Seattle Transit Blog

Primary endorsements Bertha overruns TRU and low-income fares Seattle loves light rail Driverless cars Adventures with Car2Go in Everett http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_021.mp3

Sound Transit – Angle Lake Testing 30 second from Sound Transit Video on Vimeo. Wednesday afternoon Sound Transit (ST) gave media a short preview of Angle Lake Station. The 1.6 mile extension south of SeaTac Airport will open some time in late September (exact date to be announced soon), and the project is also running […]

David Rolf righteously demolishes the record of neighborhood councils ($). Yonah Freemark reviews the transportation platforms of the federal parties and candidates. Spoiler alert: the Democrats are better. Sammamish Council split on ST3; comments narrowly focus on Sammamish, not thinking as a subarea, much less a region. The Seattle City Council killed microhousing, and hundreds […]

Sound Transit has a series of ads and art wraps out on Link Light Rail trains reminding passengers not to hog space in various ways. When someone takes up two seats, either by putting their belongings on the adjoining seat (if the stuff could have fit under the seat or on their lap), or taking […]

The planned move of Tacoma’s Amtrak station to Freighthouse Square, already home to Tacoma Dome Station, moved closer to fruition on July 13, as local officials celebrated the start of construction. Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar was joined by Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland at the Tacoma Dome Station plaza, and both spoke about the change […]

These are Seattle Transit Blog’s endorsements for the August 2, 2016 primary elections. As always, we choose candidates entirely based on their positions and record on transit and land use. The primary only decides initiatives and races with at least two candidates, so that’s what we cover here. Seattle Proposition 1, The Housing Levy Renewal: […]

City Limits, Laurence Hyde, National Film Board of Canada

King County Metro has put out a survey on managing their parking at park & rides. Metro needs a push from the public to take the leap into doing management programs even as tepid as what Sound Transit has done, and are fully aware people also use their parking lots to go to businesses nearby. […]

After a couple years of being coy about inevitable overruns, yesterday the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) informed lawmakers that 4-year delays actually do cost money. WSDOT Acting Secretary Roger Millar said that the new best-case scenario is a $223m cost overrun and an additional year of delay, putting the tunnel opening into early 2019. […]

On Wednesday, July 20, County Executive Dow Constantine and the King County Council held an event to celebrate passage of a proposal to spend $87 million to build workforce housing near train stations and other transit centers. The plan will raise the money from bonds backed by hotel/motel tax revenue which will start to be […]

Imagine you’re a woman, living with a husband and two kids, your elderly mother and disabled sister. Your husband works full-time and often overtime, perhaps as a security guard; he makes more than minimum wage but not a lot more. You would get a paying job too, but your time is taken up with caregiving. […]

Mayor Murray blows up the unrepresentative “district council” model. Metro bike racks violate state law, but WSDOT can (and will) issue one-year waivers to allow them to continue operating. Pierce Transit spending $3m to improve transit centers and park-and-ride next year. Republican platform wants to cut transit and Amtrak funding. Montlake Blvd design is highway-like. Meeting […]

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat was out with a piece yesterday – “At Last, Seattle Loves Its Light Rail” – ($) that describes Link’s 83% ridership jump as a tipping point from our “recalcitrant” Lesser Seattle instincts to our inevitable Big City future. It’s a good piece, and I encourage to read the whole thing, but here […]

Designs for Move Seattle’s “RapidRide Plus” will be rolled over the next few years. It has become clearer of late that the “Plus” meant “Rapid Ride Plus Other Things”, not plus as in “better than Rapid Ride”. SDOT views these not as transit corridors, but as multimodal corridors (something that wasn’t necessarily clear to voters last fall). […]

Though the light rail projects in Sound Transit 3 (ST3) took up most of the oxygen during the run-up to the Board vote to put the measure on the ballot, there was less public discussion about station access. Advocacy groups won $100m for a Station Access Fund (consisting of things like sidewalks, signalization, bicycle lanes and […]

After studies, drafts, public comment, more drafts, amendments, and so on, you might be a little confused about what exactly is in Sound Transit 3 (ST3). This is the third of a brief ST3 reference series (2019-2024 here, 2030-2036 here) about what’s in the package that we’ll vote on in November. Today, the two last […]

If driverless cars become universal, then running buses will become much more economical, too:

May was another impressive month for Sound Transit ridership, with the latest ridership report showing weekday Link ridership at 65,000 daily boardings, up 83% over May 2015 (36k), and up even 8% over April 2016 (60k). Link set records for total boardings, at 1.8m, and will likely continue to set records through October, when seasonal patterns […]

After studies, drafts, public comment, more drafts, amendments, and so on, you might be a little confused about what exactly is in Sound Transit 3 (ST3). This is the second in a brief ST3 reference series (2019-2024 here) about what’s in the package that we’ll vote on in November. Today: the second wave of openings (2030-36), […]

The STB Editorial Board is gearing up for primary endorsements. We’re only going to look at races with more than two candidates, and as always only consider positions on transit and land use. Anyhow, if you have any recommendations, particularly on state legislative candidates, that we should take a careful look at for the August […]

The Times has a handy calculator ($) to estimate what your ST3 tax burden would be. Kitsap Transit settles for $2.75m with an injured cyclist. Mercer Islander heroically fighting to expand special SOV privileges. 31% of Seattle riders are “all-purpose”; 23% “commuters”; and 46% “occasional.” Of course, “all-purpose” riders make up a larger proportion of […]

[UPDATED with additional information and corrections. – MHD] After studies, drafts, public comment, more drafts, amendments, and so on, you might be a little confused about what exactly is in Sound Transit 3 (ST3). This is the first in a brief ST3 reference series about what’s in the package that we’ll vote on in November. […]

Moving all these light rail riders into autonomous cars will help solve traffic congestion, per automobile technology investor. (Photo by Oran). Just when you thought silly season was over for transit opponents (We should vote down ST3 because Sound Transit threw a large opening day party for U-Link!), Bryan Mistele, CEO of INRIX, a traffic-information […]

Taking questions from the reader mailbag. Links mentioned: Detailed Move Seattle Budget RapidRide+: The Corridors Is UW Sleepwalking into a Transportation Disaster? Where America is Working http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_020.mp3

Happy to announce we've expanded our Home Area to serve more neighborhoods and added 150 MINI Clubman to our fleet! pic.twitter.com/9RkJzkxjfO — ReachNow (@ReachNowUSA) June 28, 2016 Rachel Lerman, The Seattle Times ($): BMW’s car-sharing service is expanding into the Seattle areas it promised to serve when the service launched two months ago. ReachNow said Tuesday it […]

In recent testimony before the Sound Transit board (and in its ST3 comment letter), the agency’s Expert Review Panel (ERP) asked the agency to take a finer look at expected household costs for Sound Transit 3 (ST3), this November’s major transit expansion measure. The published estimates of $203 annually per adult included a calculation of […]

Arlington County, just across the river from Washington DC, is a model for rail transit oriented development. It was not an easy journey but it was worth it, even their “slow growth-ers” agreed. It is quite the contrast from how civic leaders in South King County and Snohomish County approached Link’s alignment.

Metro Planner Ted Day and Heather McAuliffe are planning a family-friendly transit “hike” on Sunday, July 24th. I will use routes 62 and 75, and involve a stroll through Magnuson Park. Heather explains: Meet up location: Eastbound stop on Stevens Way at Rainier Vista for Routes 75 and 372 (UW Station) Board Route 75 departing […]

It’s that time again. If there’s a question you’d like Frank and me to answer on our next podcast, put it in the comments and we’ll get to as many as we can. The podcast should air sometime next week.

Temp bus lane on Westlake to help @kcmetrobus riders following #DucksBusCrash closure of Aurora Bridge. pic.twitter.com/1Zecno8ZQI — seattledot (@seattledot) September 25, 2015 I’m fond of criicizing local agencies (usually WSDOT) when events, planned and unplanned, bring pleas to take transit while those agencies take away any incentive to take that transit. So it’s only fair […]

Filling in another 32% of the funding puzzle, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced yesterday that the Lander Street Overpass project has been awarded $45m from the $800m pool of “FASTLANE” grants intended to improve freight mobility, highways, and bridges. Because everything we fund around here is piecemeal, the project has now cobbled together […]

Next year is a big year for Amtrak Cascades. The 2009-era stimulus projects will complete, Seattle and Portland will get two additional trips, and those trips will be faster and much more reliable. Since it’d been a while since we’d done an update on heavy rail projects, last month I sat down with Janet Matkin […]

Kitsap Transit needs bus drivers. Kenmore Council unanimously supports ST3. There’s an opening on Sound Transit’s Citizen Oversight Panel. “We love development and we are attracting a lot of new people,” ($) says Burien. If only officials in Seattle could be so unambiguous. GOP Gubernatorial candidate evasive about ST3, but meanwhile recycles the usual anti-rail, […]

