Not Just Bikes finally has something good to say about Toronto transit. Not 100% good of course. This is the Eglington line that opened in February. Not to be confused with the Finch West line (slow), or the Ontario line (under construction, and we presented as an automated model for Ballard). Here’s Toronto’s current map of subway, light rail, and streetcar services.
This is an open thread.
Link ridership is out for August
https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership
4.7 mil. Down from 4.9 in July. I wonder how long until the record monthly in June with 4.97 mil is surpassed? Will the record hold until WSLE opens?
I would find it interesting to compare Link ridership to Link service disruptions.
Just plotting the last month by day suggests that there was one on August 2 (Sunday) that resulted in losing about 50K boardings, for example.
At some point, the quality of the counting equipment may factor in. If one car door on one side of one of dozens of trains has faulty counting, it’s not going to be obvious.
Although average weekday demand was lower at every station but Stadium, the Eastside stations showed the bigger proportional drops. SeaTac barely dropped compared to the others. It makes me question whether or not there’s a problem with counting on a 2 Line train door. Maybe not — but one has to wonder.
Usually, Link has highest ridership in summer months. It will be interesting to see if adding the 2 Line changes that. September brings less discretionary trips but more students. Also, freeway construction has been significant and that may affect Link usage, especially on weekends.
Automatic Passenger Counter data on doors is notoriously unreliable among all transit systems. The devices to count bikes, strollers, carts, etc as people boarding. It’s why the FTA has specific methods for scaling and interpolating data.
Almost like they could just enforce fares instead.
What?
Hijacking a topic to whine about fare enforcement is not allowed.
However, Sound Transit measures both Automatic Passenger Counter data and cardreader taps and compares them. The results have different lag times.
And ST is installing fare gates.
My assumption is that ST uses a mix of data to guage a ballpark estimate of ridership, APCs on trains, ORCA reader tap data from both ORCA cards & Tap 2 Pay, TVMs & Transit GO ticket data, fare enforcement data, etc.
ST only installed APC in a sample of its fleet. So the total boarding is estimated using a sample of all the LRVs. In theory it should work ok as long as the sample is perfectly random.
However I doubt it is perfectly random. It is possible that sometimes an entire 2-4 car trainset doesn’t have even a single LRV equipped with APC.
Increased gas prices have brought more transit riders in many metros nationwide. Economic factors like these will probably be more influential on ridership than the handful of Link line extensions that are still about a decade away and will add only 2-4 stations at a time. I’ll also note that the next three Link extensions (West Seattle, Tacoma Dome, Everett Phase 1) are planned to open close to each other timewise , so it’s hard to know which will open first given a history of Link construction delays.
The number of large events in July vs August may affect it. In any case, we can’t tell anything by one month, or a three-month sequence. We can’t tell how much is volatility vs systemic change in behavior.
It would be interesting to chart Link monthly ridership since April (or March or January or last year) against number of sports events and festivals, and number of hours of Link closures (planned and unplanned). We could see how much the lines all move together, whether ridership is doing something different, and whether there’s a persistent ridership loss after a spike in disruptions.
Edit: Oh yes, gas prices too.
MLS is moving toward aligning its season with European leagues, taking the summer off instead of winter.
Regardless, I don’t expect the nations World Cup or the Club World Cup to return to Seattle in our lifetimes.
Has there been any analysis of the effect of rental e-bikes and scooters on mode share in Seattle? Have they shifted trips away from walking, biking, transit, or driving? Do they supplement those modes instead of substituting for them? Do they generate new trips instead of substituting for older modes? Has the introduction of rental e-bikes and scooters change where people choose to live or work?
Speculation and anecdotes are welcome too, but I’d be most interested if anyone done any more rigorous analysis of the available data.
That’s a good question. I don’t know if SDOT has analyzed this. News reports suggests they primarily replace transit trips, but that’s not Seattle specific.
I’ve never used them. My friend who does has an e-skateboard. He uses that sometimes, but other times he uses a rental scooter or transit. He doesn’t have a car. He’s a high-paid tech worker so he can afford to both have an e-skateboard and use rental scooters.
