This last weekend, Seattle opened a substantial portion of East Link, a new light rail line that will eventually allow for a quick, single-seat, rail journey from Downtown Seattle to Downtown Bellevue and Redmond, connecting most of the important centres for technology in the Puget Sound region along a single rail corridor. The opening was well received, and only happened because politicians pushed to open the east of Lake Washington portion of the line — possible because it has its own operations and maintenance facility, while works are completed on the complex portions crossing Mercer Island and the lake.
Of course, Sound Transit is far from perfect, and their transit expansion program has many of the same issues as other agencies like high costs, a significant excess of parking, and light rail where it does not belong. And yet, they also feel a cut above other agencies in the US; in some ways, the agency and its programs remind me of those going on in Canada. With sleek marketing materials, and things like wayfinding that totally obliterates most of what you will see on this continent, this all gives me a lot of hope, and so I wanted to talk about it in more detail.
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Service Levels are Solid
While Seattleites rightly complain about lacking service on Central Link given how busy it is, most American light rail systems have far worse service than Link, which doesn’t get super frequent, but also doesn’t get super infrequent — East Link will run every 10 minutes. By comparison, Denver’s East Side suburb of Aurora’s relatively new light rail line gets 1/3 the service with 30-minute headways.
At the same time, Seattle broadly seems to understand the value of high levels of service — urban buses in the city are frequent, the excellent RapidRide BRT-lite dispatches with the fluff of many BRT services in North America and focus on frequency, and Sound Transit’s highway services are also an under-appreciated bright spot.
Wayfinding and UX is Great
The wayfinding on Link has always been rather good, which I chalk up in large part to the system being quite young, and in a very international and tech-savvy city (insert comments about Californian transit systems with bad wayfinding), but some of the new changes have been very nice indeed. Over the last few years, the city adopted a nice number-based service designation, and the new full-LCD next train displays that show the next two trains are also lovely. There are also nice new LCD internal displays on the new Siemens S700 trains (which I think look great), although like most of the cities in North America with modern Siemens LRVs with these displays, I think they are underused.
Plans are Strong
Of course, Seattle’s future plans are quite strong, with plans to extend “Central Link” all the way up to Everett and South to Tacoma quite advanced (portions of the route to Lynnwood and Federal Way are both well on their way), and additional plans to serve more parts of Seattle and the East Side are also underway. The changes made with East Link (more grade separation, better station & stop designs) also make me optimistic that as more and more projects are completed, we will see more gradual improvement and learnings. That desire for improvement, general humility with plans, and lots of transparency is a breath of fresh air on a continent that struggles with all of these things.
And the great plans don’t stop at rail: the “Stride” BRT system, while rather expensive, is exactly the type of highway based regional express transit that more North American cities ought to implement. And its use of electric buses — while a liability for the Puget Sound Region (electric buses are still kind of in their infancy in North America, especially for long distance highway services) — will clearly benefit a lot of cities. I also think there will be a lot of value provided by Stride in allowing people travelling north and south from Bellevue, or to Bellevue and the East Side from the north and south being able to take Stride as opposed to the capacity constrained Central Link.
The Vancouver Connection
I have a hard time believing that a lot of the changes you see in Seattle’s light rail projects in particular are not influenced by Vancouver, which is an easy Amtrak ride up to from Seattle. From the addition of very substantial elevated sections to the Link network, to those new next train displays, a lot of the changes we see in Seattle seem like they may have their origins from up north. That being said, I still think there is much to learn from Vancouver on providing feeder bus service, using proper metro technology for rapid transit (the second downtown Seattle tunnel really ought to carry automated metro trains to Ballard and West Seattle, instead of compounding the mistake of choosing light rail for central link), open payment with credit and debit, transit-oriented development (a lot more high rises to be found in Metro Vancouver), and right-of-way and station planning (Seattle often has odd gaps between stations, missed station opportunities, and weird station designs with too much parking).
In the future, I hope the learning can go both ways. While I think Vancouver is the clear winner on rail, Stride will surely be a great model for the highway buses in Metro Vancouver — which aren’t nicely branded, electric, or coherently organized — to move towards. I also think that as each city adds new stations, lines, and technologies, the other will take notice, and healthy competition is powerful!
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