On first impressions Seattle is a lively and interesting place, but perhaps a little, er, grungy. It’s a hilly city with a downtown built across a reclaimed tidal beach and nearby cliffs which have overtime been regarded into some very steep streets. There is a very cute, if crumbling, historic downtown where fancy restaurants and hipster spots sit with some unease in amongst a precinct with a bad reputation and a large homeless population.
Overall Seattle seems quite a road heavy place despite the abundance of pedestrian activity. Actually I get a very Auckland vibe, it seems a place that is embracing its urban life and activity but doesn’t quite reach it’s potential just yet. The most obvious manifestation of Seattle’s highway history is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. This hideous beast is a giant double decked motorway viaduct running right down the waterfront of the city, with finger ramps snaking off into the city blocks. Counting the street underneath that’s three levels of heavy traffic severing the city from the beautify Puget Sound waterfront. A few businesses struggle to attract people down to the water, but I doubt they’ll ever achieve a nice waterfront while the viaduct stands. Auckland came close to building an exact clone of this monstrosity above Quay St, boy we dodged a bullet there!
The classic symbols of Seattle are the Space Needle and the Monorail, two icons of one vision of the future from the modernist age. The monorail is fun, if basically useless from a transport perspective. Initially a temporary installation to shuttle people from downtown to the site of the 1962 worlds fair in a park a couple of miles away, it still does that only that today. It shuttles back and forth between the two termini stations every ten minutes.
I caught the southbound Amtrak from Seattle King St station. America is filled with beautiful grand rail termini like this, most of them crumbling and vastly underused.
Seattle has a fine fleet of buses of all types. Most seem to be articulated with metro style interiors, many routes are trolleys under wires while others are electric hybrids. They also run double deckers, single level rigids and seemingly everything else.
Perhaps the crowning glory of transit in Seattle is the underground bus and light rail tunnel. Yep, it has both in the same tunnel. This looks and feels very much like a metro line, except for the vehicles the three city stations are quite reminiscent of the Washington DC metro. The tunnel takes buses from all over the city, originally special trolley buses but now they are fairly conventional low emission hybrids. It used to be just buses but they’ve recently added tracks for the airport light rail line. I’m of two minds of whether this is a good idea, and in wonder if it was a political outcome rather than a planning one. You see the station platforms are very long with multiple bays, capable of raking several light rail trains and a half dozen articulated buses. However they cannot overtake each other or pull in and out around stopped vehicles. This means the light rail trains have to wait for all buses to clear the platform before they can stop, likewise buses have to sit behind stopped trains. Several times my train sat stopped in the tunnel for that reason, and at one point I counted more than seven buses backed up on the approach to the station waiting for a single train at the platform. I believe this requirement to stay inline was added when the rail tracks went in because there is actually enough room for buses to pass otherwise.
I think Auckland could really do with a smaller version of one of these bus metro stations under Customs St to take all the Britomart buses. Also riding the light rail has made me consider this as a possibility for new lines in Auckland. It was very frequent with high capacity vehicles, and presumably is a lot cheaper than heavy rail due to the easy geometry.
Oh and some very unique, if slightly gross street art. This is the Gum Wall, ’nuff said.
To finish, an interesting factoid for urbanists, the street level of the old downtown is some two or three levels above the actual ground level. Years ago a great fire swept through the town, which gave the founding fathers an excuse to deal with the perennial problem of tides swamping the muddy streets. They used the reconstruction from the fire to raise the streets on retaining walls many metres above ground level, while the original footpaths and building entrances remained below. A series of municipal ladders were constructed at intersections to overcome the grade change of up to ten metres in places. After several years of inconvenience and numerous deaths from falls, they started to enclose the footpaths into vaults and converted the windows of the upper floors into new ground level entrances. Initially the old lower footpaths and levels functioned as a colonial era shopping mall, but overtime fell into disuse and were converted into subterranean speakeasies, brothels and gambling dens. They were latter condemned in the mid twentieth century, and only saved from being filled in by a local historian. Well worth a look if you’re ever in Seattle.
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You went under the footpaths? I assume you did. Loved that tour! Also which Amtrak route did you take? One goes past Tacoma Narrows where the bridge famously collapsed.
Yes did the underground tour, very awesome. Took the amtrak south via Tacoma narrows, we were lucky to have Park Seevice volunteers onboard who gave a running commentary.
I had same thing, it was wonderful. Specially as I remember learning about it way back it 6th form physics.
I always got a Wellington vibe when in Seattle, but I guess I can see the Auckland aspect too. As the home of “grunge” (e.g. Nirvana) I guess it’s allowed to be a bit grungy too! Fear not about the Alaskan Way Viaduct; it’s being replaced by a tunnel; should be open by 2016. That should certainly transform the possibilities along the waterfront there.
That’s a pity. Getting rid of the viaduct will completely compromise the Seattle race track on Gran Turismo!
Really, they are doing a Big Dig? I would have thought a simple boulevard would have been fine, there is already another massive freeway about a mile parallel anyway.
Massive fecking boring machine [world’s biggest diameter] for cross town traffic PLUS an at grade boulevard; nuts.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About
Not all are convinced the Tunnel is desirable.
Did you do any cycling? Was any cycling infrastructure visible to you?
There’s already the I-5 for cross town driving… overkill, they should have just dismantled the vile viaduct and observed the result. Like here the forces of Motordom are still strong in the states refusing to look at the facts:
I didn’t do any cycling when I was in Seattle, and it’s still a bit of a work-in-progress. Probably better than Auckland, but that’s not saying much. They had a very pro-cycling Mayor until this year (biked to work) who helped push things along. Their neighbourhood greenway programme in particular is very nice. And they have bike racks on buses!
