Looks like we may soon be studying mass transit alternatives for West Seattle and Ballard -- again. This time light rail. But there are some obstacles:
Construction of surface rail through Interbay is relatively simple, but crossing the Lake Washington Ship Canal to Ballard and the Duwamish River to West Seattle would push costs well into the hundreds of millions of dollars -- even if tracks halted at Westlake Center and the International District
For a gondola, that would be the easy part. I’ve been considering the possible applications of gondolas to urban transit since discovering Steven Dale’s blog (www.gondolaproject.com), and it looks like some commenters at the Seattle Transit Blog have too.
Steven Dale suggests:
I prefer to look at the technology as one that can exploit rather than just deal with natural obstacles. Rivers, valleys, parks and electricity corridors become usable space for transit that other technologies would not be able to utilize.
A perfectly applicable thought here. Why not exploit the ship canal? It’s the one stretch of Seattle waterfront lined not by pricey condos but by jobs. We could zig-zag to serve both sides, with stations alternating between Leary Way and Nickerson, serving lots of residents as well as jobs, serving the Ballard and Fremont neighborhoods and also Seattle Pacific University. This has the aesthetic feature that while the Burke-Gilman trail will be crossed by the gondola, and Leary and Nickerson will have Gondola stations, none of these corridors will be taken over by the gondola. Here is a possible route:
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| See full size. Generated in iMAP. |
After the ship canal I go down Aurora. Why pick the one street where nobody lives? Well, it’s straighter, we’ll likely want a future extension on Aurora (see green line for an example), and the fact that everyone on the east slope of Queen Anne paid for a fantastic view and this is the one place we can hide the gondola from them. Poor east-west connectivity makes it hard to serve much of this area anyway, but I’d put a station at Galer as there is a pedestrian corridor there.
There are many options (pink lines) for getting to Westlake Center. I suspect an option serving Seattle Center and Belltown would get more riders than one serving South Lake Union.
So should we build this? The line I’ve drawn would be 6.2 miles. Driving directions say it takes 15 minutes by car, though much of the day it would be a good bit longer due to traffic. Buses take 30 minutes, or 20 if you catch an express according to Metro’s schedule, and they run every 10 minutes during rush hour, 30 minutes mid-day. A streetcar would be no faster than the local bus, though a light rail line with exclusive lanes may be faster.
What about a gondola? With a top speed of about 20 mph, a gondola that did not make stops could make the trip in 19 minutes while leaving every minute. However, it won’t be non-stop. I estimate about 11 intermediate stops. If dwell times can be kept to about 30 seconds, this would be a 25 minute trip, better than the local bus and arguably better than the express because there is no wait. The ultimate question is what the price is -- estimates from ski resort prices may seriously underestimate the cost of building in an urban area, but then utility relocation, property acquisition, and street disruption/reconstruction should be much lower than with other transit technologies. I’d definitely vote for this if the cost came out to $200 million, what about you?