I think he said he rode his e-skateboard from Seattle to downtown Bellevue on I-90, and maybe to downtown Redmond on 520 or the Burke-Gilman? I was surprised at riding a skateboard across the Mercer Island bridge and not finding it too tedious or windy, but he said it was fine, and when he said the travel time it was remarkably short.
I’ve never used any of the Lime/etc either, but thinking about why I’ve never used them while seeing so many people riding them has made wonder which trips people are using them for and why they chose them over walking/driving/transit/buying their own bike.
For myself, most of my daily trips are within walking distance- I live in a walkable neighborhood close to my job so most of what I need on a daily basis is accessible on foot. I also have an employer-subsidized Orca pass for destinations that are further away. I also have a bike, but rarely use it currently even when it might be faster than walking or transit, it’s usually not that much faster and dealing with transit is stressful. Like my bike, using a Lime bike or scooter might save me some time on trips, but it probably wouldn’t be very much and I’d have to pay per trip, while walking or using my Orca pass or riding my bike are essentially free.
But clearly a lot of people are finding the rental bikes and scooters useful.
My guess is that the numbers are too small to impact modeshare stats very much. For regular commuters, buying and riding your own bike is much cheaper, and probably much more common. The special trips where bikeshare makes sense, I don’t think are that numerous, relative to all Seattle trips.
There were about 10.5 million trips on Lime bikes and scooters in Seattle during 2025. That’s about 8% of the combined annual Link and Metro ridership, and the percentage would be higher for trips restricted to the Seattle city limits. So Seattle transit ridership is about an order of magnitude higher than Lime ridership, but I’d say that Lime ridership is still significant.
I see it as all relative. Certainly it has added trips by bicycle compared to the past. However, I think most people use them instead of walking, so it probably has had negligible impact on transit ridership and traffic volumes. I could also see that if they weren’t there, people just would not walk as far to get some place discretionarily.
There are companies that use Bluetooth locations to estimate who is using what mode when. They look at the speed at which sensors move and where in the street they are to guess what mode they are using. It’s emerged as a big data science industry. It’s more reliable than asking a sample of people with questionnaires but it’s not perfect. And of course it can distinguish between rented or personally owned devices.
I don’t know the particulars, but I could understand if that vendors would be required to share data in exchange for being allowed to operate in a city.
Ultimately there are people who categorically avoid transit, people who categorically prefer transit, and people who are mode-neutral.
App-taxis and e-micromobility were ideally seen as ways to fill in gaps transit doesn’t serve; e.g., to neighborhoods without bus service, or in a direction the transit network doesn’t address. But a disproportional amount of usage is in inner-city areas with the most transit alternatives, so there seems to be a lot of transit avoidance. People who don’t want to ride with strangers or wait for a scheduled pulse.
In some cases there is no viable transit route in that direction (like SLU to First Hill, or the Summit area to First Hill/Cherry Hill, where you’d have to piece together two short segments and maybe a first-mile walk and last-mile walk, and that’s just too much overhead). In other cases people are going straight from one bus stop to another.
I suspect part of the reason Lime seems to be so popular is that it’s very immediate- if there’s a bike/scooter available, you can start your trip right away instead of waiting for a bus, plus the bike/scooter may be even closer than the bus stop. This makes me wonder what the effect will be on ridership if the city ever requires Lime to move to a corral system, like Pronto had here a decade ago, and Divvy (in Chicago) and Citibike (in NYC) use. Would Lime usage drop much if Seattle riders had to walk to a corral before starting their trip?
I agree that some of the trips you mention that are relatively short distances but still require a transfer (or a longish walk) on transit probably also push some people to using Lime.
There’s two different ways to look at mode share.
The way that the Census looks at us is with commuting only, or traveling to and from work. That contrasts to people making all other kinds of trips.
So I could see it having only a slight effect on commute mode share but being more impactful for the mode share of all trips.
