even this year, the ST party line is that they can’t afford to take the time. (Keep in mind that automated train alternatives have been suggested for several years and could have been added a few years ago with no effect on schedule. The schedule argument to me was and still is silly — especially given how unlikely that FTA will advance funds for two more years anyway.)
I believe the Kubly proposal was focused more on the technology than getting into debates around station locations or the second tunnel. The idea was to issue a “Request for Information” to explore an automated light rail line between Ballard and West Seattle that would be 100% grade separated (i.e. discarding the split spine that ST currently envisions). This request would assume “stations located within Sound Transit’s proposed station envelopes.” But I would think the idea of automated trains running more frequently but with smaller stations could be compatible with either North/South CID or Midtown/5th Diagonal/4th Ave combinations, assuming the second tunnel goes forward. It could also indirectly end up lending support to the automated Ballard to Westlake stub line idea, without the second tunnel.
As a sidenote, there was another recent video about ST3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BFdnOTYloU by “Yet Another Urbanist.” While this video does make some good points, I think it really misses the boat on both automation and the second tunnel. In the comments, he calls Kubly’s proposal “silly” because, “it would cause more delays to try to rework the plan to split the spine into a single automated train tunnel.” In the video, he also criticizes time spent studying the single tunnel idea because “cramming all 3 lines down one tunnel” is a “nonstarter” due to construction impacts and creating a single point of failure if problems occurred in the tunnel. I am not persuaded by the construction impacts argument because he’s not talking about the Ballard stub alternative. And the lack of redundancy/resilience that comes from having only 1 downtown tunnel seems worth the trade offs, given the countervailing benefits of dropping a very problematic second tunnel.
“ST promised to get to groundbreaking as soon as possible by allowing for fewer alternatives to shorten the environmental analysis.”
ST begged the cities/public to agree on one or two alternatives to study, to avoid the south Bellevue fiasco where the city insisted on some fifteen alternatives and obstructed the project. That didn’t happen because the Seattle cities/public were unable to agree on Ballard and West Seattle alternatives. We couldn’t give in to something that would be very bad for passengers, and others insisted on other alternatives for their own reasons. So it was the cities/public that didn’t step up, and that in itself isn’t ST’s fault or under ST’s control.
The thing is that approach didn’t ultimately work. The whole shift from new stations at Jackson and Madison were never part of the plan until 2022. The DEIS didn’t even have them. Had ST put an automated train from Ballard alternative on the table in 2017 or 2018 and sincerely considered it, things would likely have been so much cheaper that a project may have even been under construction now. Consider that the station layouts and construction impacts would have been greatly less disruptive so that opposition in places like the CID would have been way less convincing, for example.
Plus both the realignment from 2021 and the “enterprise initiative” efforts were explicitly addressing what’s affordable given bonding and revenue flows and not in their motions.
Finally, the cross lake segment was not delayed three years due to earlier alignment issues. It was a construction delay; not a delay by a city.
The notion to keep down the number of alternatives was needed to save time and was effective as a way to get to openings quicker both appear to bogus to me.
The first controversy was over the 5th Avenue Shallow and Deep alternatives. Some CID activists didn’t want any station at 5th & Jackson and pushed to get it out of the CID. STB wanted to keep it there, but it took years for other CID activists to say so and get organized. The move to CID/N was a reaction to the controversy over a 5th & Jackson station. It was out of the blue and unprecedented, but if the rest of the city and public had been united about one of the existing alternatives or there was a less intractable debate about two of them, the CID/N&S alternative might never have come up, or if it did it might not have been able to gain traction.
The important point about the CID impact was driven by how 5th Ave alternatives would need to take out almost two full city blocks of buildings in the heart of the ID. .
The same thing was being required for Midtown station.
Had automation been studied, the needed real estate could have been considerably reduced.
Why are we closing the ENTIRE SODO Busway just to build West Seattle Link!? I can see the segment between Royal Brougham and Holgate still operating but why this abomination!?
Why will the current 1 Line tracks south of Holgate St now split from the current tracks and go into DSTT2 while serving terrible new stations that fail at complementing the current tunnel stations Downtown?
This needs serious rethinking! Only the segment between Holgate and Spokane streets will have West Seattle Link tracks! Though I have a question, will the new SODO Station (which we don’t need two!) have crossover tracks so the train can turn around in 2032?
I could suggest a tunnel under 4th Ave S and dismantling the SODO Busway corridor entirely (possibly repurposing it for something that will actually work like semi trucks and BNSF trains).
A good reason for a tunnel under 4th Ave S is… THE LIGHT RAIL GRADE CROSSINGS ON THE CURRENT SODO BUSWAY CORRIDOR!!! People have suggested dismantling the MLK tracks and burying/elevating them but I can see that being a big cow. This idea is less of a cow and would only need some disruptions that wouldn’t be as big as grade seperating the MLK segment.
