All posts by MartinP

While the rollout of battery-electric buses (BEBs) has been slowed by the cost of building the charging infrastructure and availability of capable BEBs, Metro is upgrading and expanding its trolley bus network.

The current trolleys have only a small battery. That allows them to run briefly off-wire but not on steep hills. This helps in case of obstructions due to construction, accidents or events. During the Third Ave construction some routes (1, 3, 4, 7, 14, 36) have operated off-wire. During the Montlake construction Route 43 has operated off-wire. Once the trolley wire has been reinstalled, the routes will return to on-wire trolley operations.

Recently Metro started to upgrade the buses with larger batteries which will allow longer off-wire operations. They expect to upgrade all 174 trolleys by 2027. Metro is evaluating whether the upgraded batteries would allow Route 12 to operate off-wire until the overhead wire is completed on Pine St, currently scheduled for 2029. Metro is also considering trolley buses to operate off-wire for Route 48 until the gaps on the overhead wire are closed on 23rd Ave, currently scheduled for 2032. First it would need to improve power infrastructure though to accommodate the additional buses.

With the upgraded batteries and power systems, Metro hopes to run trolley buses throughout the week rather than powering the wires down for construction on Sundays.

PS: I updated this post as Metro contacted me to explain that the streetcar avoids the trolley wires by using its battery, not the other way around. Also, the current trolley batteries work uphill, but performance is poor making it unsustainable on steep grades.

With Link running mostly north to south, what’s the best way to serve neighborhoods to the west and east of the line? The highways (I-5, SR-99…) run north/south, too, and Seattle’s hills get in the way. Gondola technology might be a good way to address this issue. Gondolas’ ultra-high frequency speeds up transfers, and grade separation provides reliability. East-west trips are usually short, so a gondola’s limited speed isn’t an issue. While South Lake Union (SLU) and Capitol Hill have been booming and growing significantly, bus route 8 has been struggling to make its way up the hill, and gets into severe traffic congestion along Denny Way causing long delays. A decade ago, Matt Gangemi and Matt Roewe, an engineer and architect respectively, proposed a gondola line connecting the Sculpture Park, Seattle Center, SLU, and Capitol Hill along John Street. Connecting the recently-renovated waterfront and Seattle Center’s cultural opportunities with the SLU tech centers and housing and Capitol Hill nightlife should be part of the mayor’s and Chamber’s plan to revitalize downtown Seattle and make it more attractive to tourism.

Recently Ross and I discussed various alignments. It would be nice to serve the center of Seattle Center directly akin it did during the Seattle World Fair in 1962. Running along Thomas or Harrison Street might be better than John Street. You could also extend the line beyond Broadway to serve Kaiser Permanente hospital and the business district at 15th Ave E.

Continue reading “SLU to Capitol Hill Gondola”

At last week’s Sound Transit Board meeting, Sound Transit’s West Seattle project manager Brad Owen showed the extend of the guideway from the SODO station along the Spokane viaduct, across Highway 99 to the Duwamish bridge. He explained that rather than pouring its concrete deck in place, they plan to use precast segments. That will speed up the process and reduce cost.

The rendering shows the enormity of the guideway, adding a 4th level to the existing 3 levels (at grade, Spokane viaduct, Highway 99). At least the underside would be a bit nicer than the i-beam girders Sound Transit has been using lately along I-5.

Continue reading “SODO guideway construction”

As Issaquah continues to grow, traffic has become a challenge. With I-90 running through the city and with major elevation differences between west and east, the few arteries are getting clogged. Now the city is considering another I-90 crossing. Would that address the problem? Or would it be better to increase transit options such as adding a gondola?

Continue reading “Issaquah Gondola”

The Seattle Times recently reported that the Board selected 5 candidates for consideration from 60 applicants. After Julie Timm left, Goran Sparrman stepped in as Interim CEO, but he plans to retire on May 15th. A year ago, Sound Transit hired Terri Mestas to lead its construction projects. What would be expected from the next CEO?

