All posts by Martin H. Duke

The youth fare is abolished effective Sept. 1st. This year’s transportation package in Olympia sends transit agencies a bunch of money in return for getting rid of the fare, neatly solving the dilemma of encouraging ridership by either cutting fares or using the money to improve service. Agencies across the state quickly fell into line.

Personally, I say good riddance. Youth ORCA is a pain to get, and if you have a few kids (as I do) round trips get expensive fast. There are also benefits to creating a broadly shared generational experience with transit, and in avoiding interactions with fare enforcement. With a state subsidy, there is no downside, unless it causes transit facilities to become (more of?) a place to hang out and behave anti-socially.

The main news is overwhelmingly positive. However, explanations of the formal policy are a confusing muddle.

Too little internet content is about unironic appreciation for people doing the right thing. So good for Dan Strauss, trying to put the light rail station where the people are in his district:

“Placing the station to the east undermines our city’s work to create a densely connected community,” Strauss said. “This is infrastructure that will last 100 years, and we can’t afford to get it wrong.”

Moreover, Seattle’s preferred alternative presentation contains a lot of good advice for Sound Transit, particularly in the all-important tunnel north of Chinatown. Seattle Subway has written previously about the best choices for future riders. Though I don’t agree with 100% of either document, I invite you to compare results.

Elsewhere in old friend Lizz Giordano’s report for Publicola, there’s less exciting news. Lisa Herbold is extensively quoted about “impacts” without much apparent regard for future riders. Maybe Sound Transit should just build the Gray Line and no one would be impacted at all. Most notably in her district, Seattle requests a Delridge station by the steel plant to keep it away from neighborhoods, and thus from potential riders.

I don’t like this framework for thinking about the project, but at least there’s a recommended decision that can move us forward! That’s more that can be said about the City’s Chinatown advice:

• How the state transpo budget affects area projects
• New ORCA TVMs on their way
• Sound Transit’s service change
• and Metro’s
• SBB reflects on the bike helmet law repeal
• Disagreement as to whether ST vehicles are lawless, dangerous or not
• Brooke Belman will be the interim ST CEO after May 31
• Kent’s microtransit experiment is called Pingo
• Bill would provide raises for Uber/Lyft drivers ($)
• CT cutting 164 daily trips due to driver shortage
• New bus stops in Pioneer Square
• Hilltop Tacoma Link now to open 1Q2023
• Streateries overwhelmingly popular

This is an open thread.

• Avalon residents ask if a station there is really needed (!)
• Missing middle housing bill is dead, but ADU reform is not
• Some advice for YIMBYs on how to win more battles
• Bad behavior on buses and trains ($) is out of control, Metro seeking answers ($)
• New Sound Transit guidelines will avoid pedestrian crossings
• Tacoma Link needs $30m more (from $252m recently, $217m a year ago)
• State Supreme Court hearing arguments ($) that fare inspection is unconstitutional
• Just how fair is it that Metro gets so much Federal money?
• The supply chain comes for Metro’s maintenance ops ($)
• Feds sending $37m for Swift Orange
• If residents don’t want Mt Baker to be “desolate,” the key is lots and lots of commerce
• King County helmet law is gone; city laws remain
• Relatedly, two new safety-oriented positions are open: 1, 2
• How to restructure for Link in Tacoma
• Apple Cup train failure now has a cause ($)
• Driver shortage reaches ST Express
• South Sounder kills pedestrian
• New Amtrak locomotives
• A guide for transit to trails ($)
• Love on the bus

This is an open thread.

Metro usually gathers a citizen sounding board when it’s planning a major service change. It’s a way to gather impressions after detailed technical discussion instead of drive-by comments.

They’re currently collecting applicants for the service change associated with Lynnwood Link. If you’re willing to approach it with an open mind, think about the community as a whole instead of your own needs, and commit the necessary time, it can be a rewarding experience and do some good for the region. Please consider it!

• Stephen Fesler https://www.flickr.com/photos/zheistand/5763940792/in/pool-seatrans/" title="Buses jammed on 3rd Ave">https://live.staticflickr.com/5144/5763940792_d463652a2b_z.jpg" width="640" height="408" alt="Buses jammed on 3rd Ave">also unhappy with how ST3 is turning out
• Transit update from West Seattle
• Rogoff says reduced fare enforcement partly responsible for collapsing revenues ($), ECB is skeptical
• And now the Supreme Court can make things even worse
• Plan for Kirkland’s Dan Ryan Tower ($) is coming together
• Venu Nimani is the new Dongho Chang, an unenviable position, but he says the right things
• East Link zoning blows
• Welcome to the new Community Transit Board
• Concrete strike drags on, affecting transit projects
• Pets now allowed on water taxis
• Fesler thinks big about the Rainier Valley
• Helmet law enforcement downgraded
• Lizz looks at the local record of traffic enforcement cameras
• A futuristic, electric foot ferry ($) for Bremerton
• CAHSR infighting continues
• What opened worldwide in 2021, and is coming in 2022

This is an open thread.

Last week Sound Transit released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the West Seattle/Ballard Link Extension (WSBLE), the long-awaited Link line from Alaska Junction to 15th and Market, via Sodo, Downtown, South Lake Union, Uptown, and 15th. The comment period began today. View the online open house and comment here.

