Orphan Road

Or, at least, "revising neighborhood plans" to accommodateTOD:

With Sound Transit's light rail line from downtown to the airport scheduled to open next year, the city is feeling pressure to increase station-area development in southeast Seattle. Thus, the draft legislation targets communities around three southeast Seattle light rail stations to update their neighborhood plans first: North Beacon Hill; North Rainier (Mount Baker at McClellan Street) and Othello (Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Holly Street).

"We're looking at the town-center idea and asking, how do we create the kind of communities (at light rail stations) that neighborhoods have identified in their plans?" said Diane Sigamura, director of the city's Department of Planning and Development, which helped craft the measures with the Department of Neighborhoods and the Mayor's Office.

I think I posted this a while back, but I've updated my Google maps of Link and Sounder alignments based on the proposed 15-year plan from Sound Transit.

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=103428233658015669918&hl=en&gl=us&p...

Try doing this with a bus:

DART is updating its fleet of 115 light rail vehicles (LRV) by inserting a new, low-floor insert between the existing sections of the vehicle adding seating capacity and improving access through level boarding. The newly modified vehicles began service on June 23, 2008.

Known as Super Light Rail Vehicles (SLRV) because of the greater length and added passenger capacity, the SLRV will seat approximately 100 passengers compared with 75 on the current vehicles. Standing passengers on the vehicle can nearly double the capacity.

(via)

The Seattle Times has a front-page story on the changes light rail is bringing to the neighborhoods along MLK Way. It's a fine read, but I wish it had dug a bit deeper into the underlying reasons why the neighborhood is changing.

Pivoting off of daijimin's post on the subject, I think there's a much more complicated story to be told here. We know that light-rail was a disruption, and that many of the Asian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood moved away because of construction. But much of that was going to happen anyway. And anyone who thinks those communities won't thrive outside of the Rainier Valley has obviously never been to Renton...or Federal Way...or Lynwood...or...

The story of immigrants to America first living in urban areas and then migrating out to the suburbs as they prospered is almost as old as America itself. After all, New York's Lower East Side is no longer a bastion of Italians, Irish and Jews. And as an Irish-Italian descendant of those immigrants, I'm glad they made their way out.

On the other hand, if they'd held on to the real estate, I'd be sitting pretty right now! Which gets us to the other side of the coin: if you believe, as I do, that the cul-de-sacs of today could become the tenements of tomorrow, then it's problematic, from a public policy perspective, to consign the poor folks to the auto-dependent suburbs at a time when auto-dependent lifestyles are on the wane.

Still, the newly-middle-class still seem more interested in movin' on out (to the suburbs) than movin' on up (to, say, a deluxe apartment in the sky). And not just in the U.S. Thousands of gated suburban communitites are going up in China to house that country's newly mobile middle class. It's mostly those of us who've lived for a generation or two in the suburbs who want to try living in the city for a change.

All of this is to say.... it's complicated!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.