All posts by Peter Johnson

This is the third and final post in our series about the latest designs for the West Seattle and Ballard Link extensions. This post covers West Seattle.

On September 5th, Sound Transit released its latest concept work on the West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions. We’re examining each segment in-depth, from north to south, station by station.

More detailed information, including Sound Transit’s score of each station site and track segment, can be found here. Sound Transit’s new outreach website has visualizations and other information. Here’s where you can read Part One (Ballard) and Part Two (Downtown & SLU).

Since the Level 1 analysis, ST eliminated the Delridge station options that were well off of Delridge Way, leaving only alignments that continue west on Genesee Street. Nearly all alignments that point west at Alaska Junction are also gone, as they mesh poorly with vague future plans to continue to White Center (the west-pointing ST3 representative project remains). The majority of surviving options tunnel under the Junction.  All have a potential ridership of between 10,000 and 12,500 within the station walksheds.

Staff continue to make it clear that a tunnel will add costs.  The three tunnel options here increase the overall project costs by anywhere from $500M to $1.2B, in addition to creating increased schedule risk. If a tunnel were to be selected, supplemental funding from the City would be required.

Duwamish Crossing

ST presented three alignments of the water crossing: a bridge north of the West Seattle Bridge, a bridge adjacent to the south edge of the West Seattle Bridge, and a bridge south of Harbor Island with a tunnel through Pigeon Hill.

The Pigeon Hill alignment seems likely to be eliminated. It would be the most complicated feat of engineering, and therefore the most expensive option at $1.2B more than the representative project; the river crossing would be the widest, and the tunnel would have to be a deep bore through the hill. ST staff seemed lukewarm about the alignment.  

Continue reading “Link Plans Part 3: West Seattle”

This is the second of three posts in our series about the latest designs for the West Seattle and Ballard Link extensions. This post covers Uptown and South Lake Union.

Last Wednesday, September 5th, Sound Transit released its latest concept work on the West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions. We’re examining each segment in-depth, from north to south, station by station.

More detailed information, including Sound Transit’s score of each station site and track segment, can be found here. Sound Transit’s new outreach website has visualizations and other information. Read Part One here.

Since the Level 1 alternatives, there have been a few changes. The all-Mercer St. alignment, the 8th Avenue First Hill Stop, and the idea of having only one stop in South Lake Union have disappeared.

Uptown (Seattle Center)

The underground Uptown station will sit in a neighborhood dense with jobs, residents, and events ridership. The station will lie on an east-west, tunneled track segment roughly on the axis of 1st Avenue N. The question is whether the station will be built on Harrison, Republican, Mercer, or Roy.

Sound Transit identified four factors in the ultimate decision: tunnel and portal alignment, service for Key Arena & Seattle Center, bus integration, and TOD potential.

Roy scores the lowest by those metrics. Bus integration and Seattle Center service would be poor, though there is more upzoning potential near the station site. Continue reading “Link Plans Part 2: Uptown, South Lake Union, Downtown, and Sodo”

The Sound Transit Board’s capital committee on Thursday made the early construction of the North 130th St. more likely. The agency’s staff and elected leadership also continued to express concerns about the Trump administration’s hostility to transit projects.

The committee also voted to elevate Downtown Redmond’s new Link station, change the Federal Way Link federal grant proposal, study improvements to Seattle RapidRide, and install new diagnostic units on light rail vehicles.

N 130th Street Station preliminary engineering

As we predicted Wednesday, the North 130th St. Link station got one step closer to opening at the same time as the Lynnwood Link Extension in 2024, instead of 2031. The Sound Transit Board’s Capital Committee encouraged (but did not formally vote to recommend) a plan for ST staff to begin preliminary engineering on the station.

Until today, the board’s Snohomish County officials opposed building the station before Everett got Link service. Edmonds Mayor Dave Earling, the only Snohomish County official on the committee, supported the move to begin engineering work. Earling’s cautious endorsement of the move was a victory for Seattle officials, especially City Councilmember Debora Juarez, who campaigned on the issue.

