• Forget gondolas, turn Silver Line Green.
• ST is hiring a Senior Transportation Planner.
• The mean musical chairs of rising rent and home prices.
• A bold, divisive plan to wean Californians from cars.
• For low-income renters, the affordable housing gap persists.
• Pollution impacts heighten the need for lids or freeway removal.
• Seattle underestimates by millions the cost to run its new streetcar line, Metro says.
• Olympia passes housing bills advancing CLT, homeless funding, and WSCC Lodging Tax.
• Innisfil, Ontario went with Uber instead of public transit‚ and says it saved $8 million per year. Keep in mind that Innisfil is “36,000 people spread over 270 square kilometres,” so this result is what you’d expect.
• Public transit officials are “struggling to understand” Trump’s proposed cuts.
• UW light-rail escalators re-started after 2-hour breakdown ($) Friday.
• Retail turmoil triggers new visions for shopping malls like Northgate ($) in Seattle.
• A closer look at plans to add safety improvements in Green Lake & Wallingford.
• How to survive the Cascadia Earthquake? Tips from seismologist Lucy Jones, “the Beyoncé of earthquakes” ($).
• Can London become a people-centric smart city?
• As city grapples with homelessness, leader tasked with response resigns.
• Here’s how WMATA says it would spend $15.5 billion over a decade.
• Waze launches free carpool app in Washington state matching drivers, riders ($).
• British Columbia goes all in on rapid transit, funds high-speed rail study.
• Modernism in London’s “Metro-Land.”
• Paris rolls out “on demand bus stops” in bid to fight sexual harassment. Note that King County riders already have this.
• Why are the NYC subway’s operating costs so high?
• Light rail frequency: promises and priorities. Another helpful debunking of the the stubborn myth that rails guarantee high-quality service.
• Construction costs and experience.
• How signal timers after a 1995 subway crash led to NYC’s current transit crisis.
• Feds join suit against MTA alleging ADA violations.
• The myth of “forcing people out of their cars.”
• Why outer suburbs in the East and Midwest have stopped booming.
• Portland wants help plotting bus-only lanes, bikeways and safer crossings in central city.
• Falling transit ridership poses an “emergency” for cities, experts fear.
• Don’t delay the downtown bike network.
• City Council briefed on downtown circulator and Seattle streetcar.
• Why Sound Transit doesn’t want you walking down a stalled escalator.

This is an open thread.

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Seattle Center and the Seattle Monorail have a survey in the field:

With plans underway for renovating KeyArena and bringing a new NHL hockey franchise to Seattle, Seattle Center and Seattle Monorail Services are planning ahead by exploring how to make it easier to use the monorail to travel to and from Seattle Center and connect to Link Light Rail.

With One Center City (possibly?) on the horizon and an NHL franchise looking likely at a rebuilt Key Arena, many people are looking to Seattle’s oldest grade-separate transit system, the 1962 World’s Fair Monorail, to evolve from a tourist curiosity to a legitimate piece of transit infrastructure.

Key Arena will re-open in the early 2020s, but the arena’s light rail station won’t open until the mid-2030s. That leaves a 10-15 year gap of concerts and sporting events that could benefit from improved mobility.

ORCA support (which we advocated for), the bare minimum for integration into the transit network, is coming in “spring of 2019.”  Improved access to the station and a re-design to allow direct access from the street (as opposed to the Westlake Center Food Court) are also under consideration:

@SeattleMonorail study (1/2):
The medium cost option would allow for 6,000 people an hour. pic.twitter.com/tC56zsRIbV

— Andrew Koved (@Andrew_Koved) March 14, 2018

A Bell St. station and a doubling of frequency (also possible, given enough funding) would be icing on the cake.

Take the survey and let the Seattle Center and Monorail folks know what you think.

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Route 7, one of the most popular bus lines in the city, is getting a RapidRide makeover in 2021.  Metro and SDOT are kicking off the public process for the Rainier Valley line with an online open house through April 8.

10,800 weekday riders make the 7 the 5th busiest Metro route, behind RapidRide lines C, D, and E and the RapidRide-in-waiting Route 40.  Rainier Avenue is also a very dangerous street for pedestrians, and bicycle facilities are non-existent.  And while the buses themselves come fairly frequently, the also get stuck in traffic and bunching is common. All of which is to say there’s plenty of room for improvement here.

