In my dream world we’ll have an era of rail and transit construction much like the original interstate highway program with a 90% Federal contribution.

Except that the original interstate highway program had a massive amount of eminent domain, bulldozing communities according to what the feds wanted, and ignoring environmental issues. The result was NEPA. Of course, the other result of that is that it’s absolutely impossible to build anything, including rail, that quickly. Seattle is lucky enough to have projects that already have EISes completed, but there’s only so much that could be done to speed up new projects.

NEPA makes it easier to add more lanes to an existing highway than to build new rail over new right-of-way. Less environmental impact, you see. (Even if the environmental impact is net positive of rail, there’s still more impacts both ways when using new right of way.)

Too true. The highway and suburban sprawl lobby is still powerful and has many friends at the federal, state, and local level. Not to mention all of the fellow travelers, useful idiots, and snake-oil salesmen.

More realisticly I hope the next 8 years (and beyond) see the best Federal support of transit and rail since the projects of the 60’s and 70’s.

U-Link by itself will get almost (at least $813mn) what was planned into ST2. My point is it’s not crazy to guess that the three ST2 LRT projects could in total get more than the $900 million estimated into ST2.

Also, the timing matters a ton as well. If the feds were to give $900 mn tomorrow, all of the system will be finished much sooner than if the $900 mn shows up in 2020.

Finally, The operations will only be .4% or .5% of the .9% the Sound Transit is authorized from ST2. So Sound Transit would not necessarily have to ask for more funding authority. Probably though.

RE: ST3, please, let’s just do it on a presidential year — that was a big lesson from ST2’s passage, in my opinion. Earliest might be 2016 since I don’t think it’d be wise to ask for more funding before U-Link opens. ST3 will have to have more taxing authority, from the state legislature, which might not be a political possibility before U-Link opens as well. So that might push back a vote until 2020… So I think we’ll be waiting 8 or 12 years. That’s a long time to speculate :(

While I expect the Obama administration to be much more favorable to rail, the current criteria for evaluating grant requests are in place until they are changed. In any case the fact that both Central Link and U-Link recieved high ratings by the New Starts criteria and that U-Link recieved what is a relatively large grant under recent funding I think bodes well for additional large Federal grants for the remainder of Link.

I believe the $2.5 billion is additional money on top of whatever “normal” amount of money is appropriated for new starts or whatever replaces it in the next transportation bill.