Continue reading “Sound Transit CEO Selection”

The Rainier Valley line has been plagued by pedestrian and car accidents since it opened. The Sound Transit Board asked staff to develop a safety plan not only for Rainier Valley but also for other at-grade Link segments in SODO, on the Eastside (2 Line), and along Sounder (Lakewood). While some improvements have already been made or incorporated into the new 2 Line stations and Graham station plans, staff recently published a plan for further improvements and solicited feedback.

Continue reading “At-Grade Crossing Plan”

Trevor Reed wrote an op-ed in the Urbanist about Sound Transit’s shortcomings. To address them, he encourages readers to sign a petition by Transportation Reform asking the State to take action to audit Sound Transit and improve its ability to deliver transit services.

Continue reading “State Must Reform Sound Transit”

A decade ago, Sound Transit hired experts to review transit modes to select the best mode for the Spine which could accommodate at-grade, elevated, and tunneled sections. It reconfirmed the decision to proceed with building a light rail network. At the time modes such as monorail and the Vancouver, BC SkyTrain were dropped as they do not work well for at-grade alignments. However, for many of the modes they considered at the time, the experts pointed out that other options may have advantages in other circumstances.

Continue reading “Ballard Link Mode Selection”

When the ST3 measure was approved by voters in 2016, Sound Transit had only some rough ideas about how to deliver the promised transit improvements. Cost estimates were done based on comparable projects. Now that the plans are getting more specific and Sound Transit can do bottoms-up estimates, it turns out that the projects are more complicated, and cost is quite a bit higher. That’s certainly the case for the West Seattle extension, but I expect similar increases to happen for the Ballard/downtown section. While I was recently traveling to Munich, I was wondering whether the region could learn some from their transit system.

Munich has an extensive S-Bahn regional rail network operated by DB (Deutsche Bahn). All lines converge in the city’s center through a single tunnel. For the 1972 Olympics MVG (Muenchner Verkehrs Gesellschaft), the city’s transit agency, decided to build a separate U-Bahn subway network which by now covers all major parts of city, either underground or elevated. It uses third rail power to allow for smaller tunnel diameter and reduced cost.

While the U-Bahn kept expanding within the city, the S-Bahn kept reaching more suburbs. When the S-Bahn’s daily ridership passed 800,000, DB decided a second parallel tunnel was necessary. Such undertaking turned out to be quite a challenge; the cost and timeline has kept slipping. Currently the tunnel is slated to open in 2037. In the meantime, the transit agency is making further improvements to their signaling system to allow even more trains to travel through the existing tunnel.

Sound Transit had chosen light rail technology to allow for affordable at-grade tracks. While this may be important for long stretches in the suburbs, for urban applications Sound Transit has avoided at-grade tracks to avoid interference with other modes. So maybe Sound Transit should consider a more appropriate technology for its urban lines akin to U-Bahn technology — such as Ballard/SLU — and keep it separate from the existing light rail. That would also allow for an automated line with shorter more frequent trains, and therefore smaller stations such as the Skytrain in Vancouver (or Honolulu, Montreal, Copenhagen, etc).

Continue reading “Munich vs ST3”

Pundits claim West Seattle had been added to the ST3 plan by politicians envious that Ballard gets a light rail connection. It seemed easy to draw another line on the map, but now that Sound Transit published the final Environmental Impact Statement for the West Seattle Link Extension (WSLE) it has become evident that it is far more complex than anticipated. While the ST3 measure promised to bring 37,000 riders for $1.5 billion ($2.4B in 2024 dollars) by 2030, now the price tag has tripled to $7.1 billion (in 2024 dollars), and completion is delayed to 2032, and the ridership forecast for 2042 (after WSLE is connected to the current downtown tunnel) is only 27,000 new riders systemwide.

The delays and cost explosions are directly related to the apparently-unexpected complexity of building the extension as drawn in 2016. The route needs to roller-coaster up over the Duwamish and Pigeon Point, down into the Delridge Valley, and then back up to the Alaska Junction. To ensure southward expansion in the distant future, the station at Alaska Junction was rotated to be north-south, requiring more property takings. To avoid disturbing the Duwamish superfund site, the new bridge needs to stay away from the river shore. The SODO soil is prone to liquefaction in an earthquake, so the elevated guideway pilings have to be extra deeper than normal. The Pigeon Point slope is unstable and requires large retaining walls. The initial setup for tunneling is expensive, even if the tunnel is relatively short.

