that's part of the problem: we now have 3 tunnels through downtown and a ton of skyscrapers with large footings which makes it challenging to build another tunnel.
If anything the 99 tunnel is a good example of why tunnel boring under downtown Seattle is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. And it highlights the need to either put all trains through the existing transit tunnel, or build a new cut-and-cover tunnel on 4th or 5th.
We were lucky that Big Bertha got stuck somewhere where it could be accessed from above. If it had gotten stuck under pioneer square, or under downtown Seattle, we would have been screwed.
As someone living here, I can confirm that there were actually a ton of issues with that project. There were just far far more issues with keeping the viaduct in its original way. Plus, while not perfect, that project helped reconnect the city with the waterfront
Appreciate your videos as always, especially the Seattle ones! As a Seattle area resident, I'm extremely disappointed by the meekness Sound Transit has exhibited throughout it's existence. Their decisions seem to suggest that their goal isn't to provide world class transit, but to make sure they cause as little disruption as possible. Examples include aligning routes along freeways instead of avenues/boulevards (sacrificing development opportunities and walkability), creating at grade sections with level crossings (sacrificing safety), using light rail instead of metro vehicles (sacrificing capacity), and now this wild proposal to bypass King Street and Pioneer Square (sacrificing connectivity). Connectivity, capacity, safety, walkability, and development opportunities are kind of the biggest reasons for building rail transit in the first place and those are being sacrificed in the name of cost and disrupting the present as little as possible. We're talking 8 added minutes of travel time (average depending on trip route) with the most egregious being 10 minutes for people traveling to/from Bellevue/Redmond (Amazon/Microsoft) and the Airport. From my observations over the last several years, I've seen little understanding or acceptance from Sound Transit of the transition period required to achieve greatness. I understand the concerns about disrupting this neighborhood specifically, but they should study how to reduce disruption in their operations/construction without completely changing the plan. For example, why does it need to take 10 years to build the original station? Unfortunately the last public comment period passed (March 9). The final vote will be held on March 23. I don't think it's exaggerating to say this is one of the most important infrastructure votes in Seattle's recent history given the implications.
I never thought about that, all the expenses outside are happening alongside i-5 restricting access to people living on another side of i-5
Рік тому+40
I think RM Transit, or some other channel, once put it as “avoiding short term disruption, ends up causing long term disruption”. Here the city needs to be reminded of this?
I agree, I would also add: A shortage of urban stops. The University of Washington (UW) got only two stops (it should have three). Between the UW and downtown they only added one station (Capitol Hill). There should be a station at First Hill, as well as one at 23rd & Madison. This is how a traditional metro works. They ignored bus to rail integration for much of the line. SkyTrain is extremely successful in part because the buses and trains complement each other so well. The Canada Line is especially effective. Every major cross street has a station. Sound Transit seems disinterested in that sort of thing. All the while, there is an obsession over distance. This plays a part in all of these decisions. If your goal is to build a traditional metro, then you don't skip First Hill. Maybe you don't go any further. You wait until you cover such an important part of the region. But if your goal is to go out to the hinterlands, then you skip it. My own theory is that the folks who are making these decisions don't know much about transit, but think they do. They are politicians. I don't mean that in a bad way. My mom was a politician. I have great sympathy for politicians. But these politicians all have more important jobs. They run major cities or counties. These are huge organizations for which they will be judged. In contrast, no one will judge the efficacy of the system for decades, and even then, people can always make excuses (e. g. the city didn't grow the way we thought it would). So without knowing much about mass transit systems, they looked at what all Americans are familiar with: freeways. This metro is remarkably similar to the existing set of freeways. If you didn't care about the downside of freeways, and there none in the area, it would look like this. Long distance lines, with huge gaps. Little concern over what is actually next to the stations/on-ramps. The problem is, mass transit is not like a freeway. Worse yet, the freeway runs alongside many of the routes. As a result, very few will actually save time for a typical trip. The region would be much better off with a traditional metro -- one with multiple lines intersection in various places in the urban core -- with feeder buses connecting to the rail system from outside. Or maybe just a smaller system that covers the essentials, while maximizing bus-to-rail integration. The irony is, the nearest neighbor to Seattle (Vancouver BC) has built such a system. It is just sad that we couldn't learn any of the lessons there. It is like Seattle is the Goofus, and Vancouver is the Gallant of transit in the Pacific Northwest.
Having lived in Seattle all my adult life, I've seen the convoluted history of transit planning play out. Basically a bunch of conflicting political interests and historical NIMBYism creating unwieldy solutions that don't satisfy anyone. Using the CID as the transit hub is the logical choice but it will take a lot of arm twisting to make that happen. That said, there is an elephant in the room regarding the CID - the historical racism behind the way the residents have been treated, not just on this project, has made them understandably wary of any major changes to their neighborhood. Case in point: the originally proposed station for the new line was on 5th Ave, a block east of the current light rail stop and Union Station, and would have torn up the heart of the area. (And the smugness of the predominantly white urbanist groups and their "we know better than you do" attitude doesn't help. If you want to learn more about the rejected plan decades ago that Reece refers to, search "forward thrust Seattle"; too long to go into, but the federal money that would have gone to that project was snapped up by Atlanta instead.
I could not agree more, whats key is that Chinatown needs transit - because a lack of connectivity is horrible, but it needs to respect the needs of the area
As a counter-point to the "white urbanist groups" trope - aren't most people involved in politics and government white? Like it feels weird to call out urbanist groups for their whiteness, but elected officials
Because the existing station won't continue serving the ID well once the lines are split. The Rainier Valley and Airport will connect into the new line, without access to the ID unless a 2nd station is built there.
@@chadnewton5721 I mean the best rider experience would be if we run all three lines through the existing tunnel, no need to switch between different tunnels. Upgrading the signaling system would allow all three lines to use the same tunnel with great frequency. No disruption of CID for ten years either.
Fun fact about the escalators, the reason they are broken all the time is because they literally bought ones not meant to be run constantly, but then ran them constantly...
Great video Reese. I am the Design and Construction Director for the FW project with Metrolinx and have been involved on this project since 2015. It is truly exciting to see this come to life and will definitely serve a part of Toronto that has been sorely lacking higher-order transit for a long time. What I can offer in addition to your video is that the local community is very excited about the project, even though we have had some challenges with traffic during construction... Also, the streetscaping will be amazing when we are complete, with elevated cycle tracks as well as enhanced sidewalks and grade-separated multi-use paths at Hwy 400 and CP rail corridor. Come back when we are finished and check it out!
I just made my first trip to Seattle, great ciy, but needed to go to Everett. There are two trains in the morning from Everett to Seattle and two in the afternoon back to Everett. There are no trains on the weekends or at any other time. It is hard to understand why Sound Transit thinks nobody in Everett would ever want to go to Seattle in the evening or on the weekend.
Agree. Don't forget they want to setup Everett as the second airport for the region but come with no public transit to downtown Seattle. And they have only one car rental which discourage tourist to use the airport. It also means the locals have to drive long down to SeaTac to catch their flights
And the planned extension of the Link to Everett isn't even supposed to open until 2037. So even if they do continue on the same path, we'll all be really old by the time it gets finished. I didn't even consider the travel time for the Link that far north. Yikes.
The limit of 2 trains south in the am and 2 trains north in the pm and only on weekdays on Sounder North is due in large part to an old (2003?) contract between Sound Transit and BNSF that they wouldn't run more than that for 100 years. So, apart from putting some ever so diplomatic pressure on Sound Transit to revise that contract, given the glaring lack of respect for mobility equity and reducing VMT and GHG, don't expect more.
Maybe Sound Transit thinks because there isn't enough demand on the weekends. Did you think of that? There are buses by the way that go to Everett. You really think it makes sense to send a heavy train 30 miles for 40 people?
The metro area I live in Portland does have a central station for its metro light rail. It’s called Pioneer Square. The green, blue, red, yellow, and orange lines stop at it. Also, many bus lines running through the city center stop within a few blocks to create the “Portland Transit Mall.” We don’t have a commuter rail in our city center. There is only 1 commuter rail line and it moves between the various western suburbs so there’s no need for a central station for commuter rail and metro as there’s not even a single commuter rail service that exists in Portland City Center.
Most transit networks in Europe doesn’t have a main hub (With the notable exception of Paris), lines usually form a grid or a "triangle transfer", this is better for high density cities such as in Europe as it allows to have multiple well-connected places instead of a single one. (Usually trams form a grid while metros form a triangle transfer like in Prague, Vienna, Lyon, Milan…)
I mean you have hubs, but they are several, Lisbon has a few Metro/Suburban rail interchanges and those interchanges also tend to have bus terminals (except Entre Campos I think) and a few Metro/Bus interchanges as well (like in Campo Grande, which is also a Metro/Metro line interchange)
@@truedarklander Absolutely, bus and tram terminals are often located at transfer stations to offer better connectivity, but they are not main hubs (like Châtelet-les-Halles in Paris where 8 lines cross each other and millions of users must transfer at this station). Lyon has 4 lines and 4 transfer stations, Prague has 3 lines and 3 transfer stations, not one station where all lines intersect.
The San Diego Trolley has three main transfer hubs--Santa Fe, Old Town, and 12th and Imperial. Not a triangle, but does help disperse passenger loads and minimize backtracking.
"Poor soil" is basically a consequence of being a city. That's why they have made tunneling machines that build the walls at the same time as they excavate and move forward.
Yes, true, though even if you were to build the tunnel with Earth pressure balance TBM with all the possible help of grouting or ground freezing, there still can be permanent effect on groundwater flow and pressure - flow blocked or redirected just because of the finished tunnel structure being there. And those changes can lead to buildings leaning or cracking. Dunno what the water table looks like in that area. I don't quite have the context Reece has, all the plans I could google on ST3 website show the Midtown station still in place, as well as Int'l District/Chinatown station. That seems like convenient enough transfer, and can be built out with an underground passage with travelator for accessibility, not sky high expenses...
We have soil conditions in some places that make it impractical or impossible to build stations. It's the reason we have street cars. The street cars link two areas (First Hill and South Lake Union), the former of which isn't suitable for light rail. statiion.
