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Posts by Adron

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by Adron

Every Time I Feel Bummy About Trimet…

I seem to stumble into the poor plight of King County Metro in Seattle. Recently they started running their BRT routes, or “faux BRT” routes I should say. The D line has run into the gamut of problems, including ridership it just can’t handle. I wish em’ the best, cheers.

Amid what appears to be poor planning and being forced to push the BRT into service while severely cutting other routes in the area, King County is making improvement along the route slowly and steadily. Light priorities are definitely a start, but not the ultimate solution. The ideal, which in traditional Seattle fashion, is 15-20 years away.

Light Rail

This ideal scenario is to build out the Link Light Rail out to West Seattle. However West Seattle is at the bottom of the priority list right now, and Seattle can’t multi-track (not that any city in the US can anymore). The other lines that will complete well before anything even gets legitimately planned for West Seattle include Bellevue, Redmond (maybe), north Seattle (maybe), south of the airport (maybe) and of course the currently being built University District line.

The University District line, which I’m highly confident will change the way Seattle exists in a huge way, connecting three of the core areas of Seattle; downtown, University District, and Capital Hill. This line, part of which exists out to the airport now, should become a huge success at that point. Versus the current situation, in which the light rail is of moderate success and arguable becoming rapidly more successful year over year. They’re seeing much more rapid growth in ridership than originally expected. With double digit percentages year over year. This last month, the Link Light Rail has caught up to the other typical ridership numbers of lines here in the north west.

  • Trimet Blue Line: 54,200
  • Trimet Red Line: 21,700
  • Trimet Green Line: 23,300
  • Trimet Yellow Line: 16,400 < poor poor Yellow Line. 😦
  • Link Light Rail: >= 27,000

References:

As I Wrote This Entry…

I read a few blog entries over on Seattle Transit Blog and oh boy that just reminds me of one big reason why I high tailed it back to Portland after 2 years in Seattle. They’re completely FUBARing their entire transit system slowly but steadily at King County Metro. They’re taking examples time and time again from Portland and implementing them horribly. The only project that looks to be going really well, and it isn’t actually King County Metro, is the Link Light Rail extension to U-District (as I mentioned above). The BRT, the streetcar expansion, and other things all look doomed to be complete catastrophes. Just read that blog entry and comments on Human Transit’s Blog. Seattle is just heading the complete opposite direction of getting itself put together well. It is completely neglecting the core elements of the city that SHOULD have major transit corridors, dedicated lane miles,  and other associated enhancements and pushing in traffic bus service and in traffic streetcar service that is destined to be stuck. Seattle traffic is the only city in the North West (excluding San Francisco if you count it as NW) that has truly bad traffic. With this type of attitude, of not giving dedicated ROW to transit services, that traffic will remain horrible and get worse without a single alternative to it all.

If they keep up, I can imagine in 20-30 years you might see Tacoma, Vancouver BC, and even Portland start to take a lead in growth and population over Seattle. Seattle could literally, stymie its population growth in a significant way if they don’t figure out how to manage their city properly.

…and don’t even get me started on the other city amenities…   :-/

by Adron

The Side Door

Barista

Barista, classically amazing coffee.

Today I headed to The Side Door as my second office of the day. After making my postal pick up at the UPS Store and enjoying a good Barista espresso & cappuccino to kick off the day I wanted a different side of the Willamette. I cut through along Yamhill to Naito Parkway and then along the water front and over the Hawthorne Bridge. Once on the other side it was a loop under the bridge and out to Water Avenue up to The Side Door.

At The Side Door I had a great working session before heading back out for an easy commute back to the home office via the Portland Streetcar CL Line. Yup, that’s right, two trips confirmed on the CL Line.

The working session at The Side Door was great too, in that I was able to get a lot of work done, but also got introduced to a lot of rocking doom metal via the rocking staff. Thanks Side Door staff!

…with that, I’m at the home office and it’s all foot traffic for the rest of this day.

by Adron

Middle of the Week Commuting

My lady and I enjoyed a joint commute today. I decided my morning office was going to be Barista. I have to make an early morning pickup at the UPS Store for an important delivery pickup and the Barista Coffee Shop (3rd St Location) is just shy of 2 blocks away.

