CHS:

The Seattle Department of Transportation, which is handling funding and construction for the King County Metro line, estimates the project will cost $14.6 – $17.5 million, with $9.4 million already secured through federal grants. Construction will include installing trolley poles, overhead wires, and traction power sub stations. The second phase of the project is expected to get underway next year, setting up the 48 to go electric in 2018.

Now that the 48 has been split from the northern half, electrification is much easier than it would have been for the 48 that ran to Loyal Heights. There are just two segments of 23rd Avenue, totaling 1.7 miles, in need of electrification.  We first wrote about the possibility of an electrified 48S back in 2011.  It looks like all the funding is coming together.  Happy times.

The 48 runs along SDOT’s RapidRide+ Corridor 4, which exends south to Rainier Beach, setting up a potential restructure that combines the 48 with the already-electrified 7.  That’s a long way off, however.  SDOT’s Bill Bryant told me that the “key for both the Rainier and 23rd corridor services is that they will become RapidRide lines.”  Combining them into a single route, Bryant said, would only happen after a good deal of analysis and public outreach.  As we’ve learned, messing with the northern half of the 7, from Mount Baker to the ID, could be difficult.

An electric, RapidRide+ 48 with BAT lanes and signal priority running on a newly-repaved 23rd Ave will be a big boost for the CD.  It’ll be even better once frequent connections to Madison BRT (2019) and East Link at Judkins Park (2023) open.

Following the lead of the Transit Riders Union, we’ve written a bit lately about the pain points introduced when disjointed interagency fare policies meet an evolving system in which Sound Transit plays an ever stronger role. With the ULink restructure incentivizing transfers between agencies at a greater clip than ever before, much noise has been made about the ineligibility of Metro’s human services bus tickets with Link. (See previous writing on this here and at The Stranger.)

The basic problem is that while Metro and Sound Transit both issue deeply-discounted tickets for their own services to human service agencies, those service agencies do still have to pay for them. Given that Sound Transit’s tickets are good only on Link, and Metro’s are valid systemwide, agencies strongly prefer to use their limited dollars on Metro’s tickets. In a network being progressively restructured to rely on Link, that’s an effective service cut for those who can’t pay any fare at all.

While we await the interagency policy alignments necessary to fix the problem – we’ve suggested free ORCA cards, broader Lift access, the elimination of paper transfers, and fare alignment between the agencies – yesterday Metro and Sound Transit announced an interim fix. The two agencies will keep the same programs and policies, but will simply issue a single joint ticket, perforated with two Metro 1-zone passes and a Link Day Pass.  Service agencies will pay $11 for a book of 10 combo tickets. The internal administrative burdens of these programs will remain, as will the disparate fare policies, but this step should serve the immediate need while long-term solutions are found.

Congratulations to TRU for effectively organizing movement on this issue. Their planned protest for Saturday will still be held, morphing into a celebration and call for long-term solutions.

After a delay of over a year, Sound Transit opened the south platform at Mukilteo’s Sounder station on Monday. The platform and accompanying pedestrian bridge wesre opened with a ribbon-cutting that afternoon attended by Mukilteo Mayor Jennifer Gregerson, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff, Everett City Councilmember and Sound Transit Boardmember Paul Roberts, and Snohomish County Executive and Sound Transit Boardmember Dave Somers. The celebration was originally scheduled for Monday, March 28, but was delayed because of a mudslide earlier that day on the tracks between Mukilteo and Everett.

All northbound Sounder trains headed towards Everett now use the new platform, requiring alighting passengers to cross over the tracks on the new pedestrian bridge. The original platform, which will now only serve southbound trains, was opened in 2008 and was intended to be quickly supplemented by a second platform, with only temporary shelters installed. Instead, the project to build the second platform was delayed during negotiations with BNSF Railway over service time needed for construction, which began in the summer of 2014.

The $18.1 million project was originally scheduled to open in early 2015, but the date was pushed back—first to autumn of that year and later into 2016—because of a limited time-frame for construction imposed by BNSF and state inspectors identifying problems with the new elevators on the overpass in late October; it was declared complete in January and is not expected to exceed its budget despite the delay. The station is the last Sounder station to receive a second platform and to use a second track and is one of the last pieces of the 1996 Sound Move measure to be built and opened.

As of 2015, Mukilteo Station has an average of 142 boardings and alightings every weekday. It is located adjacent to the Mukilteo ferry terminal, which is planned to be replaced with a new terminal sited closer to the station by 2019, and is served by three Community Transit routes and two Everett Transit routes.