My city has the central bus station right along the main tracks going through downtown. However, the Amtrak station is a few miles away. Even worse, the local commuter line stops at the airport on the outskirts. Both trains used to run into the heart of downtown, but bringing it back would require additional track lines and a new station and few seem to have the vision, let alone the courage to pursue such an ambitious plan.
You know, we use the phrase rapid transit to describe a variety of modern systems, yet we see (in video and real life) trains lazily drifting in and out of stations and around not so sharp curves following grossly padded schedules. We see trains sitting motionless as the high priests of safety ponder when to operate door controls. Transit may be rapid when compared to streets gridlocked at peak times, but it seems to be a deceptive term. Too few systems have the punch of a BART train, or the people mover at ATL, or the Montreal Metro (praise be). Am I wrong or is the way Seattle LRT operates a good example of an UNrapid transit system? This would be a fun topic to explore in depth in a future video. Because SPEED, MATTERS!
I suspect there's a reason most people talking about such things seem to generally drop the word 'rapid'. Of course, Linguistics would tell us that the main reason is that the lack of a concept of non-rapid transit made the 'rapid' lable redundant, but equally, the transit just not actually being all that rapid would do it too.
This is making me think of the original plans for Charles Center in Baltimore. It was supposed to be the hub for three subway lines in Baltimore but now just ends up as a massive and awkward liminal space since the city basically said "this is way too expensive," cut the NW/E subway line in half, turned the N/S line into a really shitty light rail, and completely scrapped the W/NE line. The MTA (not to be confused with NYC's MTA) did propose a light rail extension recently (though the comment period is over) which would connect the places the N/S line was supposed to connect which is a testament to bad decisions in the moment leads to higher costs later. I hope Seattle can avoid the poor planning that befell Baltimore.
Hi Reece, if you're going to make a video about weird/malfunctioning transit systems, take a look at Naples, Italy. This City deserves video of its own, for several reasons: many diverse lines and systems, rich history and interesting natural setting as well as multiple challenges and mistakes. Naples metro is really weird in shape, it's really deep and advertises itself as the prettiest in Europe/the world (famous art stations), however trains run every 30! Minutes sometimes. Problems with rolling stock make the offical schedule a joke. Besides, the whole artsy image of the metro is overrated af, and stations are poorly maintained, there are no functioning ticket machines etc. (I'm talking about Line 1, or Metropolitana collinare - the hill Subway). Line 2, branded as metro is just a commuter, old railway with couple underground stops. Line 6 is a joke. It opened from nowhere to nowhere, operated for couple of years and closed for over a decade, for renovation and extension. There's also linea Napoli - Aversa, which is a interprovincial, suburban Subway, and has just ONE train operating (it uses old Rome metro trains). There are many plans and extensions underway, there is also weird tram network and multiple suburban systems of their own, like circumvesuviana etc. So please please cover Napoli sometimes! Hugs
I am curious though RMTransit, which doesn't seem to be stated in the video. Is the current plan better than doing none at all? I agree that Seattle could do a lot better and greatly improve upon the plan they currently have. However, with the amount of politics, land rights, and cost that happens with decisions like these to begin with I assume it is still better getting something in place than not having one at all.
I recently moved to Seattle and the transit decisions always baffle me. Beyond the light rail here, the bike lanes and greenways out of the city center tend to be random residential roads that don’t connect. This annoys local residents who wonder why they’re suddenly near a road with no through traffic, and people who bike as they don’t have a connected route to actually go anywhere.
You're wrong about a couple of things. There is no "King Street Union Station". These are two separate stations that are a block apart, and Union Station has not been a railway station since around the start of Amtrak in 1971. Furthermore, King Street Station and the Chinatown Link station are not one and the same; they are, in fact, nearly two blocks apart and require crossing over the tracks and then going past Union Station to get to the Link station. I was also under the impression that the Ballard-West Seattle light rail line was going to use the same tunnel as the existing Central line, not a new tunnel, but as I live quite a distance from Seattle, you may be right about that one. But after building the WA-99 tunnel, I don't really think the city wants to build another new tunnel.
My suggestion as a Dutchmen: let some Dutch designers do the work: efficiency guarenteed! E.g. two lines following about the same track... JOIN them! Connectivity? Well, look at The Netherlands. look at Rotterdam, like 3 metro lines share the same track in the center, but before and after they are completely separated. (yes, there are 3 more lines). Yes, it is expensive, but will pay back in the years coming. Learn from it, I use the publc transport a lot, and it's easy here. The US can learn from The Netherlands! Tunneling: ask the Dutch (You reffered them for Amsterdam metro) Besides that all: I like your videos a lot! Very infomative!
I'd love to bring just about any foreign team to the US and have them build our transit since we are in general so terrible at it. The only caveat is they would have to be given free rein to do as they wish and not be beholden to whatever stumbling blocks usually bedevil American planning boards.
I think the other big thing is how Seattle, King County Metro, and Sound Transit have not coordinated to make sure they are placing infrastructure equitably. The central gripe of CID is that they get all the infrastructure placement for things like homeless services, which was plopped down by Seattle during the last five years, and then have to get torn up for full-region transpo. Seattle set Sound Transit up for failure even for than ST undercuts itself on this one, by not being at all interested in making places in the city pull their weight on the way we've collectively advocated for impossibly high housing prices. Instead, CID takes every hit because it's older, has language access issues, and has been relatively depopulated by round after round of "investment" that it's not getting full value from. A transit hub should be a blessing for a neighborhood, but decades of shortsighted decisions to make CID a sacrifice zone have ensured that it would be skeptical, and now we may pay a permanent price for it.
The plan is completely underground in Uptown+Belltown+Downtown+Chinatown with Chinatown the hub due to its heavy rail service. The above ground service will mirror 15th Ave W. The above ground is largely elevated. The reason the hub has not been OKed yet is some residents of Chinatown oppose expanding that station due to construction impacts having been thru that before.
As a Seattleite, I appreciate your coverage of this topic so much because the lack of a new station at International District is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. 4th Ave needs to be replaced anyways so why not get two birds with one stone? Hopefully this video garners the attention of the buffoons at ST.
King Street station is about a block away from union station. Union station is owned by sound transit. Pioneer square and Chinatown international district light rail stops attract a lot of bombs and vagrants and people hanging about smoking drinking and carousing. And the Seattle times came out today March 19th 2023, with a article about the Seattle underground tunnel & it's maintenance issues.
SF has this same problem as well. All of the new HSR services and Caltrain are in to the Salesforce Transit Center, which isn't on BART or Muni. It's absurd.
This reminds me of Chicago with its downtown commuter rail (METRA) stations that mostly don't connect to the rapid transit (Ogilvie is next to an L station, but the others aren't -- not a huge walk, but bad if you have bad weather).
I live approximately 20 miles east of the stadiums off of I-90, the plan was to get a line about 5 miles away by 203X. Years ago in an online discussion with transit, it brought up the concept of doing underground boring instead of above ground as I felt long term it would be a better option and would cause less disruption to existing traffic patterns. Additionally you don’t have to deal with long term cost of land acquisition; which allow that land to still generate tax revenue. The other big concern I voiced was attempting to reuse the existing I-90 carpool infrastructure for the trains, especially for crossing the lake; which the level will rise and fall depending on the season. I said a tunnel under the lake, similar to what BART, did in the Bay Area makes more sense. Today we are told the design for how the rails are attached to the old freeway bed failed, and it all has to be removed and redone. Like the voiced concern about the lack of adequate transit stations design in Seattle, the design going into Bellevue is mind boggling, it misses the huge shopping and dining area by 4 blocks, which if the walk was flat would not be bad, this is hugely congested at Christmas time and a good rail design would help eliminate some of this congestion. On the east side we have I-405 north south freeway, with horrendous traffic congestion, let alone if there is an accident, and no real street level avenue to drive around issues. The plan has no design to help mitigate this nor does the design have a good transfer point to allow this to happen without significant additional monies required. The real driving force was Seattle wanting to take cars off the street with a primary plan to supplement north south access off of I-5 and because at the time Microsoft was/is a large employer of Seattle residents, the line was also primarily designed to facilitate getting them to and from work. Just to note I did bring up how London was planning on adding 60 mile of underground rail in less and money, yes they did go over budget and time, but most of that line is up and running, again utilizing existing stations with in London. In 2-3 years the board overseeing all of this will need to tell taxpayers, what the shortfalls will be based on the existing taxing revenue or to complete this an additional amount will need to be authorized. This does not include the monies needed to fix some of the existing poor design issues you mentioned, such as the seemingly always broken escalators.
Wow. Looks like they are taking lessons from Parramatta (in the Sydney region) which is about to get major investment in heavy rail, light rail and metro - at different locations a kilometre apart.
As far as I understand here they're just 100 m apart, and thus I would say the rerouting of tunnel and making it curvy would be quite pointless? I don't know which plan he's talking about, ST3 website shows an Int'l District "transfer" station intact. If that's axed and the closest station is Pioneer Square then that's indeed a bit closer to a kilometre...
@@u1zha the ST3 website is out of date. Notice even in its semi-frozen state there is no description of the 3 transfer stations downtown. Transfers are barely even an implied goal in the lists of goals. The ID Chinatown thing is hugely political, as was the highway tunnel. The usual rap on Seattle is that its history is single homes, even compared to other West Coast cities.
Haven't been to Seattle too many times but as a Portlander who wants to travel but sometimes needs to transfer at SEATAC to get a lot of places but wants to take trains as often as possible, why aren't there any easy ways to get from either Tukwilla or King Street to SEATAC? It seems like there should be a direct line (bus/LRT/whatever) between the airport at least one of those and the airport that doesn't require much walking.
Transit layout in the US doesn't make any sense and are completely inconvenient. Decision makers have never used transit in their lives and doesn't care that is actually useful or convenient.
The problem is the ones who are in the specific department to manage these decisions. No matter what, they are doing it in "our best interests" nonsense
To be a little fair to them... the fact that it's not useful or convenient, or not even There, is a significant contributing factor to their not having used it. (not that not having used it is the biggest factor behind the decision making most of the time). Unfortunate feedback loop. Doesn't make their decisions any less bad, of course.
@@ficus3929 And not just the city, the 20hr/7day commuter lines that almost reach Philly (more or less do) and Providence-Boston. Even reaches the Appalachian Trail to the north, and the end of Long Island. The weakness is non-radial transit, but that’s everywhere. NJ has the best setup of the suburbs, but lost funding and so is crowded.
