The News Tribune: Sounder is looking to keep the added ridership by adding trains.
So, you might have heard that a couple lanes of northbound Interstate 5 were closed last week. Hysterical media predictions of "nightmare" traffic failed to come true. Lists of "survival tips" for dealing with hellish commutes failed to be necessary. Even an entire blog (the Seattle Times' The Clog) devoted to "the Closure" couldn't make the predicted traffic clusterfuck materialize. For nearly two weeks, half of I-5 has been closed down—and traffic has, as if by a miracle, actually gotten better.
Last Monday – the first commuting day during construction on I-5 in Seattle – nearly 12,000 people boarded Sounder trains between Tacoma and Seattle. But while the number of passengers remained high throughout the week, it declined each day as I-5 gridlock didn’t materialize.From the Olympian.Sound Transit, the agency that operates the Sounder, knows it will take more than a construction project to persuade many people to leave their cars behind.
“A lot of people have made choices for this particular (construction) project that are probably not sustainable,” said agency spokeswoman Linda Robson.
From the Times.
From the Post Intelliger.
And so on...
2 comments:
I've not seen where Sounder terminates in Seattle, but the cautionary note is very relevant: what happened in South Florida with Tri-Rail is that a lot of people tried it when I-95 construction started; and most of them were so turned off by the shuttle-bus transfers that they not only never came back to rail transit, they were basically made permanently sure that it doesn't work.
The Sounder terminates at King Street Station in downtown, where a mecca of transit options await. Bus lines to every part of the region arrive and take off from this point. The waterfront streetcar runs along this point. It is conveniently located next to the sports stadiums as well, so when Sounder does special runs to ball games you are dropped off right at the stadiums! It is a smooth quick ride! I think a lot of people switched from the Sounder during I5 construction due to lack of parking at some stations. They (Sound Transit and King County Metro) have been running extra buses to get people through as well.
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