City Planning Director Talks Waterfront Transportation

No parking = no economy on the waterfront. 

Effing morons.

“ There’s been a lot of concern about how many cars will be displaced onto city streets because drivers don’t want to pay a toll to drive through the tunnel.”

But no concern if we tore down the viaduct and replaced it with….nothing.

By the way, the Embarcadero, which the urbanists love to jerk off over: lots of cars on the road, lots of parking.

“We’re dedicating a lane in each direction during peak periods for transit.”

Actually, they’re not, if my recollection of the lane configuration charts from that night is correct. From Yesler to King, In the AM peak, the two “flex lanes” are transit only, but in the PM peak, the southbound flex lane is transit, and the northbound flex lane is GP traffic, while one of the other middle lanes is taken to provide an extra ferry queuing lane while maintaining two GP northbound lanes.

There are serious questions about whether it makes any sense to put SR-99 buses bound for Delridge and West Seattle on Alaskan Way, and it’s not at all clear that Metro will choose to do so: they are also studying transit pathways that go through SODO and Pioneer Square. One of the most important factors in any transit alignment is reliability. When ferries are unloading, the entire street grid around Colman Dock is hosed, and the peak transit lanes on Alaskan (even if there are two of them, which I don’t think is the plan) will do nothing for buses in the off-peak or the weekends. They will also do nothing for buses that are stuck in gridlock on Marion as all the cars from the ferry try to fight their way into the city at once.

Turning Main St into a transit mall, with car access restricted or prohibited (at least in the peaks, probably all day) and turning the buses on Main would give riders from West Seattle much better access to jobs, government offices, sporting events, intermodal transfers (e.g. to First Hill) in Pioneer Square and the south end of the city generally, and might well be more reliable due to the lack of exposure to ferry traffic. Main St would also avoid the current problems with West Seattle buses backing up onto 3rd Ave due to the difficulty of making the right turns from 3rd to Columbia in the evenings. Are the Waterfront team aware of these transit problems that don’t show up on their maps, but are a very real concern?

It seems to me that the Waterfront team could make their lives a lot easier by having Metro do some preliminary analysis on the proposed Alaskan+Marion/Columbia pathway, to see whether that pathway can be ruled out as insufficiently reliable, and what it would take (e.g. full time transit lanes?) to make that pathway sufficiently reliable. If Marion/Columbia isn’t a viable transit pathway, their job would get a whole lot easier, as they would have subtracted one item from their cars+bikes+peds+transit+freight equation. 

Have these jagoffs at the city planning office even tried to use the Alki “cycle” track during the summer? You’ve got roller-bladers skating across half the width, walkers 5 across, taking up the entire track, moms with their double-wide strollers chatting on cell-phones and skateboarders doing tricks. This is all in what is marked as a bicycle-specific path, with a marked pedestrian path right next to it. And they want to duplicate this fiasco in this plan, while they have more than ample room for wide cycle tracks alongside pedestrian boulevards as well as easily two G.P. lanes each direction with a left turn lane in the middle. 

I thought the whole point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a waterfront was so that the city could “connect” to it. How is that going to happen when you have 100 feet of impatient, aggressive motorists and (in the summer) sun-baked concrete to contend with? Seems to me like this whole plan smacks of developers giving the reach-around to whoever the hell is designing this P.O.S.

Any road that is 4 lanes or more wide needs a pedestrian island in the middle at cross walks. Something 101 feet wide would need 2 to 3 pedestrian islands for walkers to be comfortable crossing there.

“Have these jagoffs at the city planning office even tried to use the Alki “cycle” track during the summer? You’ve got roller-bladers skating across half the width, walkers 5 across, taking up the entire track, moms with their double-wide strollers chatting on cell-phones and skateboarders doing tricks.”

Wow, ever heard of “share the road”

Jagoff indeed.

“impatient, aggressive motorists”

Says the guy with spandex up his ass screaming at the “roller-bladers skating across half the width, walkers 5 across, taking up the entire track, moms with their double-wide strollers chatting on cell-phones and skateboarders doing tricks” in HIS way.

