Seattle is the opposite of every other US city. (Safety First)
Is urbanism inherently left wing? (Oh the Urbanity!) (Warning: The end contains a Canadian rant on US policies.)
The Alto high-speed rail mentioned in the video will connect Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, Peterborough, and Trois-Rivières at 200 mph. It’s currently in planning. Toronto-Montreal is estimated at 3:07 hours vs 5:30 driving.
Musical interlude: Another One Rides the Bus.
This is an open thread.
This is cult like behavior.
In a previous thread Al S. gave us a link to Link Ridership.
Looking through it I’m either doing something wrong or the data has become corrupted. When I look at July 2026, Average Boardings per day, East Main Station, it says 2632.7 (.7 is somebody that’s not all there). That’s more than Wilburton (2444.3) and Spring District (2347.3) which doesn’t seem right. And what’s really odd is the breakdown by day; Sunday 963.2, Saturday 727.7 (Boeing?), Weekday 941.8. This is the only station where I see Sunday ridership higher than Weekday ridership. Is there a Mega Church nearby I don’t know about?
The big three remain DT Redmond (8.0k), DT Bellevue (9.5k) & S. Bellevue P&R (8.4k more that DT Redmond?).
Also, with Firefox (one of the browsers listed For the best desktop experience) I can’t see Judkins Park; the list cuts off half way through Mercer Island (works with Edge). But according to the data it has ridership on par with the RV stations (5.5k). I just don’t see Judkins Park having more daily ridership than Red-Tech or Marymoor.
I absolutely can see Judkins Park having ridership exceeding Marymoor or Redmond Tech. It’s easily the fastest way downtown for a lot of people in a fairly dense part of Seattle and it has good connections to three busy buses. Every time I’ve used it – about a dozen times since opening day – it’s been fairly busy.
Though I do think there are sometimes major issues with the ST ridership numbers. I’m on my phone now so can’t specifically double check this, but for a while they reported equal or similar ridership for Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood which to me is clearly not correct.
for lynnwood it says 3,820 and mountlake terrace says 3,476
mhmm which as you suspect im a bit confused by. definitely lynnwood is much more popular. or at least id expect at least a 1000 difference.
or i guess are people using it for a lot more short trips than expected??
Yes I too wonder if the system is miscalculating those stations. The estimate feels low considering the parking garage size with bus transfers occurring too.
Because trains idle at Lynnwood l, I’m wondering if it’s just not counting all the boarders. Riders get on over an extended period. If the train is turned off when doors are open , I don’t think the counters are registering.
Monutlake Terrace is like an overflowing parking to Lynnwood park and ride these days.
is this data connected to riders who:
1)do not pay?
2)are students, and do not normally show id or badge?
3) are using phones, so data lag?
Montlake Terrace is a convenient drop off/pickup spot for a bunch of shoreline and Edmonds.
@ jeffrey j.a. paul:
The primary data source are counter sensors at every train car door. They don’t measure fare payment or age.
On packed trains people have to get off to let other people out of the train and then they get back on. It seems like that would lead to over counts.
you need to select
* station
* avg boarding per day
* weekday
i think you accidentally have sunday+saturday in the last selection
when i view the table i see
* Bellevue downtown 3,979
* east main 942
* judkins park 2,349
* redmond tech 2,152
* marymoor 2,148
* downtown redmond 3,171
honestly im surprised redmond tech is so low and marymoor is relatively high or on par. are there that many people using the marymoor parking garage i guess?
The parking garage at Marymoor is huge. I think it’s roughly the same capacity as S. Bellevue at ~1,000. It’s also the penultimate station before the end of the line in DT Redmond. Terminus stations tend to have high numbers.
I purposely looked at all days because Link runs 7 days a week. I just can’t see East Main getting more boardings on a Sunday than a weekday. It’s the only station I could find where that was true. And overall the numbers seem way too high for East Main. I go through there during what should be the busisest part of the day/evening and rarely see more than three people getting on. As often as not there is nobody getting on or off.
There is a huge math error in the page’s average tab calculations. It sums the average weekday, average Saturday and average Sunday to get total average ridership when it should be averaging them.
So make sure to look at an average weekday only.
You can also set the tab to the latest month and select “Day” while screening for each station to get the boardings each day for each station.
Ah, I see that now. On the right side of the page it reports 942 boardings per day for the month. That’s not right either. It is simply reporting the weekday number. If you averaged week days and weekend days it comes out to 914 because of the small number of Saturday boardings. Appears to be doing that for all stations.
I still don’t believe the Sunday number for Least Main. For all other East Link stations the weekday numbers are higher than weekends. And the Saturday & Sunday numbers are about equal with Saturdays being larger for most stations. If anywhere was going to have larger weekend boarding numbers I would expect Marymoor because of the park.
SeaTac has substantially more Sunday boardings than Saturday which is believable. But the Sunday numbers are still ~20% lower than weekdays.
Nice catch. It is an example of complete misuse of stacked chart.
Another thing that struck me with the numbers (if they are to be believed) is how poor the ridership is at Beacon Hill given the huge cost of building that station. And ridership is declining. Down 1% month over month but down 19% since 2019. You could say transit use is down since the pandemic but that didn’t hit until early 2020. If you look at Mt Baker it’s up 15% from 2019. It’s the only station I found with such a huge drop. And it doesn’t seem to have gotten any bump at all from the 2 Line opening.
