Tag: East Link

Andrew’s already pointed to all the great new information on East Link, but I’d just like to come out against the “B7” (I-405) alignment in South Bellevue.  There’s going to be a lot of fear of traffic, noise, and disruption among residents living near the existing S. Bellevue Park and Ride.  The path of least resistance, certainly, will be to shove the line out to the highway.  That’s a bad idea for several reasons:

• Ridership projections and cost per rider are worse by a factor of 5.
• The bus connections for I-90 routes will be much better along Bellevue Way.  When there’s an accident on I-90, it’ll be great to have an efficient way to connect to the train from Eastgate or Issaquah.  Depending on how the travel times work out, it may very well be that it makes more sense to terminate the 554 at South Bellevue.  In any case, a stop near Wilburton won’t be nearly as efficient, not least because of how hard it is to get on I-405 from I-90.
• The road disruption won’t be all that bad.  MLK, which was a massive job, finished up in less than two years in front of my development.  Traffic flowed pretty well throughout that time.
• In the long run, being close to the light rail will increase property values in that neighborhood.
• It’s true that it might attract more traffic, but any amenity that makes a neighborhood a better place increases traffic.  At least light rail provides an alternative to sitting in that traffic.
• Link is really, really quiet.

Not only do I think the residents are operating from a misperception of their self-interest, but when you consider the broader region, the B7 alternative is by far the worst.

I think the public meetings are going to have a lot of this NIMBY sentiment, so I hope Sound Transit comes armed with data about property values, a sound recording of an operating LINK train, and some other examples of why residents’ worst fears are unfounded.   If you live or work nearby, they also probably won’t mind your support.

Sound Transit has released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for East Link, here’s an executive summary (9.6 MB pdf). The study compares the impacts, costs and benefits of different routings, as well as the impacts, costs and benefits of elevated, at-grade and underground rights of way. There’s also an interactive map on the Sound Transit site, where you can see the different alignments. Worth checking out, I promise.

From the press release:

The Sound Transit Board is expected to identify a preferred alternative next spring and staff would then complete the final environmental impact statement to be published in 2010. A final decision on the project would be made in 2010 after the Final EIS is published.

Public comment on the current alternatives will play an important factor in the Board’s identification of a preferred alternative…

The public comment period runs from Dec. 12 – Feb. 25, 2009.

My thoughts, as well as times and locations of public meetings below the fold.

Continue reading “East Link Thoughts”

In the Sunday paper, the P-I had a spot-on editorial in favor of the the Sound Transit expansion vote we’ll be getting on the ballot in November, and pointing out the madness of raiding transit funding to put into the highway fund:

Major investments in public transportation are the smart, obvious move at a time when high gas prices are pushing a record number of Americans out of their cars and packing them into mass transit. Unfortunately, doing so is neither smart nor obvious to the federal government. Running short of gas-tax dollars for highways and roads, the Bush administration is planning on taking money out of mass transit funds to take care of highways.

The New York Times on Tuesday reported that, “the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.”

Congress has the power to put the kibosh on this plan by refusing to approve it, and killing this counterintuitive move is the only way to go.

Of course I agree, but I think congress should go one step further. People have already started making the decision that the convenience of driving may not be worth the trade-offs in terms of cost and stress, which is why driving is down and walking, biking, and riding transit are up. It’s time for congress to take a similar re-evaluation and decide whether it’s still cost-effective in terms of mobility to subsidize highways to the extent the Federal Government has been.

The obvious reason why the highway fund is in trouble is because people are driving less, and thus buying less gas and paying less gas tax. But the less obvious reason that highway fund is in so much trouble is that the same amount of highway funding buys you less roads today than ever before. The cost of concrete, steel and real estate are all considerably higher than they were ten years ago, and because of it roads are more expensive than before.

The cost of providing transit has also gone up with materials and real estate prices rising, but transit costs less to begin with in a lot of cases. In our area, just the 520 bridge replacement will cost nearly as much as East Link, and the Alaskan Way Viaduct will likely cost more than as North Link. Neither will get significantly more users than the corresponding light rail systems. With tax dollars tight, it may be time to think about increasing funding for the more cost-effective way of moving people around.

Introduction: One possible – but not guaranteed – project on the Eastside is commuter rail line that could run from roughly Snohomish to Renton, or some segment between them. The STB staff have varying opinions on the value of this line, which we fleshed out in this roundtable.

BB is Brian Bundridge, BS is Ben Schiendelman, AS is Andrew, JJ is John Jensen, and I’m MD.

MD: I think we all agree that East Link should be the highest priority on the Eastside. But right after that, the I-405 corridor’s congestion is absolutely horrible. Because the ST2 map leads me to believe that I-405 light rail is going to have to wait for ST4, I say we do something for commuters along that route in their lifetimes. Let’s get this thing built.

