A pretty painting of the "Vision Line" by J. Craig Thorpe
The “Vision Line” route for East Link proposed by Kevin Wallace is fantastical, but in the real world of building effective mass transit, that is not a good thing.
The plan offers plenty to roll your eyes at. From the circus tents that would provide protection from rain if only they wouldn’t be the first thing to be cut when going to design, to the mile walk to Bellevue’s shopping and entertainment core that would depress ridership, to a watercolor rendering showing a dense urban forest growing under a concrete, elevated light rail station next to a somehow nearly-empty I-405.
The watercolored amenities, of course, will disappear from design shortly after a more prudent tunnel is taken off the table by the Bellevue city council, which may be point of the proposal. Not included in Wallace’s lowball cost estimate is the centerpiece walkway nor the cost of moving the Bellevue Transit Centeraway from the downtown core, which he has proposed. Mayor Degginger has noted that creating an expensive walkway could bring total costs in line with tunnel estimates.
Wallace’s route misses the South Bellevue Park & Ride and loses north of 3,000 daily riders, which he says can be made up with transit-oriented development. But you cannot develop around stations that are cut, you cannot develop on top of I-405 which borders most of the alignment, and you should not sacrifice serving an established downtown core. Wallace argues that that the “cost per rider” metric is more important than just looking at ridership, but compares segment cost with total ridership rather than segment ridership. Using the more accurate measure for the impact on Bellevue make the proposal’s cost numbers less impressive.
We wanted to give Kevin Wallace a chance to address the many concerns that you had with his recent Vision Line proposal and to defend the premise behind his idea. I had the opportunity to bring forth some of the questions that arose during our open question thread and hear more about Wallace’s reasoning for picking the controversial alignment. Prior to asking him your specific questions, he briefed me on why he developed the Vision Line the way he did.
Wallace has four basic premises behind the proposal:
The minimization of impacts on homes, businesses, and roads.
An alignment within Sound Transit’s budget.
Rail that will enhance the city’s multi-modal transportation system and preserve city roads.
A system that provides potential for [transit-oriented] development.
I attended last night’s workshop for the Downtown Bellevue segment of East Link. After the meeting, I talked to Kevin Wallace briefly about the Vision Line. I will be meeting with him on Friday to further discuss details about the plan. I’ll also compile a list of questions or concerns that you might have, so leave a comment below if you have a question you want to ask Kevin about this new proposal. As much as you may disagree with this proposed line or even the premise of it, keep the comments civil and practical. Avoid statements like “What’s with the circusy station? It’s ugly!” I won’t be able to ask him all of your questions, but I will bring forth the most pressing issues.
Below is a recap of the workshop written in real-time.
WORKSHOP RECAP
I’m currently at the Downtown Bellevue workshop for East Link at Bellevue City Hall. Like the three neighborhood workshops that came before this one, public comment booths for each downtown alternative are out with strip plots and maps detailing the plan and elevation of each alignment. Vision Line Coalition folks are aggressively lobbying outside the meeting area and handing out literature to attendees about Kevin Wallace’s proposed alternative. The turnout is fairly high tonight with at least 100, give or take, in attendance. The minutes of the presentation are below the jump.
Thanks to intrepid reader and commenter Bernie, we have an account of Monday’s City of Bellevue “study session” on East Link alignments. The agenda is online and includes an information packet. Below, a synopsis of his notes. Consider this a preview of tonight’s East Link Workshop.
Sound Transit’s preferred alignment runs along the surface on both 108th and 110th Avenues to bracket the Transit Center, and is projected to cost $700m (in 2007 dollars, as all the figures below). Longstanding tunnel option C3T costs $1.175 billion. Sound Transit on Monday presented the first cost estimates for the relatively new C9T option, which travels under 110th Ave NE and comes in at $980m – $1.01 billion. As Sound Transit has committed to fund the surface alternative, this reduces the funding gap for a tunnel to about $300m from an earlier rough estimate of $500m.