New York... though from what I've come accross, transit is basically the entire list for 'reasons to move to New York rather than anywhere else', and transit and inertia make up the entire list of 'reasons not to leave New York'.
In my town, we have a bus station within about a 5 minute walk of the train station, it is also built into the side of a supermarket and is next to the main shopping street. It's a bit worse when you actually get into the main city but most, if not all trains that go to the main station in the city also pass through my local train station.
Early on in the video, the host mentions that it will take two *HOURS* to get from Everett to Tacoma? Why isn't this being built as a heavy/commuter rail with higher operating speeds? Assuming it takes an hour to go from Everett to downtown Seattle for example, I'm sticking to driving for that distance.
Having made the connection between Amtrak and Seattle light rail at the King St station several times it is not now very convenient. My memory is that it requires a trip up to street level a walk outside of about a block and crossing two streets at a signal. Certainly not ideal. This could be greatly improved with the intention of creating a regional transit hub.
One thing that really blew me away about the light rail was the UW station being by the stadium instead of on 15th or University. Good for students and on game days (how many is that) useless for the thousands of apartments within walking distance of 15th.
man the more I learn about some of the issues that cities like Seattle are facing, the more I cherish being here in Philly where we just so happened to inherit huge and well connected transit hubs from rail generations past.
you still need to get to the travelator, there are also several escalators in the way. So yes, it's possible to get from one line to the next, but you can't get to the streetcar or major bus lines or Sounder regional rail.
Transfers between lines 1 and 3 are possible at SODO (many will do this for a less crowded station), but line 2 and Sounder/Amtrak would suffer badly. There's no need to radically rethink it either, the existing CID-1a (4th Ave Shallow) alternative is fine, though they could make it less disruptive by building stations within the bore instead of excavating down from the surface. Westlake can NOT be allowed to become the only hub. It is ALREADY overcrowded
Public transport projects in Seattle are always a mixed bag. Many successes marred by self-inflicted defeats. The Link light rail expansion has been one of the better run projects. Northgate Station has been a massive success - and it's had a real positive impact on those of us that live in the north of the city. But the way the planning got the Ballard line has been going doesn't fill me with confidence at all...
I personally feel Sound Transit screwed themselves when they sold their site at the old Convention Center Bus Tunnel station in 2018, knowing they were going to plan a line to Ballard. That Convention Center station would have been a good location to start a new portal and begin the Ballard line off of that junction. It was already grade separated all it needed was an entrance to the existing tunnel route. Only once that connection was completed is when they sell that station site off and or build an new platform for trains.
Just FYI - HSR isn't going to happen in the PNW no matter how much we say we want it. That is evident in how the Cascades is managed. Overall, great video!
It depends on what you mean by "High Speed Rail". If you mean Japanese style bullet trains, then no. If you mean trains going say, 120 KMH with very good reliability, then it is definitely possible. We just need to understand that the former is very difficult, while the latter is not.
@@rossbleakney3575 100% agree. There is a push to build ultra high speed rail here and we need to come to the reality that isn't ever going to happen in our region. 110mph corridors, absolutely and it can be done today for far less than HSR. The probably is that WSDOT thinks it is sexy but all it does is create consultant's cash funds and take away from the Amtrak Cascades. The amount of money they have spent on HSR studies could have reduced travel time between Blaine and Pacific Central Station by 30 minutes already, which is sorely needed.
I work in downtown seattle but recently moved even further from main transit linesdue to affordability. I used to use transit to come downtown when I lived closer, but since moving, my drive is 45minutes to an hour, and most transit optoins are 1.5 hrs minimum. During Covid, street parking was incredibly affordable at just 50-cents an hour, in some areas leading to me driving in most days instead. Over the past year it's gone to $2.50 or more in those same areas. Driving and parking is effectively deincentivised, but there is still no true viable alternative given the existing hubs, and the proposed expansion hardly improve the access in my area, even if they reach the surrounding communities on time in the next 10-20 years. It's disheartening to know that this is considered a good example of transit in the region and that it could simply be getting worse in years to come with poorly thought out "compromises" setting us up for a worse overall system despite how much we're paying for it.
Hi Reece, love your videos but I admit I didn't really understand the main premise of this one. I'm not a Seattle local but on Google Street View it looks like these two stations are literally next door to one another? I can see entrances to both in the same view, they don't look more than 50m apart. Surely any passengers doing the journeys you describe would just walk this very short distances between the two confusingly named stations rather than go all the way out of town to transfer? Or am I missing something?
To actually walk out of the light rail station to the Amtrak station, it's about a 300 meter walk. And that's if you don't need elevators, like I do. You have to walk through or around an office plaza, cross a major street, then either climb down a ton of stairs or go over the bridge that crosses the Sounder train tracks, down the elevator, and double back to the Amtrak station. Fun when you use a cane to walk and it's pouring rain. I haven't looked at the new lines/stations very closely yet... so I don't know what new issues will crop up. Still better than any city I've personally lived in.
@@RMTransit Ah, thanks for the clarification. I think I got confused by all the station names and missed the fact that the new tunnel wasn't going anywhere near either.
I’ve lived in Seattle throughout the entire development of the Light Rail system and it’s been a mess. The primary line stretches across Martin Luther King Jr Way S at the surface level, right down the middle of the road. Many low income homes and local minority-owned businesses were torn down to accommodate the Light Rail. Accidents often happen on the rail line, sometimes even involving collisions with Light Rail cars, resulting in shutting down both directions of the system until the accident is cleared. As a result, the new Light Rail expansions are either above or below road and pedestrian traffic.
Westlake station, the one they are planning to connect at, is connected to a gigantic shopping mall complex, Westlake mall and Pacific Place (basically two huge malls in one). It doesn't matter that fewer and fewer people even go to malls anymore, not to mention the people who do make up a small fraction of transit users; I guarantee you they wanted the connection at Westlake because they want it to connect to the dying shopping malls.
I've got Redmond Eastlink construction going on in my neighborhood, so I do keep up with the latest updates (delays), but in addition to a hub, a Redmond/Kirkland/Bothell line would be nice (some say a 520 Bridge shuttle would be redundant, but make the cars go 80mph during peak traffic and maaaaybe?).
Why Seattle isn't just electrifying and speeding up the sounder is beyond me. Even if it had only 30 minute frequency, it would be enough to act as Seattle's main regional spine that everything connects to, and there are enough useful existing rail branches that would really tie together the region. It would also cost a fraction of the cost of light rail, and have higher capacity. Instead, Seattle is battling LA and Phoenix for the top spot of most uselessly long LRT line. More so, they could have completely grade separated Link Light Rail, and used proper high floor, open gangway rolling stock, but they chose not to. Now it will always play second fiddle to what Skytrain is capable of just a couple of hours north, which is sad because Seattle desperately needs something as good as Skytrain more than Vancouver.
They can't improve the Sounder because they don't own the rails, BNSF does. BNSF prioritizes their own shipping, and cheap solutions in order to get that short term profit. Unfortunately, it was an act of congress that gave BNSF its rail network, and so there's not much they can do to fix that.
ST doesn’t own any track on the Sounder Corridor. It’s all owned by BNSF, who like the other class 1 railroads, hasn’t allowed sound transit to make any improvements to infrastructure or services
The lease on Sounder track usage makes operations incredibly expensive - each rider costs Sound Transit roughly $35, versus like $5 for light rail. Until they have their own track, it doesn’t make much sense to invest more in it.
Can we do a video on Phoenix's pretty meek but decently ambitious transit plans? We got some BRT coming, light rail extensions, and a new "downtown hub"....we lack intercity rail service in our town so we don't have a real "hub" so the downtown hub will be the best we are going to get. I do like how there is a single brand to worry about though, Valley Metro, rather than some agencies like LA where they have 900 different agencies, brands and passes to worry about.
I definitely need to comment that the majority of people in the CID wanted 4th Ave. S. The idea of a North South alternative has been carried by a small minority of people, led by a single organization, and the Mayor and County Executive. The Mayor hired a consultant who is good friends the primary land owner where this new South CID station would land. The County Exec for some reason is tying the North CID station to redevelopment of the Civic Campus area. He can definitely redevelop the Civic Campus without killing the 4th Ave S station, but for some reason this is his hill to die on. Oh and King County already has a lease on the South of CID station land, but would need to buy it from the friend-of-consultant landowner.
Do you think that Seattle will eventually convert Link to a high floor rapid transit system just like Boston did with the modern day Blue Line (to address capacity issues in the future)
Not anytime soon. Right now Seattle is just trying to get the fundamentals down. It won't run into capacity issues for decades. The only conversions I see at this time is making the central line fully grade separated (as there is one section that isn't). But that won't happen for decades either
What they really need to do is extend the light rail down to Renton and Kent. It would give 200,000+ people light rail access and provide another north south line so that people on the eastside don’t have to go into Seattle to go south
With the big reduction in car traffic through downtown post-pandemic, a cut-and-cover on 4th with redirected traffic would actually be realistic. When ST3 was being developed, that would have been unfathomable!
Well... you haven't heard of warsaw. We might be in Europe, but our central station is connected only to trains and buses. Our rapid urban rail is on a separated station, and WKD (warsaw's single separated commuter line) is also on it's own station, and the main metro hub is about a half kilometer away. That's called f*cked transit.
Driverless robotaxis, though slow in arriving, will still beat this solution and be much, much cheaper to implement, with the added benefit of removing a lot of pavement for parking currently required.
I rode on the First Hill line once to see what it was all about, and was really underwhelmed. City Beautiful rode it during his "Seattle transit speed run", and he didn't have much good to say about the streetcar either. There were plans to connect the two existing lines, but apparently that project is now on indefinite pause.
I think the value of having Link connect to Sounder and especially Amtrak is overstated here. These carry a few thousand per day most of the time compared to over 100k boardings per day on Link.