Hmm, when I picture e-scooter/bike usage it’s non-work trips.
I have used lime if my start/end times of inbound/outbound journey to work could not accommodate waiting for a feeder bus or the weather was good and I could avoid the 12 minute walk to a link station.
I haven’t used Lime in a while, but I still have the app, and for those of you who aren’t familiar, on the app you see a map with all the different individual locations where every scooter, bike, and glider are in the cities where they are allowed. And you can obviously see where there tends to be higher and lower concentrations of Limes. When you tap on a nearby icon of whichever type you want to ride, it will tell you how many miles of charge it has on it, and the price per minute to use. Example, if I tap on a scooter icon next to IDS, it says it has a 9 mile range, it’s $1 to unlock, and is $0.47/min + tax.
I use it for last mile, mostly in downtown Seattle, because that’s one of the few places where the density of them is enough that you can rely on finding one. If I hop off a bus in Pioneer Square, and want to get to Belltown, it’s a pretty decent choice.
I prefer the bike-style ones. They are much more stable.
They pulled them out of Tacoma, unfortunately. They were way under-powered for the hills, so few people used them. They were ideal for when I was getting off at the Tacoma Dome after PT stopped running and still being able to get home.
I use Lime at least once a month, just for fun. I usually ride it from Alki all the way to Lower Queen Anne and take the bus back to WS. I alternate between the Lime Bike, Scooter, and Glider. Of the 3 modes, the Lime Bike is the fastest.
For myself anecdotally, I use them as a last-mile solution to avoid slow and unreliable bus connections. The main trips I usually make are Westlake to SLU and back (avoiding the slow C, 40, SLUT) and UW station to Ravenna (avoiding the unreliable 72). Overall it saves me at least half an hour each way. With the monthly passes, it becomes very reliable, especially when an employed can subsidize it.
I don’t think many people care, but I personally think it is quite expensive to use Lime Bike if none of their promotional day/week/month passes is a good fit for you.
It makes more sense for tourists who are visiting and traveling to a lot of different places within one day or two to use Lime Bike.
I see it more like an alternatives to bus when transit option doesn’t exist. The most common use case for me is to get to somewhere only 5 minutes away through a trail with very steep elevation gain.
I ended up buying that $5.99 Limepass because I frequent do that 5-minute trip and it only costs $1.5 if I manage to finish my trip within 5 minutes, but outside that I think wherever there is transit option, taking bus is cheaper and faster.
Is Bellevue “a corporate city”? My roommate explained it that way on the phone to one of his distant relatives.
I thought, “It’s not a corporate city even if it has some big-name corporations.” Because those aren’t what drives it or affects most of the residents. The most influential and long-term businessman is Kemper Freeman, and he’s not a corporation, at least not in the sense of a national presence and Wall Street investors.
So is Bellevue a corporate city?
When my dad was visiting me in Seattle, we rode the 2 line across the bridge. He lives in DC and said that Bellevue reminded him of Arlington Virginia or Tysons Corner.
Bellevue is firmly a satellite city/corporate office area in my opinion. It’s getting better, the belred corridor around light rail is planned to have way more dense housing, but at the moment downtown is really the only large area to go to in Bellevue. Stripmalls like crossroads or areas like spring district are either too generic or too new to really feel like an impact (and spring district is dominated by the Meta offices)
I’ve never seen Tysons corner but I imagine it as a business center without single-family neighborhoods taking the majority of land or having secondary neighborhood shopping centers like Crossroads.
I’ve been to Arlington and stayed with somebody there. Pentagon City station has impressive walkable TOD integrated with the station entrance (a shopping mall), and I think Crystal City is similar. But when you get out to the Huntington terminus where I stayed, it seemed like a typical American car-oriented suburb with no corporate giants. So I wouldn’t think of Arlington as a corporate town. Unless the Pentagon itself is the corporation.