Because Judkins Park is about 3/4 of a mile from Beacon Hill, I suspect that a few riders switched stations. Keep in mind that Judkins Park is downhill and Beacon Hill entrance is uphill. So someone living on the hillside in between may walk down to Judkins Park (boarding) but return via Beacon Hill so they can walk downhill back home.
This uphill- downhill switching is probably occurring a bit with UW students and lower Capitol Hill residents too.
For trips to downtown or Capitol Hill, I am someone who has switched from using Beacon Hill Station or the 7 to mostly using Judkins Park. Believe me, life is so much easier now.
The few times I’ve gotten off at Beacon Hill, it seemed like a large number of passengers were transferring to various bus routes.
I’m wondering if a bunch of those people are finding it better to take the 7 and use Judkins Park?
The few times I’ve gotten off at Beacon Hill, it seemed like a large number of passengers were transferring to various bus routes.
That makes sense, given it is a major transit hub. There also isn’t that much development nearby.
I’m wondering if a bunch of those people are finding it better to take the 7 and use Judkins Park?
That seems like a stretch. None of the buses serve both stations. The only bus stops that have buses serving both stations is along Jackson. If you are heading towards downtown you just take a bus to CID. Link goes different directions if you are going the other way.
In contrast I could see how someone would switch Link locations (from Beacon Hill to Judkins Park). Not a lot though. It is a long ways between stations. If they are midway between it seems like they would just take the bus. Those riders might end up taking the train eventually but again, I think they would be split between CID and Judkins Park (now).
I think ridership just fluctuates. That has always been the case. There is a lot of up and down on a monthly basis (and even year by year for the same month).
I get on at Westlake and off at Capitol Hill so that it’s downhill in both directions.
With UW/U-District I’d expect it to depend on which station is closer to the building you’re going to/from. Full-time students go to two or three buildings in a day, so their first building might be closer to UW and their last building closer to U-District.
Interesting theory that a significant system expansion has lead to a decrease in ridership. I get the uphill vs downhill thing. But you’d expect that overall ridership would see a bump as the new world across the pond has suddenly opened up.
I went back to before Judkins Park opened and looked at the numbers comparing ridership to 2019 (pre-Covid)
Jan 2026 -20%
Feb 2026 +2% (up 22% month to month, something strange?)
Mar 2026 -11% (down 11% month over month)
Apr 2026 -10%
May 2026 -12%
Jun 2026 -10%
Out of curiosity I went back and looked at the Jan/Feb numbers for Beacon Hill in 2025:
Jan 2025 -8% from 2019 but up 13% month over month
Feb 2025 -13% from 2019 and -13% month over month
Maybe the data from 2026 is just messed up?
Anywho, clearly a trend away from using Link on Beacon Hill. Has bus service gotten so much better that “nobody” is riding the train anymore? Also, is there any reason to go to Beacon Hill other than it has really cool station art; or is it pretty much just people from Beacon Hill going elsewhere?
FWIW I looked back to when Amazon moved HQ from Beacon Hill to S. Lk Union; that was way back in 2007.
The multi million dollar question is why did they tunnel under Beacon Hill when they could have gone around and taken the 2 Line route from Judkins Park to DT? For the construction effort expended being close to what it was for Capitol Hill the payback sure isn’t there. And unlike Capitol Hill there was an easy way to avoid the tunnel entirely and likely had the same or better ridership.
Was there ever a plan to run Link on the surface between Mt. Baker and downtown Seattle, presumably on Rainier Avenue? What a boondoggle that would be today!
I’ve never felt that ridership at BHS was weaker than the other Rainier Valley stations. There is a lot of transfer activity between Link and the 36 or 60 at BHS. There just hasn’t been much construction happening beyond the immediate station area to feed Link trains.
Was there ever a plan to run Link on the surface between Mt. Baker and downtown Seattle, presumably on Rainier Avenue?
I think that was the original plan. But then they wanted to serve the stadiums (and SoDo). That led to the Beacon Hill tunnel and station (it would be silly not to have a station there, given you were building a tunnel). That being said, skipping the stadiums and just following Rainier/Jackson would probably would have been cheaper (as a surface line). There are plenty of potential stations, including a connecting station for the line to the East Side. Depending on cost, that might even be a branch.
If I’m not mistaken, at one point they considered going on Rainier Avenue to Rainier Beach as well. I think the best value would have been cut and cover (not surface or elevated). Rainier would probably have higher ridership either way.
I wasn’t in Seattle when the Beacon Hill tunnel was decided. I remember reading somewhere that the OMF location and the desire to serve the stadiums were also a factor.
Here’s a verbal description from the Federal Register in 1997 for the environmental studies:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1997-11-18/html/97-30212.htm
“Was there ever a plan to run Link on the surface between Mt. Baker and downtown Seattle”
That was the first proposal sort of. The original Rainier Valley vision was surface from CID (on Jackson or Dearborn?) around the southeast edge of Beacon Hill to Rainier Avenue and on to SeaTac and presumably Tacoma. Then ST said Rainier Avenue was too narrow for a surface line without disrupting other uses too much, so it switched to MLK. Paul Allen also asked for a Stadium station. Both of those led to the Beacon Hill tunnel. But there was no Beacon Hill station. The community pushed to get a station, or at least a shell for a future station. Eventually the station got written into the plan.