Thank you for pointing this out as it appears to be something a lot of people are very aware of. Sounder and Cascades combined run less 15 trains per day out of Seattle thanks to BNSF, and overall, Westlake is much more of the Geographic and Economic Center of the region, so making Westlake the hub of the local transportation network makes far more sense than King Street as people actually want to go to Westlake
I have used and seen the substantial amount of transfers between the N and S lines and the link during peak hours or not, I prefer idea of spreading transfers between westlake, uni st., pioneer square, chinatown, stadium, and sodo, bit silly to suggest they should provide less options
Don't underestimate Atlanta's transit. Pre-COVID MARTA rail per-mile ridership rivaled BART's, which is amazing in a core city much more sprawling than SF-Oakland.
The biggest problem with Link, why would anyone put that on the ground like it doesn't even make sense how the lightrail is taking longer for me to drive in peak traffic. It's useless.
as a local we are definitely suffering due to the lack of the hub. They are trying to make up for this late in the game but the damage its going to cause to local infrastructure is chaos.
Seattle could massively improve their transit times by providing a couple lines that skip the downtown corridor. As is, if you want to go from north to south, or east to west you will be spending a half hour or more in downtown traffic.
Even having a stub terminal a bit past Northgate for the Tacoma line, running three lines in the current tunnel (combined frequencies at just under 3 minutes) and sorting out the Ballard issue another way would be a solid option.
Just a heads up, Kings Street & International District are NOT the same station. They’re almost two full blocks apart, requiring crossing a very large multi-lane road as well as travelling up from station height to road height on either side. It can take 10mins to walk that otherwise tiny distance when the traffic is highest. One of the biggest transit improvements in that area would be an underground pedestrian connection between the stadiums, the light rail, and King’s Street. But that may never happen considering how fucking butthurt I District nimbys have been recently. They have good company with the cunts living in Clyde Hill and on Mercer Island.
King Street / International District is completely untenable, also, king street and Intl District aren't connected, at best, they are adjacent, but there is a substantial street and multiple buildings separating them
Part of what you are missing is the homeless/ addict issue. The major homeless shelter in Seattle is just north of king street and Chinatown is one of the major places addicts find their drugs. The folks in the ID have associated transit with homelessness and addicts so they REALLY do not want to be a major transit station that will increase the numbers of addicts and homeless folks in their neighborhood. The neighborhood has demonstrated the ability to vote as a block big enough to change city elections so the county and regional government listens to them.
The benefits from the light rail is extremely misrepresented in this video. This is about enabling anyone to work and live far across town (see San Francisco's issue). It is also the only realistic option to make freeways and streets drivable for commerce/travelers that depend on roads. But again, the primary benefit this light rail offers is to give people that can't afford $5k/mo for shoebox apartment a chance to work where wages are higher. This will cool off the insane rent/housing closest to seattle and stimulate demand in the surrounding areas. Seattle literally can't house more people than there are now, but there is an abundance of economic opportunities. This makes places like Lynnwood unlivable without a car because entire square miles are nothing but homes of people that then clog up the freeway (slowing other commerce) and enabling a cycle of poverty for people that spend 25% of their paychecks on commuting.
Your commentaries are so complete and so accurate that you could probably have a six figure job in the industry right now, if you wanted it. Just saying...
It's too late. The Seattle Process, or as I call it, Buyer's Remorse, interfered with the project. Several times, voters have agreed to pay for a transit system and then voted to remove the taxes on their vehicle registration for said project. The city-state used the State Constitution to block that circular game this time. The Seattle Process also includes fights with residents and businesses; check out the I-90 Mercer Island Lid fight to see the amount of money needed to receive residents' buy-in. In fact, the city, state and the feds were lucky that a portion of the old bridge turtled; it forced MI residents to do something. What you have suggested will probably be done in the future, but you will have to show the problems and offer the solutions to get the voters and residents to agree without too much of a fight. (I moved to MI from the Detroit area in the late 90s and laughed when the I-90 special privileges for MI were removed. The current residents were shocked to find out they had agreed to the loss of privileges when the state and feds added light rail. An MI friend said no one believed that light rail would ever happen, so they happily agreed to lose privileges to receive more perks.)
The issue with Chinatown is that residents don’t want Sound Transit to condemn a large part of the major throughways and blocks of buildings to build what most likely incentivize property developers to further displace and demolish what is frequently ignored as a crucial cultural and economic draw of the city.
King's Street Station (Chinatown International Station) never felt like a hub to me, but Westlake Station did, although there is just the Light Rail and the Monorail. Still, the Station is big, and has a lot of UNUSED Shopping Spaces, a totally missed opportunity. I lived 20+ years in the USA, 8 years in Seattle - i still think Seattle has the best Public Transportation in the USA, but that is based mostly on King County Buses, not the Light Rail. Other than that, my Home of Hamburg (Germany) has - in comparison - an absolutely STELLAR Transit System. 😅 I am quite happy to no longer live in the US.
The problem with the ID hub is that it will negatively impact the historic pan Asian district. Seattle has a long history of building in ethnic neighborhoods as a continuation of racial covenant discrimination.
Take note, Seattle. Vancouver may offer comparative "quality" urban transit, but it also lacks an urban hub. The existing main "junction" of the Skytrain and Canada lines at Granville and Georgia has no engineered walking connection for changing passengers, above or below ground, and a total lack of signage to guide them from one line to the other. It's a joke. And not a funny one either.☹
I don't know of anyone remembers that Mercer Island was at one point supposed to be The hub for buses coming from East County to transfer to the link. Sound Transit was forced to lower the scope of that plan due to a lawsuit from The city of Mercer Island. If we're going to grant that kind of privilege to a wealthy and very white area, We need to start doing the same for POC. I understand that this is very inconvenient.
This really is a case of only in America! The main railway station is where the interchange needs to be. Also that extra midtown is essential for usefulness.
Your Atlanta shade is not appreciated. But entirely warranted. We're working on it... sort of. In fact, you could consider doing a video on the proposed MARTA expansion. As you can imagine, it's not going well.
Minnesota got a lot of transit money recently to expand their BRT. I would love a video on what they are doing, I don't think you have many examples of the Midwest (excluding Chicago), a region almost synonymous with sprawl, and it would be great to see what they can do right.
I am also hoping to see more on Minnesota, particular the light rail in the twin cities. It’s seems like another example of a city (cities, in this case) that should’ve built a metro but went with the light rail option instead.
@@williamfay2725 And I don't understand some of the light rail routing decisions ... such as avoiding Uptown and going through parkland for the Green line extension. "We're going to avoid the populated areas and build stations a mile from the neighborhood center."
Рік тому+1
@@lizcademy4809 would this be transit virtue signing? Announce you have a transit system, but one that doesn’t serve its populace.
Thank you for making this video. I'm a Seattleite and while our transit agencies mean well, they are just completely incapable of making good/cohesive/coherent decisions. Seattleites loves ST and King County Metro, but after living in Europe for a few years it has become painfully clear to me that Seattle needs some tough love. The transit agencies MUST get their acts together. The unconnected streetcar lines that have no alignment or signal priority sitting in traffic, the bizarre alignment and system length of Link, the absolutely deranged rolling stock decision that results in EIGHT driver compartments for each full-length Link train... the list goes on and on. You brought up fantastic points in this video regarding the central hub that I've barely even thought about, which just make the current plan relying on ridiculously deep stations even more frustrating. I have been saying for years (I should point out that ST3 was approved in 2016 and they are still plodding along and debating the tunnel) that ST needs to just cut and cover down 4th/5th. The concerns about business and traffic disruption are, frankly, irrelevant. This is a once in a generation investment and no one should care that some banks and office towers would have their street (read: car) access disrupted for at most a few years. Sorry, but you can't please everyone. Someone will inevitably be inconvenienced when infrastructure work is needed, so why not focus on doing it right? Ugh, and the escalators. THE ESCALATORS. Come ON, Sound Transit!
Your rant just convinced me they won't do it right 😢. Seattle city government loves their businesses and suburban commuters just way too much and prioritize making everyone happy instead of making the tough decision that needs to be made. I think it's a city gov culture thing, based on listening in to a couple of city counsel meetings.
keep in mind that seattle had no issues with boring a 1.7 mile tunnel for a road.
I mean a lot of people had problems with SR-99
that's part of the problem: we now have 3 tunnels through downtown and a ton of skyscrapers with large footings which makes it challenging to build another tunnel.
If anything the 99 tunnel is a good example of why tunnel boring under downtown Seattle is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. And it highlights the need to either put all trains through the existing transit tunnel, or build a new cut-and-cover tunnel on 4th or 5th.
We were lucky that Big Bertha got stuck somewhere where it could be accessed from above. If it had gotten stuck under pioneer square, or under downtown Seattle, we would have been screwed.
As someone living here, I can confirm that there were actually a ton of issues with that project. There were just far far more issues with keeping the viaduct in its original way. Plus, while not perfect, that project helped reconnect the city with the waterfront
Appreciate your videos as always, especially the Seattle ones! As a Seattle area resident, I'm extremely disappointed by the meekness Sound Transit has exhibited throughout it's existence. Their decisions seem to suggest that their goal isn't to provide world class transit, but to make sure they cause as little disruption as possible.
Examples include aligning routes along freeways instead of avenues/boulevards (sacrificing development opportunities and walkability), creating at grade sections with level crossings (sacrificing safety), using light rail instead of metro vehicles (sacrificing capacity), and now this wild proposal to bypass King Street and Pioneer Square (sacrificing connectivity). Connectivity, capacity, safety, walkability, and development opportunities are kind of the biggest reasons for building rail transit in the first place and those are being sacrificed in the name of cost and disrupting the present as little as possible. We're talking 8 added minutes of travel time (average depending on trip route) with the most egregious being 10 minutes for people traveling to/from Bellevue/Redmond (Amazon/Microsoft) and the Airport.
From my observations over the last several years, I've seen little understanding or acceptance from Sound Transit of the transition period required to achieve greatness. I understand the concerns about disrupting this neighborhood specifically, but they should study how to reduce disruption in their operations/construction without completely changing the plan. For example, why does it need to take 10 years to build the original station?
Unfortunately the last public comment period passed (March 9). The final vote will be held on March 23. I don't think it's exaggerating to say this is one of the most important infrastructure votes in Seattle's recent history given the implications.
I never thought about that, all the expenses outside are happening alongside i-5 restricting access to people living on another side of i-5
I think RM Transit, or some other channel, once put it as “avoiding short term disruption, ends up causing long term disruption”. Here the city needs to be reminded of this?
