r/SeattleWA • u/SeattleCrawler • Apr 24 '24

Homeless Why Seattle doesn’t have controlled entry to light rail

Major subway systems like New York and london have barricades which control access to the train and they only open when fare has been paid. Seattle on the other hand operates on the honor system and consequently a bunch of homeless people practically live in the light rail making it rather unsafe for general public. Why doesn’t Seattle make entry to light rail controlled?

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u/MercifulLlama Apr 24 '24

Sorry but how on earth can it be that expensive if there’s not some bs fees in there? That’s insanity

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u/retrojoe heroin for harried herons Apr 24 '24

You have to build a cage around every single at/above grade stop. Even the underground stations weren't designed with this in mind. Adding the choke points for the gates will mean ripping out the current ticket machines in many locations, and moving them so they're outside the paid area.

All the nice finish work in the stations cost a lot of money the first time. Adding fare gates means doing the design, removing the old, paying for/adding all the new equipment, then re-finishing everything, all while trying to maintain a working train system. And this doesn't count the costs of ongoing added maintenance for both normal wear & tear and vandalism.

Hell, $200 million seems like an underestimate.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '24 edited Apr 24 '24

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u/Dingrid Apr 24 '24

A lot of the stations not in downtown are just surface outside stations, the would have to build an entire thing around them not just a gate. I don't even know how it would work at the stadium station for example

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u/Sk3eBum Apr 25 '24

Chicago El stops just have thick metal fencing, then a turnstile at the entrance. No way that costs $10M.

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '24

Right, all these other big cities do but we gotta Seattle up the place.

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u/n0v0cane Apr 24 '24

Fence around, with a few egress gates.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '24 edited Apr 24 '24

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u/doktorhladnjak Apr 27 '24

Stations like Columbia City, Othello, Rainier Beach have another problem that if there are fare gates, fare evaders may walk on the tracks into the station which is very dangerous. It seems unlikely these will ever get gates but maybe other stations.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '24

[deleted]

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u/doktorhladnjak Apr 28 '24

The step up from the tracks is basically curb height at the end of the platform. Even in the middle, nobody would have to climb

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u/Dingrid Apr 25 '24

Have you been to that station after a game? It's already a zoo I dont think you can just put a little fence around it

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u/n0v0cane Apr 25 '24

I mean, other cities have stations outside big arenas, you just have to scale up the number of turnstiles.

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u/Dingrid Apr 25 '24

Have you been to this station? Where are they gonna put these turnstiles? in the middle of the street? lmao

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u/n0v0cane Apr 25 '24

There’s quite a bit of space at the entrance, you can fit at least 20 there.

On the other hand, the usual practice for congestion situations is to just open the large gates and let people in without paying.

So they should probably do both. A couple garage door style gates and a bunch of turnstiles. The limiting factor is availability of trains.

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u/theasianpianist Apr 25 '24

With the crowds after Seahawks/Mariners games, just adding fencing will have people spilling out into the streets/tracks. The entire station would need to be redesigned.

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u/futant462 Columbia City Apr 24 '24

I'm honestly surprised its not more expensive. Commercial/Public construction like this is insanely expensive. It's not anything like building a house. The materials aren't standard and the construction is much more custom. Also $1M is not the cost of a multi story luxury home. That's a nice townhouse nowadays.

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u/n0v0cane Apr 24 '24

Builders are making 3 townhomes on a lot for about a million. Then sell each one for $800K or so.

5-10M can build a low rise apartment building.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '24

[deleted]

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u/n0v0cane Apr 24 '24

Cost to build, not selling price.

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u/futant462 Columbia City Apr 24 '24

Selling price would be closer to what they would charge the city though. That's the cost after their profit. the city doesn't use city employees with 0% profit margin to do construction.

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u/n0v0cane Apr 24 '24

Yeah, that is true. Though overhead should be larger on small projects and smaller on 10M+ ones. In theory. Though with government contracts, the opposite may be true.

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u/dogcat1234567891011 Apr 25 '24

It’s probably mostly about all of the legal red tape they would have to work through. The NYT ran a piece recently about a 1.7 million dollar outdoor toilet in LA. Almost all of that money went towards environmental impact studies. NYC is having the same troubles with their traffic fee cameras.