Of course Beacon Hill should have a station, regardless of whether ridership is excellent or not. It’s one of Seattle’s longstanding urban villages, and it’s isolated by steep hills. The city should have upzoned the station area significantly too. Don’t take the lack of upzoning out on Link or the station-area passengers. They couldn’t have known in the 1990s what future 2010s or 2020s ridership would be. Not building a station for a longstanding walkable village because future ridership might be lackluster or upzoning may fail is cutting off your nose to spite your face. The right thing to do is to build the station AND upzone. If you build the station but don’t upzone, the right thing to do is upzone now — better late than never — not lament that so much was spent on the station. Not building the station would mean the Beacon Hill village would have no rapid transit access. That’s not a solution for the future: it’s perpetuating the problems of the past, and foreclosing the opportunity for the village to ever reach its potential in the future.
Ah yes, the stadiums. Seems like that would be really important but the reality is neither Stadium or SoDo has great ridership; about the same as Othello and Columbia City. I’m surprised though that the ridership is heavily weighted toward weekdays. I guess there’s just not enough Seahawk Sundays to tip the needle. Plus a lot of people just walk from CID. The 2 Line though is just packed when there’s an afternoon Mariners game. All water under the bridge now but I wonder what the cost of the tunnel and deep bore station ended up being compared to a Georgetown bypass?
” Seems like that would be really important but the reality is neither Stadium or SoDo has great ridership; about the same as Othello and Columbia City.”
Stadium station was a political move to appease a tech billionaire. SODO station was so that industrial workers could walk to some employers. Both of these are factors other than maximizing ridership.
At the same time, of course high-capacity transit should serve stadiums, for the same reason it should serve airports, universities, shopping malls, and highrise district. Because that’s where a lot of pedestrians travel simultaneously, and high-capacity transit is the most effective way to deal with that.
Still, CID station is also close to the stadiums, and some people still walk from there even with Stadium station. How close is close enough? I don’t know, but to me the necessity of Stadium station has never been definitively established. Since I’ve never been to the stadiums, I don’t have a feel whether they’re in the maximum reasonable walkshed of CID station or not. But necessity doesn’t mean a thing when political favors are the primary consideration.
Lumen field is well-served by Chinatown station. In fact, from my few observations, it seems to be more popular than stadium for games there. T-Mobile on the other hand is more of a walk from Chinatown since you have to go around Lumen, and that makes stadium station significantly more convenient. The one piece still missing however is an at-grade connection between stadium station and T-Mobile. The overpass over the train tracks psychologically feels arduous.
@Delta,
Spot on.
I would agree that the ID station is easier to access both stations (and it’s my preferred stop regardless of which stadium I’m going to) for a couple of reasons:
Walking from ID takes you past the assorted food carts and drinking establishments, if you want to socialize prior to the game, and
That overpass from the Stadium station to the stadiums is just god awful to navigate with crowds. The sidewalks don’t handle the crowds and it feels like it takes longer than if I just walk from ID. (It probably doesn’t take longer, but every time I’m walking around that spiral ramp I think, “couldn’t they have designed this just a tad better?”)
The thing that makes Stadium Station unappealing is that there is literally nothing interesting between the station entrance and the entrances to the stadiums. It’s instead crossing a busy 4th Ave S and dealing with elevation changes. If I am there when no one else is around, it seems kind of spooky.
The best stations are those where entrances are in the midst of storefront retail and food, bustling with people many hours a day.
“Interesting theory that a significant system expansion has lead to a decrease in ridership”
System expansion wouldn’t cause a ridership decrease systemwide. There must be something else causing the decrease. Oh yes, the pandemic, work from home, and the long malaise of Trumpism that makes people think further climate action is futile and nothing will get better, and since other people are being selfish with driving more and now canceling renewable energy projects, they might as well too. There’s also Link’s never-ending unreliability.
But system expansion certainly causes decreases at certain stations, as people start using new stations that are close to them or easier to get to. Beacon Hill station is for Beacon Hill. If some people on the periphery of the hill switch to Judkins Park station, well, they were never in the target market for Beacon Hill station anyway. The biggest thing holding back Beacon Hill station is the anemic upzone there, which means thousands of potential residents who could walk to the station or take the 36/60 to it aren’t there, and the potential businesses that would bring an increase of outsiders aren’t there. This isn’t a change since it’s the lack of a change. But what has changed since Beacon Hill station opened is housing prices have increased, so some residents have been replaced by more affluent residents, and they may be less inclined to take transit.
Yes, but overall system ridership is up. Most of the stations south of CID are up or flat. SeaTac is up on the order of 50% from 2019! The only other station with this level of decrease is Angle Lake and that’s because it is no longer the Terminus station. So yes, system expansion did lead to a big drop there but that’s because it is primarily a P&R and now there are other P&R lots to drive to that are going to be closer for many people.
You may have a valid point about the neighborhood moving up scale and fewer residents use transit. I was also wondering if people are just staying put. That seems to be getting more and more common in Seattle and that would mean the population is getting older. A lot of people just retired after the pandemic so an increase in retired population would account for a drop in transit use.
Peter Zeihen says the median Boomer reached retirement age in 2020. And others were close to retirement so they took it early or got laid off and decided not to work further. Then in 2025 DOGE forced some federal workers out or they took an incentive to leave. Although the ones I know who took the incentive were also close to retirement age or beyond it or got a major medical condition at the same time.
