I’ve been reading at Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit about driverless metros, and I’ll admit, at first the idea was not too appealing. The full grade-separation required has a lot of “Chinese Wall” potential for city neighborhoods, and ‘people movers’, as they are also called, haven’t really delivered the goods in Miami or Detroit. Nor has the Monorail, with a half hour between departures, the last time I rode it, been real inspiring.
But it occurred to me that the 520 bridge might be just the place for such a train. At the Seattle end you have a clearly visible huge potential for transfers and journey-ends at the U of W. The metro could start there and stop once, at Overlake Transit Center. The journey time would be quite short, and providing service on 5-minute headways, say, when a football game ends, or during rush hour, would be easy. Passengers for Overlake Hospital or Bellevue could simply transfer to ST2 trains running west. At the west end riders could transfer to Link to go downtown or head north.
I imagine some would say that providing parking at Overlake would simply be pushing the parking problem out of town, and I say, why not? Let them park their cars out there and use modern transit to enter the city, just as the modern skyscraper forces people to park their cars ‘out there’ and use the elevators to reach the offices.
Jarrett’s article and the comments are well worth a read, so I’ll just say, low labor costs, short headways, a corridor made for grade separation, fast travel between two major markets with transfers at both ends- what’s not to like?
I have a couple of issues with this:
First I really don’t want to add yet another transit technology to the mix in Seattle. I’d prefer we stick to the ones we already have. FRA compliant rail, LRT, streetcar, and buses are quite enough. At least LRT, streetcar, and buses can share ROW and other facilities to a certain extent.
Second I’m not sure a UW to Overlake Transit Center line would be the best or the most optimal routing. I think you’d do better to run the line into Bellevue for one thing. For another I’m not sure U-Link/North Link has the necessary capacity. Also Overlake Transit Center really doesn’t have room for adding much in the way of additional parking.
Thanks for the link! It’s important, when considering driverless metro, to look at the kind of development that it both needs and generates. As I’m sure you know, Vancouver’s SkyTrain is generating a linear series of tower-clumps around its suburban stations — mostly residential but some office. Transit connections, such as you’d have at Husky Stadium and Overlake, are just not enough to drive the ridership you need for such an expensive technology. You have to have strong density around the stations, and a series of such stations so that you get the cumulative benefit of linking all those stations to each other.
The key issue with 520 is that it’s not a linear string of obvious station sites. Rather, it’s a chokepoint serving many demand patters that fan out on both sides of the lake. That suggests the need for a facility that protects transit through the chokepoint but that can be used for services fanning out on both sides to serve the actual demand pattern. In other words, Bus Rapid Transit.
A good bus lane with flyover connections to key destinations at each end would be useful to a huge range of frequent bus lines, including Downtown Seattle to Overlake, Downtown Seattle to Kirkland, UW to Overlake, UW to Kirkland, and UW to Downtown Bellevue. Peak services could penetrate further into the east side, and specialised private commter services (UW-Microsoft?) could also use the lane.
That seems to me a better fit in a corridor where there are destinations fanning out on both ends but nothing to stop for in the corridor itself (unless you want a Medina or Clyde Hill station and those cities are ready to grow some tower clumps there, which I doubt.)
Cheers, Jarrett
Jarrett, I was also considering some aspects of the line that are different from most such lines, mainly, that we already have a grade separated corridor, which should reduce the expense of creating one by quite a bit, and secondly, that the U of W is the state’s second largest employer.
A large part of the BRT fan-out could start at Overlake Transit center, reducing by many miles the distances traveled by buses.
Then, extending south from Overlake to I-90 is a dense corridor including apartments and a college.
This, of course, is mainly a thought experiment. I understand how your professional perspective leads to BRT, but I have the liberty to regard it all with the utmost skepticism, as i suspect the price of energy will rise much faster than the projections you must use would indicate.
Yes, I was initially quite resistant to the gee-whiz element of driverless trains, and then I remembered- Seattle is seriously behind the times. And a freeway corridor is not a place where rail technology has to mix comfortably with pedestrians and slow drivers.
Take the good part of what Vancouver has already done, leave out the expensive maglev or linear induction technologies, and reap rewards in the form of dramatically lower operating costs and headways.
Well the reason for not adding yet another technology to the mix is it allows the line to mix with the rest of the system. Say an eventual UW to Ballard line or to tie the Eastern end into East Link and an eventual Issaquah spur.
While driverless metros have their advantages you don’t really want to build an isolated system that doesn’t play well with everything else.
It isn’t an absolute thing though as the Canada Line is different technology than the Expo or Melinium Lines, however the Canada Line would be a useful starter line by itself if Vancouver had no other rail.
The ability to mix with the rest of the system can be over-rated and the 520 is a good example of why.
The big advantage here is the bridge, which means running trains without stopping, and the transfer stations at each end of the line. There is no reason here to plan for street running, or extensions, and there are reasons not to.
To see how this thinking leads you astray, just look at your comment- “or to tie the Eastern end into East Link and an eventual Issaquah spur”. To a person who hadn’t thought too much about it, the way to get to Issaquah would be to cross Mercer Island and go straight on out.
The object of the thought experiment was to combine an existing corridor with a technology that can run minimal headways almost 24/7 for very low cost at very high speed. It’s a shuttle that would reduce the travel time by more than half an hour for a person taking ST2 from Overlake to the University, that is to say, saving such a rider more than an hour each day.
That oughta be worth something.
I want to be with [SCO] on this, for the amount of service hours we could cut by not driving a large number of buses all the way across the bridge then into downtown.
But that begs the question: when East Link starts running, why not quit running these over-the-bridge busses anyway? Drop off passengers at Link and turn around, saving a huge amount of service hours for a potentially small amount of extra travel time.
The problem here is that using the East Link to get from Bellevue to the University adds a half hour on each trip, or an hour a day for the regular commuter.
This eventually is going to be mighty irritating to commuters (especially standees!) who ride the trains trundling south to the East Channel bridge, over Mercer Island, through Seattle, and eventually to the University.
Well then add a shuttle bus just across the bridge and back. You’d only need one line rather than a few dozen now that everyone is going from one point to one point (Bellevue to UW).
Right, but the point of the thought experiment was that the driverless trains can add frequency and extended hours of frequent service without increasing labor costs.
Whether the extended service hours mean much to the two end points I can’t say, but I’m real sure the volume of traffic is there.