There’s also small company towns, where the majority of employment is one large company, and if it goes away, the town collapses. Boeing for Pugetopolis was a bit like that, but while I was growing up in Bellevue, while Boeing was the most desirable employer because it had the highest salaries, the majority of residents weren’t Boeing employees. And since then Seattle/Pugetopolis has diversified.
My perception of Bellevue may be based on before the corporations came, and my continuing ties are to demographics not related to the corporations. But my impression is still that it’s not a corporate town.
Redmond might be a corporate town since Microsoft is so dominant in it.
One of the jokes from Almost Live in the 90s about the Eastside was that the architectural style of Kirkland is classified as “post-modern Taco Time”. Which honestly is a pretty good humorous summation of how bland or “devoid of culture” the Eastside can feel at times.
https://youtu.be/idqtQxas14s
Something like two thirds of the people that work in Bellevue commute from outside the city. That is to say the population grows by 300% during the work day. I don’t know about the term “Corporate City”. It’s not a “company town” like Seattle used to be when it relied so heavily on Boing (will the last person leaving Seattle please turn of the lights). But it has several large corporate employers that create a large amount of jobs; PacCar, Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobil to name a few. So it’s the reverse of the “bedroom community” it was during the original growth years.
I think downtown Bellevue feels generic because it feels so polished and generic, like it was designed by a focus group. SLU is quite similar to Bellevue in that regard. There’s very few of the rough edges that make places unique and interesting. When people say a place has “character” I think it means that you can feel the small decisions people have made to their own individual tastes. I think that patchwork character is what gives Pike Place or CID or Fremont (or so many others) a more homey feel.
“I think downtown Bellevue feels generic because it feels so polished and generic, like it was designed by a focus group. SLU is quite similar to Bellevue in that regard.”
All post-1990 developments are like that. See Roosevelt Way in the U-District, or the 15th Ave W development, or most of downtown Redmond. It’s based on car-centrism, modernist architecture, and being as cheap as possible. Not on human scaling, aesthetics, or walkability. It has token amounts of transit-orientation if it’s lucky, and the required sidewalks and ADA access. But it’s not convenient for non-drivers, or a place people would want to linger. All that was thrown out in the 1940s, and developers say more decorations would be too expensive nowadays. (Never mind that moldings, mass-produced art deco decorations, and vertical-looking orientation would cost no more than the modernist geometric grotesqueness (overscaled-ness) they build.)
There are a few exceptions. Main Street in Old Bellevue is impressive. Historic Cleveland Street next to Downtown Redmond station has some pluses. Restoring old buildings on Pike-Pine has been good, like the Pike Motorworks building. Sometimes they restore a 1-2 story facade, and then include a modern tall building behind it, like the Melrose Market or something within a block of it. That works well too, and gets more floors of housing, while keeping the ugliness above sidewalk level. And some of the new brick townhouses have their positives, even if the light fixtures and decorations are simpler than before.
And there’s a brand-new old-style building under construction at the southeast corner of Broadway & Pike, kitty-corner from the college. When I first saw it, I had to ask somebody whether it was really new or I’d never noticed a nice building there. He said it’s new. It’s in a pre-WWII style with arched windows and moldings. There’s no indication of what it will be: a company custom-building a store, or housing. I hope it’s something the public can enter and sells something a variety of people would go to. I’m afraid it might be a tech company’s exclusive space. We’ll see. But that is what we need more of everywhere, both architechtually and urbanist.
Corporate city in my mind is like those which housing suburban high rise office park but don’t really have a Downtown.
When I lived in Atlanta. I lived in two places like that. First few years I lived in an unincorporated area around Cumberland Mall. Then during pandemic, I moved to somewhere near Marta Dunwoody Station. That place is home to a shopping mall and HQ or US HQ of IHG, Arby’s, UPS, and Mercedes Benz. But neither place has a real downtown. Many high rises office buildings sit in enclosed office park and have no retail on street level.
FYI – it’s Eglinton, no second g.
Last week I took the 131/132 to Costco in SODO in the late morning, and 11 people got off the bus for it. Across the street at least 6 were waiting for the northbound bus from it.
