Transit service and planning

An unworthy episode obscures historic deliberation and progress for better public transit. In August 2023, a closely divided Eastlake Community Council board of directors approved a letter calling on federal and local officials to cancel funding for both the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue.

In response, four dissenting board members, as individuals, sent their own letter to the same recipients, expressing support for the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue. A few days later, five board members by the barest of majorities voted to remove from the board their four board colleagues who had voted against the anti-letter, and who had written their own unofficial letter supporting the project.

These inexcusable actions by a narrow board majority were an unprecedented departure from ECC’s 52 years of fair and open process, and its former tolerance for the diversity of board and neighborhood opinion. The urgent need to reform the current board is fully discussed on another page of this web site (click here).

Fortunately, the remaining ECC board members were not successful in blocking funding and plans for RapidRide and protected bicycle lanes for Eastlake Avenue. The present web page on transit history in Eastlake begins with analysis of the RapidRide J line project, including the ECC board’s years of careful analysis, serious dialogue with officials, and openness with the public that preceded the recent ECC board majority’s reversal that hopefully will prove only a temporary aberration.

A related web page (click here) covers the ECC board’s long involvement with cycling issues, including its years of dialogue with RapidRide planners on cycling possibilities through the Eastlake neighborhood, leading to a recognition of there being no real alternative to protected cycle lanes on both sides of Eastlake Avenue as a means for safe passage of cyclists.

The present section also goes back before the RapidRide issue, covering more than a century of rail and bus improvements and debates that involved the Eastlake neighborhood, including after ECC’s 1971 founding, its involvement with transit planners and elected officials in advocating for improved bus service. For example, ECC was deeply and constructively engaged with public officials when, in recent decades, light rail and a new streetcar line were considered for Eastlake Avenue.

Until very recently, ECC’s involvement in transit issues recognized that the Eastlake neighborhood is not an island, but rather a key transportation crossroads. That is, ECC has a responsibility not only to those who live or work in Eastlake (many of whom are transit riders and/or cyclists), but also to countless others whose bus route or cycle ride will, by geographic necessity, take them through Eastlake.

The board long recognized (and hopefully will again soon) that if ECC does not rise to its responsibility as a crossroads, our transit decisions will be made outside the neighborhood, and ECC will also lose its clout on other, unrelated issues.

Early ECC consideration of RapidRide. As outlined in a subsequent section below, despite years of effort by the Eastlake Community Council, the neighborhood’s bus service has long been poor. Eastlake has one of Seattle’s highest rates of bus riding, but our current Metro route 70 is slow, crowded, and unreliable–and there are no expresses. For that reason, the possibility of greatly improved transit service on Eastlake Avenue was an opportunity that ECC could not ignore.

ECC’s Jan. 12, 2018 five-page comment letter to SDOT and the Federal Transit Administration in the environmental scoping process for RapidRide and protected cycle lanes can be found by clicking here. Following are some key sections:

“ECC supports a format for Eastlake Avenue that makes buses more frequent, reliable, and swift; makes bicycling safer with protected lanes; does not widen the roadway (preserves or expands sidewalks); and continues and expands the current planted medians and center turn lanes, allowing left turns to all side streets. We recognize that the combination of these steps is likely to sacrifice most or all of the on-street parking on Eastlake Avenue. But we cannot support the removal of this parking unless SDOT fully and fairly analyzes the impacts of the loss of this parking upon neighborhood residents and businesses, and unless the Mayor and City Council take steps to restore on-street and on-site parking elsewhere in Eastlake, thus helping to mitigate the expected loss of this parking on Eastlake Avenue that would result from the Roosevelt RapidRide proposals.” ….

“Impacts of this project are clearly significant; an EIS should be initiated now. The official documents offered in this scoping process offer a ‘preliminary schedule’ with a ‘milestone’ in January 2019 stated as the ‘Finding of No Significant impacts issued’. We believe this statement is conclusory and should be retracted. Th purpose of the Environmental Assessment is to ascertain whether or not impacts will be signifcant and hence whether an environmental impact statement (EIS) will be required.”

