A couple of days ago there was a great deal of discussion about the merits and costs of a Sand Point crossing. There are two things that a study would find out that everybody would like to know; the monetary cost of the crossing and the potential ridership over the connection. Unfortunately I can’t give any insight into those things. What I can to do is provide some tangible benefits based on travel time using Seattle Subway’s previous posts about the Crossing, Ballard Spur and Better Eastside rail.
Thursday evening Sound Transit staff conducted an open house at the Mercer Island Community Center focused on the East Link light rail extension. Approximately 80 to 90 people, including staff, trickled in throughout the evening, which included the brief opening, presentation, and Q&A sessions. The presentation centered on the design of Mercer Island Station in particular, approximately 30% complete. Essentially, the alignment of the track is completely determined at this point; several Sound Transit engineers at the open house intimated that this was the crucial first step of the design.
“There’s a lot of work ahead of this, but we’re at a point where we have a good idea of what’ll work correctly,” said David Hewitt, founder of Hewitt, an urban planning and design firm handling the design of Mercer Island Station East Link.
As one resident put it: “They’ve done their homework.”
The Mercer Island Station (a working name) will squat firmly in the center roadway of I-90, with light rail running on either side. From 77th and 80th Avenues SE, riders can stroll into the western and eastern entrances of the station, respectively. Detailed images and layouts are available here.
Each entrance will consist of a plaza with ticketing and seating areas, leading to an escalator, a stair, and an elevator, with surrounding lightweight steel and glass structures. The east entrance will also have a bicycle cage for secure storage. Once a rider descends 25 feet onto the central platform, she has roughly 380 feet of open space in which to frolic, with a central canopy serving as weather cover. Sound-dampening walls specially designed to absorb I-90’s acoustic assault will outline the tracks.
“It’s fairly symmetrical in nature,” Hewitt said. “The scale of the station is a very pleasant one we think.”
At last week’s Sound Transit Board Meeting (video here), one of the more interesting reports was the staff analysis of the D2 roadway, which runs between I-90’s Rainier Freeway Station and the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. There are also PowerPoint slides.
No matter what, these lanes will be closed to all traffic during track construction later in the decade. But afterwards, Sound Transit has always assumed that the 554 would terminate at either Mercer Island or South Bellevue Station. Metro has five peak-only routes that serve the I-90 corridor: the 212, 214, 215, 216, and 218, which together amount to about 18 trips per hour in the peak, that it might prefer to keep running into downtown. In 2010, these added up to about 1 million rides a year, or about 4,000 per day*. For these routes, there are four main options:
Run joint operations on the roadway, as is currently done in the DSTT. This doesn’t necessarily mean buses would still run in the DSTT itself, but will create similar reliability and schedule impacts to both buses and trains. This is the baseline assumption in the ST budget.
Run trains only on the roadway, forcing buses to access downtown via Rainier Avenue and S. Dearborn St. This speeds up the trains a bit but makes the buses slower and much less reliable. It saves on capital costs but Metro will pay more to operate buses.
Terminate Metro buses at Mercer Island or South Bellevue. This creates at least some transfer penalty for bus riders, but keeps trains fast (carrying the bulk of the riders) and saves Metro about 15,000 service hours annually, or around $1.5m, that could be invested in more service on these or other routes.
Squeeze the tracks on one side of the roadway, allowing a one-lane busway for peak-direction trips. ST staffer Ric Ilgenfritz testified that this is likely cheaper in capital expense than the joint operations option. See the illustration, along with some discussion, below the jump.
We’ve just received a copy of a letter (PDF) dated today, signed by all these and several others, politely letting Bellevue City Council know that they need to get on with it. They go so far as to say East Link and 520 replacement are “equally critical,” very strong language for a transit project, especially on the eastside.
This is a strong message not only to Bellevue City Council, but also to Kemper Freeman, and the small group attacking light rail construction: Business community leaders and the largest employers on the eastside are all sick of the quixotic attacks on East Link. We need regional mass transit now.
Good show to all those who signed. I hope to see other employers add their voices to this message.
NEW SECTION. Sec. 3. State government, the department of transportation, and other agencies may not transfer or use gas-tax- funded or toll-funded lanes on state highways for non-highway purposes.
For background, I-1125 is primarily concerned with tolls and what the state can do with tolling revenue and would mean bad things for both roads and transit. I-1125 would eliminate variable tolling, and prohibit tolls raised on a road to be used for anything but the construction of that road. However, the abpve language is particularly scary for East Link; the new provision would prohibit the state from transfering the I-90 center lanes to Sound Transit for East Link. Goldy noticed Kemper Freemans sizeable donation to the I-1125 campaign and reads between the lines:
Of course, that is a section specifically designed to block the use of I-90’s center lanes for Sound Transit’s East Link light rail crossing. It’s what Freeman’s lawyers argued and lost in court, and it no doubt helped inspire Freeman to donate $25,000 to I-1125, the campaign’s largest contribution to date (if you don’t count the indecipherable transfers from Eyman’s other committee).
It’s scary to think that the voters in the Central Puget sound can approve a transportation system and one man with a strange vendetta against transit can help give voters in the rest of the state the ability to undo that decision. Let’s hope I-1125 doesn’t pass.
