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Subject:
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RE: Will Seattle light rail
extended to Snohomish County create intolerable crowding on peak period
trains in King County? - Newgeography |
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Date:
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Wed, 23 Jan 2019 23:49:08 +0000 |
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From:
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Email The Board <EmailTheBoard@soundtransit.org> |
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To:
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CC:
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Email The Board <EmailTheBoard@soundtransit.org> |
Dear Mr.
Niles:
Agency staff have collaborated in response to your email regarding
Link light rail capacity, and the following is the response. On behalf of the
Sound Transit Board of Directors, I would like to thank you for your detailed
comments and taking the time to engage. Your emails, in addition to your
written testimony provided during public comment, have been provided to the
Board.
The action
you propose of delaying construction of light rail expansions due to high
demand is not one Sound Transit plans to pursue. It would leave transit riders
with no alternative to the buses that are already straining to meet rider
demand on the busiest corridors. Each light rail train can carry the capacity
of up to 10 buses. As train frequencies improve to up to every three minutes
they will provide capacity for up to 16,000 riders per hour in each direction.
In contrast, a freeway lane can carry a maximum of 2,000 cars per hour.
In the 1990s
when the region took action to move forward with building a high-capacity
regional transit system, the light rail system at the core was designed to
provide substantially greater capacity than many others around the country.
Each station was designed to include platforms stretching 400 feet, one third
longer than a football field, and long enough to accommodate four-car light
rail trains. Our system was also designed for faster speeds and higher
reliability that come from a predominantly grade-separated system.
These
features stand in contrast to systems like the Portland area’s, which is
limited to two-car trains by station lengths and extensive at-grade sections
where trains cannot extend longer than one city block.
https://seattletransitblog.com/2016/06/08/seattle-is-the-tortoise-portland-the-hare/
In the
future Sound Transit’s light rail trains will arrive up to every three minutes.
Each four-car train will offer capacity to serve approximately 800 riders, or
approximately 200 riders per car, in crowded conditions. The extremely high
demand the region is seeing from people who want to ride transit — a very good
thing — means that today we are already hitting those capacities periodically
onboard our current two- and three-car trains operating every six minutes
during peak hours. It’s not frequent, but it will happen more often in the years
ahead during peak hours. As this occurs, people’s experiences will continue to
be consistent with the workhorse role that transit plays in many other major
metropolitan areas’ transportation systems.
Sound
Transit’s planning for purchasing more train vehicles and building more
maintenance base capacity to store them. In this work we are using a planning
assumption of a more comfortable load of around 150 riders per car instead of
200 riders. Higher than expected light rail demand means this planning target
will be exceeded more often than we predicted several years ago, but there will
still be sufficient capacity to provide similar transit-riding experiences to
other cities.
Sound
Transit is continuing to move forward with the region’s 116-mile light rail
system based on the Board’s direction that this relief for transit riders and
our overarching transportation system cannot happen soon enough.