ST is considering lowering the South Bellevue station below street level or moving it away from the street to maintain car and bus access to the lot.
The Sound Transit board will re-evaluate Segment C (Downtown Bellevue) in the first quarter of 2010.
The Bellevue Reporter released details this morning on Kevin Wallace’s proposed alignment of East Link— what he dubs the ‘Vision Line.’ The proposal essentially calls for the use of the BNSF corridor (B7 alternative), which would bypass the South Bellevue Park and Ride, and an alignment along 114th Ave NE through downtown before crossing I-405. This alternative would run right along the freeway and is furthest from the downtown core than any of the other DEIS alternatives. To address the distance factor, the plan calls for a covered walkway that leads to the Bellevue Transit Center. Wallace has stated before that he believes a surface alignment would be too disruptive and a tunnel would be too costly.
From the Bellevue Reporter:
The Vision Line aims to protect residential homes and downtown businesses. But it adds another option to a growing list of alternatives for Sound Transit’s East Link light rail project.
Wallace is asking that Sound Transit consider his plan as part of the East Link environmental-review process.
Arup, the San-Francisco based consulting firm that undertook the study, has full details of its Phase A study here. One important thing to remember is that this first phase of the plan has not taken ridership into account, an integral factor into making East Link cost-effective. However, Wallace believes that the ridership will be comparable with the other alternatives while still bringing down the costs of the Bellevue alignment. We’ll have a follow-up soon with these concerns and questions addressed directly by Wallace.
With University Link under construction and Sound Transit 2 to follow, service frequency has become a hot topic.
Today, Link operates at peak frequencies of 7-8 minutes, dropping to 10 and finally 15 minutes during off-peak periods and on weekends. With average October weekday ridership of 16,200, today’s peak frequencies meet demand and will likely continue to through the next few years, but U-Link will change that.
The North Link Final Supplemental EIS operating plan summary (PDF), which only covers S. 200th to Northgate, the extent planned for in Sound Move, calls for 6 minute peak headways end to end by 2015, with an eventual increase to 5 minute headways between Northgate and Rainier Beach (referred to as “Henderson” in the document) sometime prior to 2030.
With Sound Transit 2, we’ll essentially get a new line – running from Northgate or farther north to Bellevue. Currently, the East Link DEIS operating plan summary (PDF) suggests four car trains every 10 minutes in 2020, with headways down to every 9 minutes in 2030.
An overall Sound Transit 2 operating plan I saw on paper suggested three 9 minute headway lines – One from Lynnwood to SODO or Rainier Beach, one from Northgate to Bellevue/Redmond, and one from Northgate to Sea-Tac/Federal Way. This would cause three minute headways between every other train south of downtown, and could cause problems in at-grade portions.
There’s another possibility here, though. Sound Transit could operate two lines, one from Lynnwood to Federal Way, and another from Lynnwood to Bellevue. This would keep headways south of the International District more stable, and make Bellevue headways higher overall. Either way, frequency from Northgate to the International District will be down to four or even three minutes with Sound Transit 2.
The limiting factor is largely the uncertainty associated with the MLK portion of Link – missing a light can add a minute or two to a trip, making it impossible to really shoehorn more trains in without degrading quality of service significantly. If we want another line through downtown, it will need to either go on the surface, or in a new tunnel.
Sound Transit will have its fourth public neighborhood workshop for East Link on Wednesday, November 18th, from 4 – 7pm (presentation will begin at 5pm)at Bellevue City Hall. This workshop will be specific to the Downtown neighborhood and will likely be similar to the ones held last month for South Bellevue, Bel-Red, and Overlake (you can read our recap of the South Bellevue workshop here).
From Sound Transit:
This workshop will be focused on the downtown Bellevue preferred route and stations, identified by the Sound Transit Board, as well as the tunnel alternatives. Additional public meetings will be scheduled throughout the East Link project area as Sound Transit continues to progress into preliminary engineering along the preferred alternative.