@ Exactly, failing to do a project right once often means several other more expensive and time consuming projects later
I agree, I would also add:
A shortage of urban stops. The University of Washington (UW) got only two stops (it should have three). Between the UW and downtown they only added one station (Capitol Hill). There should be a station at First Hill, as well as one at 23rd & Madison. This is how a traditional metro works.
They ignored bus to rail integration for much of the line. SkyTrain is extremely successful in part because the buses and trains complement each other so well. The Canada Line is especially effective. Every major cross street has a station. Sound Transit seems disinterested in that sort of thing.
All the while, there is an obsession over distance. This plays a part in all of these decisions. If your goal is to build a traditional metro, then you don't skip First Hill. Maybe you don't go any further. You wait until you cover such an important part of the region. But if your goal is to go out to the hinterlands, then you skip it.
My own theory is that the folks who are making these decisions don't know much about transit, but think they do. They are politicians. I don't mean that in a bad way. My mom was a politician. I have great sympathy for politicians. But these politicians all have more important jobs. They run major cities or counties. These are huge organizations for which they will be judged. In contrast, no one will judge the efficacy of the system for decades, and even then, people can always make excuses (e. g. the city didn't grow the way we thought it would).
So without knowing much about mass transit systems, they looked at what all Americans are familiar with: freeways. This metro is remarkably similar to the existing set of freeways. If you didn't care about the downside of freeways, and there none in the area, it would look like this. Long distance lines, with huge gaps. Little concern over what is actually next to the stations/on-ramps. The problem is, mass transit is not like a freeway. Worse yet, the freeway runs alongside many of the routes. As a result, very few will actually save time for a typical trip. The region would be much better off with a traditional metro -- one with multiple lines intersection in various places in the urban core -- with feeder buses connecting to the rail system from outside. Or maybe just a smaller system that covers the essentials, while maximizing bus-to-rail integration. The irony is, the nearest neighbor to Seattle (Vancouver BC) has built such a system. It is just sad that we couldn't learn any of the lessons there.
It is like Seattle is the Goofus, and Vancouver is the Gallant of transit in the Pacific Northwest.
You can still make comments up to March 23! I'll be making a public comment that day.
Having lived in Seattle all my adult life, I've seen the convoluted history of transit planning play out. Basically a bunch of conflicting political interests and historical NIMBYism creating unwieldy solutions that don't satisfy anyone. Using the CID as the transit hub is the logical choice but it will take a lot of arm twisting to make that happen.
That said, there is an elephant in the room regarding the CID - the historical racism behind the way the residents have been treated, not just on this project, has made them understandably wary of any major changes to their neighborhood. Case in point: the originally proposed station for the new line was on 5th Ave, a block east of the current light rail stop and Union Station, and would have torn up the heart of the area. (And the smugness of the predominantly white urbanist groups and their "we know better than you do" attitude doesn't help.
If you want to learn more about the rejected plan decades ago that Reece refers to, search "forward thrust Seattle"; too long to go into, but the federal money that would have gone to that project was snapped up by Atlanta instead.
I could not agree more, whats key is that Chinatown needs transit - because a lack of connectivity is horrible, but it needs to respect the needs of the area
@@RMTransit the existing tunnel already serves Chinatown well, why not just upgrade it to allow for higher frequency?
As a counter-point to the "white urbanist groups" trope - aren't most people involved in politics and government white? Like it feels weird to call out urbanist groups for their whiteness, but elected officials
Because the existing station won't continue serving the ID well once the lines are split. The Rainier Valley and Airport will connect into the new line, without access to the ID unless a 2nd station is built there.
@@chadnewton5721 I mean the best rider experience would be if we run all three lines through the existing tunnel, no need to switch between different tunnels. Upgrading the signaling system would allow all three lines to use the same tunnel with great frequency. No disruption of CID for ten years either.
Fun fact about the escalators, the reason they are broken all the time is because they literally bought ones not meant to be run constantly, but then ran them constantly...
I fucking hate that. Everyday I step off and am like, "oh I wonder what it'll be today, stairs or escalator."
Gotta save that money... Meanwhile, they are spending half a billion on parking...
Escalators can never become broken, they can only become stairs - Mitch Hetburg
Supposedly they are in the process of replacing them with their expansion plan
That's pretty much the Sound Transit Way!
Great video Reese. I am the Design and Construction Director for the FW project with Metrolinx and have been involved on this project since 2015. It is truly exciting to see this come to life and will definitely serve a part of Toronto that has been sorely lacking higher-order transit for a long time. What I can offer in addition to your video is that the local community is very excited about the project, even though we have had some challenges with traffic during construction... Also, the streetscaping will be amazing when we are complete, with elevated cycle tracks as well as enhanced sidewalks and grade-separated multi-use paths at Hwy 400 and CP rail corridor. Come back when we are finished and check it out!
I just made my first trip to Seattle, great ciy, but needed to go to Everett. There are two trains in the morning from Everett to Seattle and two in the afternoon back to Everett. There are no trains on the weekends or at any other time. It is hard to understand why Sound Transit thinks nobody in Everett would ever want to go to Seattle in the evening or on the weekend.
Agree. Don't forget they want to setup Everett as the second airport for the region but come with no public transit to downtown Seattle. And they have only one car rental which discourage tourist to use the airport. It also means the locals have to drive long down to SeaTac to catch their flights
And the planned extension of the Link to Everett isn't even supposed to open until 2037. So even if they do continue on the same path, we'll all be really old by the time it gets finished.
I didn't even consider the travel time for the Link that far north. Yikes.
You should have checked the busses. There are lots of them to Everett
The limit of 2 trains south in the am and 2 trains north in the pm and only on weekdays on Sounder North is due in large part to an old (2003?) contract between Sound Transit and BNSF that they wouldn't run more than that for 100 years. So, apart from putting some ever so diplomatic pressure on Sound Transit to revise that contract, given the glaring lack of respect for mobility equity and reducing VMT and GHG, don't expect more.
Maybe Sound Transit thinks because there isn't enough demand on the weekends. Did you think of that? There are buses by the way that go to Everett. You really think it makes sense to send a heavy train 30 miles for 40 people?
The metro area I live in Portland does have a central station for its metro light rail. It’s called Pioneer Square. The green, blue, red, yellow, and orange lines stop at it. Also, many bus lines running through the city center stop within a few blocks to create the “Portland Transit Mall.” We don’t have a commuter rail in our city center. There is only 1 commuter rail line and it moves between the various western suburbs so there’s no need for a central station for commuter rail and metro as there’s not even a single commuter rail service that exists in Portland City Center.
Most transit networks in Europe doesn’t have a main hub (With the notable exception of Paris), lines usually form a grid or a "triangle transfer", this is better for high density cities such as in Europe as it allows to have multiple well-connected places instead of a single one. (Usually trams form a grid while metros form a triangle transfer like in Prague, Vienna, Lyon, Milan…)
I mean you have hubs, but they are several, Lisbon has a few Metro/Suburban rail interchanges and those interchanges also tend to have bus terminals (except Entre Campos I think) and a few Metro/Bus interchanges as well (like in Campo Grande, which is also a Metro/Metro line interchange)
@@truedarklander Absolutely, bus and tram terminals are often located at transfer stations to offer better connectivity, but they are not main hubs (like Châtelet-les-Halles in Paris where 8 lines cross each other and millions of users must transfer at this station). Lyon has 4 lines and 4 transfer stations, Prague has 3 lines and 3 transfer stations, not one station where all lines intersect.
That really depends on the city! Lots have central hubs, lots have triangle transfers!
The San Diego Trolley has three main transfer hubs--Santa Fe, Old Town, and 12th and Imperial. Not a triangle, but does help disperse passenger loads and minimize backtracking.
Vienna does have one big hub, karlsplatz is the only station where three lines meet, I would consider that as the central hub
"Poor soil" is basically a consequence of being a city. That's why they have made tunneling machines that build the walls at the same time as they excavate and move forward.
Yes, true, though even if you were to build the tunnel with Earth pressure balance TBM with all the possible help of grouting or ground freezing, there still can be permanent effect on groundwater flow and pressure - flow blocked or redirected just because of the finished tunnel structure being there. And those changes can lead to buildings leaning or cracking. Dunno what the water table looks like in that area.
I don't quite have the context Reece has, all the plans I could google on ST3 website show the Midtown station still in place, as well as Int'l District/Chinatown station. That seems like convenient enough transfer, and can be built out with an underground passage with travelator for accessibility, not sky high expenses...
We have soil conditions in some places that make it impractical or impossible to build stations. It's the reason we have street cars. The street cars link two areas (First Hill and South Lake Union), the former of which isn't suitable for light rail. statiion.
My city has the central bus station right along the main tracks going through downtown. However, the Amtrak station is a few miles away. Even worse, the local commuter line stops at the airport on the outskirts. Both trains used to run into the heart of downtown, but bringing it back would require additional track lines and a new station and few seem to have the vision, let alone the courage to pursue such an ambitious plan.
People take Light rail, not because it's faster or more convienent then driving, because it's dramatically cheaper than finding parking downtown.
You know, we use the phrase rapid transit to describe a variety of modern systems, yet we see (in video and real life) trains lazily drifting in and out of stations and around not so sharp curves following grossly padded schedules. We see trains sitting motionless as the high priests of safety ponder when to operate door controls. Transit may be rapid when compared to streets gridlocked at peak times, but it seems to be a deceptive term. Too few systems have the punch of a BART train, or the people mover at ATL, or the Montreal Metro (praise be). Am I wrong or is the way Seattle LRT operates a good example of an UNrapid transit system? This would be a fun topic to explore in depth in a future video. Because SPEED, MATTERS!
I suspect there's a reason most people talking about such things seem to generally drop the word 'rapid'.
Of course, Linguistics would tell us that the main reason is that the lack of a concept of non-rapid transit made the 'rapid' lable redundant, but equally, the transit just not actually being all that rapid would do it too.
This is making me think of the original plans for Charles Center in Baltimore. It was supposed to be the hub for three subway lines in Baltimore but now just ends up as a massive and awkward liminal space since the city basically said "this is way too expensive," cut the NW/E subway line in half, turned the N/S line into a really shitty light rail, and completely scrapped the W/NE line. The MTA (not to be confused with NYC's MTA) did propose a light rail extension recently (though the comment period is over) which would connect the places the N/S line was supposed to connect which is a testament to bad decisions in the moment leads to higher costs later. I hope Seattle can avoid the poor planning that befell Baltimore.