Continue reading “North 130th Station moves closer to early construction”

Sound Transit will brief the public and stakeholders on the latest West Seattle-Ballard concepts tonight, and what it shows could make a ruckus. So far, ST has tipped a preference for siting the Chinatown station and segment on 5th Avenue South. But a coalition of neighborhood groups and transit advocates is rooting for a 4th Avenue station and alignment.

Maiko Winkler-Chin, the executive director of the Chinatown/International District Public Development authority (SCIDPDA), is one of the community leaders arguing for the 4th Avenue alignment. The First Hill streetcar project made the neighborhood’s businesses and residents wary of rosy government agency claims about construction impacts.

“For me, my responsibility in the neighborhood is to make sure that we don’t suffer big impacts, or we don’t suffer impacts at all,” Winkler-Chin says. “This neighborhood has dealt with a lot of transportation impacts. I don’t know if people know how bad it was to have the First Hill streetcar built in this neighborhood. I was told that was going to be like a paving project. That as a paving project that never seemed to end.”

“We had an electrical cutoff in the neighborhood, for 15 or 16 hours. We had multiple water cutoff notices—attempts at water cutoffs, and actual water cutoffs. The timing and coordination of doing that sort of work is really difficult because of the unique nature of the businesses down here.”

Winkler-Chin says that some restaurants in the neighborhood were surprised when their water and electricity went out, and says that retailers suffered major drop offs in business due to sidewalk and street closures.

Winkler-Chin says that Little Saigon’s retailers were hit particularly hard. Construction crews closed the 12th and Jackson intersection during the lunar New Year. That’s one of the Vietnamese diaspora’s most cherished holidays, and the neighborhood’s busiest shopping season. According to Winkler-Chin, Little Saigon merchants didn’t know that the closure was coming, and the closure depressed customer traffic and disrupted deliveries.

No street level retailers or apartment buildings occupy the superblock between Jackson and Seattle Boulevard South on 4th. The parallel stretch of 5th features several large apartment buildings, street-level retailers and restaurants, and the west side of the Uwajimaya complex. As a result, Winkler-Chin says, the 5th Avenue project would be much more disruptive.

Winkler-Chin also points out that the 4th Avenue alignment could reactivate Union Station as a public space and multimodal hub. Transit advocates, neighborhood groups and downtown leaders have long wanted to better integrate Union and King Street stations into the surrounding neighborhoods.

“I’m trying to minimize impacts to this neighborhood,” Winkler-Chin says. “Other people want a vibrant and functioning Union Station. If we could do both, that’s great.”

Sound Transit systemwide ridership went up 2.9 percent in Q2 of 2018, when compared to Q2 of 2017, according to the latest ST ridership report.

Riders boarded ST vehicles 12,442,840 times. The average weekday saw 163,681 boardings, a 2.4 percent increase from Q2 2017.

Link (6.2 percent more boardings) and Sounder (5.1 percent) both saw substantial ridership growth. Link’s average weekday ridership grew by 5.4 percent over Q2 2017. Westlake (11,827 boardings on an average weekday) and Husky Stadium (10,263 boardings) stations were first and second in Link ridership. Rainier Beach’s ridership grew the most, with a 14.6 percent increase in weekday ridership.

ST Express bus boardings went down a marginal 1.2 percent, which the agency says is “partially due to park-and-ride closures for East Link contruction [sic].”

The only bad news comes from Tacoma. Tacoma Link ridership is down 9 percent from Q2 2017. ST says “the total ridership decline was related to fewer special events and the temporary closure of 200 parking stalls at Tacoma Dome Station for renovation work started in June.” So, we can safely blame the drop (among other things) on Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, who played their respective May 22 and August 25 shows at CenturyLink Field, rather than the Tacoma Dome.