We expect a lot of folks coming out against the preferred surface alignment and South Bellevue residents still continuing to lobby for the B7 alignment coming into Downtown. Also expect input regarding the new C9T tunnel option. This is all part of a public outreach period to collect comments before Sound Transit publishes its FEIS (Final Environmental Impact Statement) next year. I will be there to cover the workshop and we’ll have a recap up soon afterwards.
[UPDATE:] On Thursday, the Sound Transit board was briefed on yet another new Downtown alternative. This alignment would be an elevated-surface hybrid with the main downtown station being just south of the Bellevue Transit Center along 110th Ave NE. Considering that a surface segment is still part of the plan, it’s unclear how the council members-elect will react to the new alternative. We expect to hear the details of Kevin Wallace’s full plan soon, so stay tuned for our continuing coverage of East Link.
There’s been a fair amount of overheated rhetoric in the comment threads in response to one Bellevue City Councilmember proposing a bad alignment through his city. Indeed, there’s reason to believe that a majority of Councilmembers agree with him, at least nominally. And Tukwila’s 1999 lawsuit (H/T: Jim Cusick) provides a reason to believe that a city can force Sound Transit to ditch their preferred alignment.
Some are perceiving this as “Bellevue” rejecting East Link, or go so far as to question the point of the whole East Link project. I think either position is way off base.
First of all, there’s no reason to think a low-information election based on any number of local issues is a better signal than Bellevue’s vote for Prop. 1 in 2008. As interested outsiders, the useful contribution is to help inform and mobilize Bellevue voters, not dismiss them.
Secondly, a BNSF/I-405 alignment is not the end of the world. We don’t have the specifics and the studies to see if the Wallace plan would reduce ridership so much that it imperils federal funding, in which case ST has a really strong case to win in the court of public opinion. Otherwise, the coming Bellevue fight is just the Tukwila fight writ large. The final outcome in Tukwila is a terrible one for those that live or do business there, but for the rest of us it just means we go around the heart of Tukwila at 55 mph rather than through it at 35mph on our way to the Airport.
All transportation projects have to, at some point, make some routing compromises to get built. Suburban freeway alignments are (unfortunately) standard practice in most American rail systems. Indeed, for those with no stake in Bellevue, the Wallace plan might even speed up trips to Redmond and free up enough cash to get to Redmond Town Center.
As people interested in building a good regional system, we should help our neighbors in Bellevue who are fighting to make sure that their City gets maximum benefit from such a large investment. But it does no one any good to spite the whole city and give up on a project that would still be a huge leap forward in regional mobility.
Now, if you are a Bellevue resident, part of your city council is scheming to make sure that East Link serves as few homes and jobs as possible in Bellevue. That would be something to get excited about.
Kevin Wallace, currently leading Patsy Bonincontri in the race for Bellevue City Council Position 4, disagrees with Sound Transit’s preferred alignment through Bellevue. From the Bellevue Reporter:
Wallace, a top executive from Bellevue-based Wallace Properties, has said he does not favor the preferred route along Bellevue Way and 112th Avenue Southeast. He also said a tunnel option through the heart of downtown would likely be financially unattainable, while a surface route there would be unacceptable.
Wallace is developing an East Link routing alternative that would run light rail along the abandoned BNSF rail line through South Bellevue and close to the I-405 expressway downtown.
Needless to say, running this far from Downtown Bellevue and the Transit Center, built on the cheap and specifically designed to be far from where anyone lives or works, would be disastrous for near to medium term ridership.
The Reporter article indicates that a small group targeted Bonincontri in this election when she turned out to be the swing vote in recommending the Bellevue Way alignment. That implies that determined citizen action in favor of an alignment that serves people and jobs can have big impact on what the City Council ultimately does.
Sound Transit has just announced a partnership with several other agencies and governments to keep the eastside rail corridor in public ownership. This purchase would allow King County and Redmond to move forward with trail projects, and secure portions of the right of way necessary for East Link.