“Mitigation of parking consequences needed in EA or EIS. We particularly recommend the development and analysis of a mitigation package to increase public on-street and private on-site parking supply as a way to compensate for the severe reduction in on-street parking from the proposed elimination of all parking spaces on Eastlake Avenue. … The Mayor, City Council, and departments should exempt Eastlake as a special case from the drive to repeal on-site parking requirements in new buildings. Already as a result of these efforts, none of the townhouse, apartment or condo buildings now going up in Eastlake have enough on-site parking. The problem will become far worse if all parking on Eastlake Avenue is eliminated.”….

“No night construction. Construction is slated to take from 12 to 18 months. In order to protect the health and comfort of residents in Eastlake and throughout the corridor, it is important that the project construction only be done in daylight hours. SDOT and its contractors should commit beforehand not to apply for or use the major Public Project Construction (MPPC) Variance that is allowed to some transportation projects under the Seattle Noise Ordinance..”

The proposals in the 2018 letter (some of which are just as current and worth pursuing today) received little attention from a new board majority which gave up ECC’s leverage by adopting a new stance of hostility to RapidRide and protected bicycle lanes, culminating in a September 2019 board vote to oppose the entire project. An Oct. 25, 2019 letter (clickhere.) communicating that position went to the Mayor, City Council, and Federal Transit Authority.

Neither in the 2019 letter nor apparently in any subsequent ECC written or oral communications to the Mayor, City Council, SDOT, or other agencies was there any followup to or further mention of the 2018 ECC letter’s proposal for Seattle to keep or restore for Eastlake the longstanding on-site parking requirements for new construction. The removal of these requirements is steadily adding to on-street parking demand and will continue to even when parking on Eastlake Avenue is greatly diminished. Given that such a large proportion of the neighborhood’s on-street parking would be lost to RapidRide and protected bicycle lanes, Eastlake has a real case for such a City accommodation.

The new ECC board majority did not follow up on the Jan. 12, 2018 letter’s call for SDOT to commit not to apply for or to use the major Public Project Construction (MPPC) Variance that is allowed to some transportation projects under the Seattle Noise Ordinance. If the board continues to ignore this issue, Eastlake may unnecessarily suffer disruptive night-time construction noise for the life of the project.

Given its opposition to the project, it is puzzling that the current ECC board majority did not challenge SDOT’s 2021 declaration of nonsignifance (i.e. its assertion that that an EIS is not required}, nor the U.S. Federal Transit Administration’s decision that SDOT was correct in its April 2022 Finding of No Significant Impact for the project. Such steps toward a NEPA administrative or court challenge are normally taken by a group that is opposed to a project. In this way, ECC’s opposition to the project seems to have been more performative than real.

The RapidRide project will provide excellent bus service which Eastlake Avenue has not had for generations. The quicker, larger, and more frequent Rapid Ride J line buses will move a lot more people; ridership is projected to be over twice that of the pre-pandemic route 70 levels. Cars will still be the most visible and numerous users of Eastlake Avenue.

The time required for stops will be shorter. The seven route 70 stops in Eastlake will be reduced to four (at Garfield, Lynn, and Hamlin Streets, and at Harvard Avenue). With the station and the bus doors on the same level, lifts will be unnecessary. ORCA card readers at the station and at the bus doors will eliminate the current delay as riders pay and receive transfers. The buses will no longer face the delay and danger of needing to pull in and out of traffic for each bus stop. And cyclists will no longer face cars that cross in front of them on the way to parking places, nor will they risk crashing into open car doors.

A three-year construction project, which will temporarily sacrifice much of Eatlake Avenue’s on-street parking, is needed mostly for other reasons than the bus and cycle improvements. Pavement, sidewalks, curbs, and gutters need replacement, as does the main water line.

About 350 parking spaces on Eastlake Avenue will go away. More than half of these are now unavailable every weekday at commute time – for two hours on the inbound (south) side and then for two hours on the outbound (north) side, with violating vehicles immediately ticketed and towed. This peak-hour parking prohibition has been in place since 1987.

