Another year, another light rail ride without pants. STB reader “Atomic Taco” has posted pictures of Sunday’s event to our Flickr pool and uploaded a fun video to YouTube:

Also note that our site logo, up top, is still in the pantless mood.

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We almost missed this, but West Seattle Blog reports that Metro is meeting with three community groups about RapidRide C.:

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm Tuesday at the Senior Center of West Seattle (California/Oregon).

I couldn’t guess if there will be more struggles over taking parking to give RapidRide right of way. The meetings are open to the public.

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Good evening, readers.  Tonight, Metro’s Regional Transit Task Force (RTTF) is hosting a town hall-style forum at the University of Washington.  Among a panel of Task Force members are King County councilmember Larry Phillips and Seattle city councilmember Tom Rasmussen.  The forum tonight includes a presentation followed by an open Q & A session.  Follow along for live updates below the jump.

Continue reading “RTTF Town Hall Forum Live Blog”

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There’s talk of a snow coming Tuesday afternoon. As we all know by now, snow in the middle of the day means people stuck at work and disaster all around. From Metro:

Transit users should plan ahead for afternoon and evening trips that could be disrupted, delayed, reduced, or on snow routing. Even though weather in the morning may be clear, leave from a bus stop or park-and-ride that also has service when buses are on snow routes in case travel conditions deteriorate by the afternoon commute.

Do what you need to do.

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Today, King County Metro unveiled a new website that displays monthly ridership, service quality, safety and security, financial, service effectiveness data. The data is aggregated system wide, not route or subarea specific. From Metro’s press release.

King County Metro Transit now has performance data online that provides up-to-date information about bus ridership, vehicle breakdowns, accident rates, and even how often buses show up on time.

“As a public agency, Metro Transit is accountable to the people we serve,” said Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond. “We want to make it easy for our customers and others to find information about our performance, and see how we are measuring up to our targeted goals.”

The new “Monthly Performance Measures” website currently features graphs and data about ridership trends, service quality measures, safety and security data, and some financial information. Navigation through the website should make Metro data and reports more accessible. Desmond said this is just a beginning, and he hopes the website will evolve over time with more data and other information the public will find interesting or helpful.

The rest of the release is after the jump…

Continue reading “Metro Unveils Monthly Performance Website”

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The deadline to submit comments for the East Link SDEIS is today.  If you haven’t already done so, you can send your thoughts to eastlink.sdeis@soundtransit.org or mail a letter, postmarked today, to:

Sound Transit, Union Station
Attention: East Link SDEIS Comments
401 S. Jackson St., Seattle, WA 98104

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Regional Transit Task Force Town Hall Forum

The Regional Transit Task Force will be holding a forum to discuss transit with the public on Monday evening from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm at Kane Hall’s Walker Ames Room on the UW campus. More details and a list of the panelists from UW Transportation Services website.

UW Station Community Meeting

Sound Transit, UW, and WSDOT will host this open house on Wednesday, January 12, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at the Museum of History and Industry in Montlake. The latest plan and design for connecting the station to the Triangle area and the campus will be revealed. This will determine how well the station can be accessed and the ease of bus-rail transfers.

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This was taken on January 3rd. It’s nice to see the architecture of these freeway stations progress in some way.

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In tragic news, on Thursday around 12:42 pm, a man was struck fatally by a northbound Link train while crossing against multiple warning signals at S Holgate St in SODO. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled the death a suicide, the Seattle Times reports. This is Link’s second fatality since it opened in July 2009. The first fatality was also a suicide that occurred in the same area shortly after Link opened.

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Every now and then there’s second guessing of the decision to route Central Link through the Rainier Valley instead of a more direct route to the airport down East Marginal Way. The idea is that a faster trip to Seatac would boost ridership, and more importantly, make South Link a better competitor with existing freeway express buses.

I have three basic objections to this line of argument:

1. Ridership and Federal Funding. Station boarding data shows that about half of Link trips begin or end in the Rainier Valley. It’s true that some people would board in Georgetown or along Boeing Field, but it’s obviously a much smaller market and anecdotal Route 124 performance* doesn’t suggest robust demand. Cut ridership by a little less than half, and it threatens federal funding and offends basic cost/benefit considerations. Furthermore, bus transfer opportunities from South County are almost by definition riders brought from buses, which FTA formulas frown upon. And of course, North subarea savings couldn’t have been used to extend the line further south.
2. Low Development Potential. The idea of an MLK alignment is that there is a lot of development potential to join existing reasonably dense neighborhoods on either side.** The East Marginal Way walkshed is fundamentally limited by an airfield on one side and a river on the other. Furthermore, Seattle has shown no interest in rezoning these areas from industrial, and the economics of redevelopment are fundamentally limited by environmental contamination issues. The big employer, Boeing, has tons of free parking on their campus there.
3. It’s not a Commuter Line. Ignoring the Rainier Valley to increase speed on South Link is a direct sacrifice of all-day ridership to provide better connection between distant homes and jobs.  Although it makes sense to serve work trips wherever possible, optimizing it for commutes gives you commuter rail. Light rail and subways are about providing high-capacity all-day connectivity. Sometimes you have the money to do both through grade separation, as is the case with North Link. That wasn’t the case here. I would rather run express buses to Federal Way forever than skip good, close-in markets for rail.

Next: the outlook for constructing a bypass in the future.

* How about some spring 2010 performance data, Metro?

** The fact that Metro has done a poor job of connecting those neighborhoods to Link is aggravating, but fixable and an issue wherever you put it.

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