However before I headed off we both walked into Stumptown at Stark. I locked my bike real quick and we walked inside. With just 7 minutes before the streetcar arrived I decided to stay in line and she headed off to purchase a fare for her commute. I then, upon purchasing our quick breakfast croissants, jumped on my bike for the super long (that’s sarcasm ya’ll) trip about 280 feet to the streetcar stop. I rolled up with 4 minutes before the streetcar arrived. We enjoyed chit chat, our croissants and the morning air.

The streetcar arrived on time per the GPS Tracking estimate and per the schedule. It is always a bit amazing when the transit tracker arrival, schedule arrival and the actual arrival are all the same! Almost like the operations are more precise then they are. Because the thing is, this is America, and we’re pretty lazy about our precision of operations in this country. But that’s just fine for the commutes we’ve built for ourselves.

CL Line (click for full size, beware, it's huge)

CL Line (click for full size, beware, it’s huge)

My lady boarded the CL Line (yup, you read that right, somebody in downtown is actually riding the CL Line!). She heads across the Broadway Bridge and into the offices at the Left Bank Annex. I headed down the Stark Street Buffered Bike Lane and then onto 3rd to pull into Barista Coffee. I think the cross streets are Washington and 3rd. Barista, if you haven’t tried it, is one of the top coffee shops in the world (yeah, I didn’t mistype, world vs. just Portland).

Overall her commute it about 25 minutes, including the 4 minute wait at the streetcar stop. My commute was about 5 minutes, including a stop at a red light. Including the stop at Stumptown Coffee for morning croissant for her and I we maybe added 3-4 minutes. That’s what a commute should be. End of story.

by Adron

Boston, Portland’s Sister City?

Recently I took a trip over to the north east coast with my girl. We had a great trip visiting Conneticut, with our flight in and out of Boston. We used a mix of transit while in Boston to connect from the airport to the intercity bus to Hartford. Where we then bummed a ride with my girl’s folks. Overall it was a great trip, but this is my Transit Sleuth Blog, so enough about all that, let’s talk about hard core transit in Boston and how bad ass Boston is.

I’m generally pretty hard to impress when it comes down to transit. Portland does OK, San Francisco does OK, but the cities that really get me are usually the hard core operators like Chicago, New York or Vancouver, British Columbia. Well, Boston has officially entered those ranks of amazing cities. When it comes to removing that noose of automobile ownership and really getting down to important ideals, livability and effective transit and biking options.

Boston Transit Options

Two lines we took that are built out subway style heavy rail, included the Red and Orange Lines. Both of these lines were clean, are practically spotless by American standards, and amazingly well run. The lines were also smooth, without much jarring, and during rush hour I was still able to easily board and de-train in the inner core of the city.

Boston’s subways are cleaner, seemingly faster, and better rides than other comparable systems in cities like New York (MTA has notorious bumpy subway trains, they’re still not as bumpy and jarring as busses, but for a train they’re ridiculous) or Chicago. They’re also very easy to ride. The signage is good and getting around is simple, even when I wasn’t paying attention. The calls for each stop were clear and easy to hear (by comparison, there’s always room for improvement) which was a pleasant break from the standard mumbling on some systems.

The another rail mode option, as Portlanders, San Franciscans and Seattleites would now know, is light rail. I believe in Boston they refer to these as Streetcars however, but I’m not 100% sure. The Green Line was the main line we rode on, getting from North End to the Northeast College area. These trains were driven like a bat out of hell, jarring a bit in the turns, but fast and extremely efficient with solid ridership. The Green Line even splits into three separate segments as it exits the inner core of the city. This line, as the orange and red, was also technically a subway.

Which speaking of, the Silver Line is a bus line, that is underground that runs directly from the airport. This line is technically BRT the way it is intended to be built. However, Boston just refers to it as part of their subway system. There is a lot of contention about the quality of service of the Silver Line versus real rapid transit lines like the other subway lines, since Bostonians were originally promised a light rail line. It appears, after some research on wikipedia and digging through state records that they botched up the construction estimates and planning during the epic big dig failure.

On any of these lines, albeit during rush hour, we never waited for more than 90 seconds, with most of the trains we transferred from or to we had zero wait time. We literally walked onto the platform and onto the train. A transit rider’s dream transfer!

Next…

I’m aiming to have a part II to this article regarding the biking options and other parts of the MBTA and Boston’s Transit & biking options. Stay tuned!

by Adron

CRC, a way to kill decades of progress…

This however, is a vastly superior idea.

A Common Sense Alternative to the CRC from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.