Zach wrote for STB from 2010-2017, and was our inaugural Staff Reporter from 2015-2017. Zach has also worked for Pierce Transit, Commute Seattle, and owned a bike rental business. As of June 2017 he works at Sound Transit. Zach is a Beacon Hill resident and can often be found biking, riding Link, or driving his Seattle-cliche Subaru.
If you work in an office, you probably take for granted the little things. Standing up to walk to a coworker’s desk. Multiple runs to the coffee machine. Off-site meetings to stretch your legs. The ability to use headphones. Availing yourself of legal pot.
But being a transit operator affords you none of those things. Imagine sitting for 4-8 hours at a time. If you drive a bus or streetcar, your bathroom breaks depend on the whims of traffic. If you’re really late on one run, you may not get a break at all in order to keep your next run on time. Your daily work life consists of hundreds of micro interactions with strangers, asking random questions as you navigate a 40′ or 60′ machine through tight city streets. For many part-timers who work only the peak periods, think about it: you hate traffic, but traffic is what they do for a living.
The pay is decent and the benefits are top-notch, but the work is hard and often thankless. They work hard for you every day, and are far more often the object of scorn than praise, as angry people lash out at them as a captive outlet. Just about anything you’re tempted to be mad about on a bus ride isn’t their fault.
Today is Transit Driver Appreciation Day. As you board a bus today, give your driver a quick thank you for freeing you from having to drive yourself.
Sorry, Tacoma. You’ll be waiting a long time if Olympia and D.C. have their way. (Kaizer Rangwala – Flickr)
The news out of Washington Thursday morning was terrible for urbanists and transit advocates. President Trump’s 2018 budget request intends to pay for his priorities – increased defense spending, border wall construction, etc – partially on the backs of cities. Worse than percentage cuts to grant formulas, Trump’s budget goes further to propose wholesale federal disinvestment from transit projects. The proposed 13% cut to DOT’s discretionary budget represents a paltry $2.4B – or approximately 0.06% of a roughly $4T total – but it falls almost entirely upon cuts to Amtrak, and elimination of TIGER grants, Essential Air Service subsidies, and worst of all, New Starts and Small Starts grants for large transit projects:
…limits funding for the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Program (New Starts) to projects with existing full funding grant agreements (FFGA) only. Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.
This is a very, very big deal for Puget Sound, and especially for Sound Transit. ST2 projects such as Lynnwood and Federal Way may seem secure, but they are both at the penultimate step to construction, just short of a signed FFGA and technically still in Project Development. After years of design, environmental work, planning, andtaxes paid by all of us,Trump’s proposed budget could easily pull the rug out from both the Lynnwood and Federal Way extensions. Since ST3 extensions are obviously physically dependent on ST2 completion, pulling these grants also threatens the entirety of Snohomish and Pierce County’s ST3 Link projects. The expected loss would be $1.17 billion for Lynnwood and $500 million for Federal Way, nearly half the funding for those projects. (East Link, funded by taxes, bonds, and a low-interest TIFIA loan, is not threatened at this time.)
Sound Transit’s taxing authority and its adopted System Plan would remain, of course, and the ST Board would follow established procedure for delaying or cutting projects. From the ST3 financial plan:
For those cases in which a subarea’s actual and projected expenditures exceed its actual and projected revenues and funding sources by five percent or greater, and/or where unforeseen circumstances occur that would result in an inability to substantially complete projects within such subarea’s plan, the Board must take one or more of the following actions:
• Correct the shortfall through use of such subarea’s uncommitted funds and/or bond capacity available to the subarea
• Scale back the subarea plan or projects within the plan to match a revised budget
• Extend the time period of completion of the subarea plan
• Seek legislative authorization and voter approval for additional resources
It is important to remember that part of the Federal Way extension (to Star Lake/272nd) was already deferred this way when the 2009 recession dried up revenues, only to be later promised it would be next in line when revenues revived. A second deferral would be a devastating blow to ST’s perception in South King County, through no fault of its own. Other projects that are threatened include the Tacoma Link extension to TCC, Rapid Ride G, the Center City Connector streetcar, Community Transit’s SWIFT II, and Spokane’s Central City Line. Cities across the country would see their capital budgets gutted, and only Los Angeles would emerge relatively unscathed.
Simultaneously, Olympia continues its assault on Sound Transit for daring to successfully ask voters to enact the taxes Olympia itself authorized. The Motor Vehicle Excise Tax has admittedly led to sticker shock among mostly high-value car owners, but it is also the most progressive of the three sources authorized for ST3. The faux populism of an urban Manhattan developer-cum-President is bad enough, but Olympia Republicans – and crucially, a handful of Democratic allies – are throwing a one-two populist punch with the drive for a directly-elected board.