A neighborhood blessed and cursed by geography. Eastlake even back to prehistoric times has been a crossroads. Seattle’s hourglass-shaped geography, in which Puget Sound, Lake Washington, the Ship Canal, Lake Union, and Portage and Union Bays squeeze north-south land travel into a thin waist between Ballard and Montlake, with much of that travel going through Eastlake. Until Interstate 5 opened to the north in 1963, Eastlake Avenue was also State Highway 522, with nearly triple today’s traffic volumes.

But long before the automobile, Eastlake benefited from streetcar rail lines that opened in 1893 to serve larger destinations such as downtown, Capitol Hill, and North Seattle. The initial investors wanted to connect downtown with northern land they were selling. But passengers to and from the Eastlake neighborhood were key beneficiaries, enjoying easy access to downtown and the University District. Eastlakers also had easy access to Capitol and First Hills on another streetcar line up 10th Avenue E.

With a car not being essential for living or working in Eastlake, a boom ensued in home and apartment construction and in industrial expansion. Retailers and restaurants thrived by serving not only Eastlakers, but streetcar riders who stopped here on their commute between a downtown job and a home to the north. With easy access to labor, employers expanded, and Eastlake attained the unique balance of workers and residents which continues today.

With land sales completed, investors lost interest in the streetcars. The City stepped in to keep them running, but with costs exceeding revenues, it pulled up the rails in 1940 and bought buses, which only partly filled the gap. Some (including the Eastlake Avenue route) were rubber-tired electric trolleys, but as financial and maintenance problems mounted, with the decades many were replaced with diesels, including along the Eastlake Avenue line in 1971. That was also the founding year of the Eastlake Community Council, which began a successful 20+ year campaign to bring back the electric trolley buses, and to improve Eastlake’s bus service generally.

Re-electrifying route 70. Eastlakers were not happy that a 1974 joint Seattle/Metro plan for re-electrifying bus routes did not include Eastlake Avenue, 1990 opening of the downtown bus tunnel could not include our diesel buses. ECC pressed for re-electrification, and in 1993, King County Metro added Eastlake Avenue to its plans, giving as one reason the “strong community support” for doing so. Finally in 1997, route 70 became electric. It was King County Metro’s first re-electrification of a bus route in 15 years.

Eastlakers who took the new trolleys downtown immediately discovered that funds to wire the route 70 to the downtown transit tunnel had, with no notice to the neighborhood, been reallocated to expanded suburban diesel bus service. That issue became moot when the expansion of light rail led to all transit buses being excluded from the tunnel in 2019 and onward.

Difficulties in protecting and improving Eastlake’s bus service. In the 1990-2015 period, the Eastlake Community Council advocated for bus service without much success. It hosted numerous public meetings on the topic and fostered the independent but short-lived Eastlake Bus Riders Coalition. ECC submitted hundreds of petition signatures, wrote numerous letters to pubic officials, and ensured that the 1994 Eastlake Transportation Plan and the 1999 Eastlake Neighborhood Plan had strong transit proposals.

ECC was unsuccessful in saving from cancellation route 25 (with stops along Boylston Avenue E. and Lakeview Blvd. on the way to Capitol Hill and Montlake), and route 66 (Eastlake’s last express). For a typical ECC letter from that period, click here; for the County Executive’s reply, click here. King County Metro eliminated both routes in 2015, with the funds saved being largely spent for service improvements elsewhere. Promised improvements in the route #70 were years in coming, and it has been years since Eastlake Avenue had an express route.

In that period, ECC particularly objected that many Metro buses (including some whose funding benefited from closing routes 25 and 66) used Eastlake Avenue but with no stops there. ECC letters lamented that Eastlake was treated as an express corridor between downtown and the University District, not as a destination for or source of riders. And although the route #73 express (later canceled) had become more frequent with funds taken from the 66 cancellation, Metro did not heed ECC’s urging to add the four express stops (Aloha, Garfield, Lynn, and Harvard) that had been served by route 66 (and will now become RapidRide stops). Until RapidRide comes, Eastlake’s bus service is hardly better than mediocre.