Bernie, why would I use beacon hill station to go to the eastside with a transfer at ids when it’s faster and easier for me to use Judkins Park?
If you can use Judkins Park instead of Beacon Hill that’s great but if you’re not between the two it makes for an awfully long walk and uphill on the return trip. The transfer at CID is terrible. That’s why a lot of people just walk to the stadiums from there since the transfer is a long hike up and back down and they you might have to wait 5-10 minutes to get on a packed train.
A while back I posted about how long it took a coworker to get to Judkins Park from Federal Way. He started transferring to the 7 at Mt Baker and it saves him 30 minutes.
The zoning around Beacon Hill Station is pretty terrible, and there’s not really much reason to go to Beacon Hill if you don’t live there.
In fact, it’s the only station in Seattle I’ve never used. (I have been to Beacon Hill a few times before Link existed.)
I read your comment and thought—no, the zoning can’t be that bad. But no, it really is that bad. Things drop off to neighborhood residential (formerly called single family but rebranded because it now allows stacked flats due to state law) after literally 3 blocks from the station.. except along Beacon Ave S. The walkshed is a circle, but we won’t build anything but million dollar homes in it unless it overlaps with an unsafe, unhealthy arterial. Totally backwards.
In any case, I think this is actually in contention for the worst zoning of any station in Seattle proper—I think it’s worse than Rainier Beach which is the other contender. If you count Pinehurst then I guess Beacon Hill would be number two.
Also, I like Beacon Hill, and even if I didn’t have friends there I would visit just for the vegan soft serve at Milk Drunk and maybe MacPherson’s produce. I also think the station is useful for skipping some of the slower parts of the 60 if you’re coming from the north and going to Georgetown or South Park.
How much the restaurants and shops draw people from outside depends on what they individually are: do they offer something unique or rare in the city? Do people know about them?
In Columbia City I’ve gone several times to the movie theater, the Columbia Ale House, a barbecue place that’s gone, the library, and my friend has a friend with a lighting store and he goes to the bookstore.
At Mt Baker I’ve gone Mekong Rainier (an Asian grocery with hard-to-find Thai ingredients), the small Thai restaurant and Philly’s Cheesesteak, and it’s the closest station to Mt Baker Park, the community club that sometimes has events I attend, and a high-end pizza place.
At Othello I’ve gone to Tami’s Bakery (Vietnamese).
At Rainier Beach, nothing. That grocery interested me, but inside was disappointing.
At Judkins Park, one of my yoga instructors set up a studio in a house-like building in the 2000s, so I went there for a while.
At Beacon Hill I mostly go to the library or Jefferson Park. I’ve walked through the village looking for interesting restaurants or shops, but none have stood out. The flyers around are for activities of interest to residents but not much else. So it’s neighborhood-oriented retail as opposed to drawing people from outside. Since the village is so small, that’s what it would tend to have. Further south a movie theater opened but I’ve never been to it.
The food scene near BHS is pretty good. The restaurants do well and there are some good pop-ups/puestos that are interesting. La Esperanza and Red Apple are both very convenient to the station for grocery shopping. El Centro de la Raza and Jefferson Park are the public anchors of the community.
As I said earlier, there’s very little new construction beyond the immediate station area, but the existing single-family housing is fairly dense (by Seattle standards) and there are lots of actual multi-generational families living in those houses. There aren’t any public schools within the immediate walkshed of the station, but Cleveland, Franklin and Mercer MS all serve the Beacon Hill community.
If you are riding the 36, 60 or 107 you will see a huge gain and spill turnover at Beacon Hill Station on every trip. The 36 and the northern portion of the 60 are among Metro’s most productive routes.
I don’t want to be glib here, but I think Beacon Hill has the most going on around the station of any Link station south of downtown other than Columbia City. There’s a library, a community center, some very good restaurants, a couple small grocery stores, and a brewery. It’s not super dense, but it’s got good bus connections and it’s in the middle of a well-established neighborhood commercial center. I certainly have some bias (it’s my neighborhood station), and I’ve got no issues with any related upzoning or future developments, but there is plenty of good reason to go to Beacon Hill and there’s a reason it’s been one of the busiest stations south of downtown since Link opened.
In the immediate 2-block radius around the station, sure Beacon Hill is a winner. But if you’re looking at a larger radius then Mt Baker and Columbia City beat it out. The single family zoning in North Beacon Hill is a travesty and we need to fix it. Really all the south Seattle stations need real upzoning.
More people live within a short walk of Beacon Hill than Mount Baker (which also has a lot of single family homes a few blocks away). I’d reckon it’s fairly close between Columbia City and Beacon Hill, mostly because Columbia City is on the western fringe of the neighborhood as is next to a large green space. And there’s been fewer new apartments built near Beacon Hill, but there are more older ones.
Anyways, this is besides the point. My point is that there are a lot cool things to do near Beacon Hill station – most of that is stuff on Beacon within a five minute walk. I’ve got no problem upzoning more of the area around the station, but I question how much that matters right now. There are existing vacant lots and it’s a pretty bad time to start a new development in Seattle.
Which are the very good restaurants?
“The single family zoning in North Beacon Hill is a travesty and we need to fix it.”