Um, I do “share the road”. I don’t ride smack in the middle of the lane because that just pisses off other people. When there is a bike lane, I use it. When there is is sidewalk right next to the bike lane, which is one of the ONLY totally separated and protected paths in the entire city, yes, I do get a little ticked off. When you drive, would you be fine with cyclists riding 5 abreast in the lane, taking it up entirely? 

And my problem with this proposed design is that they have an absolutely enormous expanse of land available that is a clean slate, and they still refuse to separate pedestrians, cyclists, and motorized vehicles. Now, when it’s summer-time and all of the tourists are swarming the place, I’ll have to use the friggin G.P. lane if I want to go more than 5 mph. 

Nope, I don’t have spandex “up my ass”. Just as you most likely don’t have a Big Mac from the drive-thru stuck up YOUR fat ass. Lookee, I can stereotype someone, too!!

And I do have a problem with rude, inconsiderate people. As well as anyone on wheels that doesn’t have brakes, i.e. skateboarders and rollerbladers, just like people have problems with brakeless bicycles. It is a MARKED BICYCLE ONLY lane, not a Multiple Use Path.  

Agree about the need for a median on large roads. The crossing distance is 101 feet, but 23 feet of that is the median.  Adding more medians would make the crossing even bigger. With no median, that section would be 78 feet.

The median is a plus for pedestrian refuge, landscaping and noise/visual buffer.

Good post.  Though it seems like a challenge to connect transit to Columbia, Marion there seems like a huge opportunity to create a transit hub with Coleman Dock (which is a BIG transit facility).  Also note that busses coming from the south on SR 99 into town aren’t only from West Seattle proper, but Burien, White Center and Des Moines.

Linking a KC Metro hub with Coleman Dock would create transit transfer opportunities that don’t exist (or are cumbersome)  today. For example, how many more people might walk onto the ferry (instead of drive), if they could catch a bus accross the street from the terminal once they arrived in Seattle?  Today they need to trek up to 3rd. Avenue, which may be a deterent.

The Main Street Pioneer Square route has some advantages as well, but faces resistance from the historic preservation folks who are concerned about having busses travelling hrough that area.

Its too bad there isn’t more space in the southend (Yesler to King) to create a PM transit only lane – though that would make 5 NB lanes assuming 2 lanes are for ferry, and 2 for GP in the PM.  Of course people can argue that Coleman Dock doesn’t need 2 lanes for holding, or GP doesn’t need 2 NB lanes, but from what I heard, those aren’t negotiable. 

places that have lots of cars, yet are chock full of people walking and enjoying urban life:

greenwich village and where jane jacobs romaed.
all of paris
most of rome
most of london
most of dc.  mall, dupont circle, farragut, georgetown, all full of people walking woo hoo!  and also full of cars and traffic and omg parked cars! 
about every other big city in the world.
copenhagen and amsterdam.

shockingly, in the boulevards of paris there are people walking and sitting at little cafe tables just feet …excuzez moi, au moins de deux metres avant des coche dans les rue!  yes, in sight of cars!  and there are even …..horrors!  parked cars!  aiiiiiii!  and that’s not all mon ami, some of those parked cars are HALF ON THE SIDEWALK AND NOT EVEN OBEYING PARKING RULES AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it is a profound mystery how these cars coexist with peds and street vibrancy.  Because being Seatle smugsters, we all know we must ban parking before it’s safe to even consider letting a pedestrian somewhere, my god just having a bike lane cross a ped crosswalk is a huge safety issue!  so, we’d reject the way they do it in those uncivilized places liek greenwich village or paris or rome — see, we’re very humble here, but at bottom, on the inside we know WE KNOW BEST.  Just don’t say it outloud, that’s not polite.