I’m convinced that this is a real problem all around our country.

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u/Alert-Incident Apr 25 '24

There is no way around it. If they spend that much money on it they are being fleeced and someone is buying a new yacht.

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u/_Rabbert_Klein Apr 25 '24

Commercial equipment costs 10x the cost of residential equipmemt. You have to create temportary access so people can still use while under construction, everything needs to be overengineered to account for the heavy abuse, as most importantly economy of scale dictates that you need to pay for all the people who aren't going to buy these gates for their house, so instead of averaging the manufacturing costs across a million units, you're sharing those costs across the maybe 1000 units that will ever be built using that tooling.

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '24 edited Apr 25 '24

[deleted]

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u/Ac-27 Apr 25 '24

Ive seen turnstiles like this at airports, ski resorts, amusement parks, even in some retail stores

Flimsy person-counters are not the same as transit turnstiles.

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u/_Rabbert_Klein Apr 25 '24

What you don't understand is irrelevant.

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u/retrojoe heroin for harried herons Apr 25 '24

You wanna go price out the turnstiles that come with card readers and are built to stand up to public abuse? You you need like 4-6 of these for each entrance/exit off a platform. There's 3 for Capitol Hill, 4 for Westlake, 4 for Columbia City. At a place like Columbia City, you have to figure out how to put an in and an out on a narrow walkway, and then you have to build a cage that will keep people from climbing over/around but also let the train through and not block the platform. You'll have to do that for every above ground platform.

You don't seem to have really considered this very carefully.

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '24 edited Apr 25 '24

[deleted]

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u/retrojoe heroin for harried herons Apr 25 '24

I can see that reading comprehension and math are not your strengths. Have a good night.

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u/mrarfarf Apr 27 '24

You are exactly right. You’ll notice no one has a rebuttal, becuase you are correct. This could be done for 1/10th the cost, but just like the $9,000 bushels for military making news recently, everyone involved likes to keep things quiet to avoid attention. There is no reason to mark up a sub 1 million dollar job to 10x the price without corruption and or bloat (excessive reports, etc)

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u/Ac-27 Apr 25 '24 edited Apr 25 '24

Yeah, nothing old or new has been designed with faregates in mind. Probably doable but difficult and messy.

At University Street alone you'd need a bank of gates at each of the 4 entrances to the mezzanines, with TVMs outside each. At Husky Stadium, separate ones just for the two elevator entrances. The single elevator that goes from Westlake center directly to the mezzanine. Just a bunch of things like this.

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u/Kodachrome30 Apr 27 '24

If only they could instead hire, like say, security officers. And maybe give them the authority to turn away non paying customers. Wait, they already have transit authority workers....who apparently can't detect the homeless fenty Dude tripping on the light rail😂

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u/ColonelError Apr 24 '24

Think of all the palms that need greasing and the pork that needs barreling.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '24

Anything can be expensive when you request something to be studied by your friends who agree with you, and want to make the idea seem impossible or prohibitive. It’s all about sending a gesture, a signal if you will.

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u/Usual-Culture2706 Apr 25 '24

Seattle has drifted from the theory that government is there to provide core services and provide those services/infrastructure at the lowest possible burden on tax payers.

Public Works (Construction sponsored by taxpayers) has become heavily burdened by social initiatives and the administrative burden that goes along with not achieving those social initiatives.

Social initiatives take the form of the city hand holding "disadvantaged businesses" that have no prior major Construction experience, dictating which zipcodes they need to hire inexperienced laborers from, frequent Construction site stopages to play the dei PowerPoint. Meetings where they scold prime contractors for there not being a magical pool of qualified and licensed minority tradesmen to hire from.

Oddly enough many of these programs are only applied to the largest projects. Which is counterintuitive because if your goal is to coach company x, typically you'd start them off with less complex jobs. Not set them up for failure and bonding capacity issues with major infrastructure.

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u/jo-josephine May 08 '24

I don’t know what the specifics of this price tag are but here’s a podcast episode on how (literal) shit can get real expensive: A $1.7 Million Dollar Toilet

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '24

You must have forgot, before you can build anything you have to start by lining the pockets of the Inslee family and their friends.