The northern half of the hill is overwhelmingly single-family (as is the southern half), but the avenues just northwest of the station are impressively multifamily. 15th & 14th? I once walked from the station to that area to see what it would be like to live there and if I’d want to. I think there was a 5-minute gap to the row of apartments I’m thinking about (less than ideal), but still, the apartments are there.
Mike Orr,
Homer (Mediterranean), Musang (Filipino), and Bar del Corso (Italian) are all excellent (and somewhat pricey) places worth going to for special occasions. Carnitas Michoacan is my favorite Mexican place in the city. Milk Drunk has great soft serve too.
And yes, lots of apartments between the station and the end of the hill especially on 12th, but at least where I am (near Massachusetts), it only makes sense to go to the station if I’m heading south or if traffic is apocalyptical and the 36 is running really behind. I think that places north of the elementary school mostly use the 36 to get downtown (or to C/ID station at least).
“There are existing vacant lots and it’s a pretty bad time to start a new development in Seattle.”
This is a good point. There is a nice looking development proposed at the corner of Beacon and Bayview that has been dormant for years…permitted, existing buildings demolished and now nothing. Similar situation midblock on Beacon between Forest and Stevens. There’s been some decent infill development of smaller buildings which has been pretty good, and personally I’d prefer to see that continue, makes for a nicer urban fabric. But anyhow, it doesn’t seem the demand is high enough for more density for some reason, or the higher density zones aren’t high enough to make it pencil. We bought our house ten years ago at this point near CC station. I’d happily swap it to be closer to Beacon Hill Station…there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on up there. Regardless everything within 4 blocks of the station is LR or NC2-55. It would be quite dense if that was fully built out to the max of those zones.
Adding to the restaurant list, we like Perihelion, Oak, and Family Friend in addition to those already mentioned.
I often hop off at beacon hill to stop by the Red Apple, since it’s right across the street from the station, there is no grocery more convenient along the whole 1-line.
I wonder if that first video is some kind of AI-generated content because a month ago all of sudden several similar videos popped up in my feed, but I could be wrong…
The first video is three months old, was recommended by another STB editor two or three months ago, and has been sitting on the list ever since. For weeks everything on the list kept getting bumped by new videos I found that week that were more urgent or important. That has finally died down, so the past two articles have been drawing down the list. I actually didn’t think these two videos were that important, but they’d been on the list a long time and somebody had recommended them, so I went ahead and put them up.
I’ve also been frankly discouraged the past few weeks, as the videos themselves have gotten no or few comments, so I wonder how much anybody cares about the videos or watches them.
I assumed the first video was human-generated and had human-collected images. I did think the transition in the middle to Crosslake Link was abrupt and unexpained how it relates to the whole, but then he tied it in in the last part. I put that down to lackluster editing skills than AI. A I thought the presentation of the long history and century-old images was worthwhile in itself, since even longtime Seattlites only have an outline of the details.
I like the videos, but generally haven’t had time to watch them until days later, when discussion has moved to other topics.
I wonder if that first video is some kind of AI-generated content
It wouldn’t surprise me. It is a pretty sophomoric assessment of Seattle. We aren’t that special. About the only thing that is really unique is the way the city has changed physically in a relatively short amount of time. We got rid of hills. We sent rivers a different way. We created canals — all in a fairly recent and short period. (Obviously other cities built canals but those happened a lot earlier.)
Other than that we are pretty typical for an American city. We have freeways cutting right through the heart of the city. The video shows these but largely ignores them. We have plenty of hills but so does Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Fransisco and Juneau (and those are just in the U. S.). We have a lot of waterways but so do most cities. We did have a big jump in jobs but so did a lot of cities. Oh, and of course you have the end of redlining and the shrinking middle class which has led to gentrification.
Our zoning is not unique. Lots of cities have applied this same all-or-nothing approach. So much so that it people have different names for it: “The Grand Bargain” or “The Trickle and the Firehouse”. The result is always the same. As a city grows (and most cities grow) you end up with very high housing costs. California and the East Coast had the same problem years ago and now so does much of the country.
The video alluded to the nature of our hills and how it isolates neighborhoods. But there was no real explanation. Basically the glaciers came down and formed north-south oriented drumlins. Maple Leaf is a good example (because unlike much of the city they didn’t get rid of the hill). You can make a slow ascent from the north and south. But try and approach it from the side and it is very steep. Thus many of the roads don’t go through (at the very least they aren’t arterials). A well-thought out transit system might try and take advantage of this. Build a subway line that goes east-west (or at least diagonal) and then continue to run the main north-south lines to complement it. You would have a system where the subway is much faster than driving while complementing the relatively fast buses. But that isn’t happening. We are building a sprawling commuter rail/subway hybrid. Again, this is common. The choice of mode (light rail) is odd for such a system but again, that is common in the United States.
The idea that we haven’t sprawled is ludicrous. Of course we have. But like most cities that sprawled you have a lot of people who want to avoid a really long commuter and/or living in a soulless suburb. Thus living in the city is more expensive than ever.
“We aren’t that special… We have plenty of hills but so does Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Fransisco and Juneau”
Jarrett Walker has brought up Seattle’s uniqueness too. “Seattle is three penninsulas almost meeting.” “Nowhere in Seattle can a bus go in a straight line for more than a few miles before hitting a waterway or cliff.” “A remarkable thing about south-central Seattle is the almost complete lack of east-west roads between West Seattle and southeast Seattle.”
