• Mayor McGinn proposes a new ship canal crossing.
• Chris Karnes pushing for a decision on the Tacoma Link alignment, says it will bring more development downtown.
• Another Tacoma Link open house is this evening from 4-7.
• Guerilla bike lane done with polite class, but shows up timidity of City plans.
• Support builds to make Good To Go passes work on ferries.
• Pierce Transit Board declines to change the salary system for nonunion employees.
• No PT vanpool cuts for at least three months.
• Tales from the bus tunnel.
• Empire Builder has close call with a mudslide, thankfully no injuries. Lots of photos here.
• PSRC looking for members for a “Transportation Alternatives (TA) Program Citizens Advisory Committee.”
• Stabbing on the 36 “without warning.”
• Man vs. Link train in Rainier Beach.
• President’s 2014 budget includes $110m for U-Link, as expected (p.31).
• RapidRide E construction beginning soon.
• Renton putting in sidewalks, temporarily closing some bus stops.
• Ballard District Council survey is not fond of Metro’s changes last year.
• Ideas to improve Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.

This is an open thread.

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By the end of April, an important milestone in the East Link saga will be complete.  If all goes to plan, the Sound Transit Board will adopt its preferred cost savings options in Bellevue, and effectively finalize the alignment.  The cost savings work, which hopes to find savings to fund a downtown tunnel, will be one of the last major steps in the project prior to final design.  At this point, many see the cost savings ideas more as give-and-take concessions rather than the intense tug-of-wars over the alignment that took place in 2011 and prior.

Last week, Sound Transit hosted an open house with an update on the work, which included new cost estimates, concept sketches (.pdf), and environmental findings that were adopted as part of a SEPA addendum to the Final EIS.  According to ST spokesperson Geoff Patrick, there haven’t been any ground-breaking developments since the last update, although sentiment from various groups has solidified either for or against certain cost savings options.

Continue reading “Decision on East Link Cost Savings Nears”

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For those with kids who are looking for a reason to take Link down to the Rainier Valley, here’s a great (and cheap!) Wednesday night out with the family.

Start off with a Link ride down to Columbia City Station, then make the short walk to Rainier Ave and the historic heart of Columbia City.

There between Edmunds and Angeline you’ll find the recently opened Ark Lodge Cinemas in the old Columbia City Cinema space.  Every Wednesday the first showing of the evening is a ‘Stroller Park Wednesday’ show:

We dim the lights half way so it’s not pitch black and we turn the sound down. Children 3 and under are free.

Keep your tickets because it is good for half off an appetizer at Rookies just a little south on Ferdinand.  It’s very family friendly, and combined with Wednesdays all-day happy hour its a very reasonably priced dinner out.

Finish up with some classic arcade games and ice-cream at Full Tilt and you’ve got quite the evening out with the family!

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Andrew already wrote about the City Council’s decision not to extract more taxes, but instead to simply ban outright construction above 160′ along Lake Union. The Times had a breakdown of who stood where:

Joining Bagshaw in supporting 160-foot limits were Sally Clark, Jean Godden, Bruce Harrell, Nick Licata and Tom Rasmussen. Richard Conlin said “240 feet makes a whole lot of sense” but added he was prepared to support 160 feet…

Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Mike O’Brien said Monday they favored the concept of 24-story towers in exchange for extraordinary public benefits. Although they had balked at the mayor’s proposal for so-called Block 59, they said other options might have made added height more appealing.

I think reasonable density advocates can disagree about the extent that various development taxes deter developers from building as many units as they otherwise might. I therefore at least understand the views of Burgess and O’Brien. And Mr. Conlin is clearly taking the most density he can get. In an email exchange with me he confirmed he was “fine with 240 feet” and spoke well the “compromise” that gets  “as much residential as possible.”  As far as I’m concerned he’s the hero of this sorry episode.

But the six councilmembers that pushed a strict height limit were clearly pursuing a different objective altogether.  Curious as to what considerations overcame the enormous moral imperative for as much density as possible, I emailed all six of the 160′ faction. Responses are below the jump.

Continue reading “Where Seattle’s Council Stands on South Lake Union”

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Last Wednesday I attended CityClub’s “civic cocktail,” where they mix together two seemingly unrelated topics in a participatory panel discussion and happy hour.  The program, which will air on the Seattle Channel soon, featured Peter Hahn from SDOT representing the transportation POV.  You might not think that transportation and art have much to do with one another, and to be honest a good chunk of the hour would not have disabused you of that notion.  Nonetheless, there were a few flashes of insight worth highlighting.

David Brewster, peeping up from the audience, noted that both arts and transportation in Seattle have a downtown orientation.  The problems of a downtown-centric transit network have been covered extensively on this blog (duplication of routes, lack of all-day neighborhood access, etc.); the downtown orientation of our major arts institutions is similar.  Later, a musician/bus driver noted that getting home from a concert late at night on public transit was incredibly difficult.  This is a point that can’t be overstated.  A thriving arts and cultural sector is absolutely dependent upon late-night public transport.  This might be a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t surprise me that The Seattle Opera and Seattle Repertory Theater were founded within five years of Forward Thrust going to the ballot.

My thoughts, however, kept coming back to the role of artists in redeveloping (some might say “gentrifying”) neglected urban areas. Since at least the 1980s, there’s been a tried-and-true pattern of urban redevelopment in many American and European cities: artists move into marginal neighborhoods in search of cheap rents, neighborhoods become fashionable, artists get kicked out.  This is the subject of a recent documentary about artists getting kicked out of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood as rents reach Manhattan levels. (Native Americans would likely take issue with the idea that the artists of the 80s and 90s “discovered” Williamsburg, of course.)