1 Line and 3 Line track switching would be easier via a 4th Ave S tunnel which has MORE potential then a tunnel under the current SODO Busway.
We could even consider a 4th Ave S bus mall with this! Similarily to how the SODO Busway was an extension of DSTT and sent South King County buses to I-5 without getting into traffic this could be a 3rd Ave bus mall extension.
We need to do something, Mayor Wilson!
Because WSLE is taking more than half of it for two new tracks.
Because ST thinks it’s necessary to break the spine.
Yes, because it will operate as the terminus of WSLE for at least 5 years.
WSLE includes construction of two road bridges (at Lander and Holgate) similar to the ~$100M bridge over the freight roads on Lander built by SDOT recently.
WSLE is basically fully baked. The only room for changes now are minor design changes at the stations. If transit nerds weren’t already insufferable about the Forward Thrust vote, they’ll be even more insufferable when complaining about all the design decisions leading to WSLE and BLE.
I’ve long said that the SODO tracks and station need basic rethinking. Most regulars don’t seem concerned but I am. It’s literally the middle of the spine. Done badly, it will cripple everyone using Link either directly or indirectly.
The plans that I have seen do not make it easy to switch between tracks in SODO. The buildout diagrams show that every train must make two switches to keep going in the same direction. And the middle segment between the switches is the track headed in the other direction. So every train in both directions will have to freeze for at least 3 minutes and probably more each time a train changes tracks.
All of this is on top of closing the busway. That screws riders on Metro routes as well as ST Express routes. A lane on 4th Ave S will not be as fast. That’s because every signal has a long wait because 4th Ave S is very wide and has pedestrians on it that need many seconds of time to cross the street safely.
South King and Renton transit riders are likely unaware of this planned deterioration in transit service. ST likes to talk about building but not about making transit take longer after spending billions.
There are anlternatives available. The original plan from 2016 was to have a double decker station with West Seattle trains above the current station. That would save the busway and eliminate the need for a Lander overpass. But some interests wanted a Lander overpass.
And it screws riders who walk to and from the station too. Today they can reach the Link platform at grade. The plan is to make them climb the overpass and come back down — probably with no down escalator! And the stairs will also be used by thousands of transferring riders every day including SeaTac flyers with luggage headed north of Downtown to UW, North Seattle and Snohomish County.
Al, we have discussed this before.
If you map the planned service (West Seattle to DSTT1 and Rainier Valley to DSTT2) you’ll find the plan results in no switching during regular service. WSLE will stub on new tracks west of SODO (in the busway). BLE tracks will emerge from DSTT2 in a retained cut east of Stadium station. The current tracks at SODO station will route to DSTT2, and new tracks will connect from the new west half of SODO station to Stadium station.
Of course, trains moving from DSTT1 to OMF-C will have to make their way through two switches, but ST is planning pocket tracks to handle it. The only switches in regular service will continue to be where the 2 Line joins the 1 Line south of ID/C station.
I looked at the diagrams that you referred me to Nathan. It still looks to me that ST can only have a sane direction train swap tracks by doing what I described, including stopping trains in the opposite direction. There may be tail track in the West Seattle interim period but that goes away when Link runs further north as planned.
For there to be a picket track in SODO, there would need to be five tracks — two for WS, two for RV and the pocket track.
Al, I recommend you sketch out the actual service plan. Here’s an ASCII representation:
(3 Line) Delridge –> SODO (west) –> Stadium –> CID via DSTT1 (west of DSTT2)
(1 Line) Beacon Hill –> SODO (east) –> CID via DSTT2 (east of DSTT1)
No track swapping necessary for regular service.
And yes, just like how there’s a pocket track south of Stadium Station, ST’s published plans indicate they intend to add another pocket track. It’s not clear whether it’ll be built as part of WSLE or as part of BLE, but I have a hard time imagining how they plan to get trains from OMF-C to WSLE without it.
Nathan
WSLE has a tie in to the elevated guideway from OMFC.
I know they were planning that but I could see them scrapping it if building the switches north of SODO is cheaper than building a whole new aerial guideway and connection to OMF-C (highly likely)
I’m not talking about just any switching, Nathan. I’m talking about going from one northbound track to the other northbound track, or going from one southbound track to the other southbound track. In both cases, it will require stopping trains in both directions.
And it’s because ST won’t put both northbound tracks on the east side and southbound tracks on the west side. If they did, service options and platform options become more flexible. This is how four tracks are arranged in Manhattan, at MacArthur BART and on the L in Chicago just to name a few systems.
This is important because disruptions occur. The Blog is full of accounts of hours-long disruptions including this week! There will be times when there’s a blockage and ST will have to reroute trains so that they don’t leave riders stuck inside a train.