bull shit.  nyc is full of huge avenues plus vibrant pedestrians.  it’s the fucking capital of pedestrianism in america.  they manage to cross big old seventh and eight avenues just feet from where jane jacobs found the mecca of urban street life.  greenwich village.  yes, dick, people are walking across seventh avenue to go to jazz clubs.  the sidewalks throngh with pedestrians.  so the answer is medians are nice, but no, they’re needed.  grow up.  maybe is seattle pedesitrans stopped texting while walking and took their hoods off and you know, raised their head and actually looked at the cars, they wouldn’t need to act like crossing a street is this life threateneing dangerous thing to do — people do it all over nyc every day and most of their huge avenues got no islands.  you don’t need those islands for walkers to be comfortable.  they’re comfortable already.  get used to walking among cars, okay, it helps if you act aware, but most seattle peds can’t even bother to look up or look at cars when crossing. 

ah yes, seventh avenue in nyc in the village is a failure.  broadway in nyc — total failure.  that’s why there are no pedestrians in nyc. 

connectiut avenue in dc — say at the zoo — total failure.  there are no peds there thronging the streets. 

Seattle will have limited fiscal capacity; it will not be able to subsidize parking garages on the waterfront; if there is sufficient demand, the private sector can provide parking.  In addition to the waterfront, Seattle should also fund sidewalks on the arterials that lack them ($1 billion) and has significant pavement management and bridge maintenance to catch up on.  the waterfront dreams should be constrained by fiscal realities.

The Marion Street pedestrian causeway takes intending riders to electric traction transit on Marion Street; the challenge is to improve its frequency and reliability.

“Linking a KC Metro hub with Coleman Dock would create transit transfer opportunities that don’t exist (or are cumbersome)  today.”

Colman Dock is not a transfer point of interest for the vast majority of two groups of people concerned. Most ferry riders are going to Downtown, Belltown, First Hill, Pioneer Square or the U-District, not West Seattle, Delridge or Burien. Similarly, most West Seattle, Delridge and Burien riders are going to Downtown, Belltown, First Hill, Pioneer Square or the U-District rather than to Bainbridge or Bremerton. Waffling about “hubs” is irrelevant if the services in question don’t have a considerable degree of synergy, and these services don’t. 

Moreover, as I pointed out, there are likely to be serious operational issue entailed in serving Colman Dock. The currently proposed transit facilities are inadequate to maintain speed and reliability for riders going to downtown and might well degrade the reliability and throughput of 3rd Ave, negatively affecting the vast majority of downtown bus riders (your response glossed over this as a “challenge”).

“For example, how many more people might walk onto the ferry (instead of drive), if they could catch a bus accross the street from the terminal”

They already can catch the 16 and 66 from right outside the Ferry Terminal (those two routes lay over there), and many do. They can also walk over the ADA accessible ferry terminal walkway to catch the trolleybuses on 1st & Marion. Under Metro’s proposed Fall ’12 restructure, there will be trolleybuses operating up and down Madison/Marion to First Hill every 7.5 minutes or better during the weekday and every 15 minutes or better on evenings and weekends. 

Due to the car congestion that occurs every time ferries start unloading, it’s almost certainly quicker for a deboarding ferry passenger to take the walkway to 1st than to walk the steps down to Alaskan, and sit in gridlock on a bus. The frequent and regular Madison/Marion service is likely to be far more useful to ferry riders than being able to get on West Seattle buses that will, in the peaks, often already be full of people going to downtown. The only real benefit that you think you’ll get from routing those buses down to Colman Dock is already provided by other services, and thus moot.

Transit planning needs to be based on *facts* about where where riders typically travel and what other transit services will exist in the transit network to meet those needs, not on wooly notions of “hubs” and “alternatives”.

($1 billion) 

For sidewalks? What are you smoking?

what we need is a gondola from colman up to third ave light rail then cap hill or first hill.

in portland it crosses the freeway from river to the campus, it was a few million, it’s half a mile, it moves about 3000 pphpd.

then put in gondolas to west seattle, you need a few towers in sodo, crossing the water, up to junction… then a few going north to ballard.  plenty of room over the train tracks in interbay.  great TOD opportunity near whole foods. 

