By Frank on April 20, 2008
Federal Way’s City Council wants light-rail. Good for them. Now they just need to convince a majority of their residents to vote for it!
Posted in i5
By Frank on April 18, 2008
Dan Savage writes:
We may not get more light rail on the ballot this year, but once Sound Transit’s light rail line opens to the airport and people around here—people that don’t travel or don’t pay attention when they do, or the folks that are convinced that Seattle is perfect in every possible way just as it is (or was in 1964)— get a real taste of real mass transit, voters will be clamoring to approve and pay for more rail lines.
You hear this argument often, that once people get a taste for real transit, they’ll clamor for more. You hear it especially from folks who want to wait until 2010 to put another light rail measure on the ballot.
I take such sentiments at face value, but Dan’s comments got me thinking: how many people, exactly, are going to “taste” it between when it opens in mid-2009 (or December 2009 for the Airport Link) and a vote in November of 2010? Certainly it will be popular among a certain slice of the Seattle population — residents of the Rainier Valley, for example — but will folks who live in, say, Green Lake and commute to the Eastside even notice? Not to mention people who live on the other side of Lake Washington, people we’ll need to convince if we’re going to pass a measure that goes across the water.
To be sure, they’ll get glimpses. Hopefully there will be a raft of great PR for Sound Transit following the opening of the line (the rinky-dinky Streetcar even got a ton of ink, after all). And plenty of people will get a look at the train coming into the Airport as they drive down I-5 or SR 518. Maybe that will be enough to tip the balance. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that, for a large slice of the electorate, light rail will be just as theoretical in 2010 as it is today.
Posted in airlines, i5
By Frank on April 16, 2008
Charlotte has found an interesting way for their historic downtown streetcar and just-opened light rail line to coexist. It may not last forever, but it’s an interesting compromise. Perhaps we can explore the same concept with whatever high-capacity transit comes online in the old Ballard-West-Seattle corridor.
Posted in i5, taxes
By Frank on April 11, 2008
It’s outside the Puget Sound, so I haven’t been writing about it much, but the issue of whether or not to put light rail across a new Columbia River bridge down in SW Washington is a contentious one:
It was supposed to be a community forum without staged presentations, one that dealt with funding options for light rail.
But much of the discussion during Wednesday’s forum dealt more with the pros and cons of light rail, with occasional forays into the future price of gasoline and whether ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were being fought for oil or for freedom.
This, incidentally, is why I love writing about transportation issues. It’s something we all encounter every day, and thus something we all have an opinion on. It’s the circulatory system of society — our communal lifeblood.
Of course, this is the very same reason I often hate writing about transportation issues: you can’t talk about them in isolation, and it’s exceedingly easy for a conversation to go… [ahem]…off-track.
Posted in BRT, i5
By Frank on April 6, 2008
Controversial paens to the military-industrial complex aside, the underground light rail stations are going to be beautiful. The downtown transit tunnel, now that it’s reopened, is equally beautiful. Most transit systems have stations that are brutally efficient but not much fun to look at. Seattle’s, on the other hand, will be a truly amazing work of public architecture and public space of the kind that we have far too little of.
The combination of the light rail station and the new Cal Anderson park will be an urbanist’s paradise.
Posted in i5, roads
By Frank on March 14, 2008
Mike O’Neill rightly wonders if the Sierra Club is going to live up to its promise to support the next round of light rail. The club is still on the fence, apparently because park-and-ride lots encourage sprawl.
Let’s be honest: park-and-rides do, in fact, make it easier for people to mix cars and transit. But as Will says, it’s important to design with your users in mind. As long as you have to pay to park, you’re imposing a cost and letting people make a rational decision. And park-and-rides eventually facilitate denser, transit-oriented-development down the line (notice how all the parking lots in downtown Seattle are being developed). Finally, Seattle has chosen (for good or ill) to go down the path of most mid-sized American cities and decided to use basically one system for both intracity and intercity transit (ignoring Sounder for a moment). So park-and-rides are an inevitability as the system expands outside of the downtown core.
As always, one has to consdier the alternatvies, and I will be curious to see what Mike O’Brien at the club has to say on that at the forum Will mentions on March 20. Because it’s perfectly reasonable for the Sierra Club to be anti-light-rail, and they don’t even have to be advocating an alternative. They’re just an interest group with a singular mission: stop sprawl at all costs. That’s one angle, but it’s not the only angle.
But we as policymakers (yes, in the initiative-driven transit world, Joe Citizen is a policymaker) do need to weigh the alternatives. What, overall, is going to provide the best mix of decreasing fossil fuel usage, respecting the environment, increasing density, providing options to commuters, etc., etc. When you consider al the factors, ST 2.1 is a no-brainer.
Update: What Ben said. Habituating people to transit — even if only for part of their commute — is important in the short-term.
Posted in fares, i5, roads
By Frank on January 17, 2008
Noted without comment:
Light rail might be best travel option
01/17/2008 09:52 AM
By: Johnell Johnson
CHARLOTTE — The wintry mix might be causing some delays and closings, but not where the light rail is concerned. It was running smoothly Thursday morning.
On its Web site, the Charlotte Area Transit System says it is running on an inclement weather plan for the buses, but the light rail has been moving on schedule, running about every seven minutes.
The light rail has 15 stations and runs adjacent to South Boulevard from uptown Charlotte to Interstate 485 in Pineville. It is a preferred option if you have to travel into uptown or along its route because roads are still slick and traffic is moving slower than usual.
Posted in i5, taxes
By Frank on January 13, 2008
Neat idea from a grocery store in Charlotte, NC.
Posted in i5, taxes
By Frank on January 9, 2008
Autopia is starting a series on MAX, Portland’s light rail system.
Posted in BRT, i5
By Frank on December 14, 2007
The northern terminus for the University Link, the station at Husky Stadium is nearing design completion. I saw some of the renderings at the UW open house on Wednesday, but I didn’t stay for the full talk.
The stadium will be mostly underground, as riders will descend 100 feet via several escalators to the station platform. Though there will be a large pedestrian bridge connecting the campus with the entrance near Husky Stadium, to a driver heading down Montlake Blvd. it will be almost invisible.
However, between 2008 and 2014 (or thereabouts), there will be a giant pit in the Husky Stadium parking lot as the station is excavated and built. It will not be a pretty sight. Sound Transit and its contractors are going to do all they can to minimize the mess, but there’s only so much you can do with giant hole in the ground.
On the plus side, ST will use two tunnel boring machines to dig the Northbound and Southbound tunnels between UW and Capitol Hill (the Beacon Hill tunnels were bored one at a time using a single TBM). This will speed up the process considerably.
Posted in i5, sr509
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