So 5 months after a historic yes vote on ST3, the agency is facing a three-pronged attack. First, the gutting of federal funding would slow timelines, cancel projects, and/or increase borrowing costs for Sound Transit. Second, Olympia’s proposals to modify the MVET evaluation method would reduce revenue significantly. Third, if Olympia succeeds in creating a directly elected Sound Transit Board, we will lose subject expertise in the middle of a huge capital program and create gerrymandered districts that devalue urban votes.
The result of all this would be a disaster: more adversial transit politics, higher costs, slower timelines, and increased urban-suburban divides. It would be a functional chokehold on Seattle, far and away the region’s primary job center. It would be a double injustice to the suburban poor, pushed out of the city by our unwillingness to build enough housing and stuck in traffic through our inability to build transit. It would be economic sabotage at both the federal and state level.
Assuming the ink dries on a finalized Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant, construction on the $120 million project should start in February 2018, with start of service targeted for mid-summer 2019. With new five-door trolleybuses coming up to every 6 minutes, the line will provide a huge boost to First Hill and improve transfers to the future Center City Connector streetcar, 3rd Avenue and Link light rail, the future ST3-funded Green Line tunnel, the First Hill Streetcar, and the eventual Rapid Ride corridor along 23rd Avenue.
This design update gives us clearer indications of SDOT’s thinking on multimodal tradeoffs – conflicts between buses, cars, parking, and people walking and biking – as well as a draft construction schedule. The project is tentatively phased as follows:
Early 2018: Arthur Place layover, and protected bike lane on E Union Street between 12th and 14th Avenue
Mid 2018: Madison Street from 1st to 6th Avenue, and Spring Street from 1st to 9th Avenue, including a left-side bike lane on Spring from 1st to 8th
Late 2018: Madison from Boren to 11th, including most of the center-running right-of-way
Late 2018-Early 2019: Madison from 17th-25th, in a section where buses will run in mixed traffic
December 2018: Trolley wire work and other improvements on 1st Avenue to allow Rapid Ride G to share a stop with the streetcar
Early 2019: Madison from 11th-17th, and one additional block of protected bike lane on Union between 11th and 12th
Mid-2019: Construction will wrap up in the congested stretch of Madison between Boren and 6th.
Erica Barnett had the scoop late last night that an agreement has been reached in the dispute over the future Alaskan Way surface street. Prior conflicts included those wanting a narrow roadway (bike/ped advocates), fewer or no bus lanes (Alliance for Pioneer Square), and/or more surface parking (Historic Waterfront Association). Appeals to the Final EIS threatened to drag out approval and construction, so the new agreement clears the way for construction to begin in a couple years.
The new agreement between the Alliance for Pioneer Square, SDOT, WSDOT, and King County accepts the preferred design for a 102′ surface highway – consisting of a bike path, wide sidewalks, 2 general purpose lanes, a landscaped median, and bus lanes in the southern half of the corridor – but explicitly requires the city to narrow the roadway to 79′ upon the opening of Link light rail to West Seattle in the early 2030s. Despite ourshared distaste for a new anti-urban Mercer Street on the waterfront, we argued for this same outcome late last year:
I’d suggest two ways forward: 1) work hard to expedite Link to West Seattle to shorten the window in which the waterfront will be an anti-urban mess, and 2) agitate for explicit commitments from the City of Seattle to narrow the roadway upon Link’s opening. An MOU between Metro, the City of Seattle, and WSDOT should require designs amenable to narrowing and commit all parties to shaving 20-40′ off the width south of Yesler Way. Even though urbanists lost the battle for a narrower street, we can still win the war.
As Erica notes, the agreement is nonbinding and future designs to narrow the roadway would still require the alphabet soup of agency approvals, giving lots of veto points for failure. The agreement also unfortunately caps Metro service on Alaskan Way at 195 buses per day, which is less than Rapid Ride C provides on the Alaskan Way Viaduct today, and only about a third of current Viaduct service levels. So the bus lanes we fought so hard for will be preserved but also underutilized. Accordingly, creating a new, reliable Sodo pathway for the remaining two-thirds of Viaduct buses is now the more important issue.
[Edit: as commenters have noted as as Metro has confirmed, the agreement limiting buses to 195 a day is a post-Link plan, whereas in the intervening decade buses will be capped at 650 per day, roughly the current level of Viaduct service. The remaining 195 buses could accommodate one frequent route, such as Route 21 or Rapid Ride H, or more likely a new local waterfront service, given that there will be no transit lanes. We apologize for the error.]