The narrow north-south ridges and valleys did cause development to be fragmented into those pockets and still make it difficult to get from one pocket to another. Both West Seattle and southeast Seattle are primarily north-south pockets that are more oriented toward downtown than each other, in contrast to north Seattle that’s less extreme and has more of a 2D street grid, bus grid, and shopping/work patterns.
San Francisco has steep hills and Vancouver has waterways, but there’s a reasonable argument that Seattle is more geographically subdivided into small units and narrow areas than anywhere else in North America.
Walker also says these bottlenecks are good for transit ridership, because they make driving more time-consuming and congested, so more people find it worth it to take transit across a bridge.
Extremely sophomoric, and with much hyperbole.
I’m still looking for the suburban bungalows within 6 blocks of a 40 story tower. There might be a few remnants on first hill or in SLU, but the context surrounding them is considerably more urban than the 1950’s suburban dreamscape the video would seem to be suggesting. You could however easily say that about downtown Bellevue (just look at the contrast between the North and South sides of 12th street)…maybe the author is confused.
The geography along with the growth management act have definitely limited sprawl compared to someplace like Houston, and the commute is also more difficult due to the geography.
The cancellation of regular train operations between Seattle and Portland scuttled a planned trip to Portland for me. Instead, I decided to try a trip to Pt. Townsend using local transit and WSF. Here’s the itinerary I used:
845am: WSF to Bainbridge (approx. 35 minute trip)
930am: Kitsap Transit Rt. 390 to North Viking Transit Center (~30 mins)
1053am: Jefferson Transit Rt. 7 to Pt. Townsend (~60 mins)
The ferry trip was aboard the Wenatchee, the converted hybrid-electric boat which offers a much smoother ride and less noise than the diesel boats. There appears to be a timed transfer scheduled at North Viking between a KT 390 that arrives at 1048am and JT 7 that leaves at 1053am, but that felt a little tight; so, I elected to take an earlier bus (and ferry) and spend about 50 minutes at North Viking. There isn’t much to do at North Viking TC. There’s a gas station across the street and a closed Sonic Drive-In to look at, but Poulsbo is too far to walk, so bring a book (I did).
After lunch and some shopping in Pt. Townsend, I returned to Seattle this way:
248pm: JT 14 to Kingston (67 min. trip)
410pm: Kitsap Transit Fast Ferry to downtown Seattle (40 min. trip). The fare on the eastbound leg of the fast ferry is $2, but you lose the return part of the WSF fare. It’s also possible to take WSF from Kingston to Edmonds. CT has 3 routes from the Edmonds Ferry Terminal (102, 130, 166) that connect to a Link station in 30 minutes or less.
The weather was good and I got a lot of reading done on the trip. I still need to make that trip to Portland, but it looks like Amtrak will be back in service sometime this week.
You do realize that most ferries are electric drive (as are many large vessels). It’s just a matter of what supplies the electricity, diesel engines vs batteries. Any reduction in vibration is almost certainly from the prop. Some are better balanced than others, some have had damage of one kind or another. One of the Kingston ferries had a strong Vibration for awhile. Can’t recall which one, but it must have been fixed during an overhaul as they are both reasonably smooth now.
From an engineering perspective converting ferries to hybrid drive seems like one of the simplest things, but apparently not as WA still mucked it up badly enough that the process is on indefinite hold. Electricity, boats, and salt water always seems to be a problematic combination.
I saw a good YouTube video a few weeks ago talking about how hybrid cars work, and one of the takeaways is that taking mechanical power produced by an engine and feeding it to a generator to power an electric motor is actually less efficient than just using the engine power directly. The reason why freight rail and large ships do it is not for efficiency, but to get enough torque to move such a heavy vehicle.
What actually makes hybrid cars more efficient is that, having the battery as a buffer allows the engine to be weaker without impacting the performance of the vehicle, as the electric motor and its small battery can supplement the engine with quick bursts of power, as needed, and for real-world driving, those quick bursts of power is plenty. And, for a variety of reasons, a weaker engine is generally a more efficient engine, compared to a more powerful engine of the same size.
Ferry boats is a bit different, as boats don’t need to have huge power capabilities for quick 0-60 times, like cars do. There is probably some fuel savings from using the battery to power auxiliary equipment when the ferry is docked, and maybe a little bit of regen opportunities when the ferry is slowing down to enter the dock. But, I’m not sure how much energy savings that really is. I’m guessing the big benefits will come when they eventually add the necessary wiring to allow the boats to plug into the power grid while loading and unloading vehicles, but my understanding is that that is still a few years away.
I don’t see any regen possibility with the ferries. To slow down they run the forward facing propellers in reverse. There wouldn’t be enough braking from a propeller hooked up to a generator and left to freewheel to do much of anything.; Shutting down a diesel while at the dock loading/unloading sounds like a loser. Diesels like to keep running and pollute the most on startup. That’s why you see semis and locomotives left sitting at idle. It may also be why diesels aren’t used for hybrid cars.
If they converted the diesel to LNG then the start/stop issue might be moot. But then any advantage of the hybrid for reducing emissions would also be negligible.
The thought of engineering the very high amperage connectors to survive in a salt water environment and withstand being connected and disconnected many times a day gives me heartburn. The big advantage of diesel electric drive systems for ships and locomotives is the torque curve of electric motors eliminates the need for massive clutches if diesel was used alone. They can also be reversed without a gearbox.
