(Image: Sound Transit)
It is a fact of life that Seattle summers bring transit delays as drier weather means important maintenance work can be completed. Sound Transit has announced light rail service through the city will be reduced to trains running every 15 minutes for about a month as it completes some catch-up maintenance work:
Just as one summer service disruption is ending, another is beginning. Passengers taking Link should note that trains will run every 15 minutes for the next few weeks for a maintenance project. We originally had expected to have 12-minute headways, but we have since had to move to 15 minutes to ensure reliability for our riders. We are working towards optimizing headways, while being mindful of safety through construction zones.
The reduced service will allow crews to reconstruct the platform edges and the tiles at Othello and Rainier Beach stations. Sound Transit says most of the existing tiles are cracked or broken, creating a safety hazard for passengers.
The work is expected to be wrapped up by September 17th.
Sound Transit schedules typically call for trains every eight minutes during peak service hours.
The new efforts follow completion of a larger project that also brought reduced service and bus transfers as crews completed an emergency rail replacement project at Royal Brougham Way.
It has been a tough year for service stability on the city’s current one-line light rail system. This spring, service was disrupted after a mishap involving the removal of a clock created safety issues in the downtown transit tunnel.
Demand for service, meanwhile, is recovering. CHS reported earlier this year on the return of pre-pandemic levels of ridership on the light rail system and at Capitol Hill Station. That growth has brought challenges including complaints — and hoped for solutions — around cleanliness at the busy Broadway facility.
The system is also slowly expanding. Long planned for a June 2023 opening, a new line connecting Bellevue, Redmond, and Seattle across the I-90 bridge — including the new station smack-dab in the middle of I-90 just south of Judkins Park — will debut this winter. Judkins Park will be the western-most station on the 10-stop East Link line which is expected to carry 50,000 riders by 2030. CORRECTION: Sound Transit announced the East Link opening will be delayed — indefinitely — while it works out how long it will take to rebuild faulty tracks:
Work is ongoing to identify new opening timelines for four light rail projects in construction, including East Link. Construction quality issues along the I-90 segment of the East Link alignment are expected to delay the full project opening into 2025.
A portion of the new line may open by next spring. “Trains will make eight stops between Redmond Technology Station, which adjoins the Microsoft campus, and South Bellevue Station,” the Seattle Times reports.
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Boy am I glad 15 minute headways aren’t the norm because they make the link nearly impossible to ride
I don’t know on what world Sound Transit is living in where they think they can cut service is half suddenly for almost a month and have it still be usable for riders. It was sardines last evening and many riders were left on the Westlake platform to wait another 15 min for another packed train. There’s gotta be a better way to do maintenance than just suddenly slashing service for weeks on end.
Yeah, we are in desperate need of ST expansion and some leadership from the entire organization, and it seems — as usual — that they’re asleep at the wheel.
Is it the typical American story these days where the ppl making decisions are never affected by their decisions (i.e., in health care, nothing changes because decision makers already receive A+ healthcare, and ST dithers and wallows in incompetence because the leaders don’t even ride the transit they’re supposedly running/maintaining/expanding)?
My guess is this is a huge part of the problem.
Forget about the train if there’s a sporting event. Try the street car.
Third world countries have better transit than Sound Transit
Third world transportation system Out of this world price tag !
It’s like they constructed the stations out of gingerbread. The escalators especially. Whatever contractor designed and built these stations (not to mention the signage..) should be given hard labor. Other cities and countries manage to build stations that last for decades with little or no maintenance. We probably spent more, yet got less, the Seattle transit way.
I think you’re probably underestimating the amount of maintenance that’s done at the stations you’re admiring, and overestimating how much is being spent on that here…
How is it that New York has been doing this for some 80-odd years successfully and Seattle hasn’t been able to take a single lesson from them?