TRAX

The C Line

By Frank on June 4, 2008

Details emerge on the Metro RapidRide service to West Seattle.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the point of RapidRide is not necessarily to get people to and from downtown quickly. We have express buses for that. RapidRide is designed to work more like a subway, with potential starts and destinations all along the route. Sure, some stops will be more popular than others, but serving downtown commuters is not the primary goal, as I understand it.

All that said, I think Metro is probably being too conservative in evolving this service from its standard buses. Free Wi-Fi is cool and all, but there are more important things. For example, if the goal is really to move people between destination centers, why not eliminate the stops in between “stations”?

The point of the new color and naming schemes is to signal to people “this is not a bus.” Why not go further in that direction?

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ST Visioning

By bgtothen on February 1, 2008

I wasn’t able to attend the ST workshop but I did look through the pdf that STB has on his page (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2008/01/31/2004157186.pdf). I wasn’t really surprised by most of it. There was one glaring omission though.

In ST2 there was money to do a study for HCT from the UW to Ballard via NE45th. I don’t see anything about that. Everyone know that getting East/West in this city is a nightmare and ST and Metro really need to address this. I think that they should have at least 3 high quality E/W BRT routes that help people get from one side of the city to the other and allow them to transfer from LINK to RapidRide or other local service. If we aren’t going to have light rail for a while we have got to have a good BRT network.

(Full size http://students.washington.edu/adambp/mytake.jpg)

I have done a quick little overlay (see above) of what this would look like on their map. All of these routes exist so service hours could be taken from those routes. Also with LINK some current bus service can be redistributed to help pay for this. Possibly on busy streets like denny the buses could go a block or two north and use bus only streets.

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