Third Avenue Renovation
The Downtown Seattle Association released an update to its Third Avenue street reconfiguration vision. The DSA is a private organization of business leaders dedicated to promoting shopping and jobs downtown. Here's our previous coverage in June, and a comment thread in September.
The vision describes Third Avenue as a critical north-south transportation route in downtown Seattle." It goes on to say, For a variety of reasons, significant sections of the corridor feel unwelcoming and unsafe. Over the past decade, several planning efforts have yielded incremental improvements, but the underlying challenges remain the same."
It cites a corridor study by Seattle and King County that identifies five problems downtown (including Belltown and Pioneer Square): insufficient open space, deferred maintenance, few middle-class people lingering (in spite of the large volume of people walking or waiting for buses), blank walls, too much concrete and too little color, and underused lobbies in office towers.
Before getting into the DSA's recommendations, let's look at the background of Third Avenue transit and what else is happening.
The city recognized in the early 2010s that many buses travel the entire length of Yesler to Stewart or Belltown but ridership is uneven on them. Some routes come from high-volume areas or support a variety of intra-downtown trips, while others come from lower-volume areas or terminate halfway through an intra-downtown trip. The former routes are fuller and the latter routes emptier. This leads to uneven clusters of empty seats that increase congestion. The solution is to consolidate ridership onto fewer more-useful routes. That frees up space for more capacity on those routes, and more space for pedestrians downtown. This was the motivation behind splitting RapidRide C and D in the mid 2010s, for planning a half dozen additional RapidRide lines on Third Avenue, and for leveraging underground Link as it expands.
When the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) had buses in it, the SODO busway functioned like an extension of the tunnel, allowing congestion-free travel from Convention Place to Spokane Street. Link functions like an even longer extension of it, allowing congestion-free travel to Northgate and Angle Lake, and allowing transfers to be moved out of downtown to other Link stations. A trip from North Seattle to Costco used to require transferring buses downtown, but now you can transfer at SODO instead, and perhaps U-District or Roosevelt.
RapidRide C, D, and E function similar to this, supporting more people and a wider variety of trips through downtown than the previous spaghetti of routes did. The hope is that RapidRide G (Madison), H (Delridge), J (Fairview/Eastlake), R (Rainier), and upgrades to the 40 will improve the situation even further. Seattle's and Metro's long-range plans in the mid 2010s had even more RapidRide lines than this (e.g., RapidRide 40 and 62), but overoptimistic budgeting and the post-2020 economic climate forced some of them to be downgraded to smaller incremental upgrades.
Into this fray, the DSA vision proposes four alternative concepts for reconfiguring Third Avenue: Compact Transitway", Median Transitway", Transit Shuttle and Hub", and Transit Couplet". All of these reconfigure the vehicle lanes, pedestrian space, amenities, and aesthetics in different ways.
Compact Transitway has three bus lanes on Third. The middle lane alternates directions at certain intersections, so buses would merge into a side lane there.
Transit Shuttle and Hub replaces all Third Avenue routes with a single shuttle running every 90 seconds or so. Transfer hubs at each end would connect to other routes. I experienced this in Denver, where a free shuttle on the main street comes every minute or two. A multimodal hub at the north end has a train station, light rail station, and underground bus transit center. This alternative would have two transit lanes, freeing up the other two lanes for pedestrian uses.
Median Transitway also has a single shuttle route, but the stations are in the middle of the street between the lanes, so passengers enter via left-side doors. The First Hill Streetcar is like this, and the middle third of RapidRide G (Madison) will be.
Transit Couplet keeps one direction on Third but moves the other direction to Second or Fourth. In the example diagram, Third Avenue has two northbound bus lanes and one southbound general-purpose lane. Second Avenue has two southbound bus lanes, one southbound GP lane, and the two-way cycletrack. Fouth Avenue has four GP lanes and a two-way cycletrack. The DSA emphasizes that this is just an illustration, and it equally could have had southbound on Third or the other direction on Fourth. Fourth Avenue would lose its existing bus lane in this example, but that lane is not like the others. The Fourth Avenue bus lane is currently used by suburban express routes, some of which will go away when Link extensions to Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way open in the next few years.
The end of the report has comparisons between Third Avenue, Denver's 16th Street, Minneapolis's Nicollette Mall, Portland's Transit Mall, and Vanvouver's Granville Street. It also has a history of Third Avenue.
I have no strong preference between the alternatives at this time, but I have reservations about a shuttle or a couplet. I used to dislike through-routing downtown, but in recent years I've seen its advantages. When a route goes all the way through downtown to the adjacent neighborhood like the D and E, it supports a wide variety of overlapping trips, like Ballard to Westlake, Ballard to Pioneer Square, and Pioneer Square to Belltown. When routes are through-routed through downtown like the 2 or 28/131/132, it supports all those plus trips like First Hill to Uptown or Queen Anne, or Fremont to Costco. This is similar to what a subway does, supporting a wide variety of overlapping trips. People getting off are replaced by other people getting on, spread out across all the stations. All this is lost with a shuttle, which requires everybody to transfer at two specific places. Neither of those places is a destination for a majority of riders. So what have you gained? Transfers are more justified the longer each segment is. So going three miles from downtown to the U-District and transferring makes sense, but going one mile and transferring for one more mile - or worse, two transfers within two miles - makes less sense.
Couplets create confusion and can disadvantage one direction. Visitors don't know where to get the bus the other direction, so they have to ask somebody, and may be dissuaded from taking transit. Businesses have a visible stop in only one direction. If one direction is the main street and the other direction is a secondary street, the second set of riders have to walk further and don't see the other businesses in passing. In Seattle's case, Third Avenue is the main street with a variety of walk-up destinations. Second and Fourth Avenues are car sewers with mainly office buildings, of interest only to those 9-to-5 commuters who work there. It's possible for Second and Fourth to get a wider variety of destinations and a better pedestrian ambience, but a couplet alone won't do it. And as long as there are cars, we need some kind of high-volume north-south streets for them, and Second and Fourth Avenues are it.
On-topic comments for this article are about downtown Seattle: Third Avenue street configurations, other downtown bus routes, reenvigorating the retail core, safety, etc. This will doubtless get into Link and DSTT2, but the focus is on people's experience downtown, not on generic Link issues.