Since Community Transit just announced that they will be going fare free for one week in October to celebrate their 50th anniversary, what if they brought their 1959 GMC New Look back into service? I would love to ride one of their old buses on a fixed route not just enter it as a bus museum.
Since the bluebell bus won’t be at any events in November, what if we brought it back into service? It would be the ultimate bus spotters’ dream like me, similar to how there’s only one 2011 XD40 left in service and I make an effort to catch it sometimes.
I wonder what the rules were in 1976. Probably cash only. No pets. No fare, no ride. No wheelchairs. No personal wheeled grocery carts. No eating on the bus was enforced. Service probably ended before 9 PM.
“No wheelchairs.”
What!? That’s against the law!
No wheelchairs in the sense that they couldn’t get on the bus. I don’t think Community Transit buses had lifts or ramps in 1976.
AI (Google) says Community transit started bus service October 4, 1976, using “18 leased school buses”. They did not have wheelchair lifts. Wheelchair-compatible buses came in 1995. ($)
The American with Disabilities act passed in 1990.
I started riding Metro in 1979. I don’t remember them not having wheelchair lifts, but I wouldn’t notice something I’d never heard of. I don’t remember Metro suddenly starting to have wheelchair lifts.
Metro operated Community Transit’s express routes (the 4xx routes) until the mid 80s or so. They had Metro schedules.
METRO was pretty progressive when it came to their bus fleet, I think they were one of the first us agencies to adopt wheelchair lifts for their buses. They were also an early adopter of articulated buses and tried to be an early adopter of natural gas but sort of jumped the gun on that one.
Metro in the early 80s accepted cash it bus tickets. There was no discount on the booklet of cardboard tickets, so it was questionable what hey were good for. I paid cash or tickets. The fare was 35c one zone (all the suburbs, or all if Seattle). A 2-zone fare was 55c if I remember?
There was an annual pass, giving you a free month. You had to get your picture on it. I never considered it; I don’t remember why. Maybe because as a teenager $100+ seemed so far out of reach. I don’t think there were monthly passes. If there were, I never considered getting one for some reason, even though I took Metro 5-7 days a week.
Eventually the fare rose to $1.25 and ticket prices rise accordingly.
PugetPass monthly passes must have started in the late 80s. I was at UW then and in the 90s worked at Harbor view. We were eligible for heavily-discounted monthly passes, which must have been PugetPass. Free U-Pass didn’t exist yet.
What if we send the E Line to Shoreline North/185th Station rather than Mountlake Terrace Station as planned in Metro Connects? I mean if we send it to 185th, ridership would be higher, the Shoreline P&R and Aurora Village TC riders would get an advantage with a faster ride Downtown via the Blue + Link which those riders are a lot of P&R commuters with anyone needing to get anywhere on Aurora just transferring to the E at 185th, and you basically tie a trunk Shoreline corridor (Aurora Ave) to the rest of Shoreline at 185th Station.
That’s something Metro seriously needs to consider. It doesn’t make much sense to send it to MLT station. And if we were to connect it to a Lynnwood Link station, it would have to be now and not in 2050.
I would love that, the E needs to be connected to a Lynnwood Link station, and travelling from the Aurora corridor to MLT, Lynnwood, and Everett would become easier and faster.
I think that’s one decent solution, but if King County Metro winds up with some extra funds to dump into this area, I would prefer to see them join with CT to get an Edmonds – 185th bus. The route the 130 takes between Aurora Village and Montlake Terrace is quite circuitous. This could serve as both the primary Edmonds – Link connection and an additional faster Aurora Village to Link bus. (SWIFT Blue is already a decent connection for this).
As long as the E still serves Aurora Village and the apartments on 200th. Otherwise shoppers along Aurora would have difficulty accessing Aurora Village.
Community Transit is planning to ultimately reroute Swift Blue further south on Aurora to 185th and east to Shoreline North station, bypassing Aurora Village, so the E decision should be in that context.
I want to extend the E to whichever station it can get to faster from Aurora Village: Shoreline North or Mountlake Terrace. We’d need technical data to confirm which one would really be faster.