Transit planning always looms. The 1893 streetcar system was the first of many important planning decisions made at higher levels but with Eastlake “going along for the ride.” In 1912, Seattle voters turned down the ambitious Bogue plan that would have undergrounded the Eastlake Avenue streetcar while adding another subway to Montlake. In 1971 the voters rejected another proposed subway system that would have bypassed Eastlake.

Before Sound Transit planners chose the Capitol Hill tunnel and station that we know and use today, they considered an Eastlake Avenue surface light rail route three times – in 1990, 1994 and 1997, with the latter two instances occurring respectively during preparation of the Eastlake Transportation Plan and the Eastlake Neighborhood Plan, both of which were managed by ECC.

As described in the Eastlake Transportation Plan, transit planners’ consideration of a light rail station near Rogers Playground and rail on the surface of Eastlake Avenue triggered particularly intense dialogue with the neighborhood. ECC representatives had face-to-face meetings with the rail transit agency head, got technical assistance from UW faculty, and made a site visit to the new Portland, Oregon light rail line. With opinion surveys and comments at public meetings indicating an even divide within Eastlake for and against these proposals, and in recognition that the ultimate decision was not in our neighborhood’s hands, ECC avoided a simple, stark position, instead laying out for the rail planners and the neighborhood the consequences and concerns.

Planning for a streetcar or RapidRide bus line. With public officials having chosen the Capitol Hill light rail route in 1997, years of debate ensued on whether Eastlake Avenue should have an extension of the South Lake Union streetcar or continue to rely only on buses. Again the Eastlake public was evenly divided, and ECC worked to ensure that officials and the public understood the neighborhood consequences of the alternatives.

The Lake Union Streetcar (opened in 2007) stopped short of the Fairview Avenue North Bridge for the very good reason that parts of the bridge were old and could not support a modern streetcar. Still, there was hope that once the bridge was upgraded, the Lake Union Streetcar could run on Eastlake Avenue and even across the University Bridge. Reality began to set in with cost overruns and other problems with the Lake Union Streetcar and in planning for the First Hill Streetcar (which eventually opened in January 2016). Also, it was recognized that without a substantial upgrade,the University Bridge (over which the old streetcars had run until they were discontinued in 1940) could not support a modern streetcar.

With this background, the Mayor and City Council agreed on 2013 legislation for an Eastlake Avenue corridor transit study to consider the streetcar and bus alternatives. The Eastlake Community Council helped draft this legislation, with language to ensure that the bus alternative received fair treatment. In the following years, ECC hosted a series of public meetings featuring SDOT representatives who were sometimes hesitant to divulge the nature of internal debates on when and how the Eastlake Avenue Corridor study should be conducted.

ECC eventually learned that City officials were debating internally about when to put before the voters a transportation levy, and whether to include an Eastlake Avenue streetcar in it. But the Mayor’s March 2015 “Move Seattle” program (p. 56) proposed the “Roosevelt to Downtown Complete Street” that would include “bus rapid transit” and a barrier-protected “cycle track” for two-way bicycle travel through Eastlake.

The levy ordinance that the City Council passed on June 29, 2015 and which the voters approved on Nov. 3 made $104 million available for “seven transit plus multimodal corridor projects, redesigning major streets with more frequent and reliable buses, upgraded paving, signals and other improvements to improve connectivity and safety for all travelers, whether walking, biking, driving, or taking transit.” The levy ordinance did not specifically require that Eastlake Avenue be among the seven corridors funded. However SDOT was at that point saying informally that $30 million was available for the Eastlake Avenue corridor study and its implementation.

The Eastlake Community Council board actively engaged with SDOT at this stage, providing its input to an internal SDOT debate on whether a streetcar line or rapid transit buses would take an exclusive lane in each direction. The concerns expressed by many Eastlakers against taking one lane in each direction for exclusive use by transit had a definite impact on the transit planners.

A month after passage of the 2015 levy, in December SDOT unveiled its web site with the Eastlake Avenue Corridor study now renamed to be the Roosevelt to Downtown Corridor study. The main feature of the web site was a lengthy Existing Conditions report. Later in December SDOT held two open houses, neither of them in Eastlake. At the open houses, SDOT announced that it would be studying streetcar and rapidride bus options, both of which would have a protected cycle lane, but neither of which would take a lane of Eastlake Avenue exclusively for transit.