Hi Reece, if you're going to make a video about weird/malfunctioning transit systems, take a look at Naples, Italy. This City deserves video of its own, for several reasons: many diverse lines and systems, rich history and interesting natural setting as well as multiple challenges and mistakes. Naples metro is really weird in shape, it's really deep and advertises itself as the prettiest in Europe/the world (famous art stations), however trains run every 30! Minutes sometimes. Problems with rolling stock make the offical schedule a joke. Besides, the whole artsy image of the metro is overrated af, and stations are poorly maintained, there are no functioning ticket machines etc. (I'm talking about Line 1, or Metropolitana collinare - the hill Subway). Line 2, branded as metro is just a commuter, old railway with couple underground stops. Line 6 is a joke. It opened from nowhere to nowhere, operated for couple of years and closed for over a decade, for renovation and extension. There's also linea Napoli - Aversa, which is a interprovincial, suburban Subway, and has just ONE train operating (it uses old Rome metro trains). There are many plans and extensions underway, there is also weird tram network and multiple suburban systems of their own, like circumvesuviana etc. So please please cover Napoli sometimes! Hugs
Getting places on time is NOT a priority in Naples, so in a weird way it works!
I am curious though RMTransit, which doesn't seem to be stated in the video. Is the current plan better than doing none at all? I agree that Seattle could do a lot better and greatly improve upon the plan they currently have. However, with the amount of politics, land rights, and cost that happens with decisions like these to begin with I assume it is still better getting something in place than not having one at all.
I recently moved to Seattle and the transit decisions always baffle me. Beyond the light rail here, the bike lanes and greenways out of the city center tend to be random residential roads that don’t connect. This annoys local residents who wonder why they’re suddenly near a road with no through traffic, and people who bike as they don’t have a connected route to actually go anywhere.
You're wrong about a couple of things. There is no "King Street Union Station". These are two separate stations that are a block apart, and Union Station has not been a railway station since around the start of Amtrak in 1971. Furthermore, King Street Station and the Chinatown Link station are not one and the same; they are, in fact, nearly two blocks apart and require crossing over the tracks and then going past Union Station to get to the Link station. I was also under the impression that the Ballard-West Seattle light rail line was going to use the same tunnel as the existing Central line, not a new tunnel, but as I live quite a distance from Seattle, you may be right about that one. But after building the WA-99 tunnel, I don't really think the city wants to build another new tunnel.
My suggestion as a Dutchmen: let some Dutch designers do the work: efficiency guarenteed! E.g. two lines following about the same track... JOIN them! Connectivity? Well, look at The Netherlands. look at Rotterdam, like 3 metro lines share the same track in the center, but before and after they are completely separated. (yes, there are 3 more lines). Yes, it is expensive, but will pay back in the years coming. Learn from it, I use the publc transport a lot, and it's easy here. The US can learn from The Netherlands!
Tunneling: ask the Dutch (You reffered them for Amsterdam metro)
Besides that all: I like your videos a lot! Very infomative!
I'd love to bring just about any foreign team to the US and have them build our transit since we are in general so terrible at it. The only caveat is they would have to be given free rein to do as they wish and not be beholden to whatever stumbling blocks usually bedevil American planning boards.
China builds best infrastructure. Dutch system is prehistoric - sorry.
I think the other big thing is how Seattle, King County Metro, and Sound Transit have not coordinated to make sure they are placing infrastructure equitably. The central gripe of CID is that they get all the infrastructure placement for things like homeless services, which was plopped down by Seattle during the last five years, and then have to get torn up for full-region transpo.
Seattle set Sound Transit up for failure even for than ST undercuts itself on this one, by not being at all interested in making places in the city pull their weight on the way we've collectively advocated for impossibly high housing prices. Instead, CID takes every hit because it's older, has language access issues, and has been relatively depopulated by round after round of "investment" that it's not getting full value from.
A transit hub should be a blessing for a neighborhood, but decades of shortsighted decisions to make CID a sacrifice zone have ensured that it would be skeptical, and now we may pay a permanent price for it.
The plan is completely underground in Uptown+Belltown+Downtown+Chinatown with Chinatown the hub due to its heavy rail service. The above ground service will mirror 15th Ave W. The above ground is largely elevated. The reason the hub has not been OKed yet is some residents of Chinatown oppose expanding that station due to construction impacts having been thru that before.
As a Seattleite, I appreciate your coverage of this topic so much because the lack of a new station at International District is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. 4th Ave needs to be replaced anyways so why not get two birds with one stone? Hopefully this video garners the attention of the buffoons at ST.
King Street station is about a block away from union station. Union station is owned by sound transit. Pioneer square and Chinatown international district light rail stops attract a lot of bombs and vagrants and people hanging about smoking drinking and carousing. And the Seattle times came out today March 19th 2023, with a article about the Seattle underground tunnel & it's maintenance issues.
SF has this same problem as well. All of the new HSR services and Caltrain are in to the Salesforce Transit Center, which isn't on BART or Muni. It's absurd.
This reminds me of Chicago with its downtown commuter rail (METRA) stations that mostly don't connect to the rapid transit (Ogilvie is next to an L station, but the others aren't -- not a huge walk, but bad if you have bad weather).
A video on the gardener expressway would be interesting with the Eastern replacement coming up.
I live approximately 20 miles east of the stadiums off of I-90, the plan was to get a line about 5 miles away by 203X. Years ago in an online discussion with transit, it brought up the concept of doing underground boring instead of above ground as I felt long term it would be a better option and would cause less disruption to existing traffic patterns. Additionally you don’t have to deal with long term cost of land acquisition; which allow that land to still generate tax revenue.
The other big concern I voiced was attempting to reuse the existing I-90 carpool infrastructure for the trains, especially for crossing the lake; which the level will rise and fall depending on the season. I said a tunnel under the lake, similar to what BART, did in the Bay Area makes more sense. Today we are told the design for how the rails are attached to the old freeway bed failed, and it all has to be removed and redone.
Like the voiced concern about the lack of adequate transit stations design in Seattle, the design going into Bellevue is mind boggling, it misses the huge shopping and dining area by 4 blocks, which if the walk was flat would not be bad, this is hugely congested at Christmas time and a good rail design would help eliminate some of this congestion.
On the east side we have I-405 north south freeway, with horrendous traffic congestion, let alone if there is an accident, and no real street level avenue to drive around issues. The plan has no design to help mitigate this nor does the design have a good transfer point to allow this to happen without significant additional monies required.
The real driving force was Seattle wanting to take cars off the street with a primary plan to supplement north south access off of I-5 and because at the time Microsoft was/is a large employer of Seattle residents, the line was also primarily designed to facilitate getting them to and from work.
Just to note I did bring up how London was planning on adding 60 mile of underground rail in less and money, yes they did go over budget and time, but most of that line is up and running, again utilizing existing stations with in London.
In 2-3 years the board overseeing all of this will need to tell taxpayers, what the shortfalls will be based on the existing taxing revenue or to complete this an additional amount will need to be authorized. This does not include the monies needed to fix some of the existing poor design issues you mentioned, such as the seemingly always broken escalators.
Wow. Looks like they are taking lessons from Parramatta (in the Sydney region) which is about to get major investment in heavy rail, light rail and metro - at different locations a kilometre apart.
As far as I understand here they're just 100 m apart, and thus I would say the rerouting of tunnel and making it curvy would be quite pointless? I don't know which plan he's talking about, ST3 website shows an Int'l District "transfer" station intact. If that's axed and the closest station is Pioneer Square then that's indeed a bit closer to a kilometre...
@@u1zha the ST3 website is out of date. Notice even in its semi-frozen state there is no description of the 3 transfer stations downtown. Transfers are barely even an implied goal in the lists of goals. The ID Chinatown thing is hugely political, as was the highway tunnel. The usual rap on Seattle is that its history is single homes, even compared to other West Coast cities.
Haven't been to Seattle too many times but as a Portlander who wants to travel but sometimes needs to transfer at SEATAC to get a lot of places but wants to take trains as often as possible, why aren't there any easy ways to get from either Tukwilla or King Street to SEATAC? It seems like there should be a direct line (bus/LRT/whatever) between the airport at least one of those and the airport that doesn't require much walking.
Transit layout in the US doesn't make any sense and are completely inconvenient. Decision makers have never used transit in their lives and doesn't care that is actually useful or convenient.
The problem is the ones who are in the specific department to manage these decisions.
No matter what, they are doing it in "our best interests" nonsense
To be a little fair to them... the fact that it's not useful or convenient, or not even There, is a significant contributing factor to their not having used it. (not that not having used it is the biggest factor behind the decision making most of the time).
Unfortunate feedback loop.
Doesn't make their decisions any less bad, of course.
I have a question if a person was to move to a different city in the USA based on the best transit system which would it be?
Its not even close, 100% New York
@@ficus3929 And not just the city, the 20hr/7day commuter lines that almost reach Philly (more or less do) and Providence-Boston. Even reaches the Appalachian Trail to the north, and the end of Long Island. The weakness is non-radial transit, but that’s everywhere. NJ has the best setup of the suburbs, but lost funding and so is crowded.
New York, Boston [if they get their sh*t together]; Philly & Chicago... maybe even DC
New York... though from what I've come accross, transit is basically the entire list for 'reasons to move to New York rather than anywhere else', and transit and inertia make up the entire list of 'reasons not to leave New York'.
If transit is the only consideration than NYC
In my town, we have a bus station within about a 5 minute walk of the train station, it is also built into the side of a supermarket and is next to the main shopping street. It's a bit worse when you actually get into the main city but most, if not all trains that go to the main station in the city also pass through my local train station.
Early on in the video, the host mentions that it will take two *HOURS* to get from Everett to Tacoma? Why isn't this being built as a heavy/commuter rail with higher operating speeds? Assuming it takes an hour to go from Everett to downtown Seattle for example, I'm sticking to driving for that distance.
