King County Metro has a very specific function. Their voter base is spread throughout the county, and it is their job to provide the highest quality transit service to the most of these citizens that they can. If you were in charge of the county and you started from scratch, with no buses and just a map and some data about the county, how would you design transit? First, you’d look at where most people lived and worked, since you know that commuting is a very strong transit need. You’d see that the largest job center was downtown Seattle, with Bellevue and Redmond as secondary job centers. And you’d see that a third of your citizens live in Seattle, but two thirds live elsewhere in the county. Then you’d consider your transit options.
Appropriate use of transit technologies (Matt Gangemi)
Lily Point Marine Park, Point Roberts – Photo by Flickr User Loutron Glouton
I’ve always been drawn to geopolitical oddities. Humans frequently draw straight, arbitrary lines and the terrain makes a mockery of it, such as Minnesota’s Northwest Angle or the Kentucky Bend. Other examples, such as the bizarre Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, are so anachronistic that you can almost imagine medieval barons drunkenly gambling away their various land holdings parcel by parcel.
Washington is home to one of the stranger examples in the United States, Point Roberts, a ‘practical exclave’ on the tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula just south of the Vancouver suburb of Delta. Jutting just past the 49th parallel makes it part of the United States, one of (I believe) only two settlements in the western U.S. accessible by land only via Canada (the other is the tiny hamlet of Hyder, Alaska).
Point Roberts also makes a great day trip or short overnight visit, and it’s easily accessible via transit. When I lived in Vancouver BC I visited twice, each time spending a lazy half-day circumnavigating the peninsula on foot.
The easiest way to get to Point Roberts car-free from Seattle is as follows:
Take the first Quick Coach of the day from the Seattle Center Best Western (200 Taylor Ave North) to Bridgeport Station on the Canada Line. The trip takes 3 hours and costs $51 round-trip.
Transfer to TransLink Route 601 (map) to South Delta. The ride takes 50 minutes and costs $3.75.
Either stay overnight, or catch the last Quick Coach back to Seattle.
Here’s a overview map:
The transit connections are easy. TransLink #601 runs every half hour 7 days per week until 10pm, and the border crossing is open 24/7/365. Anchoring your trip at Bridgeport Station also gives you the option to explore Vancouver’s rail transit with ease. Taking Amtrak Cascades is also possible for longer stays but will take roughly twice as long and require three transfers to reach Point Roberts (Amtrak–>SkyTrain–>Canada Line–>601).
Land use here is very similar to the San Juan Islands; thick (and brushy) second-growth forests, pockets of old growth, quiet and narrow roads, scattered homes of widely varying quality, a small grocery store, and a high-end marina on the southwestern tip. A leisurely 3-mile walk will bring you to the steep cliffs of Lily Point, where on clear days you will have expansive views of Boundary Bay and Mt Baker. Hike down from the bluff to the beach at low tide and you may spot Purple Sea Stars, and you’ll have a chance to see the pilings remaining in the beach from the old Alaska Packers Cannery. By no means a wilderness adventure, Point Roberts is merely a chance see American gas priced in litres, to set foot in an accident of geography, to pass through a comically excessive border patrol checkpoint, and to walk a few miles on quiet roads for the sheer pleasure of it.
PubliCola reports that projected revenue from Deep-Bore Tunnel tolling has dropped from $400m to $200m over the life of the project, and WSDOT hopes to make up the difference by allocating some recent highway fund distributions from the Federal Government.
WSDOT goes on to blame various ways in which the recession affects tolling income. Although some tunnel opponents will no doubt smell a conspiracy, I’m prepared to give WSDOT the same courtesy I did Sound Transit, and accept their excuse as plausible.
However, there’s an interesting asymmetry in the way our system – local, state, and federal – treats road and transit projects. When ST gets in a revenue bind, the question is what they’re going to cut: what stations won’t get built, how many years to delay completion, and so on. When a highway project runs into trouble, it’s all about where they can scrape together more cash to finish the full scope on schedule.
Whether or not Seattle might get an NBA team now is a decision that might be left in fate’s hands, but regardless of the prospects, building a new arena in SODO to accommodate both an NBA and NHL carries huge implications. The partnership that was brokered between a private hedge fund manager and the City would essentially site the arena directly south of the Safeco Field parking garage, making a kind of chain of sports complexes from north to south. Although there’s a bit of a populist flair in marketing a mega-sports district, I think there’s plenty not to like in this proposal planning-wise.
