Mastodawn

#news #LightRail #transit #seattle

From the article:

Yonah Freemark, senior researcher at the Urban Institute, was the first to notice something was up, when he spotted an eye-popping count of 4.8 million Sound Transit light rail and streetcar boardings for April, in the National Transit Database.

“The most ridden in the nation, above L.A., Boston, or San Diego,” he posted on Bluesky this week.

#news #LightRail #transit #seattle #cascadia #vancouver

Vancouver still crushes us, of course, so we aren't #1 in Cascadia.

But we're working on it.

@moira
How do we compare to subways and els (if you happen to know - I can look it up)?

@ohmu I don't know, and it's hard to know or even compare, because it's such a hybrid system. In some places, it _is_ a subway. And it's an el other places, and a streetcar in others. In North Seattle, it's Skytrain South, while functioning like a subway. So I don't even know what a reasonable comparison would be.

I mean, they went with comparing light rail to light rail because that's the technology, and that seems fair to me. But comparing against other technologies is harder to figure out.

@moira
All fair. The subways I know include embankment and elevated segments.

@ohmu Sure, but I mean in things like density of neighbourhood service. Roosevelt through Sodo? That's a subway. But if you're all "Capitol Hill only has the one stop and should have two to qualify", then I'd say the second UW stop kind of fulfills that for both the U District and North Capitol Hill, but if that's not good enough (and I'll admit that's fair), then that still leaves you with downtown through Sodo which is _inarguable_.

@moira
I hadn't heard the "it takes two" criterion until now.
I agree with it now that I'm aware.

But, anyhow, I'll poke around for a way to compare with heavy rail metros. ST light rail is already getting serious use but I don't know if it's on the same level as BART, the LRT, or Chicago - or if it even can be. I presume light rail means lighter. Smaller trains. Fewer passengers per train.

@ohmu Well, we can compare by size I guess.

Sound Transit light rail combined has the same coverage area as the O line of BART (51 miles), which makes our system 39% of the size of BART (131 miles), by distance covered.

Wikipedia says the BART system has 186,000 boardings per day on average, vs. 155,000 for Sound Transit. So Sound Transit's total ridership is 83% of BART, despite well less than half the coverage area.

Normalised by coverage area as approximated by rail length, that works out to:

BART: 1420 riders per mile
Sound Transit LR: 3039 riders per mile

So by coverage area, Sound Transit light rail is getting _more than twice as much usage_ as BART. (214% of BART.)

@moira
Ka-boom!

@ohmu holy hell BART's trains are 20 minutes apart

you've got one line that are like 11 minutes apart but the others are all 20

which is okay downtown i guess that staggers to a reasonable five but

ours in the north end are like... 4 minutes apart. _four_. the outskirts in the south and east are 10.

I think that explains a lot.

@ohmu i went looking for insides of BART trains and they don't seem much bigger than ours? they've got various seating types in different parts of the cars like we do, the highest density is a centre aisle with two seat on either side and ours do too

maybe the seats are bigger but they don't look obviously so

the cars to look wider tho' but maybe they're just shorter

@moira
They are a bit wider, as I recall.
But the big difference is each car is much longer, with only two or three consistent seating arrangements. More like an old school passenger train basically.
I wonder if they finally figured out bikes.

@ohmu Doesn't look like it

average 50 seat cars vs. 74 for sound transit (a lot of which comes from having seating where BART trains have a third door)

average 2 bikes per car vs. 6 bikes per car for sound transit

but i'm not seeing a length spec so

@moira
Wow! That's very different from the BART trains of my experience decades ago.

I'm going to quibble with bikes per car.
line cars have a nominal six bikes per car (though really it's four. I've never seen an attempt to get three bikes into those spaces). But the newer line cars only have room for one bike per alcove or two bikes per car. I was crestfallen when I pulled my bike into my first .

Jun 7

@ohmu On both 1 and 2 lines you're permitted to stand near the rack, that's how you get up to six, given that there's two racks per car.

(And I've been the second in one of those spaces on a 2. I can't _hang_ my bike, but I can be there with it.)