In 2019 Amsterdam committed to removing 10,000 street parking spaces in 5 years to make a more liveable city, repurposing the space for sidewalks, bike lanes, and transit. Local residents were enthusiastic after they were removed. Now Amsterdam is removing 10,000 more spaces by 2030. (Not Just Bikes)

This is an open thread.

41 Replies to “Sunday Movie: Amsterdam’s War on Cars”

    1. From the picture it looks like the derailment happened near the control point that switches the 1 Line trains from the 2 Line trains. Switching from the northbound track to the southbound track at CID isn’t a regular service pattern. I wonder how many other trains made that same move last night?

      Service recovery must have been difficult this morning. All trains north of CID wouldn’t have been able to return to base due to the derailment and the operators for the morning trains likely would have been asleep at the time of the derailment.

    2. I think the Board should start requesting a report on every major service disruption over 2-3 hours. Each disruption’s cause, duration, replacement service quality and communications about it should be included in a report.

      There’s a Rider Experience and Operations Committee meeting this week. This is where every one should be reviewed, and let that committee decide if the full Board should get info about it.

      I think that the Sound Transit Board (at least this committee) should be discussing the reality of operation a busy system more and not just approving contracts. ST staff need to determine what causes these major disruptions and how best to deal with them. And every major disruption report should recommend improvements about prevention, shortening the duration and improvements to replacement service along with communications to riders.

      I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that Link operations sees many more disruptions recently than other light rail systems do.

  2. Sound Transit’s text updates are soooo bad. Case in point from this morning:

    First update: “2 Line trains are sharing one track from Bel Red Sta to Overlake Sta until further notice.”

    Second update: “Resolved: 2 Line trains are sharing one track from Bel Red Sta to Overlake Sta until further notice.”

    So…. my guess is that since the second updates reads “resolved” that 2 Line trains are NOT sharing one track anymore between those two stations. But, of course, you have to infer that since the update still reads “2 Line trains are sharing one track…” Which is it?

    Seriously, this shouldn’t be that hard. How can this agency continue to put out this kind of garbage?

    1. You try being a Communications Spokesperson for Sound Transit … You work from home, and you probably also have a second job you work from home for, you may not even live locally, and you are in bed, half asleep, and you have to send out an update, and are asking AI to research and write the update for you. You’d get a few things wrong, too.

    2. On the bright side, they were able to share one track rather than shutting the entire line down from Bel-Red to Redmond. I can’t recall where the cross over tracks are since I don’t ride east of Bel-Red very often.

    3. Yeah, I get that 5am on Sunday sucks. But I count at least 5 mistakes in ST’s announcement about the closure due to the derailment. I will annotate the many mistakes and ambiguities in this alert.

      1 Line service is suspended from Capitol Hill Station to SODO Station and 2 Line service is suspended from Capitol Hill Station to Judkins Park Station until further notice due to continued derailment recovery.

      1 Line trains are still running from Lynnwood City Center Station to Capitol Hill Station and from SODO Station to Downtown Federal Way Station. Updates will be provided when available.

      Some 1 Line rains may turn back at SODO
      [comment – “some” trains? Every train from the south turns back at SODO, and no train from the north reaches SODO]

      2 Line trains are still running from Judkins Park Station to Downtown Redmond Station.

      Some 2 Line trains may turn back at Judkins Park.
      [comment – “some” trains? Every train from the eastside turns back at Judkins]

      Shuttle buses are replacing 1 and 2 Line service from Capitol Hill Station to SODO Station and Judkins Park Station to Downtown Redmond Station.
      [comment – Judkins to Redmond is the part of the 2 line that is still operating! The 2 shuttle needs to be between Capital Hill and Judkins, or at the very least International District to Judkins]

      …

      2 Line Shuttle Bus Locations:

      Capitol Hill:

      To Judkins Park: E Denny Wy & Broadway

      Westlake:

      To Lynnwood: 3rd Ave & Pine St
      To Judkins Park: Pine St & 5th Ave

      Symphony:

      To Lynnwood: 3rd Ave & Union St
      To Judkins Park: 3rd Ave & Union St

      Pioneer Square:

      To Lynnwood: 3rd Ave & James St
      To Judkins Park: 3rd Ave & James St

      Symphony
      [comment – why are Symphony and Pioneer Square listed again]
      To Lynnwood: 3rd Ave & Union St
      To Judkins Park: 3rd Ave & Union St

