Seattle's next light rail plan is slow because it reflects our values | Hacker News Reader

Seattle's next light rail plan is slow because it reflects our values

seattletransitblog.com

44 pointsjseliger52 comments

It would cost $200m to add tracks to the 520 bridge, and there's an existing 100 foot wide right-of-way from Renton to Bothell. I.e. for less than a billion and a couple years, the trackage could be more than doubled, and more than double the communities served.

The fact that this is not part of the 25 year $50b plan means something is terribly broken about Seattle's mass transit plan.

It would cost that much just to add the pontoons to the bridge. The cost of actually adding more bridge width and the rails thereupon would be more.

I read that the 520 new bridge was build to accommodate light rail with $200m in additional spending.

Did you read that from WSDOT? WSDOT says this:

"How much would it cost to add light rail to the floating bridge?

[...] Secondly, it would cost between $150 million and $200 million to construct the 30 additional pontoons and to install them on the floating bridge, alongside the 77 pontoons required for the six-lane bridge. There would be other costs associated with the bridge deck expansion and other infrastructure, including rail lines."

Yes, that's what I'd read, and apparently it would cost more. But it clearly is designed to accommodate the rail expansion, rather than having to build yet another bridge for that.

With all due respect, you'd have to be on drugs to think they could actually do that for $200M, or put the Renton-Bothell line back into service for $1B. Forget autonomous cars, that will happen right around the time personal holodecks are coming online.

What's your plan for when they start running commuter trains through your back yard?

Those tracks have always been there, and anyone who bought property next to a rail right-of-way would have known it, just like anyone who buys waterfront property has no business complaining about boat traffic. And frankly, I'd much rather have electric trains running nearby than a major road with all the car noise and exhaust.

Why would it cost billions to put tracks on an existing roadbed that is already built for tracks and had trains running on it within the last 15 years?

Why would it cost billions to put tracks on an existing roadbed that is already built for tracks and had trains running on it within the last 15 years?

Again, with all due respect, you don't live around here, do you? If so, for how long? (In other words, how familiar are you with what we call the "Seattle Process?")

Exactly what contiguous roadbed(s) between Renton and Bothell are able to accommodate the addition of tracks without either massive eminent-domain fights, which will happen, or reverting the Burke-Gilman Trail to rail service, which will not?

I've lived here for 35 years. I've ridden the "dinner train" that would run from Renton to Bothell on those tracks. I've seen trains running on it carrying airplane parts to Boeing. A freight rail bed is much more solid than a light rail bed needs to be.

The right-of-way is still there, and no eminent domain confiscations would be needed. The Burke-Gilman Trail is not part of it.

You can still see the tracks (corridor) on Google maps.

Fair enough -- I wasn't thinking about the old dinner train tracks, and I don't know exactly why they shut it down. Your mention of a "roadbed" threw me off, because that right of way hasn't been turned into a road (yet).

But my point stands: unless you just happen to need to go somewhere those particular train tracks run past, you're still going to end up in a wheeled vehicle on a road somewhere. There is nothing magically awesome about a transit system that's tied to fixed rails like a damsel in distress. It's the sort of thing you treat as a bug to be fixed.

Those tracks are on google maps, you can see where they run. They run within easy walking distance of or thru downtown Renton, Bellevue, Kirkland, and Totem Lake. They run right by Google in Kirkland. They run by Boeing's Renton plant. It's hard to see how it would not be immensely effective as the backbone of a transit system.

With park&ride, it doesn't have to be the last mile in suburbia.

And lastly, with sensible zoning, high density development will naturally grow up around places that are easily accessible to the track stations - just where it would make the most sense to be. Totem Lake, even now, is a booming, gridlocked mess, with tracks running right through it and weeds growing through the ties. It's baffling.

Don't underestimate the value of the monorail that can transport someone 6 blocks in light speed.

By the time they do everything right and in the proper way no one will want the stupid thing. It will be outdated and stupid. That's the Seattle way: aversion to making decisions fast and moving along. People here are aftaid of taking any risk. And on top of that, there is a severe amoung of entrenched old school thinking.

The good news is that by the time they are finished, the whole thing will be obsolete. Self-driving technology is going to completely change urban transportation.

I will put $100 into an index fund and bet the proceeds that self-driving technology will not be competitive with rail by 2040. The technology will be much harder to bring up to the necessary level than anyone expects, and without banning human drivers (politically impossible for the foreseeable future), you'll never be able to match the capacity of rail.