Link shared to Sound Transit’s feedback submissions page
Having made the connection between Amtrak and Seattle light rail at the King St station several times it is not now very convenient. My memory is that it requires a trip up to street level a walk outside of about a block and crossing two streets at a signal. Certainly not ideal. This could be greatly improved with the intention of creating a regional transit hub.
One thing that really blew me away about the light rail was the UW station being by the stadium instead of on 15th or University. Good for students and on game days (how many is that) useless for the thousands of apartments within walking distance of 15th.
i guess they added that station inside of the ave now... just took forever so we all graduated by then XD
man the more I learn about some of the issues that cities like Seattle are facing, the more I cherish being here in Philly where we just so happened to inherit huge and well connected transit hubs from rail generations past.
Not sure if I understood the discussed option clearly? Is the question about moving the ST3 station
Pioneer Square will be
you still need to get to the travelator, there are also several escalators in the way. So yes, it's possible to get from one line to the next, but you can't get to the streetcar or major bus lines or Sounder regional rail.
Transfers between lines 1 and 3 are possible at SODO (many will do this for a less crowded station), but line 2 and Sounder/Amtrak would suffer badly. There's no need to radically rethink it either, the existing CID-1a (4th Ave Shallow) alternative is fine, though they could make it less disruptive by building stations within the bore instead of excavating down from the surface.
Westlake can NOT be allowed to become the only hub. It is ALREADY overcrowded
Public transport projects in Seattle are always a mixed bag. Many successes marred by self-inflicted defeats. The Link light rail expansion has been one of the better run projects. Northgate Station has been a massive success - and it's had a real positive impact on those of us that live in the north of the city.
But the way the planning got the Ballard line has been going doesn't fill me with confidence at all...
I personally feel Sound Transit screwed themselves when they sold their site at the old Convention Center Bus Tunnel station in 2018, knowing they were going to plan a line to Ballard. That Convention Center station would have been a good location to start a new portal and begin the Ballard line off of that junction. It was already grade separated all it needed was an entrance to the existing tunnel route. Only once that connection was completed is when they sell that station site off and or build an new platform for trains.
Will there be a video about Dallas' light rail lines or DART?
Just FYI - HSR isn't going to happen in the PNW no matter how much we say we want it. That is evident in how the Cascades is managed. Overall, great video!
It depends on what you mean by "High Speed Rail". If you mean Japanese style bullet trains, then no. If you mean trains going say, 120 KMH with very good reliability, then it is definitely possible. We just need to understand that the former is very difficult, while the latter is not.
@@rossbleakney3575 100% agree. There is a push to build ultra high speed rail here and we need to come to the reality that isn't ever going to happen in our region. 110mph corridors, absolutely and it can be done today for far less than HSR. The probably is that WSDOT thinks it is sexy but all it does is create consultant's cash funds and take away from the Amtrak Cascades. The amount of money they have spent on HSR studies could have reduced travel time between Blaine and Pacific Central Station by 30 minutes already, which is sorely needed.
I work in downtown seattle but recently moved even further from main transit linesdue to affordability. I used to use transit to come downtown when I lived closer, but since moving, my drive is 45minutes to an hour, and most transit optoins are 1.5 hrs minimum. During Covid, street parking was incredibly affordable at just 50-cents an hour, in some areas leading to me driving in most days instead. Over the past year it's gone to $2.50 or more in those same areas.
Driving and parking is effectively deincentivised, but there is still no true viable alternative given the existing hubs, and the proposed expansion hardly improve the access in my area, even if they reach the surrounding communities on time in the next 10-20 years. It's disheartening to know that this is considered a good example of transit in the region and that it could simply be getting worse in years to come with poorly thought out "compromises" setting us up for a worse overall system despite how much we're paying for it.
Can you do the Boston Silver Bus Line and also give your suggestions?
Hi Reece, love your videos but I admit I didn't really understand the main premise of this one. I'm not a Seattle local but on Google Street View it looks like these two stations are literally next door to one another? I can see entrances to both in the same view, they don't look more than 50m apart. Surely any passengers doing the journeys you describe would just walk this very short distances between the two confusingly named stations rather than go all the way out of town to transfer? Or am I missing something?
There would not be a CID station on the new line, so you couldn’t make said quick walk!
To actually walk out of the light rail station to the Amtrak station, it's about a 300 meter walk. And that's if you don't need elevators, like I do. You have to walk through or around an office plaza, cross a major street, then either climb down a ton of stairs or go over the bridge that crosses the Sounder train tracks, down the elevator, and double back to the Amtrak station. Fun when you use a cane to walk and it's pouring rain.
I haven't looked at the new lines/stations very closely yet... so I don't know what new issues will crop up. Still better than any city I've personally lived in.
@@RMTransit Ah, thanks for the clarification. I think I got confused by all the station names and missed the fact that the new tunnel wasn't going anywhere near either.
I’ve lived in Seattle throughout the entire development of the Light Rail system and it’s been a mess. The primary line stretches across Martin Luther King Jr Way S at the surface level, right down the middle of the road. Many low income homes and local minority-owned businesses were torn down to accommodate the Light Rail. Accidents often happen on the rail line, sometimes even involving collisions with Light Rail cars, resulting in shutting down both directions of the system until the accident is cleared.
As a result, the new Light Rail expansions are either above or below road and pedestrian traffic.
Westlake station, the one they are planning to connect at, is connected to a gigantic shopping mall complex, Westlake mall and Pacific Place (basically two huge malls in one). It doesn't matter that fewer and fewer people even go to malls anymore, not to mention the people who do make up a small fraction of transit users; I guarantee you they wanted the connection at Westlake because they want it to connect to the dying shopping malls.
I've got Redmond Eastlink construction going on in my neighborhood, so I do keep up with the latest updates (delays), but in addition to a hub, a Redmond/Kirkland/Bothell line would be nice (some say a 520 Bridge shuttle would be redundant, but make the cars go 80mph during peak traffic and maaaaybe?).
You definitely leave out the fact that the bus hub station is directly across the street from king street station lol
Why Seattle isn't just electrifying and speeding up the sounder is beyond me. Even if it had only 30 minute frequency, it would be enough to act as Seattle's main regional spine that everything connects to, and there are enough useful existing rail branches that would really tie together the region. It would also cost a fraction of the cost of light rail, and have higher capacity. Instead, Seattle is battling LA and Phoenix for the top spot of most uselessly long LRT line. More so, they could have completely grade separated Link Light Rail, and used proper high floor, open gangway rolling stock, but they chose not to. Now it will always play second fiddle to what Skytrain is capable of just a couple of hours north, which is sad because Seattle desperately needs something as good as Skytrain more than Vancouver.
They can't improve the Sounder because they don't own the rails, BNSF does. BNSF prioritizes their own shipping, and cheap solutions in order to get that short term profit. Unfortunately, it was an act of congress that gave BNSF its rail network, and so there's not much they can do to fix that.
It should certainly be investigated but, as it is BNSF's line thats the challenge!
ST doesn’t own any track on the Sounder Corridor. It’s all owned by BNSF, who like the other class 1 railroads, hasn’t allowed sound transit to make any improvements to infrastructure or services
The lease on Sounder track usage makes operations incredibly expensive - each rider costs Sound Transit roughly $35, versus like $5 for light rail. Until they have their own track, it doesn’t make much sense to invest more in it.
Can we do a video on Phoenix's pretty meek but decently ambitious transit plans? We got some BRT coming, light rail extensions, and a new "downtown hub"....we lack intercity rail service in our town so we don't have a real "hub" so the downtown hub will be the best we are going to get. I do like how there is a single brand to worry about though, Valley Metro, rather than some agencies like LA where they have 900 different agencies, brands and passes to worry about.
The problem I see with Phoenix is there isn't much of a downtown or CBD anywhere. Houston and LA are polycentric. Phoenix is almost acentric.
@@1978dkelly Which probably explains why our light rail line hits all 3 downtowns in one ride. They all can argue which one is more important haha.
I definitely need to comment that the majority of people in the CID wanted 4th Ave. S. The idea of a North South alternative has been carried by a small minority of people, led by a single organization, and the Mayor and County Executive. The Mayor hired a consultant who is good friends the primary land owner where this new South CID station would land. The County Exec for some reason is tying the North CID station to redevelopment of the Civic Campus area. He can definitely redevelop the Civic Campus without killing the 4th Ave S station, but for some reason this is his hill to die on. Oh and King County already has a lease on the South of CID station land, but would need to buy it from the friend-of-consultant landowner.
Do you think that Seattle will eventually convert Link to a high floor rapid transit system just like Boston did with the modern day Blue Line (to address capacity issues in the future)
No, it’s too expensive and there’s no political will.
Not anytime soon. Right now Seattle is just trying to get the fundamentals down. It won't run into capacity issues for decades. The only conversions I see at this time is making the central line fully grade separated (as there is one section that isn't). But that won't happen for decades either
No.
Unlikely, new lines perhaps could be high floor though!
The budget for Link projects is already $31b, says the ST3 website. Over 30 years I think, but big.
@RMTransit please do a new video on Seattles potential new Light Rail plan! It would be a good video
What they really need to do is extend the light rail down to Renton and Kent. It would give 200,000+ people light rail access and provide another north south line so that people on the eastside don’t have to go into Seattle to go south
3:56 You forgot about Amtrak Empire Builder line :(
With the big reduction in car traffic through downtown post-pandemic, a cut-and-cover on 4th with redirected traffic would actually be realistic. When ST3 was being developed, that would have been unfathomable!
Well... you haven't heard of warsaw. We might be in Europe, but our central station is connected only to trains and buses. Our rapid urban rail is on a separated station, and WKD (warsaw's single separated commuter line) is also on it's own station, and the main metro hub is about a half kilometer away. That's called f*cked transit.
Amen brother! Now I’m really interested in your opinions on Fukuoka…
Driverless robotaxis, though slow in arriving, will still beat this solution and be much, much cheaper to implement, with the added benefit of removing a lot of pavement for parking currently required.
Reece you coming to Montreal when the REM launches in April?
San Francisco has the Salesforce Transit Center
Great video! I’d be sooo interested to hear your thoughts on seattle streetcar, I find it sooo unusual
I rode on the First Hill line once to see what it was all about, and was really underwhelmed. City Beautiful rode it during his "Seattle transit speed run", and he didn't have much good to say about the streetcar either. There were plans to connect the two existing lines, but apparently that project is now on indefinite pause.