SDOT did propose exclusive transit lanes for the parts of Fairview Avenue North south of Mercer, and for continuation of the corridor north of the Ship Canal. It was explained that Federal law requires that only half the mileage of a federally subsidized bus rapid transit route have exclusive bus lanes. Eastlake Avenue is less than half the mileage of the corridor, so exclusive transit lanes could be taken downtown and north of the Ship Canal while not doing so in Eastlake. Also at the time, SDOT officials said that they did not intend to recommend a streetcar, but that by including it as an option, there would be the future possibility of substituting a street car in place of the bus line.

To encourage dialogue widely within Eastlake and with the government agencies,the Eastlake Community Council organized a series of public meetings–especially needed at that point because SDOT did not organize public meetings, preferring the open house format and appointed advisory bodies. ECC widely publicized its request for public input. And in the ensuing months ECC wrote to SDOT four letters which are linked below, along with responses that ECC received from SDOT.

(1) January 7, 2016 ECC letter to SDOT (click here for the letter) expressing concern that both SDOT options would eliminate the center turn lane along with its landscaped median islands, and requesting that SDOT include a publicly analyzed option that keeps the center turn lane. Click here for the SDOT response letter.

(2) January 11, 2016 ECC letter to SDOT about various issues: Click here. Click here for the SDOT response letter.

(3) January 29, 2016 ECC letter to SDOT about parking issues: Click here. Click here for the SDOT response letter.

(4) July 19, 2016 ECC letter to SDOT about various issues: Click here. Click here for a Sept. 28 SDOT e-mail response.

ECC’s January 7, 2016 letter outlines negative impacts for traffic flow and safety, transit, truck loading, bicycles, and pedestrians that would come from SDOT’s proposal to eliminate the center turn lane on Eastlake Avenue. As explained in the ECC letter, SDOT had first introduced the center turn lanes on Eastlake Avenue in 1987 , and then expanded them to the north and south in 1999 in response to the Eastlake Neighborhood Plan.

In 2016 as a result of the written and oral dialogue with SDOT and its consultants, the Eastlake Community Council board came to the tentative conclusion that improving bicycle safety on Eastlake Avenue is too important not to add some kind of protected bike lane on Eastlake Avenue. The board believed that alternative routes on other streets than Eastlake Avenue for a protected bicycle lane would have greater impacts and would not be taken by many cyclists. Also, the board recognized that removing most bicycles from the motor vehicle lanes would help motor vehicle traffic and buses move more quickly.

A current issue that became more urgent with almost any option for improving transit and bicycle conditions on Eastlake Avenue is a tendency for disruptive cut-through traffic from Eastlake Avenue to divert to the neighborhood’s five other north-south neighborhood streets and the cross-streets to reach them. In the early years of the corridor study, the ECC board saw it as a high priority to prevent increases in cut-through traffic and to reduce the cut-through traffic from current levels. This is an issue that has not received much attention from the current ECC board majority, which would be wise to focus on it soon.

It seems clear from this past history that the Eastlake Community played a constructive and positive role in the early planning that SDOT did for improving transit service on Eastlake Avenue. A game-changing victory was in 2016 to quickly turn around SDOT’s initial decision not to include the existing center turn lanes in the street format alternatives it was planning to study. By its analysis and by engaging support from the Eastlake public, ECC persuaded SDOT to include center turn lanes in both of its alternatives.

If the center turn lanes had been eliminated, left turns into most side streets would have been prohibited, making access more difficult for residents, businesses, and their customers. The existing planted medians (boulevard strips) would have been destroyed, with no chance ever to build additional ones where there was no street or driveway requiring a left turn. Two-way traffic would not be as safe, with the oncoming cars being separated only by a painted double line. Pedestrians and cyclists crossing Eastlake Avenue would lack a safe refuge in the middle of the street, and businesses would lack in informal loading zone.

