All posts by Seattle Subway

Seattle Subway is an all-volunteer, grassroots organization dedicated to promoting high quality transit for Seattle and the Puget Sound Region on the fastest possible timeline. Posts are generally written by the Seattle Subway Communications Team. Seattle Subway is a Washington State nonprofit corporation, pending application as a 501(C)(4).

Seattle Subway Primary Endorsements 2023

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Introduction

We are excited to share our 2023 primary endorsements for Seattle City Council and King County Council.  Seattle Subway has been endorsing local races since 2015 and our methodology has changed slightly over the years. 

For the primary this year we’re endorsing candidates that are most aligned with our vision and interests in a vacuum, thinking first and foremost about rail expansion, then about who is best for working cities. We use every source of information available to us to make endorsements starting with our candidate questionnaires, the MASS candidate forums, and including local candidate coverage and statements candidates make.  

In the general election, we start over.  If the candidates we endorse in the primary don’t make it to the general election, or if we did not endorse in our far more idealistic process of the primary, we will completely reconsider the options for our endorsement in the general election.

A huge thank you to all of the candidates who responded to our questionnaires, engaged in the MASS forums, and want to make the city and county a better place to live.  Without further ado, here are our endorsements:

Seattle City Council District 1: Maren Costa
Seattle City Council District 2: No Primary Endorsement
Seattle City Council District 3: Efrain Hudnell & Alex Hudson
Seattle City Council District 4: Ron Davis
Seattle City Council District 5: Nilu Jenks
Seattle City Council District 6: Dan Strauss
Seattle City Council District 7: Andrew Lewis

King County Council District 2*: Girmay Zahilay
King County Council District 4: Sarah Reyneveld
King County Council District 6*: Claudia Balducci
King County Council District 8: Teresa Mosqueda

*There will not be primary elections in King County Council Districts 2 and 6.

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Call to action: don’t let the Sound Transit board make expansion beyond ST3 impossible

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Feasibility of construction and financial feasibility of future expansions beyond ST3 requires that Sound Transit consider how we’re going to implement and connect those expansions now.

Seattle Subway has 5 fundamental pillars of rider experience: speed, reliability, accessibility, expandability, and safety. 

Ensuring expandability, and the financial and operational feasibility of future expansion, is fundamental to making sure ST3 is a good transit investment, and Sound Transit seems to have forgotten that. We need your help to remind the Sound Transit Board at their meetings on July 7th, July 14th, and July 28th. Sign up to testify or send an email today with links below.

ST3 can be a fantastic expansion of our regional system, but it will not be the end of light rail expansion for our region. As the Seattle Transit Blog Editorial Board wrote in 2018, ST3 must be built for the future. Light rail lines must be designed so that future expansion can happen without high cost reconstruction of the lines we’re planning today, or future service disruptions during construction. When ST3 is complete, 13 of 30 Seattle’s “urban villages” and “urban centers” will be connected, but completing our vision map would connect 27 of 30 urban villages and centers in Seattle. There are four areas where Sound Transit needs to explicitly future-proof the system as part of ST3 so future expansion remains financially and operationally feasible, saving money and reducing operational impacts long term:

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Call to action: tell the Sound Transit board to reopen study of an ST3 Link light rail station in the heart of Ballard

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The Sound Transit Board failed to advance 20th Avenue NW in Ballard to Draft Environmental Impact Statement Study. Sound Transit must study a Ballard station in the heart of Ballard.

Seattle Subway has 5 fundamental pillars of rider experience: speed, reliability, accessibility, expandability, and safety. 

For many reasons that Seattle Subway has laid out previously, Sound Transit must reopen study of a Ballard station that serves the heart of Ballard. Both Sound Transit’s proposed 15th and 14th Avenue NW station options fail to serve the heart of Ballard and Sound Transit’s prior study of a station at 20th Avenue NW confirmed that it would serve more people and have better transfers. Providing accessibility for the most visitors, workers and residents is fundamental to a good transit investment, and Sound Transit seems to have forgotten. We need your help to remind the Sound Transit Board of this at their upcoming meetings on July 7th, 14th, and 28th. 

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Seattle Subway’s summary recommendations for the ST3 DEIS

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As the public comment window for Sound Transit’s West Seattle Ballard Link Extension draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) comes to a close, it’s time to make your voice heard about what will be built as part of ST3. 

As always, powerful stakeholders who do not prioritize transit quality are very well represented in this process – we need your voice to make sure that our leaders hear from future transit riders.  When evaluating options, we focus  on what will be best for transit riders: reliability, expandability, and accessibility.  

