Seattle hopes to have a permanent permit program in place by August 31st for private bikeshare. The permanent program would would lift the cap on the number of bikes to 20,000, impose street use fees on bikeshare companies operating in the city, and add new regulatory requirements for the operation of the bikeshare program.
On Tuesday, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) briefed the city council’s Sustainability and Transportation Committee on the executive branch’s proposal. In the lead-up to the meeting, SDOT released expanded data on bikeshare performance through May, which continues to show ridership growth on bikes but cratering per-bike ride use. SDOT’s bikeshare manager Joel Miller presented five key recommendations developed from public feedback on the pilot program and a new annual permit fee structure. Miller noted that bikeshare program permits will need to be “annual and iterative” to properly address the changing nature of bikeshare here and afar.
Bus rapid transit (BRT) will stretch from Lynnwood to Burien via I-405 by 2024. It’s the larger of two major BRT projects planned to be operated directly by Sound Transit (we profiled SR-522 BRT in May). The 37-mile corridor is anticipated to cost in the $870 million ballpark, carry 18,000 daily riders by 2040, and serve 11 stations–many of which will be freeway stops. Sound Transit is soliciting feedback now on the kind of station access improvements, land use coordination, and station configuration and amenities that should be made as part of the project.
I-405 BRT and SR-522 corridors and station locations. (Sound Transit)
The new I-405 BRT route will essentially blend together portions of Routes 535 and 560, starting in Lynnwood and ending in Burien. BRT service will rely heavily on express toll lanes (ETLs), high occupancy vehicle lanes, and bus-on-shoulder lanes to keep buses moving fast. Sound Transit is partnering with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to build some new facilities, including bus-on-shoulder lanes, direct access ramps, and the NE 85th St interchange in Kirkland. WSDOT is also embarking on plans to expand I-405 to include more HOT lanes in the next few years. Whether or not bus service will be reliable is largely in the hands of WSDOT, which has an incredibly mixed, often poor record in ensuring transit reliability on their facilities throughout the Puget Sound.
Sound Transit, however, plans to run buses at relatively respectable frequencies. Service is planned for 19 hours a day Monday through Saturday with buses coming every 10 minutes during peak commute hours and every 15 minutes at off-peak times. On Sundays, 15-minute frequencies will be maintained over a shorter window at 17 hours.
Some of the big project items that Sound Transit has promised include:
A new parking garage at Totem Lake adding 600 additional parking stalls to the 300 already existing;
New direct access ramps at NE 85th St to the ETLs;
A new 200-stall parking park-and-ride lot at NE 44th St;
New direct access ramps NE 44th St to the ETLs; and
While the city awaits Mayor Jenny Durkan’s decision on the fate of the Center City Connector, scores of business owners, individuals, and organizations have waited for weeks to speak face-to-face with her about the project. On June 19th, the coalition sent a letter to the mayor outlining why the she should complete the project, instead of canceling it and forcing the return of federal dollars. The deadline that the Durkan administration had set for the release of a report, completed by outside consultant KPMG, blew by almost a full month ago with no word from the City on an updated timeline.
It sounds like the KPMG report the mayor is sitting on actually shows daily weekday ridership projections increased from 20,000 in its first year to 25,000 across the streetcar system. Ridership that high would dwarf Seattle’s busiest bus route, the RapidRide E Line, which averaged 17,000 at last count. Mayor Durkan, however, seems to doubt both her own transportation department’s estimates and apparently the independent consultant she just paid $416,000 to check their work.
“So we need to know, before we start a project like that, how much is it going to cost to build, how much is it going to cost to operate, and how many people will it really move, because the goal of transit has got to be to move as many people through Seattle as we can,” Mayor Durkan said in a KUOW interview.
Coalition members, in an email, have expressed a willingness to help trim the budget by finding sensible cost savings for stations and maintenance facility consolidation. Despite their request to speak with the mayor, she has refused to meet with the more than 100 individuals and businesses in the coalition that support the Center City Connector–among them are some notable Durkan backers like former Mayor Charles Royer.
In spelling out their support for streetcar extension, the coalition pointed to its heavy reliance on federal funding and connectedness as a whole system: “We all have skin in the game–Seattle has spent more than $45 [million] on the Center City Connector to date,” the coalition wrote. “The federal government has allocated $75 million for Seattle to complete this project. This is money local leaders have fought hard to protect for years now. Should our city choose to change strategies at this point, the $75 million would get returned.”
The federal money couldn’t just be repurposed to a bus connector service and could result in the federal government penalizing the city by denying future grants, both queued up now like Madison and Roosevelt Rapidride lines and future projects. The city’s D.C. lobbyist has advised against canceling the streetcar for just that reason, even as the mayor seems to play dumb. Future Link light rail projects in Seattle could be among projects that get extra federal scrutiny down the line, too.
On Monday, the Seattle City Council decided the process to establish a business improvement area in the SoDo district and the fate of two landmarks. The city council approved the formal landmarking of a former Auto Row retail building in Capitol Hill and stark Modernist office building in Fremont. The city council also set in motion a process to form a special business improvement area that would fund special tasks in the SoDo district and impose special assessments on business improvement area ratepayers.