Metro has not committed to all the alignments in the Metro Connects 2050 map. Recent restructures have contradicted some of them. E.g., the RapidRide G restructure did not create a Denny-Madison route to replace the 8 and 11, or a Broadway north-south route to replace the 49, or reroute the 106 to Boren and SLU despite them being in Metro Connects. It moved the 12 to Pine Street, even though it was the 2 that moved to Pine Street in Metro Connects.
The thing with extending the E to Montlake Terrace station:
The E has overnight service, and the ST Night Owl service will probably serve Montlake Terrace station. There is no equivalent freeway station at 185th.
So, to make the night owl network work better, they should probably extend at least the late night Es to Montlake Terrace once the Everett night bus starts.
Otherwise you wind up with a disconnected tangle like the south end currently has between the 7 and TIBS.
“As long as the E still serves Aurora Village and the apartments on 200th.”
There’s basically a trade-off here. Swift Blue riders get an advantage by getting a one seat ride to Shoreline Town Center, meanwhile the E gets sent to Shoreline North/185th Station and overlaps the Swift Blue on 185th.
People riding on Aurora south of 185th would also get an advantage by being connected to a Link station.
They could take a train and ride 7 minutes to Lynnwood which is harder right now because it involves an infrequent, slow bus ride from Aurora Village (114 or 130), take two seats (Blue + Orange), or take the 331 to MLT which is basically extending the E to MLT.
Meanwhile park and ride users from Shoreline P&R or Aurora Village TC would just ride the Blue to Link rather than riding the whole E to Downtown Seattle. Those riders wanting to go Downtown would also get a faster ride, people not looking to go Downtown would just transfer to the E at 185th if they want to go down Aurora or if they want to get around the neighborhood just take the Blue to 185th.
Metro route 333 also goes between Aurora Village and Mountlake Terrace Station, scheduled every 15 minutes during the day on weekdays, serving the other strip mall and TOD along the way.
I hope for the easiest and fastest transfer between Blue and E, which would be along Aurora, at adjoining “stations”/stops.
Having both take 185th over to North Shoreline Station would require crossing 185th to make that transfer, and make accessing Aurora Village similarly more dangerous.
But I would also like to see the area just east of I-5 and 185th also get bus stops. There is a school district facility there. Blue is just bypassing it.
“Swift Blue riders get an advantage by getting a one seat ride to Shoreline Town Center”
If you mean City Hall that’s at 175th. 185th is Fred Meyer.
“There’s basically a trade-off here. Swift Blue riders get an advantage by getting a one seat ride to Shoreline Town Center, meanwhile the E gets sent to Shoreline North/185th Station and overlaps the Swift Blue on 185th.”
There’s a third group of people, people living between 185th and 205th, or people from the Aurora/Greenwood area going to Aurora Village. They get thrown under the bus. The only route they have is Swift Blue rerouted to Aurora/185th, so they walk further to a station and it doesn’t go south of 185th.
Honestly I think extending the E to Link is a solution in search of a problem. It’s not a terrible idea but it’s still adding an expensive and low productivity tail to the E. Copied from my previous response:
Leaving the E as-is seems fine to me. Extending the Blue Line to Link makes sense since that serves Snohomish Aurora to Seattle trips, which should be reasonably common. Extending the E to Link would mostly serve Snohomish Link to King County Aurora trips, which are much less common.
Notably, extending the north end of the E to Link does not improve trips from King County Aurora to Link destinations (like to UW or Capitol Hill), because it forces riders into out-of-direction travel.
Once the Blue line is rerouted it will serve as a connection to Link for riders north of 185th. South of 185th it will basically always be faster to take the E line to downtown Seattle instead of transferring from an E-W route to Link.
It’s always entertaining to imagine better transit connectivity. In the grander scheme of things, the question is more where do public resources belong.