I think the value of having Link connect to Sounder and especially Amtrak is overstated here. These carry a few thousand per day most of the time compared to over 100k boardings per day on Link.
Thank you for pointing this out as it appears to be something a lot of people are very aware of. Sounder and Cascades combined run less 15 trains per day out of Seattle thanks to BNSF, and overall, Westlake is much more of the Geographic and Economic Center of the region, so making Westlake the hub of the local transportation network makes far more sense than King Street as people actually want to go to Westlake
I have used and seen the substantial amount of transfers between the N and S lines and the link during peak hours or not, I prefer idea of spreading transfers between westlake, uni st., pioneer square, chinatown, stadium, and sodo, bit silly to suggest they should provide less options
I also live in Seattle. Sound transit needs to reconsider their alignments, and maybe ask us for our opinions
Don't underestimate Atlanta's transit. Pre-COVID MARTA rail per-mile ridership rivaled BART's, which is amazing in a core city much more sprawling than SF-Oakland.
They used the money WSDOT rejected.
Hey I think it is better than Vancouver as I say Washington North .
The biggest problem with Link, why would anyone put that on the ground like it doesn't even make sense how the lightrail is taking longer for me to drive in peak traffic. It's useless.
as a local we are definitely suffering due to the lack of the hub. They are trying to make up for this late in the game but the damage its going to cause to local infrastructure is chaos.
Great Video, Reece! Maybe someone (hopefully, many someones) from Sound Transit watches your UA-cam channel.
Seattle could massively improve their transit times by providing a couple lines that skip the downtown corridor. As is, if you want to go from north to south, or east to west you will be spending a half hour or more in downtown traffic.
What would you suggest us seattelites do, so we can get this done the right way?
Even having a stub terminal a bit past Northgate for the Tacoma line, running three lines in the current tunnel (combined frequencies at just under 3 minutes) and sorting out the Ballard issue another way would be a solid option.
Just a heads up, Kings Street & International District are NOT the same station. They’re almost two full blocks apart, requiring crossing a very large multi-lane road as well as travelling up from station height to road height on either side. It can take 10mins to walk that otherwise tiny distance when the traffic is highest. One of the biggest transit improvements in that area would be an underground pedestrian connection between the stadiums, the light rail, and King’s Street. But that may never happen considering how fucking butthurt I District nimbys have been recently. They have good company with the cunts living in Clyde Hill and on Mercer Island.
Unfortunately Sounds just like same planners as Sydney existing Metro and the new Western Sydney Metro in Sydney CBD
I wish there was something we could do about this
King Street / International District is completely untenable, also, king street and Intl District aren't connected, at best, they are adjacent, but there is a substantial street and multiple buildings separating them
Part of what you are missing is the homeless/ addict issue.
The major homeless shelter in Seattle is just north of king street and Chinatown is one of the major places addicts find their drugs.
The folks in the ID have associated transit with homelessness and addicts so they REALLY do not want to be a major transit station that will increase the numbers of addicts and homeless folks in their neighborhood.
The neighborhood has demonstrated the ability to vote as a block big enough to change city elections so the county and regional government listens to them.
What do other countries do to curtail this I wonder?
@@1978dkelly certainly not giving the homeless housing first so they can get back up on their feet easier
Central station is important to boost city's economy
The benefits from the light rail is extremely misrepresented in this video. This is about enabling anyone to work and live far across town (see San Francisco's issue). It is also the only realistic option to make freeways and streets drivable for commerce/travelers that depend on roads.
But again, the primary benefit this light rail offers is to give people that can't afford $5k/mo for shoebox apartment a chance to work where wages are higher. This will cool off the insane rent/housing closest to seattle and stimulate demand in the surrounding areas.
Seattle literally can't house more people than there are now, but there is an abundance of economic opportunities. This makes places like Lynnwood unlivable without a car because entire square miles are nothing but homes of people that then clog up the freeway (slowing other commerce) and enabling a cycle of poverty for people that spend 25% of their paychecks on commuting.
Also walking through Pioneer Square? Kinda sketch :/
Can't believe BC/Vancouver has lower GDP than ... Oregon. Much less than WA. Skytrain and Vancouver just feel so much more impressive.
Connecting suburbs to city center at the expense of well run trains in town is not good for the city
Your commentaries are so complete and so accurate that you could probably have a six figure job in the industry right now, if you wanted it. Just saying...
Their biggest mistake always will be not expanding the monorail 😤
I mean seattle is islolated by water, public transport is going to be more efficient than cars, particularly railway system.
Looking forward to that Amtrak cascades video!!
omg the fart sound... so unexpected I laughed so much.. LOL
This is type of stuff that makes me so mad and sad
It's too late. The Seattle Process, or as I call it, Buyer's Remorse, interfered with the project. Several times, voters have agreed to pay for a transit system and then voted to remove the taxes on their vehicle registration for said project. The city-state used the State Constitution to block that circular game this time. The Seattle Process also includes fights with residents and businesses; check out the I-90 Mercer Island Lid fight to see the amount of money needed to receive residents' buy-in. In fact, the city, state and the feds were lucky that a portion of the old bridge turtled; it forced MI residents to do something. What you have suggested will probably be done in the future, but you will have to show the problems and offer the solutions to get the voters and residents to agree without too much of a fight. (I moved to MI from the Detroit area in the late 90s and laughed when the I-90 special privileges for MI were removed. The current residents were shocked to find out they had agreed to the loss of privileges when the state and feds added light rail. An MI friend said no one believed that light rail would ever happen, so they happily agreed to lose privileges to receive more perks.)
The issue with Chinatown is that residents don’t want Sound Transit to condemn a large part of the major throughways and blocks of buildings to build what most likely incentivize property developers to further displace and demolish what is frequently ignored as a crucial cultural and economic draw of the city.
He would know that if he did the research. He did this video for the likes and views.
King's Street Station (Chinatown International Station) never felt like a hub to me, but Westlake Station did, although there is just the Light Rail and the Monorail. Still, the Station is big, and has a lot of UNUSED Shopping Spaces, a totally missed opportunity.
I lived 20+ years in the USA, 8 years in Seattle - i still think Seattle has the best Public Transportation in the USA, but that is based mostly on King County Buses, not the Light Rail. Other than that, my Home of Hamburg (Germany) has - in comparison - an absolutely STELLAR Transit System.
😅 I am quite happy to no longer live in the US.
The problem with the ID hub is that it will negatively impact the historic pan Asian district. Seattle has a long history of building in ethnic neighborhoods as a continuation of racial covenant discrimination.
Seattles plan is not meant to be competitive with driving. Seattles plan is not rapid transit. It is public transit.
Take note, Seattle. Vancouver may offer comparative "quality" urban transit, but it also lacks an urban hub. The existing main "junction" of the Skytrain and Canada lines at Granville and Georgia has no engineered walking connection for changing passengers, above or below ground, and a total lack of signage to guide them from one line to the other. It's a joke. And not a funny one either.☹
I don't know of anyone remembers that Mercer Island was at one point supposed to be The hub for buses coming from East County to transfer to the link.
Sound Transit was forced to lower the scope of that plan due to a lawsuit from The city of Mercer Island.
If we're going to grant that kind of privilege to a wealthy and very white area, We need to start doing the same for POC.
I understand that this is very inconvenient.
0:55 "British Columbia South??!?!?!" 😡
No worries. Washington was originally called Columbia, so it’s actually the other way around BC is British (now Canadian) Washington 😊
This really is a case of only in America! The main railway station is where the interchange needs to be. Also that extra midtown is essential for usefulness.
Your Atlanta shade is not appreciated. But entirely warranted. We're working on it... sort of. In fact, you could consider doing a video on the proposed MARTA expansion. As you can imagine, it's not going well.
Minnesota got a lot of transit money recently to expand their BRT. I would love a video on what they are doing, I don't think you have many examples of the Midwest (excluding Chicago), a region almost synonymous with sprawl, and it would be great to see what they can do right.
I am also hoping to see more on Minnesota, particular the light rail in the twin cities. It’s seems like another example of a city (cities, in this case) that should’ve built a metro but went with the light rail option instead.
@@williamfay2725 And I don't understand some of the light rail routing decisions ... such as avoiding Uptown and going through parkland for the Green line extension. "We're going to avoid the populated areas and build stations a mile from the neighborhood center."
@@lizcademy4809 would this be transit virtue signing? Announce you have a transit system, but one that doesn’t serve its populace.
@it's putting quantity before quality. The original MSP Green Line is located in a dense area so don't know why MSP is now avoiding density.
I did a video on Minnesota long ago actually !
Thank you for making this video. I'm a Seattleite and while our transit agencies mean well, they are just completely incapable of making good/cohesive/coherent decisions. Seattleites loves ST and King County Metro, but after living in Europe for a few years it has become painfully clear to me that Seattle needs some tough love. The transit agencies MUST get their acts together. The unconnected streetcar lines that have no alignment or signal priority sitting in traffic, the bizarre alignment and system length of Link, the absolutely deranged rolling stock decision that results in EIGHT driver compartments for each full-length Link train... the list goes on and on.
You brought up fantastic points in this video regarding the central hub that I've barely even thought about, which just make the current plan relying on ridiculously deep stations even more frustrating. I have been saying for years (I should point out that ST3 was approved in 2016 and they are still plodding along and debating the tunnel) that ST needs to just cut and cover down 4th/5th. The concerns about business and traffic disruption are, frankly, irrelevant. This is a once in a generation investment and no one should care that some banks and office towers would have their street (read: car) access disrupted for at most a few years. Sorry, but you can't please everyone. Someone will inevitably be inconvenienced when infrastructure work is needed, so why not focus on doing it right? Ugh, and the escalators. THE ESCALATORS. Come ON, Sound Transit!
Definitely tough love. Is it possible to inject some resilience into the squishy who expect the insanity of a risk-free life?
Seattle leaders need to go to Tokyo and see what a functioning public transit system could look like.
Your rant just convinced me they won't do it right 😢. Seattle city government loves their businesses and suburban commuters just way too much and prioritize making everyone happy instead of making the tough decision that needs to be made. I think it's a city gov culture thing, based on listening in to a couple of city counsel meetings.