BB: The biggest thing with the Eastside Rail Corridor is getting the train closer to the City Core which is the biggest complaint among those who would take the service. An elevated section would however be expensive but would it be so expensive that it is prohibitive?

BS: Crossing 405 would be a 150-200m bridge, so yeah, I think it would be. And you couldn’t go elevated with heavy rail in the middle of Bellevue’s actual downtown.
The biggest issue is that you’d have to rip out and replace the trackbed along the entire corridor – that’s a couple hundred million, there’s no ballast. Then you’d have to shore a lot of the corridor up against slides. I actually went out and took pictures near Woodinville – there are a fair number of slides visible from the not too distant past.
You’d need platforms, equipment, another 100 million. Then you’d upgrade all the crossings or the cities would say no way – another 100 million. It goes through Totem Lake diagonally next to a large intersection – intersecting two streets there. Upgrades there alone would probably cost you a good ten million. The park and ride necessity to get any ridership would cost you another hundred million.
The thing is, this money would do a lot of more cost effective things for the eastside. The rail corridor simply isn’t the best bang for the buck with that money – you could spend it on more bus service (seriously) and get two or three times the riders per dollar. Sound Transit banked east king money last time because they knew east link was ten times as cost effective as this – the eastside rail contingent didn’t even start to speak up until ST2 was on the ballot, even though they’ve had ten years of BNSF trying to sell that corridor.

AS: Ben is right about the costs of the Eastside BNSF Corridor. On a trip through the Eastside in April, we saw a slew of spots where the train speeds were limited to 20 mph and even sometimes as low as 10 or 15
mph, the Totem Lake double-crossing comes to mind. Those areas require track upgrades that could cost well into the hundreds of millions.
The one big slight on the routing of the track is that it doesn’t go through downtown Bellevue. The common response is that it goes very close, and that the future of downtown Bellevue will be on that side of 405. I cannot see this happening until after ST2 gets built and a station connecting the BNSF track to Link is put in place. At that time, the Eastside Corridor becomes viable. It would connect job centers in Kirkland, Bellevue and Renton with residential centers in Kingsgate, Totem Lake, Kirkland and Newcastle/Kennydale.
The criticism that the rich people whose backyards the tracks go through will oppose the trains is valid, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In whole I think that the Eastside BNSF corridor can be a working rail transit corridor, though I believe we need ST2 in place first to make it work.

BS: And with ST2 in place, the cost of the eastside rail corridor would be better spent on connecting Overlake to downtown Redmond, so that ST3 could start building more in the 405 corridor.

AS: Imagining the exact same cost, I’d say connecting Kirkland to Overlake Hospital is more important than connecting DT Redmond to Overlake, though I bet LRT to Redmond would be more cost effective.

BS: The ridership would be higher on DT Redmond to Overlake, because DT Redmond is upzoning and DT Kirkland isn’t.

BB: There’s also a real technical issue there. With Eastside trains running every nine minutes (as assumed in ST2 planning -Lynnwood-Sea-Tac and Northgate-FW are the other two nine minute runs, for three minute central operations and six south of downtown), you’d create a transfer at Overlake Hospital. You couldn’t split the route.

One idea that was brought up to me is the time savings of Everett – Redmond. The train would take 30 minutes at a maximum speed of 45 mph with stops at Everett, Snohomish, Woodinville Jct, Columbia Winery, Redmond Town Center.
But per BNSF, double tracking the flood plains is required.

AS: Kirkland’s not upzoning? Maybe not, but what’s this I’ve heard about Google building a campus literally next to the BNSF line?

There are several other large companies in that area also, Bungie, Clearwire, and Monolith, among others.
Kirkland also has nearly the population of Redmond (46K vs 51k) in less than half the area. (4220/sq mi compared to 1220 sq mi). A fair bit of that population density for Redmond is already served by the Overlake TC station.
The Kirkland BNSF corridor is a good bang-for-your-buck rail because it cuts right through the employment centers, as well as the residential centers.

BS: Monolith is at the S. Kirkland Park and Ride, and has about 100 employees (I worked there during the SOE buyout). Bungie’s got 40 (again, I worked with them during Halo). Clearwire might be 100. Downtown Redmond has 4-500 MS employees alone at Redmond Town Center, and there are a couple of office buildings there that we don’t have either. Downtown Redmond is seriously upzoning – they just made plans

to turn another downtown parking lot into 5 stories, and the town center is looking at developing the east parking lot (by Claim Jumper) and/or tearing down an existing parking lot to replace it with an office building, and building a larger semi-underground garage.

The business park in east Kirkland really just doesn’t cut it. You don’t have any high density residential, and those are your prime users – MS employees and Bellevue DT employees. Connecting to that Kirkland business park doesn’t add much because you don’t have good residential on the line in a decent distance.

MD: That’s Part I. There’s more to come as the conversation continues…