One of the most mentioned advantages of East Link’s B7 (cross-slough/BNSF route) is that it provides the guideway for a future connection to the Eastgate Park & Ride and Issaquah. It’s a common theme at open houses, testimony to government boards, and a favorite talking point of the Build a Better Bellevue crowd, both citizens and Bellevue City Council members alike. Frankly, it’s one of the few strong arguments for the BNSF route. Build one guideway and you are ready to go east in the future.
However, the east side of the Mercer Slough is a steep ridge. It starts with 118th Ave SE, goes up to the BNSF ROW, and then climbs in a set of tiers containing the I-90 and I-405 ramps and finally I-405 itself. Standing near the BNSF right of way and looking up, it finally hit me.
In last Friday’s B7 writeup, a post-RSS addendum to the story stated that although the cost of the actual B2M and B7R segments differed by $40m, the choice of B7R incurred an additional $100m of costs in the C (Downtown Bellevue) Segment. Some commenters asked reasonable questions about the data, so I’ve reproduced below table 2-2 from the East Link Supplemental EIS, which is a cost matrix of the various B and C segment choices.
As you can see, the total difference is $140m-$160m. Furthermore, B7R incurs an additional $9m of costs [Table 2] in the C segment over vanilla B7 in table above, making the total gap between B2M and B7R at least $150m. There are certainly both drawbacks and benefits to a B7R alignment, but the large cost difference is probably a significant argument for Sound Transit’s preference, B2M.
The Bellevue city council is expected to take up this issue tonight with lots of supporters expected from both sides, so tune in or show up if you want to see a show.
Despite worries it might not be made public, yesterday afternoon the City of Bellevue posted their $670,000 East Link study phase 1 online. A controversial expenditure at the time, it was intended to compare the B7 alignment that Sound Transit studied in its EIS with B7 “revised”, which was conceptually reputed as improved over B7 and named B7R. Although the study did not address Sound Transit’s preferred B2M alignment directly, observers widely construed the study as an attempt to show that B7R, which largely follows I-405 through South Bellevue, is superior to B2M, which would serve the South Bellevue Park and Ride. All “B” alignments refer to the segment between Mercer Island and Downtown Bellevue, exclusive.
There are several differences between B7 and B7R, the most salient of which is a new Park and Ride “A-2” at the Bellevue Way/I-90 interchange. Assuming that downtown Bellevue gets a tunnel, choosing B7R would leave the cost of Segment B about the same at $515m, because the cost of the A-2 P&R is canceled out by the elimination of the 118th Ave SE station. It would increase overall East Link boardings in 2030 from 49,000 to 50,500.
There are additional costs for bus operations (up to $1m** a year), plus some money to enable sharing of the BNSF tracks with other rail operators, if desired. B7R also incurs a further $9m in costs in segment C, because the approach to the tunnel is more expensive. Crucially, there are cost and schedule risks associated with the Mercer Slough crossing (pg. 3):
The crossing of the Mercer Slough is challenging as a result of: the environmentally sensitive nature of the Slough; the poor foundation materials; the movement of the peat as documented by WSDOT; and WSDOTs concerns regarding protection of their existing I-90 structures. While two construction methods have been developed, further analysis will be required to define the appropriate solution and to satisfy WSDOT concerns. This could potentially delay the project and add construction cost.
The B7 figures do not match those from the supplemental EIS because the City of Bellevue instructed Arup, who did the study, to use a different (“BKR”) traffic model for both, and “the BKR Model has greater detail for the localized road network and traffic analysis zones.” (page 6)
Although some of these differences make it hard to compare things directly, it is evident to me that the ridership difference between B7R and B2M is basically a wash, but B7R is approximately $40m more expensive*.
*$40m accounts for the gap in segment cost, but is likely to be significantly more when factoring in the costs for the C9T tunnel since a connection to B2M is roughly $100m cheaper.
**The $1m figure only accounts for additional costs with Sound Transit bus operations and leaves out Metro routes. According to the report, ST would have to procure two additional vehicles just to maintain bus headways.
Sources for Erica C. Barnett tell her that the first phase of the latest City of Bellevue study about the two remaining South Bellevue Link alignments basically confirm what previous Sound Transit studies found — a revised “B7” alignment, along I-405, is more expensive and carries fewer riders than Sound Transit’s preferred B2 alternative, which takes surface streets from I-90 into downtown. Sound Transit could equalize ridership by spending even more money on B7.
There’s no word on whether the report will be released to the public, or how this will impact the follow-on phases of the study. There is a total of $3m and up to 2.5 years of further study that the Bellevue Council could authorize if it wishes to explore B7 further. This study follows other independent studies Bellevue commissioned to critique Sound Transit’s analysis of the alignments. The Bellevue Council is supposed to decide on the follow-on phases at a meeting on Monday, May 16th, although the agenda can change at the council’s whim.
Sherwin’s primer on East Link is a good starting point if you’re bewildered by all the alignment codes.
I’m carefully reading the majority opinion of the state supreme court on the Freeman v Gregoire case, looking for more interesting points to make. I’ve found several, but this one deserves a quote on its own. From page 6:
On December 1, 2009, the FHA confirmed that reimbursement of federal-aid
highway funds expended in the construction of the center lanes of I-90 would not be
required "should [the center lanes] be used for light rail transit."