It’s worth remembering that the worst of the problem will be roughly a decade long, during which the Waterfront will be a truly terrible, hostile highway for pedestrian and bike crossing. The post light rail vision is fairly decent, with a wide bike path, wide sidewalks, grade separated transit, no viaduct, and most cars hopefully out of sight in the underground tunnel. But the remaining 6 lanes south of Yesler (4 GP plus 2 ferry queue lanes) are likely permanent, as is the 79′ ultimate width. It could have been a lot worse, but the color of Alaskan Way will match the winter skies: lots of concrete gray.
San Juan Islands from Chuckanut Drive south of Bellingham (Photo by the author)
In Part 1 of this series we looked at the Seattle-Everett segment of a potential high speed rail (HSR) service between Seattle and Vancouver B.C. We looked at the paucity of available right-of-way, the likelihood of repurposing the I-5 express lanes, and the topographical challenges involved in descending from 500′ in South Everett to a sea-level Everett Station. In Part 3 we’ll look at the approach into Vancouver, and in Part 4 we’ll look at inland routes and ideas for suburban terminals. But for today’s Part 2 let’s look at the middle third of the trip, from Everett to Bellingham.
For HSR trips between major cities, the highest speeds are usually reached in the intermediate rural areas, with slower approach speeds to the anchor cities being relatively common. So we would reasonably expect to fly through the farmlands of Snohomish and Skagit Counties. How would we do it? Continue reading “Seattle-Vancouver High Speed Rail Part 2: Everett to Bellingham”
Clallam Transit Route 14 from Port Angeles to Forks Eric C. (Flickr)
On Labor Day Weekend 2010, my partner Sarah and I traveled to Nanaimo, B.C. the cheap and lengthy way: via the Bainbridge Ferry, Kitsap Transit #90 to Poulsbo, Jefferson Transit #7 to Four Corners, Jefferson Transit #8 to Sequim, Clallam Transit #30 to Port Angeles, the Black Ball Ferry, and the former VIA Rail Malahat. We returned to Seattle via the BC Ferries and Amtrak. The experience was luckily seamless, but it really was only for the insane among us. Ever since that trip, we’ve done the sane thing and driven our car anytime we’ve gone to the Olympic Peninsula.
Clallam Transit Route 123 – branded as the Strait Shot in honor of the Strait of Juan de Fuca – will turn the 5-seat ride of old into a simple 2-seat ride, a ferry and a timed bus connection. The bus will make very limited stops, including Poulsbo and Sequim (see map).
The service will run twice daily on weekdays and Saturday, with a morning and evening service in each direction, and one evening trip in each direction on Sundays. There will be timed connections from the Bainbridge Ferry to the bus, and also an onward timed connection to Forks, turning the former 6-seat ride to Lake Crescent and Forks into a 3-seat ride with timed connections.
There is already a one-seat ride between Seattle and Port Angeles, the WSDOT-subsidized Dungeness Line from SeaTac Airport to Port Angeles via Downtown Seattle, Edmonds, and Kingston. Including the respective ferry trips, The Strait Shot will be slightly faster than the Dungeness Line from Downtown Seattle, 2 hours and 50 minutes versus 3 hours.
The proposed $10 one-way fare may seem steep, but as an out-of-boundary service, Clallam Transit intends to run it at 100% fare box recovery. As a 75-mile trip in just 2 hours, the service will be very competitive with what is usually a 1 hour and 40 minute drive. The Strait Shot will also be considerably cheaper than the Dungeness Line, even though the latter includes the ferry fare within its fare.
Clallam Transit is holding a public hearing on the proposal on March 20 in Forks, and online comments may be submitted to info@clallamtransit.com by March 15. If this comes to pass, Sequim, Port Angeles, Lake Crescent, Forks, La Push, Neah Bay, and more will be far more accessible than ever before. Quick car-free weekenders will be a convenient reality.
STB has done a deep dive into the street overhauls and bus service restructures being considered by the One Center City project. If you haven’t already done so, please Participate in the online open house, and Comment at the site. The comment form is just an open-form text box, and there are no surveys to complete.
Providing dedicated resources for enforcement of bus lanes and box blocking
Approving the proposed truncation of SR 520 Routes at UW Station
Improving the transfer environment at UW Station
Canceling or revising the proposed truncations of Routes 41 and 550
Approving the proposed West Seattle-First Hill restructure
We hope that you will take a few minutes to comment in favor of these principles and ideas. Comments are due by Friday. For more background, our posts on One Center City can be found here.