I’m a native, and in the last 20 years this city has been hijacked by utopian ideologues who live in their own dream world.  Take that idiotic monstrosity, the Sculpture Park. It is ugly, looks out of place, and we lost valuable waterfront parking. At one time, you could park ON the waterfront, only a few steps from the Myrtle Edward bike/ped path. No more. I guess that made too much sense.

More open “greenspace” on the waterfront? Tell me that when a cold wet wind is blasting across Elliott Bay. Oh, sorry, I forgot we have 2 months of nice weather a year.

This city is now full of MORONS.

How about teletransports? Can we budget those?

the portland gondala was built, it was about $50 million, it works you can ride it today.  it’s technology from switzerland used in ski resorts.  you can also test the fantastic idea of a gondola about 5 hours north of here between two mountains called whistler and blackcomb:  the spaces between the towers are more than a mile i believe.  so saying gondodals are as wacky as teletransports is actually a stupid, and ill informed argument.

nearly every political discussion here becomes subject to Jante’s law.  That is, “how dare you propose something I dind’t think of, something you say others somewhere else are doing, that means you’re saying folks elsewhere are BETER THAN US smarter than us you’re saying there’s a taller poppy over there!  well fuck that we must cut off the head of that taller poppy by scorning your idea/explaning why it could dnever work here, see, we’re special, we have hills/water fill in the blank/making scornful attacks like “well if you like subways so much why don’t you move back to nyc/paris/rome” the result is our infrastructure sucks because of the local attitudes and cultures like this which amoun to a  smug, self chosen state of ignorance and failure.  Because taking ideas from somewhere else would just be sooooo humiliating or something, just like in the town of Jante no one is allowed to be better than anyone else and if you are they coalesce to put you down.  Through mockery among other techniques, like called a functioning gondola proven in portland also whistler and also in about 50 ski resorts in the alps aking to a cartoon teletransponder.  but hey, if it makes you happy to say with the incredibly dysfunctional crappy transporation nonsystem you have go right ahead I am sure the locals can shoot down every good idea to ensure that absolutely nothing from anywhere else comes here then we can continue to believe we’re as smart as the transportation planners in every other city, in fact we’re leaers on urban transportation, woo hoo, our transit is the best, woo hoo. 

again, Jante’s law……it’s all the fault of people from somewhere else, coming into our village, trying to be taller poppies than us, how dare they.  cut them down by calling them morons.  everything was perfect before the newcomers came, everything new is bad, at bottom they’re no better than us are they.

You preferred the parking and the abandoned oil site to the Sculpture Park?  Seriously?

 The real problem here is the reservation of space for cars, and I don’t see that changing easily. Colman Dock has to have loading space, and they can’t provide it the way it’s currently provided. On-street parking is apparently a critical need for the businesses. The ‘flexible’ transit lanes are, as Bruce points out above, relatively useless, but getting rid of them still doesn’t probably get you the bicycle freeway you seem to desire. I think having a 2-way cycle track will get you closer, but you’re also probably right that in the summer months with all the tourists that cycle track isn’t going to be super-high-speed. Corner’s design team seems to have (wisely IMO) understood that walking is the most important mode for the waterfront.

 The data is very clear in the Pedestrian Master Plan. Seattle has an enormous backlog of unfunded sidewalks, and we are spending very little money on an annual basis to address it.

 Native frustration notwithstanding (and I’m not a huge fan of the Sculpture Park, but for different reasons) they make a good point about seasonality. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges facing the design team.

This writing is called stream of unconscious technique.

Typically Seattle — spend millions of dollars and wasted hours devising a solution to a problem that doesn’t yet exist — oh but we KNOW we don’t want any nasty cars down there polluting our vision! Bad cars! Bad!

Embarcadero actually pretty much sucks.  It’s a giant gridlock devoid of human scale pedestrian comfort and has zero charm.  Let’s not emulate that mess.

Why should the city pay for sidewalks? They never did in the past, the developers of the neighborhoods built them and they were factored into the price of the homes. If folks want sidewalks, they need to bend over, and cough up some $$.