SoDo Business Improvement Area
Later this fall, a business improvement area could be approved for the SoDo district, extending from S Royal Brougham Way to areas south of S Spokane St. The business improvement area will be structured to focus on four core service areas: transportation, public safety, street cleaning and maintenance, and marketing and advocacy of the business district. All of this would be in addition to baseline city services, it would supplant existing services.
Housing funding solutions: Cities across the country are now moving to tax big business, including San Francisco, to fund housing and alleviate homelessness.
On a Thursday evening in early June, at the top floor of King County Metro Transit’s building on South Jackson Street, the One Center City advisory group quietly met after a nine-month hiatus. Notice for the meeting had only been posted to the obscure website for One Center City planning that very morning, and only two members of the public (myself included) were there to watch the meeting. In attendance were the dozen or so members of the advisory group, who represent various downtown neighborhoods and business interests, and high-level staff members for the government agencies involved: Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), Metro, Sound Transit, and the Downtown Seattle Association.
They were there to get a recap of the decisions that had been finalized, without them, during those nine months as Seattle’s new mayor assumed control and the Washington State Convention Center expansion, the pivot point on which so many transportation challenges downtown in the next few years hinge upon, was approved by the city council. In that time, the Fourth Avenue protected bike lane was postponed to 2021, Metro and Sound Transit announced that they would largely not be truncating any bus routes at the University of Washington light rail station to avoid downtown congestion, and SDOT told the city council’s transportation committee that it was far from a sure thing that additional northbound bus lanes on Fifth and Sixth Avenues would be ready in time for the March 2019 exit of buses from the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel.
The board also received word that One Center City, closely associated with the “period of maximum constraint” and the specific projects associated with it, would be rebranding: the new name is now “Imagine Downtown: Big Ideas for the Heart of Seattle.” Imagine Downtown will be the umbrella under which the agencies conduct the long-term planning around moving people through Seattle’s central neighborhoods. The fact that Imagine Downtown was also the name for the City of Atlanta’s downtown planning process that completed in 2009 was not mentioned.
Last week, the Pierce Transit Board of Directors formally took the step to decide the Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA) for an upgraded transit corridor between Downtown Tacoma and Spanaway. The board of directors chose the preferred route and technology to be used, the latter mostly just being a formality as bus rapid transit (BRT) had always been the plan. Still, the LPA was the result of public feedback that showed support for the chosen technology and general alignment.
Pierce Transit already operates Route 1, a conventional bus service, on the 14-mile corridor between Tacoma and Spanaway, largely along Pacific Avenue/State Route 7. BRT would replace this bus service with a faster and more reliable service. That means consolidating bus stops, implementing transit service priority (e.g., bus lanes, queue jumps, and signal priority), and providing level boarding. Frequency is expected to be in the range of every 10 to 15 minutes for buses, which would generally be an noticeable improvement in service levels from today.
Planned BRT corridor. (Pierce Transit)
The board of directors made key decisions on the routing, which will start at 204th St E/SR-7 in Spananway and terminate at S 9th St/Market St in Tacoma. The terminus in Downtown Tacoma will allow for transfers to other local and regional transit services, including Tacoma Link that is currently being extended to the Hilltop Neighborhood. The LPA also designates Pacific Avenue/SR-7 as the main street that the BRT will operate along, with the exception of the Tacoma Dome District and Downtown Tacoma.
Unlike Route 1, the LPA identifies a mangled deviation to Tacoma Dome Station duplicating ample connecting services like Tacoma Link and Routes 13, 41, 400, 500, 501, and 575. While this will shave off a little travel time for riders on the southern portion of the line, it will introduce a noticeable time penalty for passengers going between Downtown Tacoma and areas south of S 25th St. It also wastes valuable service hours for a transit agency short on revenues that could be invested in additional trips and frequency. The deviation was a condition for funding from Sound Transit in hopes of attracting more non-park-and-ride patrons at Tacoma Dome Station (garage parking is already running at capacity) with a one-seat ride.
Pierce Transit also hopes to improve the off-board transit rider experience by using higher quality shelters, new brand identity, real-time arrival information, additional lighting and security features, and off-board fare payment kiosks. Boarding buses will be allowed at all doors and onboard riders could expect wifi.
Street changes are very likely to make their way into the BRT upgrades. Earlier in the planning process, Pierce Transit evaluated the potential of using curbside business access and transit lanes, center-running transit-only lanes, and segments of mixed traffic BRT operations. A new fleet of buses would also replace existing ones. The board of directors did not, however, decide upon these aspects of the projects which will be further evaluated and refined as the project moves forward into more detailed planning and design phases.
To date, Pierce Transit has secured $75 million in state and local grants to fund the project ($60 million from Sound Transit 3 and $15 million from Connecting Washington appropriations), but another $75 million is being sought from the federal government. A Small Starts application will be submitted to the Federal Transit Administration later this year and the transit agency hopes to be awarded a grant by early 2019. Detailed planning and design (e.g., station locations, street configurations, bus types, and station amenities) will continue over the next year or so with service commencing by late 2022. Whether or not Pierce Transit secures federal funding, the BRT line will open in 2022, though that would mean paring down some of the bells and whistles from the program.
