The story of building London’s Victoria Line in the 1960s. It featured new construction techniques, like tunnel boring machines and freezing the ground to stabilize it. There were challenges like retrofitting existing stations for interchange with the new line, including diverting trains into new tunnels by constructing a new underground track junction around an operating tunnel.  The line also introduced new automatic train operation systems and fare collection.

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New regulations from the Federal Railroad Administration could open up exciting new options for passenger rail in the Northwest.   These updates have been in the pipeline for some time now and are finally ready for public review.

The first of the new rules creates a new “Tier III” for high-speed passenger rail. Tier I covers speeds up to 125mph (i.e. Amtrak Cascades, Sounder), Tier II goes up to 160mph, and the new Tier III (220mph) relates to true high-speed trains such as we might some day see in California.

The second and more interesting rule change provides an alternative crash safety standard for Tier I (and only Tier I) trains, for tracks that are shared between passenger and freight rail.  Streetsblog has a good summary:

The FRA expects the new rules will enable railroads to use trains that are safer, more energy efficient, and cheaper to operate. The rules will allow American passenger train operators to purchase rolling stock designed to European safety standards (but not Japanese standards), without going through an expensive waiver process.

“It was an obstacle for all foreign railway manufacturers to bring any state-of-the-art trains into the country,” said Alois Starlinger, a board member for the Swiss train maker Stadler Rail.

Building trains to unusual U.S. safety standards for the small American passenger rail market made rolling stock purchases needlessly expensive. Opening the door to standardized European train specifications will significantly lower prices.

Running cheaper, lighter Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU) trains on existing freight rail tracks could open up some more options for passenger rail.  As our own Bruce Nourish explained when the regs were first announced:

To get a sense of the economic and environmental cost of America’s overbuilt trains, let’s look at a simple number, the weight of the trains, taking Sounder North as an example. To a first order approximation, the environmental and economic cost of building and operating a vehicle (of a certain type of fuel) is proportional to the amount of metal that goes into it. A three-car Sounder North train weighs about 240 metric tons (50 t carriages, 120 t locomotive), while the Stadler 2/8 weighs 79 metric tons. So, roughly speaking, we could comfortably move Sounder North’s passenger load with a third of the fuel and materials we use today. This would do much to bring down Sounder North’s painfully high cost per boarding; to boot, a DMU train would almost certainly accelerate faster, ride more smoothly, and be quieter to the neighbors. DMUs on this line could be a huge win.

A win indeed.  Where else in the Northwest might we see DMUs playing a bigger role? Discuss in the comments.

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• Port of Seattle will enclose the Link/airport walkway soon within 3 weeks, eyeing plans to add a moving walkway.
• Pronto will die in April 2017. There will be no bikeshare in Seattle for at least a few months.
• But Cascade Bicycle Club is taking a victory lap for the overall bike component of the budget.
• Tacoma to “increase density by allowing smaller multifamily projects and townhouses in some new areas” and “allowing detached accessory dwelling units.” Make a note, Seattle.
• Sounder riders not welcome at Freighthouse Square.
• 279 new units in the Spring District.
• Link quarterly ridership keeps climbing, and now exceeds regionwide ST Express ridership despite covering a fraction of that region.
• ST’s credit rating upgraded.
• Shooting on Route 169.
• Sightline goes deep on Inclusionary Zoning.
• ST awards $152m contract for Roosevelt Station; construction starts early next year.
• West Seattle Junction bus shelter saga continues.
• Meet the YIMBYs.
• Happy 7th Birthday, Swift.
• How $29m in housing funds got to yes.
• King County rezoning some rural parcels.
• With the fast ferry measure now law, Kitsap Transit gears up.
• Sammamish Mayor complains about Metro cuts, but then Sammamish voted against the measure that would have maintained suburban bus hours.
• The only problem with this planned Capitol Hill building is it’s too small.
• We make it very hard to go carless, mainly due to land use decisions.
• Elaine Chao will be the next US Secretary of Transportation.
• Mass transit is back on TV.
• Volvo offering the world’s largest bus.

This is an open thread.

