No one was happier than me to see the removal of buses from the downtown tunnel and its entire dedication to Link trains, but I fear this wish-come-true has transformed the stops on this part of the line into ghost towns. There are just not enough trains in the downtown tunnel. And Sound Transit, to my surprise, never planned an increase in train frequency but was certain that a bus-free tunnel would make its trains more reliable.
Sound Transit in an email to me:
Link reliability will increase with buses no longer sharing stations in the tunnel. Trains will be more evenly spaced, and will adhere more closely to their peak schedule of arriving every six minutes. Frequency will not be increased.
And so they are, but there are not enough trains. This has resulted in considerable dead-spaces, stretches of time when nothing at all happens in this and that underground station. When the buses were in the tunnel, one could use them to just get to up and down downtown. This freedom is gone or, less dramatically, considerably restricted. The buses are now on Third Avenue, which is not in itself at all a bad thing. Not only do the buses have a street, Third Avenue, dedicated to them but they also recently obtained legal tools to keep cars and their insatiable hunger for space and a mobility that can never exist in reality but only car ads out of their way.
Heidi Groover of the Seattle Times reports that a “bill to let Seattle use automated cameras to catch drivers blocking crosswalks and bus lanes won approval in the Washington State House Monday evening, reviving an effort that appeared dead just a month ago.” This is great news from up above. But still the underground downtown tunnel feels empty between, before, and after rush hours. Despite the explosion in Link ridership, is it enough to justify a train frequency that is, to be honest, second-rate (7 to 10 minutes)?
If you want to see a first-rate frequency, check out Vancouver BC’s SkyTrain (2 to 7 minutes). The difference between second-rate and first-rate is large enough to make the kind of social impact that transforms a city. The difference is between a line that’s mostly tied to work, and one that can absorb the life of a city as a whole. But we in Seattle are still under the logic of a very functionalist public transportation system, and what this means is profound. The model for a functionalist mode is much closer to the Sounder Commuter Rail (the labor train) than it is, say, to an Uber (the life of a city). The tunnel is less about getting to a bar on the other side of downtown than it is about getting you home to the beer in your refrigerator after work. We will never win the war on cars with this kind of shopkeeper mentality.
