All posts by Mike Orr

A Golden Gardens Direct ride from the beach to central Ballard, partly with a view of the bike trail and its linear woods. (Scooby Doo and the Goblin King) This is the real-time trip block by block, so if you find it too slow you can go into Settings -> Playback Speed and speed it up. There’s two points of dialog at the middle and end, so you can return to normal speed for that and hear the shoutouts to STB.

While I was watching this I discovered there are at least three channels with videos of individual Pugetopolis bus/train routes, in case you want to see what a certain route or its neighborhood is like. This one caught my eye…

Route 224: Duvall to Redmond Transit Center (Seattle Transit)

This reminded me of my Snoqualmie Valley bus trip, which included this route. I did the trip in 2014 and again in 2022: 554 to Issaquah City Hall, 208 to Snoqualmie, Valley Shuttle to Duvall, 224 to Redmond TC, 545 to Seattle. Now I could take Link from Redmond Station, and in the fall the 215 will improve access to Snoqualmie.

The 224 is interesting because it has several contrasting parts: (1) growing small town (Duvall), (2) deep in the woods, (3) Redmond Ridge new urbanist development, (4) fields with occasional houses that haven’t changed since my 1970s childhood, (5) downtown Redmond. Redmond Ridge has little bus service so everyone has to have a car, but on my second trip I noticed it has good internal walking paths, and I saw a surprising number of people out walking. A long-ago STB author I hadn’t seen in years got on the bus in Redmond Ridge and got off somewhere in east Redmond. There’s more to Redmond Ridge than this camera view can show, so I’d recommend taking the 224 yourself through it and looking all around.

The 224 is hourly weekdays until 8 pm, and no service weekends. This is one of the routes I think should be more frequent and should run all day and evening every day, so that people in a new urbanist cluster would have ready access to transit and a viable alternative to driving. Every neighborhood should have that, especially one with integrated businesses. This is why we need more transit funding to make it happen. Of course, I also wish Redmond Ridge were adjacent to central Redmond so it weren’t so isolated.

The movie Trains will be shown On July 9 at 7:30pm at SIFF Film Center. (The webpage takes a minute to fully come up.) It’s a 2024 Polish film that’s a wordless montage of 20th-century vintage train footage, a kind of Koyaanisqatsi of rail. The director is Maciej J Drygas. I saw Koyaanisqatsi in the 80s and am looking forward to this. Thanks to Martin Pagel for finding this.

This is an open thread.

Holiday service announcements: Metro holiday service with Sound Transit, streetcars, and the King County water taxis. Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit, Everett Transit, Kitsap Transit, Monorail, Washington State Ferries announcements. Trailhead Direct (choose route from Routes menu; holiday section is in top right).

Below is a breakdown by day. If something is critical to you, double-check the agency’s announcement to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes.

Continue reading “Friday Roundtable: July 4 Weekend Service”

Vancouver BC chose a Skytrain extension in the eastern Surrey-Langley suburbs over a competing surface light rail (LRT) proposal with a different L-shaped route. The video discusses the tradeoffs between the two, how to build an elevated rail extension, and the socioeconomic factors for the station cachement areas in both alternatives. (The B1M)

This is an open thread.

What are Barcelona superblocks (superilles) really like? What do they look like, how many people use them, and what do they do in them? Here’s an overview:

By CityFixer. Seattle is briefly mentioned at 9:30-9:41.

Some shorts on the superblocks: (1) Streetfilms overview, (2) a zen garden like effect with flat rock seats, (3) the Sant Antoni superblock.

Are there other general topics you’d like to see movies on? What has the Sunday Movie column not covered yet?

This is an open thread.

Reece Martin (RMTransit) resurfaces with a discussion with Dr Jonathan English on how process issues affect the quality of transit projects. They call it “engineering issues” vs “phone call issues”. Engineering issues are straightforward technical problems, like building Link on a floating bridge or a tunnel in dubious soil. Phone call issues are those where a phone call could fix the problem or reduce costs: a call between politicans or agencies or with environmental-impact stakeholders. It might be more than one call or another communication method or a series of meetings meetings, but a phone call is a nice symbolic image.

They look at the goods and bads of Toronto’s transit: the recent east-west subway/light rail lines — Eglington Crosstown (#5), Finch West (#6), Sheppard East (#4) — platform screen doors or short fences, streetcars, too-close stop spacing, or insufficient street priority or signal priority. They look at why these happen, and how a “phone call” could have made these better. They also posit that social media played a key role in getting politicians to commit to fixing the notorious Finch West line slowness. And also that proposing to fix a problem throughout the city can overcome opposition more than proposing one of the same fixes at a time in a few individual locations.