The region’s dramatic, sustained transit ridership growth defies the national trend. ST meets a need that STB readers have collectively seen for decades. Or, as ST more prosaically put it:

“As the region continues to grow, Link is perceived to be a good choice for commuting.”

Madison BRT, also known as RapidRide G, is running into problems with bus procurement. Although the Trump Administration’s foot-dragging isn’t good for any transit project, it is these procurement delays that threaten to delay opening. At the moment, is unclear if these problems will actually delay the planned 2021 delivery.

RapidRide G will use special buses with doors on both the left and right side of the vehicle. The initial plan selected trolleybuses that may have off-wire capability.

According to a source at SDOT, the vehicles intended for the corridor—60 foot, BRT-optimized Xcelsior trolleybuses from New Flyer—can’t handle the steep grades of Madison Street. The source added that New Flyer intends to discontinue trolleybus manufacturing after an ongoing order for San Francisco is finished. Neither SFMTA nor New Flyer responded to requests for comment. Metro spokesperson Jeff Switzer referred STB to SDOT for comment on the trolleybus grade issue.

SDOT spokesperson Mafara Hobson:

Continue reading “Procurement Woes for Madison BRT”

The big news from the July 26 Sound Transit Board meeting was that the Federal Way Link extension will cost about $460m more than originally planned. It may not be the last project to cost more than expected: at the meeting, CEO Peter Rogoff briefed the board about mounting challenges in delivering capital projects on time and on cost.

“Sound Transit has the financial strength,” Rogoff said, “to withstand increased project costs, or lower than anticipated federal funding or tax revenues, or a recession, but a combination of any two or more of these factors would put considerable stress on the agency’s ability to deliver projects on schedule.”

Sound Transit can’t make any difference in a competitive labor market, or the increasing cost of real estate, or prevent a recession, but it is able to exercise control over design, alignment, and the like:

“We have already discussed that, first and foremost, controlling our work to reduce project costs will be critical for delivering our projects,” Rogoff said. “This includes the discipline to not expand the scope of projects.”

Notably, agency-perceived expanded scope is one of the reasons First Hill station didn’t make it through the ongoing ST3 planning process, although cost-increasing alternatives in West Seattle and Ballard did advance.

Meanwhile, the federal funding picture is completely opaque. The Trump administration, like most Republican administrations, is hostile to transit projects. Trump transportation officials are doing their best to kill off projects that were thought to have the go ahead. In Albuquerque, for example, local officials constructed a BRT line under the assumption that they had $75 million in Federal Transit Authority (FTA) funds on the way. As of July 18, the administration hadn’t ponied up.

Continue reading “Rogoff: Sound Transit faces headwinds for on time and on cost project delivery”

Several of the world’s largest oil companies have committed nearly a million dollars to defeating Washington Initiative 1631, which would institute a carbon emission fee on the state’s largest polluters in order to fund affordable housing and green energy projects.

Two “against” campaigns have been organized to oppose I-1631. One was organized by the Association of Washington Business (AWB), and the other was created by the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA). The WSPA is an oil industry group whose membership includes Exxon, Shell, Andeavor, and BP.

According to the latest campaign finance filings with the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), two campaigns will spend at least $992,006.19 to defeat I-1631. The vast majority of that spending–$916,974.88–comes from out of state oil producers. The campaign will probably raise more money. Initiative campaigns can raise funds until election day, and there is no cap on contributions for PACs working on initiative votes.

Five multinational oil companies have pledged to contribute the following to the oil industry’s campaign:

• $396,031.40, BP
• $201,186.54, Phillips 66
• $162,827.17, Andeavor
• $60,067.84, Chevron
• $56,826.50, Shell

The AWB campaign is, so far, much smaller than the WSPA campaign. The Washington lobbying group has only raised $14,500 so far. Washington businesses and trade groups have spent or pledged $75,031.31 across both “against” campaigns. Washington-based donors include a trade group for general contractors and a Tacoma oil refinery.

Continue reading “Big oil is already spending almost $1m to oppose carbon pricing”