Al, you are describing a (future) irregular operation in which trains from Beacon Hill are routed through DSTT1 at the same time that trains from Delridge are routed through DSTT2.
Sure, there is an argument to be made about operational flexibility, but it would be an irregular operation and there are always delays associated with irregular operation. Maybe after a decade of practice interlining the 1 and 2 Lines south of CID (which currently routinely delays trains on either line by 1-2 minutes), ST will be able to manage this sort of switch management more smoothly.
However, following the same logic which assumes breaking the spine is the best course of action (highly debatable), it would be completely illogical to run a Ballard-West Seattle line via DSTT2 at the same time as a Tacoma-Everett line (or Lynnwood-Federal Way, or whatever). The only condition which would result in a train from Beacon Hill heading into DSTT1 (once DSTT2 is built) is if they decide it’s easier to reroute the 1 Line during closures of DSTT2, in which case they would just truncate the 3 Line at SODO and once again, no trains are crossing in front of each other.
“Al, you are describing a (future) irregular operation in which trains from Beacon Hill are routed through DSTT1 at the same time that trains from Delridge are routed through DSTT2.”
Disruptions that require rerouting last several hours to a few days. Duringvthatvtimecits not “irregular”.
Disruptions may include planned ones too.
And it sure would be great if every other 1 Line train went from SeaTac to Everett or from West Seattle to SLU. All it takes is to design the tracks correctly at the outset.
It’s all very intuitive and basic. Northbound trains on one side and southbound trains on the other. Most four-track systems around the world are designed this way. It’s standard urban rail track design for a reason! It just makes sense! ST is bizarrely not doing this — yet they claim we need DSTT2 to be “redundant”?
I can’t wait for a day we prioritize surface rail over freight. There is plenty of capacity in the existing track, it’s the cross traffic that’s the problem. The port should pay for overpasses then. In these austere times having duplicate track through industrial land looks (and is) wasteful.
It’s all ridiculous. ST knows how to make transit nobody wants to ride.
Renton is next on the chopping block with the “Mobility Board” they’re putting together.
They also purposely use 40 foot buses on crowded routes and then use the 60 footers on useless empty bus routes like the F or 177/101 and have peak hr buses run 20-30 mins late every day
It’s all by design so ridership drops and they can justify the cuts.
You’re assuming all changes will be worse? You don’t even know what the proposals are, and what Metro ultimately puts forward depends partly on how the mobility board reacts to it. Other people here have been on such mobility boards (also called “sounding boards”). You could apply to it.
“Why are we closing the ENTIRE SODO Busway just to build West Seattle Link!?”
Because West Seattle is privileged, and because Dow Constantine and ST want to. This will give West Seattle grade-separated trains so that they won’t have level crossings like the Rainier Valley trains do, because West Seattle privilege.
Closing the busway comes in phase 2, during the Ballard Link work.
The busway must close to build the expanded SODO station for WSLE. This is why there are bus lanes on 4th Ave S in SODO already.
Nathan, Al is right about Fourth South. The traffic is not particularly bad, but all those lights make it a time sink, much slower than the busway. Renton and Burien riders are being screwed for the FOLLY of building a separate railroad for West Seattle.
Yes, some day there may be a third southern branch and that would probably over-burden the existing trackway. Then you build in the busway for DSTT-bound trains.
I would CERTAINLY build the curve between Line 3 at Spokane “stacked” to accommodate such a divergence, but I think we all know that “The Future does not exist for ST until the Voters approve it.” So they won’t stub-in an obvious junction there and it will cost five billion (2026 dollars) for an eighty-foot high flyover southbound.
The busway must close to build the expanded SODO station for WSLE.
Yep. This is the craziest part about this. First they get rid of the busway. Many riders will be worse off. Then they will spend years building a train line to West Seattle. After that is done, the line from West Seattle will connect to SoDo. Very few people will ride it. Years later they will build a second tunnel under downtown. This will make things worse for many existing riders who currently take Link. It won’t add much value in itself but it will allow those riders from West Seattle to reach downtown without another transfer. The key word here is “another” as very few riders will actually walk to one of the stations in West Seattle. There will only be two. Thus a lot of riders will be worse off almost immediately while a lot of riders will be worse off later. This includes those who use the SoDo Busway; those who enjoy a one-seat ride from the UW to SeaTac; those who commute in from the south and prefer the existing tunnel stations instead of the new ones; those who have a fast one-seat ride from West Seattle to downtown — all worse off. Only a relative handful will be better off, years and years from now (assuming everything is built as planned).
ST3 will probably go down in history as the worst transit project for all time. There are plenty of cheap projects that don’t get many riders. There are plenty of projects with huge cost overruns that at least serve a lot of riders. But the project is so expensive and has so little benefit that it is probably the worst in terms of overall value. The fact that the order is terrible and so many people will be worse off (in the short and long term) shouldn’t be too surprising.