Even with perfect software how could cars, self-driven or otherwise, ever compete with rail? A four-track rail system has a per-track throughput of 100000 people per hour. Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane, and an average of 1.6 people per car works out to only 3200 people per hour. That's the theoretical best. Actual roadways never approach this figure.

> Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane

I'm missing something, in a single lane at 60mph you would be able to get ((60 * 1608)/5) (assuming car is 5m long) = 19296.

If we assume that there is 5m of seperation between every car (possible when all cars are automatically driven and communicate with each other) that's still 10k cars an hour.

4 lane highway, 40k an hour, assuming occupancy at 1.6 that's 64000 an hour.

Human driven no way, we are too unpredictable and react far too slowly to safely drive in that way but computers probably could.

Well you just made a pretty unfair comparison since you added up to 64000 for all four lanes vs 100000 people /per track/ on a 4-track railway. But I think your assumptions are all pretty optimistic. You wouldn't be able to run cars that close together on a multilane roadway because cars would need to move between lanes to enter and exit which would cause pipeline shocks if there was that little room.

Anyway the main difference between my claims and yours is that yours are speculation, while mine are based on history. We've seen five million people disembark at actual railroad stations. It's happened. We don't have to speculate.

I'm interested to dig into this question a bit more -- do you have any linkable resources that give more detail on those numbers? Thanks.

They aren't mutually exclusive. An always-available self-driving car service would drastically help the usability of subways or commuter rail in the crucial last 2-3 miles. If I could hail a car to drive me the 2 miles to the Caltrain stop and then hail another one to drive me the 3-4 miles from 22nd St. to the Sunset, a much greater percentage of the city becomes available to me without a highway trip.

> I will put $100 into an index fund and bet the proceeds > that self-driving technology will not be competitive with > rail by 2040.

Longbets? [1]

(They don't seem to be very active though, so if anyone knows better alternatives, you're welcome to share)

[1] http://longbets.org/

It's a huge social/economic issue though. The people who can afford self-driving cars in our lifetime are not (usually) the same people taking the subway to work every day.

That idea is utter nonsense.

Self driving technology won't allow you to fit more than four people in a four person car.

Self driving technology gets you maybe a 4x-10x increase in the number of people transported per road lane by ensuring cars are mostly full, having them close together and cutting down on trips to reposition vehicles... however, that still won't be enough scale of transportation for the cities of the future.

25 years! holy moly!

Sound Transit is a regional transit authority. Seattle has little to do with it (except in 50 years there slightly more rail).

Please fix the nonsense title.

Maybe I'm missing something,

But I honestly don't understand the point of spending billions of dollars building light rail, when the solution seems much simpler.

Roads? Check

Busses? Check

Busses are way more flexible than rail. They can utilize existing road infrastructure. With some investment into dedicated bus lanes in high traffic areas, and more busses/bus routes, people can be moved around with significantly less capital investment.

is this a serious statement?

it's because of traffic. trains move the same speed regardless of who is on the roads or accidents or weather.

i travel around the US and i see that ALL cities of a certain size in the US are perma-fucked 7 days a week with traffic now, have you noticed?

that's why the light rail resurgence is happening.

And, even setting aside the traffic issues in major US cities, traffic is always unpredictable and public transit aims to provide some sort of dependable, predictable schedule.

buses would be predictable if it weren't for the traffic!

Because light rail is big and shiny.

Light rail is extremely comfortable. People actually open their laptops and do work. There are a bunch of reasons for that which were discussed in another thread yesterday. From there, it doesn't matter whether it's 20% faster (which it actually is, compared to busses, not even counting additional capacity).

Why are more roads the immediate answer when talking about transit investment? People get it totally wrong. Less roads means less cars on the streets. We need massive transportation systems and bike paths.

Travel around and look at what type of public transportation has worked for large, advanced societies.

Or even tiny, backwards societies. The capital of Uzbekistan has a metro, as does the principal city of Kazakhstan.

Okay. So we create dedicated bus lanes. And buses have right of way on the traffic light (we have proximity sensor - when bus approaches the light turns green). And we triple the buses on the roads.

This could work and will indeed be cheap.

So the only roadblock is how to disenfranchise the drivers so they would not vote out the administration in a nanosecond. And we may also put to good use the riot and other military gear the police is stockpiling

It is politically impossible.

Not only that, but the rail project will be finished right around the time autonomous vehicles are coming online. Nothing about any aspect of either mass transit or personal transportation will be the same after that.

