Is Rail the Answer for Seattle’s Waterfront Tourism & High-Capacity Transit?

Transit studies are thick in the Seattle air these days. Just this week, Waterfront Seattle released a transit report (pdf) on options for travel up and down the Field Operations-redesigned waterfront, and Sound Transit and Seattle’s Department of Transportation produced eight alternatives for a Ballard-downtown high-capacity line.

The impetus for the former is due to a groundswell of support for returning the George Benson Streetcar Line to service — that report considers waterfront tourists the primary hop-ons, and contrasts the use of the antique 1924 cars with new streetcars or rubber-tired buses. The latter’s momentum is due to the efforts of Mayor McGinn, who campaigned for office telling voters they’d have had a chance to vote on the project by now. Seattle’s City Council has been notably lukewarm on the Mayor’s forward march.

It is remarkable that the report on waterfront transit options exists at all, for two reasons. First, the popular waterfront streetcars were never officially retired. The last promise the public heard was the City Council agreeing to build a new maintenance barn when the old one was torn down to make way for the Olympic Sculpture Park — but that promise remains unkept. The five cars have been sitting mothballed but remain in good condition, according to a recent inspection, though in spring of 2012, a small amount of track was ripped up in preparatory work for the deep-bore tunnel’s construction.

In that context, the news of a report on whether the city will consider a streetcar line it is already eight years late in restoring to operation is, one is tempted to say, Orwell-esque. In any event, the report estimates the cost of putting the streetcars back to work, with no modifications, to be between $340,000 to $460,000 per car. That does not include the cost of a maintenance barn to replace the one the city agreed to demolish in 2005.

The “lowest cost” option — to restore the streetcars just as they were, then, without connection to Seattle’s newer streetcar lines — calls only for one major change: doors on both sides of the cars (which is actually how the cars were structured originally). Though it’s said to be lowest-cost it uses the larger amount, $460,000, to generate its estimate of $1.36 million plus the cost of the barn. (System costs due to, say, putting back the rails that were torn up, haven’t been determined. It’s not likely that the city even asked WSDOT to pay to return the line to its original state.)

Tying the waterfront streetcar line into the larger streetcar network is a much more ambitious gesture, requiring that the cars’ electrical systems be upgraded to handle higher voltage, and that their power poles be changed out with pantograph-style systems. Because new cars use low-floor arrangements to allow wheelchairs to roll right in, the vintage streetcars would need on-board wheelchair lifts. (Conversely, if newer streetcars were ever to run on the waterfront line, the high boarding ramps currently there wouldn’t work.) The amount of work required skyrockets to about $15-million-worth.

This raises the question of whether the waterfront line is for tourism — in which case the old cars are an integral part of that experience — or transit: whether its connection to the streetcar network would drive significant residential usage, even in “off” months. Either streetcar line would be more expensive (given the maintenance barn requirement for the older cars) than running buses along the route. (But it is hard to imagine anyone rallying to support the restoration of buses from 1924, isn’t it? Perhaps that is a clue.)

The Ballard transit expansion study is in mid-infancy — its findings will be presented in spring of 2014 — which explains the bewildering number of alternative routes. Some would follow a westerly path to downtown, crossing the Ship Canal west of Salmon Bay. Some would head southeast to Fremont before making the crossing, then heading downtown. The solution to the Ship Canal might be a tunnel, 140-foot-tall bridge, 70-foot-tall bridge, or the Fremont Bridge. Tunnels or tall bridges cost more, but they accomplish the feat of not stopping for marine traffic during rush hour, which would play havoc with the accuracy of rail schedules. (Those interested can weigh in using this pdf form.)

“Preliminary cost estimates range from $500 million to $3 billion,” says RT&S. At Seattle Transit Blog, Ben Schiendelman, who’s also associated with the Seattle Subway crowd, has given quick thumbnail assessments of the Ballard-downtown routes — inspiring more than 200 comments, if you want to get into the weeds there. An important thing to remember, cautions Schiendelman, is that none of these “corridors” is fully baked. You can mix-and-match still. Here’s his stab at it:

1. Option 5 from downtown to Queen Anne. Yes, it misses Interbay, but Interbay isn’t an urban village. Queen Anne is, and Uptown is an urban center. Missing these two would limit TOD, as noted in the evaluation matrix
2. A tunnel crossing at Queen Anne Ave / 1st NW. We should not take a short term cost savings to be hamstrung long term by an opening bridge. With eight potential new crossing locations, we need the ship canal crossing study to provide a better understanding of how this can serve pedestrians and bicyclists, and how we should reconfigure our existing bridges. Right now, that’s still planned for 2015, but yesterday I heard from council staff and the Mayor’s office that the study should be back on the table for 2014 in the next few weeks.
3. A station under the canal. This was suggested by Alan Hart, the designer of Vancouver BC’s SkyTrain and Canada Line stations. In Option 8, it takes two stations to do this job, increasing travel time. In option 5, there’s no access south of the canal. Here, with one station, you would get a south entrance serving SPU, a north entrance serving the Fremont urban village, and if we can’t have another bridge crossing, a mezzanine (or just a wider station box) that provides pedestrian and bicycle access across the canal. Considering this is another reason we need the ship canal crossing study.
4. Continuation of the tunnel to Market St. The Ballard urban village is on the cusp of becoming an urban center. Ideally, I’d like to ensure that the future pedestrian center of Ballard not have a train overhead. Past Market, elevated may make more sense on 15th, but let’s get out of the retail core first.
5. Option 8 from SLU to Fremont, with Bruce’s bridge configuration. Looking back at the evaluation matrix, there is no single option that connects both the Uptown/Belltown and SLU urban centers to the rest of the city. Any option that serves Ballard well misses the heart of Fremont, and while it’s outside the study area, Phinney and Greenwood (another urban village) are growing as well. There is more than one corridor here, and we should be careful to fight for both, rather than pitting them against each other. It also seems like side-routing for this, as seen in option 6, would keep service fast. In addition, the portion from SLU-Downtown, while marked as in traffic in option 8, should be separated Rainier Valley style. It was pointed out at the briefing that the downtown connector recommendations may say the same thing – so this segment of track could be upgraded as part of that project anyway!