Google Maps Does It Again

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

For select cities, including Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, in Google Maps you can now click on any transit stop and see an overlay of all transit routes in the system, with the routes accessible from that stop highlighted.

It’s a nice tool for everyday people and visitors to visualize the system.

UPDATE: Yes, onebusaway has had this forever.  That’s not the point, because no everyone knows about OBA, and if they did OBA couldn’t handle the bandwidth.

With Google maps, you pick up visitors and people just checking how to get from point A to point B.

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Central Streetcar Alignment

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The CD News has a post up about an effort to move the central/First Hill streetcar over to 12th Avenue (south of Pine) instead of Broadway.

This makes a ton of sense to me. 12th Avenue down around Seattle U is catching fire, and there’s plenty of pedestrian-friendly retail opportunity all the way south to Jackson. Broadway south of Pine, on the other hand, is mostly parking garages and hospital entrances.

Of course, those hospital entrances are exactly the problem. The whole point of the First Hill streetcar was to serve First Hill, which is being bypassed by Light Rail (in what will likely be looked upon decades-hence as a decision as misguided as having the DC Metro bypass Georgetown).

Still, it’s worth exploring. I bet the ridership numbers are greater than they would be for the Broadway alignment, which is estimated at about 3,000 riders per day (PDF). One alternative would be to proceed with the Madison St. bus corridor improvements that were studied by Sound Transit(PDF) during the FH streetcar design process. Or, better, yet, just build a Madison streetcar line all the way out to Madison Park.

You can read more about the 12th Avenue alignment in this PDF. And all of these options are interesting to think about in light of the planned Yesler Terrace redevelopment.

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ORCA Rollout Begins Monday

Posted on by Martin H. Duke
soundtransit.org
soundtransit.org

I’ll venture that most of our readers are up to speed on  the basics of the ORCA card.  If not, you can read our past coverage here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  If you don’t like to click that much, you can read the ORCA press kit (pdf, via the Rainier Valley Post) that consolidates most of the basic information into one place.

At any rate, what’s really new is the timetable above.  The bottom line is that other fare media will be good for most of the rest of the year, when you get ORCA depends on how you get your pass, and compulsive early adopters can get it from your local agency customer service office, starting Monday.   The full list of vendors will be released Monday.

“Full rollout” doesn’t begin till June, if you’d prefer to wait till the biggest bugs are squashed.

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A Busy Day

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

A busy Friday afternoon, as a couple of long-awaited updates occur:

  • ORCA rollout begins Monday, although it’ll be a slow rollout over the rest of the year.  No need to panic, because passes, tickets, etc. will continue to be honored for quite some time.  Don’t bother going to the the orcacard.com website, because it won’t be up till Monday.  The active project page is here, but is useless for new information.
  • Final Metro staff recommendations to the King County Council will be presented April 28 for Link-related bus service changes in Southeast Seattle and Southwest King County.

We’ll digest these later.

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Poll: Would you support a user fee for Cascades to VBC?

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

This is an unofficial poll I am conducting to see if people would be interested in a user fee to support a second and third Amtrak Cascades train to Vancouver BC. This fee would be used to pay for the train and the Canadian border patrol services. The fee would not be valid for those traveling between Seattle and Bellingham. Only passengers going to Canada would be required to pay the extra fee.

Please, vote and forward this off to anyone whom you know and would be interested in taking the Amtrak Cascades to Vancouver BC.

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Freedom

Posted on by Andrew Smith
700 Series Shinkansen
Happiness is a fast train (clang, clang, zoom, zoom). 700 Nozomi Shinkansen, photo by Not Quite a Photographer.

Yesterday morning I woke up in Tamami’s grandparent’s place in suburban Hiroshima (like Wallingford density) took a train into the city, bought a Shinkansen ticket and was cross-country to Tokyo before noon. That’s real freedom: just waking up and deciding I want to go all the way across the country today, instead of tomorrow, and getting there between breakfast and lunch. Not being trapped in a car or in an airport security line. Even by American standards that’s like waking up in suburban Seattle and being in downtown San Francisco by 2 pm, and there was wi-fi most of the way.

It’s not nearly as depressing coming back this time, knowing we’ll have a rail transit system for a good portion our city and region, and some sort of high speed rail for our greater region. Back in the States on Monday.

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