It's insane to start a new rail project at this point in time, IMO. Total waste of money.

> any aspect of either mass transit or personal transportation will be the same after that.

That is utter nonsense. The physics of how many cars you can fit on a road, how fast you can get from A to B and the distribution trip patterns won't change that much.

Really? What makes you think that'll be the case, once the cars are talking to each other? Get rid of every stoplight in your town and see what the "physics" looks like then.

The basic capacity of a busy road is not significantly less than that of a train, and we already have thousands of roads. We just don't use them very intelligently.

Or, to put another way: a fleet of networked autonomous vehicles is a train. Put money into making that happen, and I'll vote for it. I'm definitely not voting for $50 billion choo-choo trains, or whatever 1890s-era solution the urban transit planners in Seattle are dreaming up this week.

Simple geometry argues that you can fit more people on dedicated train cars than a fleet of independent vehicles. You don't get 100% of the benefit of stop-free transit in the real world because there will be pedestrians - you need a dedicated right of way. The argument for independent vehicles was made with rail PRT too, and it only ever reached a niche campus-and-airport market.

What you get from autonomous vehicles is improved flexibility, and that improves all transit modes while only slightly changing the dynamics that make rail vs. bus vs. car interesting.

I agree with this quite a bit.

I'd like to see a US city facing traffic/growth problems right now really embrace BRT[0].

To me it seems like the pragmatic solution, given the already extensive freeway networks in most US cities, and the incredible capital outlay required to get any sort of rail system up and running, not to mention the 20+ year timelines.

But I think most Americans have a much stronger stigma of buses than subways, so maybe it's just too uncool for the US to ever embrace.

[0]: Bus Rapid Transit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit

Seattle already has a pretty expansive bus network, including express busses and a combined light-rail/bus tunnel.

And yet... the roads are still gridlocked.

So, why aren't more people taking the bus?

Is service too infrequent? Is the network too small (not enough stops)? Is it over-capacity - more buses needed? Is the city just growing too fast for transit to keep up?

Has there been any analysis on why it isn't helping?

Seattle's bus system sucks - and it's not just gridlock.

There aren't enough running to make it make sense. This is probably because there aren't enough people actively taking the bus... because there aren't enough running.

It would be ideal if they raised the gas tax significantly and funneled the money into a better bus system. Get cars off the street and add more buses.

Who's gonna vote for that, though?

Montreal is planning to implement a BRT line by 2018 on one of the major north-south routes (Pie IX):

https://www.amt.qc.ca/en/news/projects/pie-ix-bus-rapid-tran...

If you lived in Seattle and ever had to ride the #8 bus, you wouldn't say this:

* Yelp reviews for the #8 (1.5 stars): https://www.yelp.com/biz/seattle-metro-route-8-seattle

* CHS: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/05/the-bus-stop-the-8...

* Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2ex4q6/the_no8_bus...

The recent split of some parts of the 8 help, but the greatest remaining issue with it is that Denny is constantly gridlocked, and the 8 is stuck in traffic.

Regarding dedicated lanes: there's literally nowhere to put a dedicated bus lane on Denny. It's just never going to happen. A gondola from Capitol Hill to SLU will happen before this does.

Dedicated bus lanes (Bus Rapid Transit) has its own weaknesses, particularly in pre-built up urban areas. To make the best of your system, you need 4 lanes wide of dedicated bus space at the stops, or else you get really inefficient performance, that WILL NOT SCALE.

At that point, once you've discovered that tunneling is the only option to get effective mass transit through your downtown core area, then you may as well just go light rail, since tunneling costs so much already anyways - may as well give the system a higher capacity ceiling, and higher speed.

The roads are already overcapacity in Seattle, and have horrible gridlock.

Some key roads, such as Denny, only have two lanes of traffic headed in each direction, which makes it basically a non-starter to remove one of them for dedicated bus traffic.

That seems like quite an odd conclusion, since converting half that road to an exclusive busway would increase the capacity of the road by a factor of 10.

It wouldn't if you understood why Denny was such a shitshow at rush hour. It's basically the only way for thousands of workers to access I-5. Yes, I guess they could drive up to Mercer, but Mercer is even more of a shitshow than Denny.

Busses will never catch on in the US until we do something about our homeless and mental health issues.

Agreed - one urine soaked person can disrupt over 40 other passengers.

I attempted to bus to work, but my sad conclusion was that I could never ensure I'd show up on time. It's a shame too because it would save me a ton of money.

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