      Pioneer Square

      To Lynnwood: 3rd Ave & James St
      To Judkins Park: 3rd Ave & James St

      Int’l Dist/Chinatown:

      To Judkins Park Station: 5th Ave S & S King St
      [comments – And where is the shuttle stop at Judkins? That would seem important for anyone getting dumped there by a westbound 2 line train. Also, why not tell people where the northbound shuttle stop at ID is? It was listed in the 1 line section]

      1. And presumably 2 Line trains are also still running from Capitol Hill to Lynnwood, not just the 1 Line trains. ST announcements always leave out the fact that the entire line from Lynnwood to ID/CT is equally the 2 Line as much as it is the 1 Line.

      2. The simplest 2 Line Shuttle solution would be to have buses leave CHS via the 49 route path to downtown, make all the stops along 3rd Avenue, head east on Jackson to 23rd Avenue, south to JPS, west on Massachusetts, north on Rainier to downtown and CHS. One big loop that serves both entrances to JPS and all the downtown stations.

  3. In other words, today and possibly tomorrow, are good days avoid the light rail if you can.

  4. The texts from ST when there are problems with Light Rail are pretty much worthless.

    They will say that there is a disruption but don’t tell you what the disruption is, They don’t tell you if it is affecting the entire line or just a portion of the line. In other words, the rider is let wondering what they should do. Still try to ride Light Rail or find alternate transportation.

    I have written emails to St about this, and their responses are as worthless as their texts as they think that their texts are just fine.

    ST communications are terrible but then at times so is their whole operation.

    1. They sometimes tell where it is and what it is. You have to read the alert to see if it’s one of those. I saw the emails this morning when I woke up. The first two gave no reason. The third mentioned derailment. Usually the second one will have more information, but this one happened at midnight so it affected few people and Link was about to end for the night anyway. The derailment alert was at 5am when it would affect more people over the next few hours.

      Then when ST does mention a cause, sometimes it’s specific, and sometimes it’s completely generic like “mechanical issue” or “signal issue”.

      Some have said ST has canned messages it can send with one button press, so the generic messages may be those. Then when ST gets around to it, it sends a more specific message.

  5. In cases like this, where the downtown tunnel is closed, how much does that reduce the capacity of the remaining Link service?

    1. In this case, capacity from CHS to Lynnwood is limited to the number of trains that were in service on that segment at the time of the derailment. Service south of SODO should be normal today.

      1. So no trains are stored north of Capitol Hill?

        What about east of Judkins Park? Should that be normal too?

        1. There’s a whole facility full of trains in Bell-Red at night so should be normal on the eastside.

        2. There’s the East OMF as well as the Central OMF in SODO. ST also has a longer third track west of Judkins Park, making it easier to reverse trains. So Downtown disruptions don’t prevent offering 2 Line east side service.

          The Achilles heel seems to me to be how to route replacement bus service to Judkins Park. The local street grid is not suited to reverse buses after stopping at the bus stops there. How many disruptions must occur before this problem even gets mentioned?

  6. Sound Transit should put out status alerts on Twitter (X).

    It’s beyond ridiculous that they won’t publish on Twitter because of Elon Musk’s politics.

      1. No one cares about Truth Social or Blue Sky

        Twitter/X still is a major source of information as compared to all similar services, and the messages are retained and can be searched. And commentary added by users. It’s way more useful to be able to search and crowdsource information when you are trying to figure out what is going on.
        It happens to be where I found the disruption, but it would be more useful if ST would put out official notices.

        1. It’s way more useful to be able to search and crowdsource information when you are trying to figure out what is going on.

          Which is why X is such a problematic platform. There are plenty of people who have dropped their account. This means that not only can’t they read the post but they can’t offer tips either. My guess is that a lot of Seattle transit riders are in the same boat. Information about highways would have a different demographic.

    2. I used to use Twitter to get TriMet alerts, but it became a lot less useful when they made it so you always have to log in to your account to read anything there. Before, you could just bookmark a Twitter account and read it without all the login hassle.

      They also shut off the feature where you could have Tweets sent as text messages, allowing an immediate notification.

      1. Any platform that requires logging on (just to read the information) is going to be problematic. A lot of people have no interest in getting an account to Twitter (especially now).

  7. Was the Link derailment at the switch to the ID pocket track or one of the switches where the 1/2 lines diverge/converge?

    ST hasn’t disclosed what went wrong and there hasn’t been much media coverage. The photo from ID station makes it look like maybe a train was entering the south/east bound track from the south?