Really Deep Stations

Both Doug Trumm and Mike Lindblom ($) have already explained the very deep stations proposed along underground segments downtown quite thoroughly. But briefly: typically, the deepest stations in a system are among the lower-ridership ones (like Washington Park in Portland). Westlake, Midtown, and Chinatown would be among the deepest in North America but also among the busiest in the system. Stations this deep mostly depend on elevators, which limit throughput, have an (ahem) spotty maintenance record, and increase the length of every trip that uses the station.

Worse, there is no engineering reason for Chinatown to be deep. It’s a potential concession to a neighborhood that is tired of decades of disruptive construction projects nearby. There is also no appetite to cheaply and shallowly cut-and-cover 5th Avenue downtown for similar reasons. Hopefully, early media attention will help politicians stand up for future riders, and engineers to get a little more creative.

Ridership

• Via expands to the Renton Highlands
• Pedersen will remain Seattle Transportation chair
• The website for the new ORCA is live
• Metro canceling some trips through Jan. 21 due to driver shortages
• Teamsters strike still delaying Link projects
• A list of all the transportation-ish bills in Olympia
• WSF neglect is starting to show

This is an open thread.

Seattle’s new Mayor does not seem to be a fertile source of pro-housing legislation, having campaigned on skepticism about changing single family zones. But instead of struggling for dimes, we can pick up dollar bills at the state level. The bills are SB 5670 and HB 1782, and as explained by local treasure Dan Bertolet, would legalize:

Up to sixplexes on all residential lots within a half-mile of a major transit stop in cities with populations of 20,000 or more.

Up to fourplexes on all residential lots elsewhere in cities of 20,000 or more.

Duplexes on all residential lots in cities with populations of at least 10,000.

There are also substantial limits on parking minima, and some anti-displacement measures. Cities could skip these prescriptions and instead adopt city-wide density minima, but they would have to show this did not have disparate impacts — no putting all the growth in the “urban renewal” sectors and leaving the upscale places untouched.

• Sam Zimbabwe out at SDOT; what does it mean?
• Kent Keel staying as ST Board Chair
• West Seattle/Ballard EIS will arrive January 28th
• Escalator switching at CHS
• North Sounder is landsliding again
• An update on Safe Routes to School
• Worst year on Washington’s roads ($) since 2006
• Pandemic trends in ridership, by neighborhood type
• Boston experimenting with free buses

This is an open thread.

Sound Transit recently released a revised Link schedule that will take effect January 8th “to better reflect actual trip times.” The main difference is that a Northgate-Angle Lake trip turns out to be 4 minutes slower, from 53 minutes to 57.

There are four spots where it loses one of those minutes: Roosevelt-Northgate, UW-U District, Westlake-Capitol Hill, and Mt. Baker-Beacon Hill. No doubt, to some extent these particular segments are not the only source of delay, but just where it rounds up to full minutes.

This is actually a good news story: Columbia City-Capitol Hill will still be 21 minutes, 1 minutes less than the time pre-pandemic. I’d speculate it to be a function of recovering ridership, and the resulting frictions adding 7% to overall times. But ST’s John Gallagher says that the Northgate segment is a bit slower than expected, and on the older segments two more minutes makes it easier to stay on schedule and respect timed transfers.

No one is going to remember the Durkan administration, positively or negatively, based on its transit or land use legacy. The twin crises of the pandemic and a reckoning with racist policing will dominate the historical record. But here at STB, we always size up the outgoing mayor (Murray, McGinn, Nickels) on this basis. And her legacy will largely be stasis, with isolated progress and some major setbacks.

The preceding Murray administration had largely locked in a transportation agenda with a vehicle license fee for bus service, Move Seattle, and Sound Transit 3. A first Durkan term would therefore always have been one of consolidation. Ms. Durkan campaigned as a policy continuity candidate from a productive but scandal-ridden predecessor. On this measure, her term was a disappointment.

2021 was the slowest year at STB in well over a decade. Nevertheless, both readers and commenters turned out when we did:

Most Read

This snow will stick around a while. In non-pandemic, normal work week times, this might have been a snowpocalypse event.

Meanwhile, Metro’s Emergency Snow Network is in effect. ST express has Snow reroutes but Link is basically unaffected. 6 Sounder trips are suspended.

• The ST2 projects were cruising along, but now there’s a concrete driver strike ($)
• Everett and CT will do another study on merging
• Feds send Metro $396m to make up for Covid losses
• Another bikeshare vendor — the more, the merrier
• Inside Metro’s 2022 budget
• Marko Liias is the new Senate Transportation Chair. There is no better friend in the Senate of non-SOV travel.
• New ferry will be the Wishkah ($)
• Meet the new Amtrak CEO ($)
• New books about transit maps

This is an open thread.

OMF at S. 336th St is “preferred”

On Thursday, the Sound Transit Board made the responsible decision and designated S. 336th St in Federal Way as the “preferred” site of South Link’s Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF). It has not actually eliminated the other two sites from consideration, but the process will put somewhat more weight on 336th.

• Lizz tells the story of vision-impaired people struggling to navigate transit
• Everett Council considers states its priorities for Link
• By some metrics, some are pronouncing microtransit a success
• More camera enforcement ($)
• More electrics for PT
• Seattle grows faster ($) than suburbs 2010-20
• Traffic is back, transit ridership still down
• Natural gas buses aren’t carbon-neutral
• TriMet running out of drivers; it’s an emergency

This is an open thread.