They do have a bus bridge operating between Portland and Vancouver with trains turning at Vancouver.
They didn’t do that anywhere near as well for the first two days or so. I think they just didn’t have enough buses.
They’re planning to bring the water tower of the old warehouse down tomorrow, so a huge segment of the risk should be gone by tomorrow evening. Having that huge structure supported only by vastly weakened concrete walls is a real nail-biter.
KT 390 waits for ferry, so it gets delayed 20-30 minutes without surprise. For a service that runs every 45 minutes, that means schedule is almost irrelevant. So that’s probably the right thing to take the early ferry.
Diesel-electric is just a way to make diesel more efficient. Many freight rail engines are also diesel-electric these days.
The transition to diesel-electric is not primarily driven by emission or noise reduction goal to my understanding. It just happens to have better emission result because it burns diesel more efficiently.
All freight rail engines that aren’t catenary electric are diesel-electrics. Back in the 1960’s Krauss-Maffei experimented with diesel-hydraulic locomotives, but the constant rumbling of the steel wheels on the steel rails shook the hydraulics apart.
There were a very few diesel-direct drive locos in the 1940’s but they suffered the same damage as the KM’s.
Diesel-hydraulic was fairly common in Europe. It might have been more common here but parts availability and expertise to maintain them just wasn’t available.
If you go back far enough, there were all manner of oddities, such as the diesel-steam Still engine of the 1920s.
I finally did my Bloedel Reserve trip by transit. This place has no fixed-route service on the weekend, so my plan was to take BI Ride. The BI Ride information was a bit confusing for someone who has never used demand-response service before and I wasn’t so sure if the Ride Pingo App would actually work, so I went ahead fully prepared to take Uber if needed.
According to the schedule, there are 3 scheduled trips to pick up people on Saturday, meaning you could get on bus at certain stops without booking a trip if you are going to Bloedel Resreve. I don’t know for sure if you can ask driver to take you some random place in Bainbridge. I could have waited the bus at timed stop, but Bainbridge Ferry Terminal is not a scheduled pick-up stop and Kitsap Transit’s BI Ride info online didn’t articulate what are the exact stops BI Ride would make timed stop. The one near Winslow was described as Winslow Way near Town & Country. I later found out it is actually Winslow at T&C Market (Bus Stop 888). There is a board at Bainbridge Ferry Terminal that shows that.
Unsure where exactly I should wait for the scheduled BI Ride bus, I used the app to request a ride from Bainbridge Ferry Terminal to Bloedel Reserve.
Although it didn’t exactly arrive on time, it at least assigned a vehicle at scheduled pick up time and displayed the real-time bus location and ETA in the app 30 minutes ahead of my reservation. This gave me an assurance that it is picking up my reservation.
The driver taking me to Bloedel was a nice lady. She explained the situation that the bus might not always arrive on-time because of the surging demand they’ve experienced recently. She probably set a very high standard for her job because I think this is perfectly normal. She said there are four of them driving BI Ride plus the Access service that mainly serves senior and disabled riders by request. My guess Access’ difference is probably it can go countywide.
If you look into Kitsap’s Bainbridge service, you will find some ok coverage of fixed-route service during peak period but 390 as well as 385 just started this summer are the only running fixed-route service in Bainbridge on the weekend. She told me that their demand response service was mainly to address that fact that there is not enough funding and ridership to justify running all service all-day. If you look what Bainbridge is like beyond Winslow, I think that makes sense. In fact I am surprised that there are even these many peak only routes in Bainbridge. So from that aspect, the independent fact of how expensive it is to run micro-transit is irrelevant as long as it serves the same people who would take those fixed routes during off-peak period. Running BI Ride is probably cheaper than running all the 39x routes all day. She also mentioned that all of sudden in the middle of the pandemic, they saw a surge of foot traffic in Bainbridge as well as demand for their service more than ever. Later they found out that was probably because at some point, those cruise lines departing from Seattle started including free WSF ticket (to Bainbridge I guess) in the package. This made Bainbridge as well as BI Ride overwhelmingly popular sometimes. She said last week she had to pick up somebody 1 hour behind scheduled time, but it sounds like however busy they are, they would priortize scheduld trips, which is what I took on my way back. During the last mile of my trip where bus pulled off SR 305, the driver picked up two groups of pedestrians who took 390 to Hwy 305 at Agatewood and were walking to Bloedel Reserve. The driver said she had been doing this all the time. That was some 0.8 mile walk without sidewalk which is doable. What’s worse is the way back where people need to cross SR 305 to reach the southbound bus stop. On the past Saturday, 390 comes every 45 minutes and was terribly off schedule because WSF was terribly off-schedule (30-40 minutes behind schedule), so 390 is a terrible choice especially on the way back from Bloedel Reserve.
The Bloedel Reserve itself is ok. I really just wanted to check this tourist attraction off my box and tried BI Ride. I spent almost 2 hours there walking around, so if you don’t feel like walking a lot, it is probably not for me. If you’ve been to many east coast plantations in the south, you probably will find it underwhelming.
On my way back, it was almost 4pm. So I took the scheduled bus and canceled my reservation on the App. The scheduled bus showed up pretty on time I think. Because it is a scheduled trip, it made a few detours. There was very poor cell reception around Bloedel Reserve, so if you need to book a bus to return to Ferry Terminal, definitely book it in advance or ask the gift shop for guest WiFi.