There were a lot of surprises in this round of Sound Transit planning. Some of them were positive, such as options in West Seattle that seem to address both community and transit riders’ concerns, and cost parity between elevated and tunnel options in both Ballard and West Seattle.  

Some surprises were cause for alarm, such as deep stations, slow transfers, and lack of options that serve Central Ballard and South Lake Union. Sound Transit made significant steps  during this round but still has a long way to go. Sound Transit needs to study more options; because of that, we are not ready to recommend specific options for every alignment and station presented. After reviewing the draft plan, these are Seattle Subway’s recommendations for giving feedback on Sound Transit’s DEIS.  

BALLARD: 

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SLU Station Can Be Better, Cheaper, and Easier to Build on Westlake

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When looking at the two options presented by Sound Transit for South Lake Union (SLU) in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), we’re struck by how poorly the station will serve South Lake Union.  The Harrison option is deep at about 120’ and all the way on the western edge of SLU.  The Mercer option is slightly less deep at about 85’ but its location west of highway 99 isn’t really in SLU and involves an extremely poor pedestrian environment.  Both stations are monumentally difficult to build and expensive due to their proximity to highway 99.  We can avoid all of those issues and build a station that serves South Lake Union far better by building the SLU station on Westlake.  

The Center of SLU deserves a station.

A station under Westlake located approximately between Harrison and Republican has a lot of advantages. Though it’s still slightly to the west of the center of South Lake Union, the walkshed includes nearly all of this dense neighborhood.  It’s aligned with the Denny station which means isolated construction impacts and the potential for a shallow station.  It can also cross SR 99 further north where it isn’t as deep while avoiding the need for a complex and expensive mined station under the highway.  

Central SLU is somewhere around Westlake and Republican

A SLU station under Westlake aligned north/south can also serve the dense population and job centers to the north and east far better than the proposed DEIS SLU station locations.  Aligning the station north/south will also enable a future Link extension along the highway 99 corridor much easier – opening up one of the best corridors for transit oriented development opportunities in the country.  

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ST3 Transfers Must be Excellent

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Convenient transfers can transform a good transit network into a great one. When you don’t think twice about switching lines, the network is really doing its job. Unfortunately the designs proposed for ST3’s two new massive transfer stations, Westlake and International District (ID) Stations fall well short of that mark. These designs feel like they come from principles steeped in “transit is only for commuters” or “transit is for other people” rather than what they should be:  transit intended to be the primary way everyone gets around the city.

So what makes a good transfer?  Some of that is subjective – people don’t want to have to cross the street or get rained on in the process, but most of it is objective:  How fast can I get to the platform with the other train I need to catch?  Anything over three minutes for an average rider is too long: after making it to the platform you still have to wait for the next train. Getting from one line to another has to feel as close to seamless as possible.

ID Station

Of the ID station options presented in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, only two seem to be worth further discussion: 4th and 5th Avenue “shallow.”  As we noted in our deep stations post, we were disappointed to see that shallow doesn’t actually mean shallow – it just means less deep than the absurdly deep options.  Sound Transit excluded a real shallow 5th Avenue option from consideration in a previous analysis phase due to construction impacts and considered a shallow 4th station too risky due to proximity to the existing DSTT.  Not having either option to discuss or recommend at this phase is a major miss because rider experience matters and shallow stations provide the best rider experience possible.

Of the “shallow” options presented, 4th seems to have the most potential. It could be a real transportation hub located between the existing ID station and Sounder/Amrak with direct transfers from buses on 4th Avenue. It also appears to be the hardest to fix for riders without switching to a station design that is as shallow as the existing ID station. Very common transfers from the line that terminates in Tacoma and Ballard are expected to take four minutes. We don’t see obvious ways to speed that up but we’ll leave those solutions to engineers. Sound Transit estimates that 43% of the daily 34,200 riders will arrive via transfers. That means every minute shaved off transfer times will collectively save these 14,700 riders transferring at this station ten days, every day.

Very common transfers add four minutes to each trip. ℅ Sound Transit.  
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Are ST3’s Deep Stations a Problem?

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Like most observers, we were shocked when we saw how deep Sound Transit’s station plans were for the new downtown tunnel. Beyond engineering complexity, deep stations can present a problem for riders: getting to and from the surface isn’t always easy and fast.  This concern is particularly amplified by the location and intention of these stations, downtown stations are expected to be high-ridership and a lot of trips will be short. 

