At 6:41 this morning the Seattle Times reported that light rail service between Northgate and the Capitol Hill station in downtown was temporarily suspended due to a “ventilation safety fault”. That sounds like a relatively minor problem ST will eventually figure out, but this morning it is a major inconvenience for thousands of North Seattle commuters. It also highlights the inherent vulnerability of rail systems. All it takes is one piece of track or one station to have a problem and it shuts down a large part of the system.
In the meantime Sound Transit is providing shuttle buses to the five stations where light rail service is suspended. Buses may lack glamour, but when one has a problem it is easy to dispatch a replacement, the number of passengers inconvenienced is very small and the delay is brief. Not so with light rail, especially segments in tunnels or elevated. Yes, grade separation does good things in terms of avoiding traffic on surface streets. The down side is that when there is a problem the passengers are often stuck for an extended period of time with no options.
Sound Transit has recently been touting their ridership numbers, which finally are over 100,000 per day (many or most are former bus riders who switched to light rail when their bus routes were canceled or truncated, so they are not actually “new” riders). During the last two weeks Sound Transit has been encouraging people to avoid I-5 construction by taking light rail. Good suggestion, but not this morning. Will Sound Transit tell us how many riders are now standing out in the rain trying to figure out how to catch a bus from the north end to someplace downtown?
Today’s service interruption may be only a minor issue, but it raises a timely question. Last week Sound Transit announced an “Enterprise Initiative”, which despite the bureaucratic title, isn’t about starting a new enterprise. Rather, it is a reconsideration of projects in the ST3 plan necessitated by massive cost increases. The proposed light rail projects, including the extensions to West Seattle and Ballard, have increased by billions of dollars and are no longer affordable within Sound Transit’s $150 billion program.
At the Community Oversight Panel meeting on August 13th Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine repeated his commitment to light rail, but this latest service interruption is one more reason for Sound Transit’s ”Enterprise Initiative” to seriously consider alternative transit modes. That should include Bus Rapid Transit and automated shuttles that are far more cost effective and adaptable to shifting travel patterns. A transit “spine” sounds wonderful, except when that spine has a slipped disk.