I also saw the new 385 shuttle. To me, the usefulness of this shuttle for tourists is questionable. It is very congested during Ferry arrival, so anyone who can walk can walk faster than the bus, but the sidewalk is also congested though. Because this bus is scheduled to run every 20 minutes, it doesn’t wait for Ferry like 390 does. I saw 385 leaving less than 5 minutes before I got off the ferry. Most of Bainbridge’s tourist hotspots are along Winslow Way in my opinion, tourists don’t really go beyond where they can walk to, so in that sense the shuttle is probably less important than the better sidewalk connection between Ferry Terminal and Winslow Way.
Is there anything tourists would go along High School Rd? I will visit next time.
One correction to the statement “390 as well as 385 just started this summer are the only running fixed-route service in Bainbridge on the weekend”. Clallam County (Port Angeles) Route 123 also runs 3 trips from Bainbridge on the weekend.
My wife visited the Bainbridge History Museum to do some research. It is a tiny museum but they occasionally have some really nice rotating exhibits. That’s not on High School Road but if you happen to find yourself in Bainbridge again it might be worth checking out.
I still want to visit Bloedel Reserve sometime, so thanks for the trip report. We had an article on the Bainbridge summer shuttle that’s indirectly related to BI Ride, so that’s how I found out about the reserve and BI Ride.
In the 90s my dad lived in the outskirts of Poulsbo and his gf’s family was on Bainbridge so I visited them once a month or so and saw a bit of the island, like when we went to Manitou Beach on the 4th of July to watch the Seattle fireworks from across the Sound. Nobody ever mentioned Bloedel Reserve, so I didn’t know it existed.
According to Wikipedia, it didn’t open to public until 1988. That’s probably why it was little known in the 90s.
I would guess that the 385 shuttle is intended more for locals than tourists. That is, people who live along the route riding it to the ferry when visiting Seattle.
It just seems touristy because it only runs on Saturday, but you could be right. There are quite a few service destinations on High School Rd.
This route is not well-synced with the ferry because it runs on certain headway. I found it left my ferry behind when I caught it stuck in the traffic out of ferry terminal. It runs twice as frequent as ferry, which makes me think it should skip ferry stop at certain run because it wastes tons of time to pull into ferry terminal. On the other hand, ferry arrival time is not very predictable on a busy Saturday which makes it impossible to plan a schedule that runs select trips to ferry.
I watched the overview of the Chicago area transit governance change this year:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eH-ZsEoGu_g&ra=m
I found it interesting that the governor now appoints 25% of the NITA Board, the Board is 100% appointed and smaller committees if the Board manage the various entities covered by NITA.
Just as a heads-up that first video is some ai slop.
The channel pumps out the same copy/pasted 3-5 videos a week, all with ai thumbnails and ai voiceover. The linked video’s thumbnail literally labels “Elliott Sound” on the map.
Not to mention that the street grid in the thumbnail is clearly wrong in a diffusion model slop way—it erroneously fills in a square grid in Broadmoor and doesn’t continue Beacon Ave S north of Jefferson Park, for example.
I watched about half skipping forward a lot and had that feeling of deavu all over again.
At least Mike is branching out and posting new YT channels. CityNerd, Not Just Bikes, CityBeautiful, and RMTransit were in heavy rotation for the longest time. We should encourage him to keep looking for, and sharing, videos from a variety of sources, covering a range of different topics, even if sometimes they aren’t a hit. It also seems like he’s trying to post more videos that have to do with our region, which I like.
CityNerd and NotJustBikes consistently have the most consistently relevant videos, and often have essential new analyses, or address questions that have come up in the past couple days in the comments. RMTransit was the pioneer in that category but he’s retired from making transit videos. City Beautiful also has good stuff, but I find his voice always on overenthusiastic overdrive as if everything!!! is!!! exciting!!! and it’s to much to listen to all the time.
I’ve been choosing a variety of first-time authors and styles the past few months to get at what Sam has identified, because different voices have different insights or are relatable to different readers, and they may have some insight I don’t recognize but somebody will. I’ve moved a bit toward Pugetopolis content because I may have neglected it in the past or there’s more available now.
The list is down to 5 video candidates, so now’s as good a time as any to recommend new creators, topics, or videos if you have any. I’ll have to ask in a few weeks anyway.
I will put forward FlyingMoose for videos. He might’ve been featured here before.
Don’t ignore our local media outlets. It’s a news story, yes, but they have video links to how you’d watch it via your preferred method (I like Haystack). For example, I haven’t seen this discussed on the blog how office to residential is “the next big thing” (replacing white sneakers).
Seattle developers turn empty office space into housing
My personal favorites are the history videos. I was a young child living in Lakewood when the Denny party landed at Alki. I wish I could find a link to the Almost Live coverage of that event ;-)
And don’t leave out our usual cast of characters that comment on this blog. Maybe Sam with his world renounced (or is that renowned?) video skills could put something together on why a fast ferry to Kirkland would be a much better project for ST than WSLE!
I’d missed this thinking it was a link to the background music of one of the featured “movies”. Absolutely hilarious!!!. Weird Al Yankovic (not ai Yankovic) is at the Puyallup this year I’m still looking to see if Sounder will have a special run. If not I’ll drive.