The open house materials break the 7-mile route into four segments:

• Chinatown to Mount Baker, which includes Jackson Street along with the widest, straightest, northernmost section of Rainier Ave. Improvements here could include a Business Access and Transit (BAT) lane for bus priority or a bike lane, but not both.
• Mt. Baker to Columbia City on Rainier Ave., which would continue to be a 4- or 5- lane general purpose traffic street
• Columbia City to Rainier Beach on Rainier Ave., where a BAT lane is already planned
• Downtown Rainier Beach to its light rail station on S. Henderson St., which could see protective buffer added to the bike lanes at a cost of some parking spots

Pedestrian/greenway crossings would be added throughout the route.  A few stops would be consolidated and the remaining ones would be upgraded to RapidRide standards.

Bike access would be via a “parallel” neighborhood greenway, which is unfortunate — there really is no true parallel street to Rainier Ave.  The materials include a lengthy note explaining why bikes and transit are not both feasible in the narrow section of Rainier between I-90 and Mt. Baker.  It stinks, as ever, that bikes and transit have to be pitted against one another, but as you can see on the right an unbuffered bike lane hugging a bus lane would not be a pleasant experience.

Finally, Metro is undecided about the tail end of the route at Prentice St.  Read our previous takes from 2011 and 2014 if you want to go deep on some ideas for what to do there.

The survey ends April 8.

Update: clarified SDOT’s involvement in the project

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Be sure to thank your bus driver today and every day.

This is an open thread.

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Kenmore wants to bring a new mix-used development to the shores of Lake Washington and eventually replace the cement and asphalt plants.
Credit: Lizz Giordano

Home to one of the last remaining industrial ports on Lake Washington, the city of Kenmore longs to shed its manufacturing past and cultivate a new identity. Nestled at the top of the lake, the bedroom community wants to give passers-by a reason to stop.

“Rather than just fixing potholes and writing traffic tickets, we wanted to be about building community and getting people connected to each other,” said Rob Karlinsey, Kenmore’s city manager.

To do that, the city became a developer. Several years after incorporating, Kenmore bought a dilapidated 10-acre lot and resold the land after placing certain conditions on the parcels. A couple of economic cycles later, Kenmore’s new town square is taking shape — a year-round community space, 300 units of multi-family housing, and a medical clinic replaced an abandoned park-and-ride lot and a run-down grocery store.

“The new town square area is giving Kenmore something residents never had before, which is a place for people to gather,” said Mark Abersold, a current resident who moved to the city six years ago.

“We are hoping for a ripple effect that will be a catalyst for more redevelopment,” Karlinsey said, proudly showing off the new town square to the STB.

Continue reading “Kenmore: Casting off an Industrial Past”

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• Rainier Valley through the years.
• In Kenmore, urbanism takes root in suburbia.
• Could Pittsburgh public transit handle Amazon HQ2?
• LA taps the brakes on freeway expansion.
• How a new transit system could hobble Montreal.
• Missed connections, a treatise.
• The MTA genius challenge is as bad as expected.
• Excellent principles for shared mobility.
• Dublin, California city council rejects 220-unit TOD project. “Too massive… wrong colors.”
• Portland uses bikes to rethink 70 years of strip malls.
• State legislature passes big supplemental transpo bill.
• In Munich, putting people before cars makes transit work so much better.
• Morning Crank: Adapting parking policies for the next 50 years.
• More housing, less bureaucracy: That’ll solve the housing crisis.
• Asian flavored H Mart in talks to fill key retail space at Capitol Hill Station.
• Northgate Mall plans huge overhaul ($) with housing, offices as North Seattle transforms.
• Former SDOT Director Scott Kubly takes a job ($) with bike-share company LimeBike.
• Steilacoom’s mayor, foe of Sound Transit’s $54B plan, now on agency’s board ($).
• Here’s Sound Transit’s plan to make the display signs at Capitol Hill Station work.
• Minneapolis leaders consider allowing fourplexes citywide to relieve housing shortage. Yes!

This is an open thread.

28 comments