    Is Katie Wilson in charge of ST communications?

    1. Pretty great. Full on war on cars, which is as it should be.

      I’m the bikiest guy I know, but what should be mentioned is that he didn’t talk about pedestrian impacts of all those bikes. In Amsterdam last year, I pretty much gave up walking in the city center because I felt far less safe than being on a bike. It may be my being a tourist, and not quite grasping norms and visual cues, but I was constantly being buzzed by bikes. The obvious solution is just to bike everywhere, which I mostly did, but my less bike-confident fellow travelers really struggled with this.

      It did appear that the locals did a better job of integrating peds and bikes quite seamlessly, so it was probably just an “Americans..sigh” problem, given our extremely limited exposure to high volumes of bikes.

      1. I was in Amsterdam about ten years ago. It took me a while to get used to crossing the street in the busier parts. The streets are quite wide with one each for trams, cars and bikes. You have to check for all three and then turn your head and do the same the other way. It works but it takes some getting used to.

    2. I went to Amsterdam in 2002. I was surprised to see how car-oriented the city was. It was nice to visit, but it felt like an anachronism. They tried to cram a bunch of cars into an old city, it didn’t really work, but they had no further ideas, so the city had kind of stagnated. On the same trip, I went to Paris, and came to similar conclusions.

      It’s good to see that both cities are finally rethinking the utility of cars. Maybe someday both places will get over their fear of newer and taller buildings, too.

    1. Yeah, I read that the other day. (I don’t listen to the podcasts, I read them.) I agree, ST3 is a great example of the transit dysfunction mentioned in the podcast. I think there is another, bigger problem with ST3 that the researchers didn’t quite address: Building stupid stuff. There is nothing stopping an agency from coming up with a very poorly designed set of proposals and then building them. Even if it was built at the same cost as in Spain (i. e. extremely cheap) it would still result in a poor system. But since higher cost of building (which the podcast focuses on) has a cascading effect. It leads to bad compromises which in turn leads to an even poorer system (which is exactly what is happening with ST3). It also encourages agencies to build stupid stuff since they can initially use the argument that “it is cheap” (only to find that it really isn’t). Again, ST3 is an outstanding example of this.

    2. A lot of it is apparently driven by federal grant requirements. Perhaps a silver lining in Sean Duffy’s refusal to approve any transit grants is that some places will figure out how to save some money.

      (Obviously even better would be if the federal requirements could be reformed and we still got the grants.)

      1. Yes, that is one of the many problems. On an abstract basis, the idea of federal matching funds sounds great. Each agency has an incentive to keep costs down and try and provide the most bang for the buck. The feds just chip in, making those dollars go even further.

        But the reality is that most agencies — including Sound Transit — make big mistakes when it comes to spending. Some may be focused on value — Sound Transit clearly isn’t. The government adds a layer of paperwork that must be filled out but there is no requirement that the project actually be a good value (there used to be, but that ended a while back). It is a really bad combination which helps explains why the USA is the worst at improving transit. Not only are we spending way too much (for the same sort of thing other countries are building) but quite often we are building poor-quality projects. It is often a combination of both.

        We would be better off if the feds simply gave each transit agency in the country money to spend on transit. A lot of agencies would just run the buses more often — and that is exactly what most should do.

  10. Besides not including 251, the latest GTGS dataset doesn’t show daytime 12-min headway on Rt 8. I thought that is happening this fall.

    2. Ok it looks like news in the past couple weeks all point out that the Route 8 weekday frequency focus on peak period. Feel free to delete this comment.

      1. It is still disappointing. To be fair, it is quite possible that if the levy passes (which is likely) the bus will run more often.

    1. I’ve reached out to Metro for comment on 251. It seems to be the only new route from East Link Connections not included in this service change.

      1. Yeah it is odd that something in final version of East Link Connection restructure was spared. I’d think they would only not address it if it was just slightly delayed.
        All the changes are now up in https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metro/routes-and-service/service-change.

        The article in first link praised for added trips, but I doubt there is added service hours if not reduced. Therefore, it is probably not due to driver shortage.

        With 550 gone, I am curious how they will send East Base STX fleet to. 556 clearly doesn’t need all the vehicles from 550/554. Maybe they will take this chance to retire all DE60LF and some of the DE60LFR.

        1. I was hoping with such a major expansion we were going to get all day service for the 56.

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