I would say that the break even point is well south of 185th. If a rider wants to catch a bus to Link to get Downtown from Aurora, the distance between the two routes is less than a mile between Green Lake and just south of the County line. Maybe 145th? Maybe even Northgate?
And let’s not ignore how Aurora is a bear to walk across and unpleasant to walk along. Making a transfer can feel especially unsafe!
To me, this interest suggests that the Aurora corridor should have direct bus service to Link somewhere north of the Ship Canal. How that gets laid out can be done in a number of ways. Maybe it happens through a discussion of a redesign of Aurora itself to be more transit and transit access friendly.
I’ve long advocated for at least one route going to Link that shares at least one Aurora stop with RapidRide E. In other words, no street crossing should be needed when transferring. And I see that the further south it is, the more useful it will be. MLT just feels way out of direction for using Link for most trips.
“It’s not a terrible idea but it’s still adding an expensive and low productivity tail to the E.”
Sending the E to Shoreline North station would be more productive and less cost effective than extending the E to MLT.
Changes and non-changes in Metro Connects since 2020:
Of course, these are only the few corridors I monitor.
” if King County Metro winds up with some extra funds to dump into [N 200th Street]”
Ha ha. Metro is facing a severe cut around 2032 like the one in 2014 if the county doesn’t replenish its dwindling reserves. It talked about a Metro Connects levy this year but decided to kick the can down the road for longer.
Exactly. As a 10 minute route, extending the E has the potential to be expensive.
The E could replace 331 and 333 service between Aurora Village and MLT Station. That’s 6 decently-timed trips per hour per direction replacing 6 not-well-timed trips per hour per direction.
And the trips would be faster, so actually reducing platform hours, slightly.
Thoughts on the video?
I like comparing things to Link. The almost 12 mile long, 25 station Line 5 Eglinton cost a little over $9B USD. Ballard Link will be a bit over 7 miles long and cost around $21B USD.
That’s interesting. Eglinton is half underground while Ballard/DSTT2 must be three-quarters underground. Eglinton Avenue, while it’s not downtown, the underground segment (assuming 6 miles) might have Ballard’s density. How could Toronto build it for so little? Link goes under the Ship Canal, while the Eglinton line appears to go under the Don River.
Eglinton’s major tunneling happened in the 2010s prior to covid, so it was cheaper due to a variety of factors. It started construction in 2011 and tunneling ending in 2016. In the time it took to get the line open st started, built, and finished all of federal way link, lynnwood link, redmond, and northgate. So it was cheaper due because it took over a decade and most of the heavy civil was done in the post 2008 era.
Canada is starting to build high speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City. The current price tag is $90B. I predict it will “progress” much the same way as CAHSR. The politics in Canada are even more contentious than California.
They’re not building anything until 2029/2030. It’s all in planning right now. Even with that construction start date I wouldn’t be surprised if Montreal-Toronto is connected before SF-LA
Yes, it will be, because getting out of the Central Valley to either San Francisco or LA will involve major engineering marvels.
“I don’t know about the term “Corporate City”.
It’s not a general term. My roommate was looking for a word to describe Bellevue and settled on “corporate”.
The closest counterpart I’ve heard was in the 2010s when I attended a conference in Santa Clara. There’s a cluster of hotels at the Old Ironsides/Great America part of Santa Clara, next to the then-in-planning Levi’s Stadium. The three VTA light rail lines cross there, the Coast Starlight passes without stopping, and the Amtrak Capitols and ACE commuter rail (to Stockton) stop. The conference was in one hotel; I was in another. There was nothing else around the hotels. When I arrived I asked the desk clerk where to find a supermarket, and she said, “It’s very corporate around here; there isn’t one.”
So corporate to her meant a place where companies come for conventions.
I took the light rail south looking for a supermarket to get provisions for my stay. I rode half an hour and couldn’t see any from the train, until finally I got to downtown San Jose and there was an urban-format Safeway. Most of the area in between was tech headquarters.