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Sometimes the quest for narrower streets creates strange bedfellows. This is certainly the case with the future Alaskan Way, whose proposed 9-lane “stroad” (surface highway) has upset a conflicting array of local advocates. Walk, bike, and Vision Zero advocates rightly clamor for a smaller, safer, slower roadway (reduce the general purpose lanes!). The Alliance for Pioneer Square has appealed the Final EIS, wanting to narrow the roadway without losing general purpose capacity (kill the bus lanes!). Meanwhile, the Historic Seattle Waterfront Association wants the same footprint but fewer travel lanes (more parking!).

Last year, there was enough public comment against the wide roadway to trigger another round of environmental review. But given that 2 general purpose lanes and 2 ferry queue lanes were seen as the immutable baseline for the project, the city sought to study the only lane reduction it had available, axing the bus lanes. This occurred despite the city’s insistent reassurance that it had no intention of implementing what it was about to study.

A year later, despite significant public comment to narrow the roadway, little has changed in the Final EIS. Giving each interest what they wanted (GP lanes, ferry lanes, bus lanes) always favored a wide roadway, and transit priority seemed to be the only allocation ever really at risk. So where do we go from here?

Though I certainly share the frustration over a bloated surface highway, I also believe the fight to reduce general capacity is now lost, and that further attempts at appeal will only endanger transit priority.

But transit priority must remain, even at the cost of a wider roadway, because the near-term alternatives are either politically impossible or objectively inferior. Though the proposed Pioneer Square/Main Street pathway was promising, neighborhood groups flexed sufficient muscle to scare Metro off. And now that the Lander Street Overpass is funded, there has been some rumbling about shifting transit from the waterfront onto 4th Avenue South or the Sodo busway instead. But this would be a grave mistake, with Metro’s 2013 analysis showing an up to 5-10 minute travel time penalty for transit riders, with $2,500 per day in additional operating costs for Metro in perpetuity. Even with the Lander Overpass, a Sodo pathway would add up to 10 signalized intersections if using the Sodo Busway, or up to 13 if purely along 4th Avenue S.

Luckily, there is a deus ex machina in the room in the form of Sound Transit 3. High capacity light rail will create brand new right-of-way to West Seattle by 2030, or possibly sooner if permits are expedited, bonding limits are loosened, or unexpected federal assistance arrives. With the surface highway not proposed for construction until 2020, that means West Seattle could be dependent on waterfront surface transit for less than a decade. 

Metro’s Long Range Plan already shows no transit on Alaskan Way in 2040, with Link absorbing nearly all demand from West Seattle to Downtown. Only the Delridge RapidRide (via 4th Ave S) and a new West Seattle-SLU express route (via the Deep Bore Tunnel) would provide additional Downtown service.

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.

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Frank and I will tape a podcast soon. If there’s a question you’d like us to answer, please leave it in the comments over the next couple of days.

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Back in January 2015, Sound Transit announced a $1.3B federal loan for East Link, the largest single disbursement in the history of the “TIFIA” program. Taking advantage of the continuing low cost of capital in the wake of the 2008-2009 recession, the loan provided favorable repayment terms and a rock-bottom interest rate (2.38%).

Well, here comes Round 2. At Tuesday’s Sound Transit Board meeting, the Board will vote on a TIFIA Master Credit Agreement for another $2B in low-interest (3%) loans for remaining ST2 projects. Northgate Link would get $615m, Lynnwood $658m (this after getting a $1B grant), and $629m for Federal Way. As Mike Lindblom reports, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) notified Sound Transit of the offer the day after the election, with the FTA apparently impressed by ST3’s passage and the assurance of stable tax income.

Sound Transit’s financial modeling has consistently been conservative, assuming above-market interest rates for both ST2 and ST3. Positive financial surprises like this have tangible benefits for taxpayers and transit riders. Compared to traditional bonding, East Link’s TIFIA loan opened up $200-300m in agency capacity, and Sound Transit expects these new loans to do the same:

The TIFIA loans are expected to generate between $200-$400 million of additional financial capacity for Sound Transit compared to current assumptions for traditional fixed-rate tax exempt bonds at the current market rate. The current TIFIA borrowing rate is approximately 2.98% vs. the 5.25% rate assumed for the ST2 program.

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