Since its launch a year ago, the First Hill Streetcar (FHSC) has struggled operationally. It takes a wildly variable 20-35 minutes end to end, barely besting a walking pace. Being in mixed traffic, except for a short section of 14th Avenue, renders it useless during periods of gridlock. Its frequency is poor and unreliable.
The many compromises that made Broadway what it is today (retained parking, driving/streetcar lanes, a meandering fixed rail alignment, and a cycle track) mean that the right-of-way (ROW) is fundamentally unfixable without tearing out the rails and starting over. The parking lanes that flank the travel lanes are too narrow and piecemeal to be repurposed, and removing the cycle track wouldn’t help much either.
But SDOT has a few ideas for improving the line at the margins, and they plan on implementing some of them beginning this summer. Signal improvements on Jackson Street will be the first improvements, with lengthened east-west signals and transit signal priority.
After some additional design and feasibility work, SDOT will look at adding a Business Access and Transit (BAT) lane on southbound Broadway between Pike and Marion, the only place on the FHSC corridor with surplus ROW. In this section, there is no parking in the southbound direction and the streetcar hugs the curb. This leaves a roughly 9′ median lane that currently lies empty. In a blog post last week, SDOT said that it intends to try to convert this median space into a southbound general purpose travel lane, turning the southbound streetcar lane into a BAT lane. Functionally, this means only streetcars, buses, and right turns will be permitted.
Converting the center lane to a through lane will remove left turns from Broadway to Pike and/or Union. SDOT will install dedicated right turn cycles to clear the lane of turning vehicles, which should improve flow but will marginally delay pedestrians looking to cross Pike, Union, or Madison.
Current channelization on Broadway between Pike and MarionProposed channelization on Broadway between Pike and Marion
Lastly, SDOT will also tinker with one of the slowest parts of the trip, the crossing of the clashing grid of Yesler, Boren, and 12th. SDOT will ban PM peak left turns and retime the signal at 12th/Yesler.
For all its flaws, 3,000-3,500 people per day are riding the FHSC, and it does represent the best way to get between Broadway, Swedish, and the Yesler Terrace now that Route 9 is peak only and Route 60 deviates to 9th Avenue. So though design constraints will keep SDOT from radical improvements, each of these changes should noticeably help get the streetcar moving a bit better. SDOT estimates travel savings of 3-4 minutes once all improvements are in place.
Ok, so we’re definitely not ready for the Big One. The ‘quake’ that was felt in Seattle on Monday was due to a single tanker truck, overturned and leaking butane at the I-90/I-5 interchange. At 10:30 Monday morning, the overturned truck caused a closure of I-5 in both directions that lasted until after 7pm. Crews worked to upright the tanker but also kept the scene clear for safety reasons.
20 months after we rage-laughed at ourselves on behalf of a salmon truck bringing us to our knees, this closure was far worse. Throw in a bitterly comical coup de grâce of thundersnow, and we truly had a meltdown for the ages. I-5 traffic was dead stopped for 8.5 hours, and southbound drivers’ only respite was to exit onto downtown surface streets, leading to intractable gridlock. Buses quickly fell behind, many of them two hours behind, the First Hill streetcar gave up and stopped operating on Broadway, and at one point there were twelve RapidRide D coaches bunched between Denny and Mercer in Lower Queen Anne. The West Seattle Water Taxi was turning people away on each run, and streets like Stewart were wall to wall with idling buses and cars. Normally placid side streets on Capitol Hill such as Belmont and Boylston – where I tell people I live in ‘the eye of the storm’ – were also gridlocked.
Aside from knock-on delays from tunnel bus unpredictability, Link light rail performed swimmingly, almost as if nothing at all was happening. We received two reports from Eastside commuters who had no trouble traveling from Kirkland to Capitol Hill at 4pm via bus and Link. Twitter was abuzz with frustrated souls wishing ST3 had been finished yesterday.
What was your experience like Monday? What did you notice? Below are a selection of reader-submitted photos.
The seven corridors would come online in quick succession between 2019 and 2024, beginning with Madison BRT (now Rapid Ride G) in 2019 and Delridge (now Rapid Ride H) in 2020. Shortly after the opening of these seven corridors and East Link, SDOT will have met its “10/10” goal of having 72% of Seattle residents within a 10-minute walk of 10-minute or better service. The network effect of Link’s Red and Blue lines with Seattle’s twelve total BRT corridors will be nothing less than transformative. The existing C, D, and E lines will join the seven Move Seattle corridors, a Metro-led Rapid Ride corridor between Bothell-Kenmore-Lake City-UW (Route 372), and Sound Transit’s coming BRT along SR 522 and NE 145th St.