When it launched in Seattle in 2000, Flexcar (later purchased by Zipcar) was a godsend for enabling car-free or car-light living. Hourly car rental, on demand, conveniently located near your home or office. Then came smartphones and GPS, followed by on-demand car sharing services like Car2Go and ReachNow, which did away with the dedicated parking spots in […]

A month after the largest earthquake preparedness drills in Northwest history – “Cascade Rising” – I began wondering about the seismic preparedness of our transit systems, both current and proposed. I’ve written about transportation and natural disasters before, and though life-or-death situations rightfully make subway health the least of our worries, I do believe we have […]

A couple weeks ago, I asked for reactions to the possibility of altering King County Metro routes 75 and 372 to mirror the couplet path of routes 65/67 and 78 through the University of Washington campus. Jeff Switzer from the King County Department of Transportation got back to me within a couple days with a […]

It’s a beautiful day in Safetyville…unless you are a safety-ignorant stick figure, then you’d be an amusingly morbid lesson for all of us.

On Monday, we celebrate the 240th anniversary of the colonies’ Brexit. Of course, forming a nation took a few years longer, but not as long as it has taken, and will continue to take, to build grade-separated high-capacity transit to Ballard, West Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma. There are those who think we should take even […]

With the dust starting to settle on University Link, some have turned their attention towards to the other end of the Link light rail system–the south end–and the upcoming opening of Angle Lake Station in SeaTac. With only weeks remaining until the anticipated opening in September, construction on the station and the 1.6 miles of […]

The U-Pass transit program for UW Faculty and Staff has been on an unsustainable financial trajectory for years, with a perverse reliance on parking revenue that cannibalizes funding as it succeeds in reducing driving. Rules against the gifting of public funds also require that these and other programs (such as ORCA Business Passport) be revenue neutral, […]

Northgate Link tunneling on track to finish in September. Residents in tall buildings sue to prevent tall buildings from blocking their view of tall buildings. ($) North Sound cities looking to grade-separate their rail lines.’ Capitol Hill Station is not yet perfect. 30 more stories on First Hill. Amtrak derails in Tukwila, no injuries. ST […]

In debating the relative merits of transit and bike priority in the Eastlake and Roosevelt corridors, it’s easy for each side to instinctively defend their own prior preferences. But largely unanswered in the debate so far is the fundamental existential question about the corridor, namely: How important is it from a mobility perspective, and for whom? […]

ST3 goes final Making transit work better during special events or construction Roosevelt-Eastlake BRT http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_019.mp3

Last month, Zach explained how a view of Mount Rainier from Bellevue City Hall had become a roadblock to rezoning of several redevelopable sites near the East Main Link station. Last week, the Bellevue City Council voted 5-1 to not retain the view corridor. While the rezoning process is not over, this decision makes it much more […]

OneBusAway, one of the essential transit rider tools available to us, has unveiled its updated Android app with a major redesign to its interface. The app now adheres to Google’s “Material Design” guidelines, emphasizing the use of “cards” and responsive animation, bringing a modern look that is a far cry from the bland look of yesteryear. […]

A front-page story in yesterday’s Times ($) describes a study that shows much higher property values around light rail stations. “Studies” that come from local firms trying to generate PR deserve some skepticism. Nevertheless, I think their headline writer is trying to spin this as a bad thing: “To live near light rail in Seattle, you’ll […]

Bike and transit advocates share many common goals. We all want walkable and bikeable cities alongside (or atop) fast and reliable transit. But potential fracture points have arisen between the sometimes competing visions of the Center City Bike Network (and the broader Bike Master Plan), Move Seattle’s Rapid Ride corridors, and the sudden entry of […]

Growth skeptics love to complain about South Lake Union. It’s too sterile, too corporate, too luxury — it couldn’t possibly help address housing affordability. I never bought into that — just building units does a lot of good for the region — but give it just a little time, and districts like SLU can solve […]

OFF THE RAILS – Official Trailer from Adam Irving on Vimeo.

Of all the good urban problems to have, an overactive downtown core is among the best of them. We’ve come to the point where a weekday/weekend transit service dichotomy is too simple to adequately respond to unique changes in demand or stresses to the system. From Pride, SeaFair, Rock and Roll Marathon, Obama x 3, Xi […]