In Sound Transit’s statement of interest in the Memorandum of Understanding, they’ve called out both the southern portion (for the C portion of East Link) and the Redmond spur (for the E portion of East Link, where funding only exists for study and some right of way acquisition), so they’re thinking ahead.
The purchase itself is expected to be complete by the end of the year.
[UPDATE 10:15am: Let’s not over-interpret the Bellevue results. This isn’t a comprehensive voter repudiation of East Link, it’s a local election with inscrutable forces, whose outcome is a Bellevue City Council that is less likely to make good decisions about Light Rail. “Screw Bellevue” comments are totally unhelpful.]
In the other races we’ve endorsed, the early returns are not good. Apparently the power of the STB endorsement (in bold below) does not extend much past the Seattle City limits. Other results are here.
Transportation Benefit District No. 1 (Burien) YES – 958 – 23.50%
NO – 3118 – 76.50%
Bellevue City Council Position 2 Vicki Orrico – 6817 – 46.55%
Conrad Lee – 7800 – 53.27%
Bellevue City Council Position 4
Kevin R. Wallace – 7012 – 50.95% Patsy Bonincontri – 6730 – 48.90%
Bellevue City Council Position 6 Michael Marchand – 5320 – 38.72%
Don Davidson – 8385 – 61.04%
Bellevue City Council Position 8 Mike Creighton -5622 – 40.68%
Jennifer Robertson – 6493 – 46.99%
Betina Finley – 1681 – 12.16%
With Kemper Freeman’s apparent clean sweep in Bellevue, it’s clear just how much work we still need to do in the suburbs. The likelihood of a B7 alignment — missing the population centers and blocking Eastside Commuter Rail forever — just went up.
Hutchison at the Washington Policy Center dinner. Image from Publicola.
There is no doubt that the most important election concerning transit this year is between Dow Constantine and Susan Hutchison for King County Executive. The Executive runs Metro transit, nominates 10 of the 18 Sound Transit boardmembers, and signs off on land use policies throughout the county.
Constantine serves on the Sound Transit board and chairs the Regional Transit Committee. His master’s degree in urban planning bolsters his wonky side — he noted at our last meet-up that “infrastructure creates demand,” a fact that escapes most politicos. Constantine is a great advocate for our two largest transit agencies and will be an effective leader. We have endorsed Constantine for Executive, and we urge those who want a better future for our region’s transit to donate to his campaign. But this election is notable not just for Constantine’s impressive credentials, but also his opponent’s reckless misunderstanding of transportation and transit issues. Susan Hutchison is wrong on transit.
ST Board grants final approval on the contract to build the Link segment between Westlake and Capitol Hill, 12% below budget estimates. In the same article: ST’s legislative priorities (pdf) for 2010.
Tacoma City Council unanimously votes to proceed with the Sounder D-to-M segment, berm and all; ST releases new sketches of the Sounder Pacific Avenue bridge, trying to meet community demands.
Now Lakewood is grumbling about running trains through town.
The City of Seattle makes the case (pdf) for service cuts targeted at low-productivity routes.
550 broken down at Westlake, suspends tunnel service for 40 minutes.
South Bellevue Preferred Alignment (Sound Transit)
[Ed. Note: Our newest Contributor, Sherwin Lee, wrote this last week at his Lingua Urbana blog.We’ll be cross-posting some of his greatest hits as he starts writing original pieces for STB.]
I’m currently at the South Bellevue East Link workshop to take notes and ask about some key issues facing Link. I’ve got no access to wi-fi or internet, so I won’t be live blogging, but these are real-time notes as they happened.
5:16pm: I’ve arrived at Bellevue High School for the South Bellevue East Link workshop. Supporters of the B7/BNSF right-of-way alignment are outside handing out literature in defense of that particular alternative. I take one and politely brush past them.