You don’t need to dig a tunnel to avoid the three crossings of the SoDo busway. Lander is already planned to cross on a bridge just south of the new station. There will be no at-grade crossing there. Holgate could have the same treatment for considerably less money, because it’s only two lanes wide.
Lower Royal Brougham way is obviously more difficult because Upper Royal Brougham Way is already above it. However, there is very little “through” traffic on LRBW, so simply put a barrier across it just east of the Link tracks by the Greyhound Station. Greyhound would only be accessed from Sixth South. The part of LRBW west of the Link tracks would simply become “bus only” and be a part of the busway.
There is no reason in the world to have a dedicate pair of tracks for West Seattle. Line 1 is limited to ten trains per hour and Line 3 will NEVER need more than six per hour (ten minute headways). That’s sixteen trains per hour, which is three minutes and forty-five seconds average headwy. That’s sufficiently “sparse” that all you need is the two existing tracks. That means “no new station”, for a savings of $700 million (less some bucks for improving the existing one).
There’s also an addition two- or three-hundred million savings for not covering the busway with ballast, tracks, and overhead.
EVEN if you build DSTT2 there’s enough room at the pocket track south of Stadium for the southbound Line 1 track to rise up from DSTT2 between the north- and south-bound Line 3 tracks headed for DSTT1. The northbound Line 1 trains would just have a simple diverging right-hand turnout to the new tunnel portal.
So far as the south merge/diversion, the northbound Line 3 trains would descend just south of Forest Street, use the current bikeway between Forest and Lander and merge into the northbound Line 1 trackage underneath the Lander Street Overpass. The southbound Line 3 trains would simply “go straight” at the curve at the top of the ramp to Forest Street and continue south to the east of the busway.
If ST cannot be convinced to build that divergence, then simply have a turnout underneath the Lander Street Overpass in the southbound track as well and use the shoulder and one lane of the busway down to Forest. A “single lane” section with a sophisticated signaling system would cost a few million and delay no bus for more than thirty to sixty seconds.
The busway would continue to be useful and used.
[P.S. This is an old sawhorse of mine; I’ve been saying this same thing for five years — maybe eight. Finally in this time of limited resources people are saying, “Wow, let’s save a billion bucks by not spening them on a double track railroad for six LR trains per hour!”
I still don’t understand why we can’t tie into the existing flying junction at Central OMF. I’ve raised this idea many times and have been met with crickets. Even if it requires closing Central OMF for renovations for a little while, South OMF is scheduled to be complete before WSLE breaks ground I think (?) so it’s not a problem. This would also prevent closures to the 1 Line for adding new crossovers.
I wholly agree, Sunny.
The segment between Lander and the WS corridor next to Spokane has to be mostly on aerial structures anyway. I don’t get why the option was never an alignment alternative.
And there is no need to build a new station at SODO as long as there is a Lander overpass and more tail track north of the station (ST has sketched a possible new tail track stub in its drawings anyway), or continuing the WS profile to new aerial platforms at SODO and forgo the Lander overpass (and leave the busway open too).
Added info on the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival and shuttle to the article in the last section.
So ST is still planning on crosstrack transfers at SoDo when they break the Spine, then? Lovely. Can’t wait to not be able to get to appointments because I can’t hobble up and back down a pedestrian bridge. Or I guess I could spend 20 minutes dealing with 40 escalators and cacophonous throngs at Westlake.
The only way to have all trips served “cross-track” is to widen the trackway at SoDo, put a center platform in the middle and retain the outside platforms for rapid access from the bus transfer. Then, run both lines on the existing tracks; see my comment above for the details.
I mean, they’ve cut down the size of the SODO station expansion from what they originally planned, so there has been progress. We’ll see if they change their minds again and tinker with it more.
Yeah, the busway could be made much better without spending a ton of money. It would also help the existing train line. You build overpasses to the south (and we’ve already built one). The only tricky area is close to Royal Brougham Way. But as you mentioned, traffic could be sent elsewhere. Another option is the one suggested here on page 6:
B. E3 Busway to Fifth Avenue/Seattle Boulevard/Airport Way: The primary pathway would require a new ramp connection from the SODO Busway (known as the E3 Busway) up to the Seattle Boulevard/Airport Way/5th Avenue intersection.
Note that some of the proposals on that report have already been implemented (e. g. the Lander Street overpass and the ramp from the eastbound Spokane Street Viaduct to 4th) so it is out of date even if some of the ideas are not.
This roundup was a useful reminder that taking the bus can often be the easiest solution when major events or congestion put extra pressure on the transportation network. I appreciate how these midweek posts bring together a variety of transit news in one place, they make it much easier to stay informed and plan ahead rather than being caught off guard by service changes