So before I close I do want to point out one jem in the ruff, East LINK. Now LINK is trying to follow growth not shape it. They were design to maximize accessibility, area coverage, and TOD opportunities. MAX and Skytrain were built to influence growth patters. Yet another reason is that we are late to the game. Subarea equity has forced Sound Transit to build out rather than fill in Seattle proper with highly accessible mass transit. Sound Transit is a three county regional transit provider who’s mission is to build a regional transit system. In comparison the 2nd longest line is MAX’s Blue line at 33 miles. This length forces planners to reduce accessibility to increase speed to a competitive level. This necessitates a long central line of ~55 miles, Everett to Tacoma. So what happened to LINK, why is it so off the mark? Well for starters we have weird geography which has forced our growth pattern into a long and narrow shape. So, coincidence or planning? Northwest Mass Transit Spacing Both the Expo and Millenium lines hover perfectly in the range, while MAX jumps around a bit more because of variation in land use patterns and geography. Magically MAX and Skytrain fall into that range. The ideal station spacing for pedestrian access and continuous linear TOD is roughly two times what an average pedestrian would walk, so roughly ~.5 mile to ~1 mile. Station spacing is an important measure of how dense of a network a transit system has. So how accessible is LINK for pedestrians compared to other mass transit systems in the Northwest? Well, not very, especially compared to Portland. Local streets are slow but offer very high accessibility, while freeways have very low accessibility but very high speed. As accessibility increases speed decreases and vice versa. These two dimensions are inversely related. The second dimension is speed of travel on that facility. The first, accessibility is a measure how easily it is to join and leave that particular facility. All forms of transportation can be characterized in two dimensions.
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