Before the pandemic, a large portion of trips in the current Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) both started and terminated in the tunnel.  We would expect demand for these kinds of trips to be even higher when the new ST3 tunnel opens, which adds high value tunnel destinations at Denny, South Lake Union, and Seattle Center. That demand might look elsewhere if the rider experience is bad, adding 5 minutes to both sides of a short ride just to get to the platform doesn’t really make sense for riders. The scale of the investment detaches from the utility of the infrastructure.  In short – this tunnel is very expensive and better be very good too.

So, is it possible to have deep stations but maintain a good rider experience?  The center of this issue for riders is about speed and reliability to get to and from the train platform.  The depth of the station isn’t an issue if you and 200 of your fellow riders can get from the platform to the surface in a couple of minutes.  That means that escalators are pretty much out as a primary means of getting people in/out of a station that is over 100 feet deep. Sound Transit’s DEIS presented the following depth options for each station: Midtown:  140-190, Westlake: 125-140, Denny 100-125, SLU 85-120, Seattle Center 85-120.  That means it’s very likely that every station in the new DSTT would fail riders if the primary conveyance is escalators.  


  Midtown station, ℅ Sound Transit.  Riders are skeptical.  

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ST3’s Ballard Station Has to Serve Ballard

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As we review the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) results as presented by Sound Transit, the decision to cut out all the central Ballard station options stands out as a huge mistake. There is only one Ballard station in ST3 and we have only one chance to get this right. We need a Ballard station where it will serve people who live in and visit Ballard:  20th and Market, directly in the center of the urban village.  

A place is not defined by its largest intersection. The EIS includes two station location options, 15th and Market and 14th and Market. Though a station at 15th and Market is marginally better than a station at 14th and Market, neither serve the entertainment district on Ballard Avenue well or maximize usability for most people who already live in Ballard. The forthcoming Ballard station doesn’t need to rely on new transit oriented development; there is already an urban neighborhood there in need of transit service already  – this must be development-oriented transit.

The good news is that Sound Transit studied the 20th tunnel option during Pre-DEIS work and discovered the obvious:  A 20th Avenue station performed significantly better for riders than the other options presented. The bad news is the station was cut from consideration before the EIS process for cost reasons. But an interesting thing has happened since then: the EIS analysis brought cost parity between elevated and tunnel options in Ballard. An elevated 15th station with a drawbridge now costs the same as a 14th tunnel now.  Would that cost parity extend to a 20th station?  It might. We need Sound Transit to go back to the drawing board and find out, because the difference for thousands of daily riders is significant.

20th is much better than 15th for riders (and 15th is better than 14th.)  
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Action Alert:  SSB 5528 In House Transportation Committee

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Senate Bill 5528 is moving!  It passed the Washington State Senate with Bi-Partisan Support and is now scheduled for public hearing in the House Transportation Committee on Thursday, at 1:30pm.  

We need your help to make this bill become law. 

To show your support for more and better transit:

  1. Go to the House Committee Sign In
  2. Select position:  “Pro”
  3. Enter your information
  4. Verify that you are not a robot
  5. Click “Submit Registration”
  6. That’s it!

A huge thank you to all of the sponsors of this bill in the Senate:  Senators Pedersen, Liias, and Hawkins; and in the House:  Representatives Hackney, Berry, Fitzgibbon, Ryu, Valdez, Wicks, Chopp, Pollet, Bergquist, Macri, Lekanoff.

If you support more transit service at local levels, you can help make it a reality, it takes under 30 seconds: sign in pro for the House Hearing of 5528.
State Senate Roll Call results: thank you to the Senators that voted in favor of SSB 5528

SB 5528 Gives Transit Power Back to Voters

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Senate Bill 5528’s local option will provide significant benefits for regional and citywide rapid transit expansion.

The 2022 legislative session is starting off with a bang this week. Before the first week is done Senate Bill 5528 will have a hearing in the transportation committee. The bill picks up where last year’s HB 1304 left off but expands the function to a regional level under the governance of Sound Transit.  A city, subarea, county, or combination thereof will have the option to create an “Enhanced Service Zone” to target the investments their voters care about most

SB 5528 allows the Sound Transit Board to give voters the opportunity to fund faster construction timelines on existing projects and/or fund new transit improvements and services for individual cities and sub-areas within the Sound Transit district. 

What is possible is only limited by what the individual cities and their voters want. Some sample potential projects and Enhanced Service Zones:

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