Tom FucoloroIn Vancouver, kids drive the trains + Perhaps some whimsy could help save Sound Transit’s budget
I hope these child train engineers have completed their safety trainings.There are many advantages to having a metro rail system that is completely grade-separated (either elevated or underground but never at shared street level). It never has to stop for red lights. It is unaffected by car traffic. It never crashes into people crossing the street or making turns on a red light.
But as a parent traveling to Vancouver, BC, with a child, there is another advantage that has nothing to do with transit system performance: Kids get to pretend they are driving the trains, and they love it.
Like the SeaTac Airport train, the Skytrain operates autonomously so there is no operator’s cabin blocking the view out of the front and back windows. There’s no need to explain to kids that they should go to the front and pretend to drive the train because they will immediately figure that out on their own. My sister and her family were visiting this past week (this is why posting was lighter than usual), and every time we went anywhere the kids wanted to take the train. We even took it three blocks once just because they wanted to pretend to control it. It was CA$3.35 well spent (kids ride free).
This may sound silly, and it is, but too often we discount the value of whimsy in city and transportation planning. Maybe it’s due to so many decades of austerity in public infrastructure, but grim and basic transit infrastructure is praised for its no-nonsense practicality. But nonsense can be fun! These kids are not going to go back to their schools in Missouri and tell all their classmates about the Skytrain’s excellent service frequency or transit-oriented land use. They are going to tell them about how they got to drive the trains.
Think of Seattle’s monorail. People don’t love it because it’s such a useful transit route or because the vehicle uses rubber tires instead of regular train wheels on its one concrete rail. They love it because it’s got big windows and they get to see the city rather than the inside of a tunnel. And then it goes through the MoPop building, a design decision that is pointless from a transportation infrastructure perspective but is freaking cool and memorable.
Sound Transit is facing some stressful decisions about its expansion plans, and there are calls for all kinds of austerity measures, some of which will be needed. Sound Transit spends huge sums on big, deep stations that require massive amounts of spending on excavation, and I hope they can find alternative designs for the lines and stations so that they can build out the service people voted to fund.
As Sound Transit board members and staff weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions, I hope they properly weigh the value of creativity and enjoyment as well. An elevated train can be more fun than one in a tunnel in the right context, for example. Creative reuse of infrastructure can be more fun than a brand new build when feasible. It pains me to think that they are not currently planning to use Union Station and its giant old echoing waiting room as part of the second downtown line. It’s right there in the perfect spot, and the public already owns it (Sound Transit’s offices are inside). If their planned tunnel costs too much and needs to bypass the vacant Union Station building, King Street Station and Chinatown/International District Station, then maybe they are too focused on the tunnel part and not enough on what actually matters: A train line that takes people where they need to go. If a tunnel won’t work, maybe the solution is surprising and creative. Perhaps all or portions should be elevated like the L in Chicago or, yes, the Seattle Monorail. Imagine a station somehow worked into an upper floor of Union Station and the views of the city riders would get from up there. The value of giving transit riders amazing views may not always be factored into an analysis matrix, but it’s real.
I am not an expert in building rail transit, obviously. I am using my power as a bike blogger to confidently hurl peanuts from the gallery, gleefully ignorant of whether they are helpful at this stage of environmental review and project design. It’s too late for big changes like that, they may say. And they’re probably right. Then again, if the alternative option is to chop Ballard from the delivery plan as seems to be the leading idea on the table right now, then perhaps a dramatic redesign is the more expedient option. Later is sooner than never. This may require rethinking the preferred alignment, but nobody really loves that alignment anyway. Cutting the second downtown line or the Ballard extension cannot be the solution. What would it look like to use elevated rails and cut-and-cover tunnels under existing right-of-way as much as possible? Tunneling under 4th Ave S seems like a big engineering challenge, but what about building an elevated line above it? We need to rebuild the 4th Ave S bridge structure at some point soonish anyway, so can we combine those projects to save some money. And, uh oh, the same goes for the Ballard Bridge. Yep, I wanna open that old can of worms again because surely we can save money by partnering to build a new bridge versus building two different new crossings right next to each other. The Ballard Bridge doesn’t need to open that often, and there are plenty of rail lines that deal with opening bridges. If you get stopped, then you get a few minutes to take in the view. There are worse things. Or if we really have to, I guess we can go for the high bridge option that won’t need to open even though it is ridiculous and will be worse for biking (though notably not as bad as biking across the bridge today).
Both 4th Ave S and the Ballard Bridge also have the political feasibility benefit of being Seattle projects, so the City of Seattle can put up big portions of those funds without impacting the regional balance that the Sound Transit board has to worry about. Seattle needs to spend this money, anyway, so adding some funds to also enable light rail is not going to be a hard sell. In fact, it might the the thing that sells the public on these projects since rebuilding 4th Ave S isn’t exactly a sexy investment.
My point isn’t that these particular ideas are the solutions, but I have been very surprised to see cutting Ballard or the second downtown line have been put on the table before they have explored revisiting the current alignment. Cutting Ballard is an extreme option that should be reserved as an absolute last resort. Ballard light rail was a huge reason voters approved ST3 in such big numbers. We’re a bunch of creative and smart people, and the voters have approved a huge sum of money. I believe that legislators or voters would approve additional funding if they were convinced that Sound Transit has done all the work needed to get the funding gap as low as they can. There may also be answers if Sound Transit’s political leadership is willing to consider some unconventional ideas. And maybe those creative solutions will even create a bit of memorable whimsy on the way.
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