The next morning I walked south looking for breakfast, on Great America Parkway. OMG, every block is half a mile long, and has exactly one six-story tech headquarters in center surrounded by an ocean of open space. There was nothing else. I passed one convenience store. After half an hour’s walk I found one diner (IHOP)? Santa Clara was the worst nightmare of suburban sprawl I’d ever seen.
The next year my company would only pay for a cheaper hotel further south. It was a 45-minute walk to the conference hotel (but at least there’s a trail along the Guadaloupe River). A VTA bus route ran half-hourly weekdays, hourly weekends, so I also took that. I don’t remember exactly where the hotel was, but twice as far as Mission Blvd, and next to the Montague Expressway on the west side. I looked for a supermarket here, and crossed the expressway, which took 20 minutes in itself. On the other side was a Safeway plaza, with an excellent Thai restaurant.
Later I continued walking further east, and found Agnew Road, which had new urbanist style compact housing for a few blocks. I continued walking east, knowing I would eventually reach the north-south light rail line, and hoping there was a station there. There was.
So all of that area could be considered “corporate”.
Downtown Bellevue in the past two decades has become more than a high-rise office park with a regional mall next to it. It’s started to also house many thousands of new residents.
That said, the descriptive word I would use is “sterile”. There isn’t something generally wonderous about walking around it. That’s what I think is missing.
Part of that is because the “Bellevue Collection” feels deliberately self contained and it serves as the majority of where any “street life” is. And several of the other retail buildings copy that design approach , like the ones at 4th and 116th. They’re designed to efficiently park and shop.
The recent opening of Link can be a catalyst to make its streets more interesting. It’s just not yet. It reminds me of Crystal City / Pentagon City mostly — but without the building connectivity. Of course, Northern Virginia has much more extreme weather to negotiate.
The Eastside has more interesting “village life” in Redmond and Kirkland downtowns. Part of that is a function of those other cities having narrower, less noisy, less stressful and lower speed Downtown streets that make their storefront streets more pleasant for walking. The ironic aspect is that Downtown Bellevue now has residential buildings that have the density of midtown Manhattan way higher than these other two cities!
NE 6th should be the “village street” that’s missing. For the sake of high end landscaping and sterile buildings, what could have been a great urban street feels instead like a linear park. Linear parks are great — but so are enticing busy urban streets to stroll.
Can Downtown Bellevue evolve? Perhaps. But it seems at least a decade away.
No, I was on the Montague Expressway crossing the railroad tracks.
Montague Expy is so busy, fast and wide that it makes Aurora and Pacific Highway look tame. It is very hostile for pedestrians. I can’t even think of a street in our region that comes close to being that hostile. It’s got 4 through lanes in each direction and many intersections have double lane left turn pockets.
“Aurora Village TC would just ride the Blue to Link rather than riding the whole E to Downtown Seattle.”
Swift Blue currently supports that. I’ve tried going to the Aurora Village Costco via Link+Blue. It’s 5-minute nonstop travel time from Shoreline North station. The problem is Swift Blue’s infrequency: it’s 10 minutes weekdays (good), 15 minutes Saturdays (mediocre), and 20 minutes Sundays (bad). Coming from Westlake/Capitol Hill, my best end-to-end travel time was 30 minutes if I remember. But if I got a bad transfer it would stretch to 50 minutes. On top of that is a longer walk from Aurora Village station to the Costco entrance compared to the SODO Costco bus stop.
SODO Costco is a 20-minute bus ride from 3rd & Pike. The entrance is a short walk away. The 131/132 run every 15 minutes, although they’re notoriously unreliable so you often wait 20 minutes for one. 3rd & Pike southbound is “the worst bus stop in Seattle” in my opinion: sketchy people, closed storefronts, no bench or shelter.
I’d gone to the Aurora Village Costco occasionally on the E. That takes 45 minutes. I was looking forward to seeing how much Link+Swift would improve it. The results were as above. I went there a few times, and then reverted to going to the SODO Costco. Basically, if you get a short transfer, the more pleasant Linkified environment mitigates the slightly longer travel time. But you never know if you’ll get a bad transfer, and half the time you will.