Transit, for one, gets a good shaft considering the fact that the nearest two stations, SODO and Stadium, are well out of walking distance for many people, at 0.7 miles a piece. For the huge crowds that a major-league event might draw, you could argue that fans are more willing to bear the brunt of the walk especially given the relatively high costs of event parking. But consider this– just as many Seahawks fans use Stadium Station to get to CenturyLink Field (despite International District’s closer proximity), a great deal of transit-riding NBA fans would do the same, and have to traverse through WSDOT’s monstrous new SR-519 ramps, scant pedestrian facilities, and a cruddy street grid to get to the arena.
For land use, the implications are even greater. The revitalization argument is a bit of a two-edged sword– as event-based destinations, sports complexes alone don’t make for good urban amenities, especially since non-use most of the time creates large dead zones with little to no activity. Seeing as our existing professional sports arenas and stadiums are no exceptions to this even now, stringing them together would add little value and only help reinforce bad segregation-based planning principles from the past.
For the City to hedge its bets on a bunch of cheap land is probably a poor investment decision that especially doesn’t further the cause of promoting density, transit, and the great neighborhoods that should go hand in hand. As vital as sports are to Seattle’s cultural fabric, planning for their facilities are almost always a one-sided affair with limited appeal to the city as a whole. If we want great civic life to come first, however, we should treat our sports complexes not as event destinations, but amenities within our urban landscape. This proposal falls well short of that.
As mentioned in Thursday’s news roundup, Metro lost a case in the Court of Appeals last week in Knappett v. King County Metro Transit, in which Mr. Knappett “sued King County (Metro) to recover damages for injuries that he sustained after slipping while exiting a county-operated bus on a rainy day.” A report from an earlier iteration of the lawsuit, resulting in a $1.3m award, is attached above.
Metro spokesperson Rochelle Ogershok was unable to confirm the size of the award after appeal, but she did remark that Metro was “obviously disappointed” in the verdict. They “have not yet made the decision to petition for review.” She added that the “buses and steps are safe” and that the entry to buses is “industry standard and perfectly safe.”
If I could simplify what Martin’s saying here, it would be to say, “let density be density” (with apologies to Ronald Reagan). Dense development is good on it’s own. Locally owned businesses can also be good, but one doesn’t require the other.
As an example, I’d point to the area around the Columbia Heights Metro Station in Washington DC. It’s a walkable, urban paradise compared to almost any transit station in Seattle (outside of downtown) and yet it manages to feature a Target, a Best Buy, and more.
Image courtesy City of Kent - Highline CC Campus is at right
Late last year the City of Kent approved a huge TOD rezone at the future Kent-Des Moines Road Station, close to Highline Community College:
The Kent City Council has approved zoning regulations and design guidelines in place for when light rail is scheduled to come to town by 2023 along Pacific Highway South on the West Hill…
The Midway area stretches for 3 1/2 miles between South 216th Street and South 272nd Street along Pacific Highway South…
The city will allow building heights from 55 to 200 feet, which is about 16 stories tall. City officials want to encourage developers to build up rather than the construction of more strip malls.
You can read all about this rezone in item 8B in the agenda packet available here, especially Exhibit A, starting on page 406. The revised zoning code starts around page 500. It envisions three new Midway zoning designations: MCT-1, with 80% lot coverage and 5 story/55 ft heights; MCT-2, with 100% max site coverage, and 16 story/200 ft heights; and MCR, with 80% coverage and 200 ft heights. Height limits are shorter at the edges.
Multifamily parking requirements dropped from a status quo of 1.8-2 spaces per unit (1 per unit for efficiencies) to 0.75 in these zones; the current RV parking requirement would be waived entirely.
It’s a common argument that it doesn’t make much sense to build high-capacity transit way out into the suburbs when so many close-in neighborhoods remain underserved. While this has a a lot of merit, suburbs that are willing to think this big can create actual destination stations that make all-day service worthwhile, especially when Seattle is fighting trench warfare over the difference between 40 and 65 feet.
Enough about zones; much more about station location and old-school stakeholder feedback after the jump.