A more fraught issue in succeeding years was SDOT’s proposed elimination of Eastlake Avenue’s on-street parking to clear the bus lanes and bus stops and to make room for protected cycle tracks. Through its public meetings, ECC provided an opportunity for the Eastlake public to express its concerns directly to SDOT about the loss of this parking. Meanwhile, through letters and direct dialogue with SDOT and its consultants, ECC pressed for any alternatives (none were found) that, without taking away the on-street parking could achieve RapidRide levels of service and safe cycle passage. This substantive and very public dialogue was fully reported on the ECC web site and in the quarterly Eastlake News.

As outlined in the narrative above, between 2015 and 2018 the Eastlake Community Council board of directors engaged in dialogue with the SDOT planners and their consultant, pushing them to explore every possible alternative to removing the parking from Eastlake Avenue. SDOT and ECC learned together the hard truth that, unlike Seattle’s other arterials which are generally wider, Eastlake Avenue is unusually narrow — just 50 feet from curb to curb. There isn’t as much room on Eastlake Avenue for everything that can be squeezed onto these other, wider arterial streets. The ECC board tried everything, but by 2016 recognized that fostering excellent bus service and safe cycling could not be done without removing most of the on-street parking on Eastlake Avenue.

The ECC board members and officers who came to power in 2019 did not seem interested in the analysis and the dialogue with SDOT that had gone before. As this process was at that time fully documented on the ECC web site, it is perhaps not surprising that these sections were soon dropped from the ECC web site (a main reason for the narrative and documents presented above). The frequent and civil community meetings which for years had brought SDOT together with a divided public were largely dropped. ECC held few further public meetings on the topic, favoring closed meetings with SDOT and elected officials at which a few ECC board representatives presented their anti- position as the views of all Eastlakers.

And then there was the aforementioned August 2023 purge. As reported that month in the on-line newsletters Urbanist (click here), and Seattle Bike Blog (click here), the ECC board by a 5-4 vote removed from office four board members, including three who were the board’s only renters and youngest members. The unprecedented step was taken without it even having been on the agenda that day.

As explained at the outset of this web page, the issue that divided the board was the August 14, 2023 letter, narrowly approved by the board, calling on federal and local officials to cancel funding for both the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue. In response, four dissenting board members, as individuals, had sent their own letter to the same recipients, expressing support for the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue. A few days later, five board members by the barest of majorities voted to remove from the board their four board colleagues who had voted against the anti-letter, and who had written their own unofficial letter supporting the project.

On Sept. 14, 2023, the then ECC President posted on the ECC’s Facebook site (click here) a defense of this bare majority action, asserting that “Every board member was involved in the details of this letter. It was disappointing to learn, from an outside source, that a minority of the board members had afterward and without notice to the rest of the board, sent a contrary letter to several city departments identifying themselves as ECC board members. … By identifying themselves as ECC board members, these individuals undermined a board vote … No action would have been needed if they had addressed the issue as concerned citizens. They were subsequently dismissed from the board, not for their positions on the Rapid Ride J line issue, but for the way they chose to express their position.”

Longtime ECC board member Judy Smith, one of the four removed, responded Sept. 14 on the Eastlake Social Club Facebook site (click here). “Actually the letter was not vetted or discussed with the full board in any meaningful way. It was presented as a done deal that the board was supposed to get behind and work for–to kill the RapidRide J line and protected bike lanes on Eastlake Ave. … We voted on it three times, the last in a quickly pulled togetherZoom meeting, where dissenters stated our intent to send our own letter. We were told we couldn’t. Then we were told we could but we couldn’t say we were ECC board members, which seemed absurd. There was a rush to get out the ECC letter and make it seem like the whole board was behind it. … Suddenly we were all sworn to secrecy — we couldn’t say we were on the board, we couldn’t say what the vote count was. Where is the democracy and transparency in that? The ECC letter presents itself as speaking for the whole community council, when it does not, or did not, I guess it does now. That’s what we were pushing back on.”

On October 17,2023, the Seattle Times published on its editorial page an article by Judy Smith, entitled “Get on board with Rapid Ride bus line coming to Eastlake.” The article presented the case for Rapid Ride and protected cycle lanes, and warned of “an active movement to kill the project led by the Eastlake Community Council.”