Manila’s jeepneys and emerging metro rail network. (Evan Edinger)
Evan Edinger and Not Just Bikes tour London’s bike path network. They compare it to a decade ago and to The Netherlands.
Musical interlude: Via con Me (It’s Wonderful). 1950s Rome with scooters and streetcars.
This is an open thread.
Why have two downtown lots have remained empty for over a decade? The story of the Seattle Times lot and the Pioneer Square Station lot. (Build Core)
Housing price dynamics in the US, UK, and New Zealand. (Patrick Boyle)
This is an open thread.
Link will have a few maintenance reductions in late July and early August.
On Sunday July 26 all day, the Crosslake part of the 2 Line will be replaced by shuttle buses between South Bellevue and International District. The shuttle will run approximately every 10-15 minutes. The 1 Line will run every 8 minutes from Lynnwood to Federal Way to mitigate the loss of westside 2 Line service. (It normally runs every 10 minutes on Sundays.) This is for “planned maintenance”.
From Tuesday July 28 to Thursday July 30 in the late evenings only, the Crosslake part of the 2 Line will be replaced by shuttle buses between South Bellevue and International District. The 1 Line will run as normal. This is for “monthly maintenance”.
From Tuesday August 4 to Thursday August 6 in the late evenings only, the 2 Line will be replaced by shuttle buses between BelRed and Downtown Redmond, to replace line surge arrestors. The 2 Line will run as normal between Lynnwood and BelRed. The 1 Line will run as normal.
See ST service alerts for any updates.
This is an open thread.
A Seattle city committee voted on a slate of amendments to the Seattle Transit Measure (STM) levy renewal Mayor Wilson proposed. The meeting video has the proceedings. It’s three and a half hours long, and parts of it were confusing to me. I watched the debates and votes on 6 of the 22 amendments. This alone took an hour and fifty minutes (from 0:45:36 to 2:36:41 in the video). I got exhausted at that point and didn’t watch the rest, so I’ll leave it to the comment section to report on how the other amendments fared. The entire measure with some amendments passed the committee, and will go to the full city council on Tuesday. Nine councilmembers participated: Rivera, Kettle, Hollingsworth, Juarez, Lin, Strauss, Foster, Rinck, and Saka.
Many readers are most interested in Amendment 13, which would reduce the sales tax rate from Mayor Wilson’s proposal. That amendment failed 2-7. That debate is just before the 2:46:00 mark.
Three amendments (1, 4, 28) were “withdrawn” for refinement, but then they were voted on anyway before the other individual amendments, so I don’t understand that procedure. Amendment 1 (passed) had a long debate; it wasn’t about transit service per se but about committing to certain safety strategies to deter passenger misbehavior. Amendment 4 (passed) requests an annual report from Metro on fare compliance, farebox recovery, reliability, and on-time performance of STM-purchased service, with comparisons to peer agencies and past statistics. Amendment 25 (failed) would have requested a report on expanding the Transit Access Program.
The other amendments I watched were 3 (passed) on how to spend money Metro can’t accept (e.g., if it doesn’t have enough drivers to implement requested runs), and 5 (failed) to extend the levy term three months (the failure means it will expire at the end of 2032).
What else do you see in the results?
Deadly stroad crosswalks are unique to the US. (Safe By Design)
How LA Metro accidentally made itself fare-free. (Alex Davis)
Musical interlude: Walking in LA. I can take a Bus Downtown (You Can Walk Downtown).
This is an open thread.
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”