Continue reading “Bonus Movie: Process”

Three videos by J-Man Explores.

Riding all the Community Transit Swift lines in one day, with the history of each transit corridor. Swift is the limited-stop BRT in Snohomish County, 13-30 miles north of Seattle, serving Lynnwood and Everett and surrounding cities. Transfers from Link light rail are at Shoreline North/185th station and Lynnwood City Center station.

Seattle to Olympia and back with no backtracking. Southbound is via the Bainbridge ferry and rural bus routes in the west sound. Northbound is the usual way via I-5 express routes. (Olympia is 60 miles south of Seattle, the state capital and a small city. Tacoma is in between.)

Circumnavigating the Admirality Inlet. Where is Admirality Inlet? It’s on the west side of Whidbey Island between roughly Freeland and the Port Townsend-Coupeville ferry, and the corresponding east side of the Olympic Penninsula. In a 5-hour layover in Port Townsend he explores the town, an extra Jefferson Transit route and wooded trails, and meets deer.

The J-Man Explores channel also has many shorts ranking various transit routes.

We have a Transit to World Cup Events guide, and a Seattle for Visitors transit guide.

This is an open thread.

Riding the oldest subway cars in the world. They’re 1950s cars in the Buenos Aires Metro on Line B. (Trains are Awesome)

Honorable mention to the Muni Metro F Line with a variety of vintage streetcars from the 1950s and earlier. I rode a few early 20th century international ones and found them bumpy, but the 1950s San Francisco cars felt as smooth and quiet as a modern streetcar.

The video recomments RielesDePlata (Silver Rails), a channel about Argentina rail transit by Marcos Villena. The original is in Spanish but the text and audio defaulted to an English translation for me. The English voice has a Spanish accent and is slightly halting, so he may dub it himself.

The T Line in Tacoma. (Classy Whale)

King County transit and growth planning in 1975. (KOMO News) We had a comment thread on it a week ago.

This is an open thread.

How big an apartment can you rent in a city’s most walkable neighborhood without a car, for the same cost as a 1000 square-foot rental in its most typical suburb with a car? Ray Delahanty answers that for the 26 largest metro areas in the US. Seattle is at 6:23. (CityNerd)

Q&A about the tradeoffs of car-free living in Montreal. There are challenges “but they don’t exactly line up with what people think”. (Oh the Urbanity!)

This is an open thread.

Update: The resolution passed with some of the amendments. Analysis at end of article.

The Sound Transit board meets today at 1:30-5:00 to revise the ST3 system plan to reduce costs. The meeting page has links to the agenda, resolution, amendments, reports, and information on how to view the meeting and give public testimony in person or remotely. A video of the meeting will be posted to ST’s YouTube channel within 48 hours after the meeting.

The proposed resolution postpones some ST3 projects to get costs down to the available debt limit. 13 amendments reverse or soften some of the changes. As reported, Dan Strauss proposed focusing on Ballard while deferring the second downtown tunnel. Vice Chair Claudia Balducci proposes studying automation and other cost reduction measures and other details. Another resolution would increase the car rental tax. Each resolution requires a supermajority vote to pass.

This article is to collect comments from the meeting and its outcome.

Continue reading “ST Board Meets to Postpone ST3 Projects”

Sound Transit boardmember Dan Strauss is proposing three amendments to the ST3 system plan update on Thursday. The full list of amendments is expected Tuesday, and it sounds like there will be a lot of them. Strauss is a Seattle City Councilmember for northwest Seattle. His amendments are:

1. Prioritize building the Ballard-Westlake Link segment now, and postpone the second downtown tunnel (DSTT2) until after it.
2. Use the 70% of unused debt capacity ST has, and ask Olympia for permission to issue longer-term bonds. Strauss says there are some “limited, commonsense adjustments” to debt policy that ST can make.
3. Set a target date for finishing Ballard Link, rather than leaving it indefinite.

To me, #1 is consistent with our call to build the best parts first. I’d still like to see automated trains and canceling DSTT2 (especially to eliminate the excessively passenger-hostile tunnel-to-tunnel transfers), but this is an important step. Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. If somebody offers me half of what I want, I’d rather take it, and leave the rest as something to try for later.

Re #2, there may be room to optimize existing debt capacity, but I’m still not convinced of longer-term bonds. Re #3, setting a target date for Ballard makes sense, and would avoid leaving people in limbo for years.

Update: Seattle Subway endorses #1 and #3, has a petition to sign for it, and urges people to contact their ST boardmembers starting now.