I won’t go into the merits or otherwise of needing to tunnel the Alaskan Way route, but at least it will provide the opportunity for waterfront renewal.
I do suspect that after obvious extensions to heavy rail – e.g. Onehunga to the airport, Avondale-Southdown, Mt Roskill spur -that future expansion of rail in Auckland will be via light rail. AMETI line from Panmure through Botany to Manukau and onto airport perhapd. NE busway converted to light rail. But eventually light rail over the bridge which, in 30yrs time. Could see the north shore with perhaps 2-3 other lines (east-west) forming a small light rail network.
Agree, but not over the bridge, leave that to the cars, a new rail only tunnel is the way to add speed, massive capacity, and a missing mode across the Harbour. Light Metro, like in Vancouver gives the best of both worlds; capacity and flexibility.
+1 SE line, all of the shore, and potentially a NW line should all be metro lines, get the most out of existing heavy rail assets and then build the cheaper passenger only alternatives.
‘Also riding the light rail has made me consider this as a possibility for new lines in Auckland. It was very frequent with high capacity vehicles, and presumably is a lot cheaper than heavy rail due to the easy geometry.’
Yes, light rail and buses can mix pretty comfortably together, and easily share the same much lower cost geometry. But as you have seen, definitely some careful thought needs to go into stations so they can reasonably overtake one another.
As an aside, how is the cafe scene over there? Home of the original Starbucks but I suspect so much more…
I don’t think anyone would set out to mix the two in the way Seattle has, from a few minutes observation at peak hour I’d go so far as to call it a balls up. Surely they could have rebuilt the stations or something…
Cafés were pretty average, lots of Starbucks of course. Bottomless filter coffee is the drink of choice, I ordered a short macchiato and it came out in a mug and very milky. Small hip bars seem to be the thing there.
Dang, so the yanks still can’t produce consistently good coffee as opposed to that evil “Quarfie” type substance as filmed in all those diner scenes in the movies.
No wonder Starbucks took the nation by storm! Ah, well there is still that Seattle music legacy, and from the sound of it, ‘small hip bars’. Great to read your posts on America Nick R.
Good grief, do I see a bendy trolley bus with a bike rack. This doesn’t remind me of Wellington!
@ NigelTwo
Wellington’s transport system is unfortunately sliding back into the dark ages thanks to the prehistoric attitudes of certain people within Greater Wellington Regional Council. Here’s hoping that a change of Govt on Sept 20 will drag this bunch of fossils into the 21st century.
Is the light rail driverless?
Light Metro [rail] in Vancouver is, but not Light Rail [trams] in Seattle, can’t do that without full grade separation.
Actually, the distinction between Light Metro and Light Rail could be a very fine one.
Imagine this as a possibility. Stage One: busway with street running where necessary due to cost. Stage Two: as the busway reaches capacity, or where different street corridors are desired, a tram or light rail line is added onto the busway; the buses happily share both roads and busway with the light rail line. Stage Three: as the combined corridor reaches capacity, either the corridor itself, or an alternative dedicated ROW is constructed to be fully grade separated. The option exists for some or all of those light rail vehicles to then be converted to be driverless. It isn’t the nature of the vehicles that determines if driverless operation is feasible, it is instead the nature of the corridor itself.
Modern light rail vehicles are extremely modular. If you look closely you’ll see that the entire cab, underframe and all can be easily bolted on or off the rest of the train-set. The structure is fundamentally very different to a conventional heavy rail train. Theoretically, if going to driverless operation, one could lock off the driver’s cab, or completely replace it with a further passenger “nose-cone” segment which would make the light-rail vehicle look very similar to Vancouver’s light metro trains. Options that may be useful to consider when pricing up the CAPEX of a light rail train-set that might have a service life of 50 or more years.
I thought that the seattle tunnel has less lanes than the current viaduct anyway?
A few years ago I think there was an Adelaide proposal for buses to run on concrete guided ways within the medians where the buses were more or less steered by the concrete curbs. Does anyone know if that was adopted? or if it works anywhere?
O-Bahn, google it.
Thank you for your guidance Patrick. Very interesting and also noted in one of the links that the Northern Busway gets mentioned in the list of Rapid transit routes.
Does this system have any possibility for NZ application, eg ring route Mt Albert to AIA to Manukau?
In general our view is:
The Northern Busway, which is a huge success, needs to be extended north and the street priority for its services in the city as the stops/stations need to be significantly improved.
The North Western Motorway clearly should be getting its version of a busway now, at least from Pt Chev west.
South East Auckland needs AMETI to be completed and bus priority extend.
Elsewhere there are many high bus volume roads that need continuous bus lanes and bus signal priority.
Would any of these be better if the buses are running on tracks? It’s hard to see how, really the success of the O-Bahn comes from the fact that buses using it have their own right of way rather than the track technology.
Interesting article on Seattle’s renewal here – http://www.fastcompany.com/3031544/hit-the-ground-running/the-entrepreneurs-who-saved-seattle
“.. in 1979, Seattle was the last place you’d think to find a growth business. It had more in common with today’s Rust Belt than Silicon Valley.. So what changed? Two Seattle natives decided to move their 13-employee company there in 1979 from Albuquerque. The two natives were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And the company was Microsoft. Is it possible to ascribe Seattle’s entire economic trajectory to just one company? Well, today over 40,000 people work at Microsoft in the region, and 28,000 of them are highly paid engineers. Approximately 4,000 businesses have been started by Microsoft alumni, many of which are in the region….”
Maybe the tech industry in Auckland should be more involved in urban design & planning issues to counterbalance the demands of the manufacturers & shippers of physical goods.