5:20pm: An open workshop with a number of booths is set up for public input. The presentation is scheduled to begin around roughly 5:30pm. Each booth has renderings and drafts of different phases of the guideway that follows the preferred alternative. I hear a very elderly gentleman utter “that from everything [he’s] read, those trains can’t run across the I-90 bridge!” I hold my tongue.
An SR-520 alignment overburdens tunnel capacity. (Sound Transit)
Yesterday, we broke word that Susan Hutchison favors putting light rail across SR-520. She re-iterated this position at last night’s debate. This isn’t the first time someone has held this position, but that makes the suggestion no less tired. Hutchison would do very well to read our past research on the subject because her current position is simply irresponsible.
“We should build light rail on the new 520 with a designated lane”
But in June of last year, we showed why light rail has to cross I-90 first: The University Link tunnels cannot handle Eastside passenger traffic. Light rail across SR-520 would lead to significant overcrowding and poor service performance unless we build another expensive tunnel to downtown. In January of last year, we noted that plans to eliminate future capacity for light rail from the SR-520 bridge saved $400 million dollars — a number Hutchison will somehow have to recover. The engineering challenges of going from the elevated 520 span to the underground Husky Stadium light rail station are significant and difficult. For these reasons, Sound Transit notes that light rail across SR-520 is much more expensive. Most importantly, the current alignment is voter approved: In November of last year, an overwhelming 62% of the voters in King County passeda plan that put light rail across I-90.
“We should not take lanes away from I-90 for light rail”
But in June of 2007, we showed that I-90 does not lose lanes after light rail. And we showed the corridor actually gains capacity from new HOV lanes in each direction. In March, we pointed out that the federal government funded our center lanes expressly to be converted to rail transit. The state has borrowed those lanes for decades.
“In fact, [building light rail across I-90] is a violation of the 18th amendment which says roads money can’t be used for any other purpose”
But we reported in July that transit agencies have purchased roads right-of-way in the past before without issue. WSDOT is working with Sound Transit to value the center lanes so Sound Transit can purchase them. Sound Transit is funding the two-way HOV lanes across I-90, and that work can be used as credit toward the purchase. The state is not giving Sound Transit the lanes.
First, I want to say why this race is important: There are two hurdles in building East Link light rail. We’ve written extensively about one of them, the I-90 issue, but the other is just as important in the long run.
The Sound Transit 2 ballot measure only provides enough money to build surface light rail in downtown Bellevue (the “C” portion of the project). The measure does include planning and engineering funding that allows more than one option to be advanced, though, so Sound Transit is also studying two tunnel options. Either of these tunnel options would require funding, from the city of Bellevue, above and beyond what Sound Transit can provide. The original C3T tunnel option could require as much as $500 million, and while the new 110th tunnel option would be cheaper, it’s unlikely to cut that number in half.
Bellevue presented a list of possible funding sources to Sound Transit at last week’s board meeting, but the final funding proposal will have to be made next year – after new Bellevue City Council members are seated.
With Kemper Freeman, Jr. assisting several of the campaigns in an attempt to get a light rail-unfriendly council elected, it’s especially important that we not ignore this race. Fortunately for us, there are several very good candidates!
Mike Creighton
The first good candidate is Mike Creighton. Mike has been involved at the local level in Bellevue for some thirty years, starting as a member of the School Board in 1980. He’s served on the Bellevue City Council before, and even served as Mayor for two years (the Bellevue City Council elects a Mayor from their members). He retired in 2003, but was appointed this year to fill Phil Noble’s seat. He’s served on the PSRC’s transportation policy board, and King County’s growth management planning council. He has a long list of good endorsements, including Mayor Degginger and former mayor Connie Marshall. We’d like to add to that list by endorsing him for Bellevue City Council position 7.
Vicki Orrico
The second is Vicki Orrico. Vicki is extremely involved in light rail planning, and as current chair of the Bellevue Planning Commission worked on the Bel-Red Corridor Plan to build TOD around East Link light rail stations. She’s even been endorsed by the Cascade Bicycle Club! Against her is Conrad Lee, a Kemperite and PRT advocate. Orrico has shown a solid understanding of planning principles and understands how to make sure East Link is effective – she earns our endorsement for position 2.