 …did you even read the article?  They guy said this:

“We want to make sure that the businesses that exist, as well as the
buildings on the east side that are opening up, have on-street parking
and convenient short-term parking.
We’re really interested in doing some mixed-use development that
would include some parking. There are a number of sites that will likely
be redeveloped. Could we allow some convenient, short-term parking that
has housing or offices above it? We’re looking at a lot of options. The
parking wouldn’t be on the street level—you wouldn’t be walking by a
parking garage.”

Commenters these days, yeesh.

Cite your resource, because I’m pretty sure that’s not true.  Also: what would our roads be like if we took that stance?  We wouldn’t have roads. 

 so right.

Turning Main St into a transit mall, with car access restricted or
prohibited (at least in the peaks, probably all day) and turning the
buses on Main would give riders from West Seattle much better access to
jobs, government offices, sporting events, intermodal transfers (e.g. to
First Hill) in Pioneer Square and the south end of the city generally,
and might well be more reliable due to the lack of exposure to ferry
traffic.

Typical piece of shit Seattle Transit Blog “progressive” who hates cars and wants to make Seattle impossible to drive in.

I have to say that I don’t think there’s a whole lot of aesthetic difference.

And how much did Portland’s gondola cost? How many people use it? Just wait until their entire rail network goes tits up and is abandoned. I wonder how the local transit fuckwits there (and here, who want to duplicate it in Seattle) will explain it.

Remember, this is from a guy who boasts about carrying a gun when he rides. Beware the cyclista punks! Get ‘em from behind, after dark!

Gondolas to Ballard?

Jet packs!

And FP still cannot understand an analogy: cars are just as dangerous as guns, as well as a suggestion since he has repeatedly threatened to run over cyclists, to assume every cyclist is carrying a gun, and therefore you should NOT attempt to run one over. However, I guess that’s what you get from a hick rural Midwesterner who has sex with his dualies tail-pipe.

 This is so false. I’m what can be called a “transit progressive” and I supported the rebuild or another viaduct. Would I rather have less accommodation for cars and full priority for transit over cars (meaning more bus lanes and less parking lanes)? Of course. But in a democracy you have to balance what everyone wants. My main concern was and is the cost. A rebuild, new viaduct, or boulevard would be cheaper than a tunnel. That’s less indebtedness to worry about, and more money available for transit. Transit fans *did* point out the lack of exits downtown, and how that would make the tunnel less useful than the viaduct. But *you*, automobile fans, prevailed at the ballot and got your expensive tunnel with no downtown exits. Don’t blame us for that. But excuse us for enjoying the gift that comes with it, a viaduct-free waterfront.

 It’s not about athletic pedestrians like yourselves. It’s about elderly and handicapped pedestrians and ADA requirements. What was built a hundred years ago and may be successfully full of pedestrians, can’t be legally built now. If that bothers you, please also be bothered by the zoning laws that prevent the well-loved small-lot houses, and retail businesses with no setbacks, from being built nowdays.

The only thing I can think to add to this discussion is that I’d like to see the city change the rules to make it easy for sidewalk cafes to exist in the space currently occupied by the viaduct. Let the market do the rest.

Tip though, retractable patio canopies and space heaters so that people can actually enjoy these future sidewalk cafes when it’s raining out (aka most of the year).

This would accomplish a few things. It would
(1) bring people to the waterfront (I think it’s naive of James Corner to just assume people are going to hang out around there for no reason when it’s cold and wet out),
(2) put lots of eyes on the street which in turn would
(3) address well-founded concerns people have about the waterfront park becoming a new “drug hangout” that people don’t feel comfortable in,
(4) help stimulate other activity, and finally;
(4) because it would be really cool.

PS: Anyone who thinks a parking lot was better than the Olympic Sculpture Park is just bitter. The city’s main goal shouldn’t be to make it easy for people to park on a waterfront that straddles one of the busiest downtown’s in the country. If you want a nice waterfront to park at, get creative and stop complaining (Golden Gardens and Discovery Park are awesome).