Sound Transit staff told the Board the more expensive Preferred Alternative would require third party funding, but now they’re assuming Seattle, King County, and Sound Transit will somehow find the funding, which is implausible given the large shortfall. If the Board decides to proceed with the current plan, they may choose the same approach as they did during the pandemic finance crunch (“realignment”): delay delivery until they collect enough cash from tax payers to avoid breaking the debt ceiling. 

Continue reading “Implications of the West Seattle Link Cost”

In this video Reece Martin (RMTransit) talks about the rail network in Germany’s northwestern megaopolis along the Rhine and Ruhr rivers, which is similar in size and population to the Los Angeles region. The region is split into two comprehensive transit districts, and this video focuses on the northern one. A later video will look at the southern district.

The northern transit district, Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Ruhr, contains the cities of Düsseldorf (pop. 644K), Essen (588K), Duisburg (495K), Bochum (386K), Wuppertal (351K), and other cities. The larger ones are the size Seattle was in the 2000s and 2010s. The southern transit district, Rhein-Sieg Verkehrsgesellschaft, contains Cologne (1 million) and Bonn (336K) among others. (Population sizes source.)

There’s a lot of heavy industry (especially in the northern part), some rural areas, and a very active and diverse music and sports scene. It even applied to host the 2032 Olympics. (It lost to Brisbane.) It’s served by regional rail and local high- and low-floor light rail systems and trams. Several of the light rail systems use a single tunnel in city centers. Reece doesn’t mention any of the many bus feeder lines and rural express buses, but he does mention other transit modes such as several hanging monorail systems (including the famous Wuppertal Schwebebahn).

While the Puget Sound region is smaller with only four major cities (Seattle, Bellevue-Redmond-Kirland, Tacoma, Everett), we have similar modes of transportation: regional rail (Sounder), light rail (Link), streetcars (Tacoma, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill) and the monorail which was supplied and built in that region, close to Cologne. The Rhine-Ruhr region decided to focus on regional rail connections between its urban centers, while we focus on light rail connections. We plan to double up our downtown tunnel, while the cities in the Rhine-Ruhr region tend to use a single tunnel or one per direction (east/west, north/south).

What other things do you see in the Rhine-Ruhr network? Or how it compares to Pugetopolis transit?

This is an open thread…

This week is all RapidRide as we review the Candidate Corridors analyzed in Metro’s recently published RapidRide Prioritization Plan.

King County Metro Corridor 1049, a potential RapidRide conversion of Route 150, was recently set as a Tier 1 priority corridor, expected to be constructed before 2039 after the current RapidRide projects are finished. Route 150 connects Kent to Seattle via Southcenter and currently averages around 4,000 weekday boardings. When it gets upgraded to RapidRide service, Metro expects a 60% ridership increase and a 22% travel time savings.

This line will be the first RapidRide line to use a freeway alignment. Currently the route follows I-5 and the SODO busway downtown. Because the busway is planned to be taken over by the West Seattle light rail line, it would need to use 4th Avenue South instead.

Continue reading “RapidRide Corridor 1049 (Route 150)”

Metro’s presentation of its new RapidRide Prioritization Plan revealed plans to resume work on RapidRide K and R. The Urbanist pointed out that King County Metro Route 7 was originally supposed to be replaced with RapidRide R by 2021 in the Levy to Move Seattle, but the project was delayed to 2024 and eventually put on hold due to budget issues. Now, the line will resume planning work next year, with opening targeted for 2031.

RapidRide R represents a major upgrade to Metro’s Route 7 that can’t come soon enough. With over 10,000 daily boardings (and growing) the 7 is the one of Seattle’s most important lines. During the pandemic its ridership didn’t drop nearly as much as other lines, and it has since almost recovered to the 2019 level.

Continue reading “Work Resumes on RapidRide R”