Patsy Bonincontri
Patsy Bonincontri was appointed to fill Connie Marshall’s seat. She served on the Sound Transit Citizen Oversight Panel for four years, previously chaired the Bellevue Planning Commision, and holds a degree in architecture. She’s running against developer Kevin Wallace, and her time so far on the Council has shown that she’s not afraid to take a stand to defend a good light rail alignment. Surrey Downs residents started talking about running someone against her right after the February vote. We endorse Bonincontri for position 4.
Michael Marchand
Finally, we have Michael Marchand, running against incumbent (and Kemperite) Don Davidson. Marchand has written about his opposition to the Kemper anti light rail lawsuit on his Bellevue Reporter blog, and I highly recommend the post. His attitude seems to match that of STB (and mine) very closely – he hits the nail on the head with one sentence:
With our region’s population predicted to nearly double by 2040 (for a great PSRC presentation click here), do we really think that all these people will be able to get around Bellevue using only cars and roads?
That’s his PSRC link, not ours (although we fixed it, PSRC seems to have pulled the document). This guy really gets it about what has to happen in the next couple of decades. We happily endorse him for position 6.
There’s no question – Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman Jr. is a smart cookie as far as real estate goes. The question for me has always been – why doesn’t he support light rail, when it would do so much for his properties?
For years, he’s fought East Link light rail extension. He fought it in 2007 in Roads and Transit, pushing that only the road projects be funded, even going so far as to run his own “End Gidlock Now” campaign (his spelling). He fought 2008’s Mass Transit Now. Today, he’s funding anti-light rail candidates in Bellevue City Council races, and he’s suing the state to stop light rail to Bellevue, claiming use of the I-90 center lanes is unconstitutional. More after the jump. Continue reading “Kemper Freeman’s Motivation”
The first “PT Tomorrow” (Pierce Transit’s overhaul campaign) open house is in Lakewood on October 6.
East Link public workshops start Monday the 12th in Redmond and finish Thursday October 15th in Bel-Red. The pitchforks will be out on October 14th, when South Bellevue residents attempt to avoid the blight of rail service and get the train shoved out to the BNSF tracks along I-405.
Aside from the first, I’m not expecting anyone from staff to attend any of these, so if anything interesting happens a report would be appreciated.
Sound Transit recently released their Second Quarter Ridership Report. Overall boardings were up over the same quarter last year, as usual, partly due to ever-increasing service levels.
Pierce County and South King buses and trains experienced a general decline in ridership, aside from Tacoma Link. As these subareas make up the vast majority of Sounder ridership, Sounder boardings overall took a hit.
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The final version of the 2009 Service Implementation Plan (SIP) has hit the street. It details all the planned service changes through next February, as well as provisional changes through 2013. It’s also the most thorough data source about each route that I’ve seen released by any transit agency.
A cursory glance at the ridership numbers tells you something about the transit market in various corridors. Specifically, the 545 and 550 together carried 10,112 people a day in 2008. Not every 545 rider will end up on East Link, but then I’m counting nothing from the 554, 555, or 556, nor all the Bellevue/Redmond traffic on Metro.
So let’s add up the riders. The 532, 535, 560, 564, and 565 feed Bellevue and Redmond from a huge area, Everett all the way down to Federal Way. Total ridership on these routes? 6,171.*
Dedicated believers, if they’re so inclined, can always dismiss ridership projections as biased by the agency that released them. But they can’t as easily dismiss the empirical data from Sound Transit’s ongoing experiment of connecting Eastside jobs to both densely packed residents in Seattle and widely dispersed residents to the North and South. Add in the fact that you have even more traffic passing in the opposite direction — Bellevue and Redmond to transit-optimized locations in DT Seattle — and it becomes a no-brainer.
* There are also a few Metro and CT routes in this corridor.