Even though this pattern of artist-led redevelopment has been true of many cities around the world for some time (including Seattle), part of me wonders if it’s still the driving force it once was. My sense is that we’ve gotten to the point in infill development where we jump right past the artists-move-in stage and skip right to the high-end condos.  This was especially apparent to me on a recent trip to Washington D.C., where basically every neighborhood in the city is being redeveloped at a dizzying pace. Perhaps it’s due to the changing nature of art itself, with many artists trading large warehouses for MacBooks. Or maybe their role has been co-opted by a generation of self-proclaimed creative types who want the cheap rent but don’t need the industrial space.  Or, maybe I’m dead wrong, and artists are still doing their thing and I’m just old and out of touch and I don’t see it anymore.

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Last week, the Washington State Senate released a bipartisan transportation budget (summary [PDF]) for this biennium. It’s quite unlike the previous budget we saw from House Transportation chair Judy Clibborn: major highway expansion is almost completely missing, and it includes almost no significant new revenue. However, it does hurt Sound Transit and high speed rail.

The transit part

There are two troubling changes to Regional Mobility Grants, state grants for transit capital and operations.

The first is how it’s appropriated: in the past, it’s simply been competitive. If a project is more cost effective, it ranks higher on the list. This makes a lot of sense! The Senate budget added an “agency cap” – any one agency can’t get more than 25% of total projects. This is effectively an attack on Sound Transit – it cut the $7 million grant to the Tacoma Trestle project.

This seems shortsighted on the Senate’s part. The Tacoma Trestle is a 100-year-old, wooden, single-track trestle leading up to Freighthouse Square, the Tacoma station for Sounder commuter rail. It would be replaced with a new concrete double track structure – a structure required not just for Sounder expansion, but also to add Amtrak Cascades trips required for the state to keep its $800 million in federal high speed rail funding, and therefore a state responsibility. It’s also the second highest ranked RMG project in the state. This would be a good time to call your Senator and say “I want high speed rail, don’t cut the Tacoma Trestle!”

The other major issue is a word game in the summary linked above. Normally, once a grant is allocated, the money stays allocated to that project until it’s needed, and sits in a state RMG account. The RMG account accrues interest, which can be applied to other projects later. Not this year: in the Senate version of the budget, the interest is zeroed out, rather than going to the next project on the list. It’s a quiet way of claiming RMGs are “fully funded” but changing what full funding means.

The highway part

Continue reading “Notes On the Senate Transportation Budget”

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For the next few months,  Sound Transit is installing new sound walls in Tukwila around Central Link. The impact on riders is that from April 1st through the end of July, on weeknights trains will drop to 20 minute frequencies after 9pm. Usually it runs every 10 minutes until 10pm and every 15 minutes after that.

I asked ST spokesman Bruce Gray a couple of questions about this:

Are you making any exceptions for game nights?

We’ll be able to have the same number of trains/seats online to clear out games as we’ve ever had. We’re able to clear those post-game crowds pretty quick by having consists ready in the Stadium pocket and ready to roll out of the base. Post-game headways will be more like peak headways because of the extra trains on the line.

We expect big things from the Ms this year and we’re going to make sure their fans have a good experience getting to and from the games on Link.

Why not use the turnaround track at Rainier Beach to maintain headways for most of the line? Between 9 and 10, for instance, it’s pretty straightforward to turn around every other train at RB, maintaining 10 minute headways for most of the line and 20 minutes on the Tukwila segment. Unfortunately, after 10pm the math doesn’t work out so neatly.

Our opps folks call it “operationally inefficient.” It also provides more opportunities for things to go wrong and throw the entire line off schedule… And keep in mind we’re really only talking about an extra 10 min headway between 9-10. After that it’s an extra 5 from the usual schedule.

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This is eight months old.

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Streetcars are not the solution to every transportation problem, but they do have their role. In particular, they move people within a neighborhood, from one neighborhood to an adjacent one, and connect to rapid transit. Although buses fill this role too, they don’t support as many riders on a route because of rail bias, branding, capacity issues, and a slow and rough ride. So while I fully support Seattle Subway‘s push for a high quality rapid rail network throughout our city, I also think we need the Transit Master Plan’s (TMP) streetcar network.

In fact, I don’t think the TMP goes far enough. There are other corridors worthy of study. One is along Rainier Avenue South. The corridor has good land use (for neighborhoods outside the core), high transit ridership, and is rapidly developing, but it was only tapped for some bus improvements in the Transit Master Plan and largly ignored in the Bicycle Master Plan. The standard attributes of a streetcar would fix many of the problems with existing service and such a project would serve as a catalyst for a series of transportation enhancements.

As the map illustrates, the line would connect to the First Hill Streetcar tracks at Rainier Avenue and Jackson and run south to S Othello Street, turn west and terminate outside the Othello Link Station. The remainder of the 7’s current route could be serviced by a trolleybus tail (see Bruce’s Better 7 post). Operationally, it could be run as two interlined routes that split at Jackson; the old 7 going to Downtown (and beyond?) and the old 9 going up First Hill and then Capitol Hill. Such connections would further realize the original purpose of the First Hill Streetcar: as a substitute for a lost Link stop. For those on First Hill or in the Central District wanting to head east or south on Link, there would be no need to backtrack to IDS. Instead, there would be easy connections to East Link at I-90 or Central Link at Mt. Baker Station. Riders would experience the speed and comfort benefits that come with a streetcar and the increased mobility that comes with connections to 5 Link Stations (Othello, Mt. Baker, I90/Rainier and either Capitol Hill or International District Station).

Find out why else it’s a good idea below the fold.

Continue reading “The Case for a Rainier Avenue Streetcar”

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