• The Seattle Weekly  looks at the $611M for parking in the ST3 Draft Plan.
• Metro is looking at a potential restructure of Late Night/Owl bus service and wants to hear how you use transit late at night (survey closes May 4).
• Demolition of the first 11 homes along 112th Ave SE are set to begin as East Link’s construction begins with the south tunnel portal in Downtown Bellevue. See Sound Transit’s map of the demolitions in its latest Project Update.
• County Councilmember and ST Boardmember Dave Upthegrove is looking to trade arterials for trails, will run for Commissioner of Public Lands.
• Swelling reserves mean a 59,000 service hour boost for Pierce Transit. The new hours get them roughly half way back to their pre-recession levels.
• BMW’s ReachNow carsharing service is now live in Seattle, with similar pricing to Car2Go with much nicer vehicles. More coverage coming on this soon.
• If you missed TCC’s forum on ST3, check out the combined livetweets of STB, The Stranger’s Heidi Groover, Publicola’s Josh Feit, and Laura Bernstein of @YIMBYsea.
• Improvements on Rainier Ave S – and a good chunk of bike projects citywide – are being quietly delayed. The Stranger’s Charles Mudede takes another look at Rainier’s daily chaos.
• The Beacon Hill Station bike cage is now open, offering unlimited parking for $50/year.

This is an open thread. 

Video by Oran

Pete Lorimer had an excellent suggestion in the thread about the arrival of peak 3-car trains last month:

If Link is running a mix of three and two-car trains, people won’t want to wait at the location of the third car in case the next train doesn’t have one. Then they will have to walk forward to the second car, thus overfilling that car compared to the first car. In fact, if you wait at the third car location and there isn’t one, you increase the chances of being left behind due to a fully loaded second car.

If our train arrival/announcement system was better, I would suggest they change the announcement to add info about the train length.

“The next train… Northbound… is arriving in… 2 minutes… It is composed of… 3 cars.”

Comments on all aspects of the service changes are welcome on this post.

Across the region, everyone is talking about how long Sound Transit 3 projects are going to take, and there is no shortage of opinions about what the sources of delay are.

As it stands, the 7.1-mile segment from Ballard to Chinatown/International District, including 9 stations and a tunnel from Mercer Street south, would cost between $4.5 and $4.8 billion and arrive in 2038, or 22 years after the vote. It would attract an eye-popping 114,000-145,000 boardings per day, although “only” 60-74,000 riders would use the genuinely new service area north of Westlake.

So what takes 22 years? Sound Transit’s plan allows six years for the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS); five for final design, permitting, and Right of Way (ROW) acquisition; and 11 years for construction, including roughly two years for post-construction testing and float.

There is scope, in theory, to accelerate that timeline. 11 years of planning is conservative. For example, Lynnwood Link’s EIS started in 2011 and they expect to break ground in 2018. Sound Transit executive Ric Ilgenfrtitz noted that the length of this period “depends on the quality of collaboration between us, the City of Seattle, and the FTA [Federal Transit Administration].” He cited Lynnwood of an example of excellent collaboration, so consider that a floor for the potential length of these phases.

However, eliminating the four-year delay in planning requires not only a cooperative attitude from the City, but also a change in the financing plan. As money comes in, it shifts between subareas to focus on the projects currently underway, although the sums come close to matching subarea revenues over the life of the package. At the moment, Ballard and Downtown fall somewhere in the middle, ahead of Issaquah and Everett and behind Tacoma and West Seattle.

11 years is a longer construction period than previous ST projects. It’s hard to say at this point that there’s any fat to cut, because 11 years is believable given the scale of the project. The new tunnel will have more underground stations (6) than ST will have constructed by 2023 (5). Moreover, two of these stations (Westlake and 99/Harrison) will have to be mined, like Beacon Hill, because they will pass under key infrastructure that blocks cut-and-cover construction. The U-Link tunnel is a bit shorter (3.5 miles vs. 3.15 miles), has four fewer stations, and took seven years (2009-2016) to complete while famously being ahead of schedule.

So: Ballard/Downtown is projected to open in 22 years. It could be 18 under two conditions: that the planning and preparation phases go smoothly, and we reach a regional consensus to prioritize it in the funding plan.

The Issaquah Press is reporting that Issaquah Mayor and Sound Transit Boardmember Fred Butler has suffered a heart attack Sunday evening and is in stable condition at the Issaquah campus of Swedish Medical Center. Mayor Butler, 75, is a jovial and well-liked advocate for Issaquah at all levels of government.

City Council President Stacy Goodman is serving as mayor pro tempore temporarily, and I have an email in to Sound Transit asking if she will be serving on the ST Board in his absence, if Butler will be able to participate remotely, or some alternate arrangement. I’ll update the post when I hear back.

STB wishes Mayor Butler the best in his recovery.