I got excited last week when I saw some construction going on around the stub ventilation shaft. But I am quite sure there is no plan for a Light Rail station at this location. (I live near Convention Place and I wouldn’t have as far a walk down to Westlake or up to Broadway if there was a station at the current Convention Place Bus Tunnel location)

There were huge problems with the soils under Portage Bay which had as much to do with killing the 15th NE alignment as the UW’s objections. As I recall the bid received for tunnel construction on the original alignment was well above estimates and may be above the current estimates for tunnel construction for U-Link even without adjusting for inflation.

I will agree things worked out for the best. The station at the stadium is a better location than NE 15th & Pacific for all the reasons you state as well as it’s proximity to the Montlake freeway station. I also feel the station between 43rd NE and 45th NE on Brooklyn is a much better location than the Burke Museum parking lot would have been.

I’d forgotten about all of the critics who considered the bus tunnel with “all that expensive tile” to be a waste of money. In hindsight it did turn out to be rather a bargain.

One lesson from the bus tunnel construction that should be remembered for Link is the long-term impact it had on the businesses along the route. Street level retail still hasn’t fully recovered along 3rd. The cut & cover construction along Pine combined with some other factors caused a “hollowing out” of the retail core that required massive investment to correct in the 90′s.

I know the roller coaster route selected ended up being more expensive than the one supposedly nixed by the UW physics dept but I think having the station down by the hospital and Husky Stadium will prove to be the best location.

The bus tunnel seemed like an expensive folly at the time. Over the years though people start to see it as a bargain. The worst thing about Link is now we need to dig another bus tunnel! (only partially kidding)

Funny thing is even with the cost of the tunnel U-Link and North Link received one of the highest cost-effectiveness scores ever from the FTA. Why is that? Because the ridership of U-link and North Link is huge.

I sure hope the vibration mitigation works. 60′ is not that deep for a light-rail train. If you ask me, this whole thing is idiotic beyond words. Why is the train not just going up the express lanes? with stops that more or less correspond to 39th, 45th, 65th etc. Because the tunnelling mafia need their payoff.
Busses between the UW and downtown are doing the job fine…

For the South line there is a combination of wanting to keep reasonable end to end travel times, plus the problem of putting in parking that limits the station count somewhat.

My take on this is that a rail system is dependent on bus transfers being in place that will fill that second seat.

BART and Skytrain are kind of anomalies in their application of technology and the service they supply, but do reflect a North-American style metro area. Germany’s U-Bahn/S-Bahn systems, which are fairly standard across the entire country, make good case studies. Munich in particular. Note that often the suburban and urban systems share tracks in the city center to allow transfers, as well as to serve the CBD.

I was quite active in that era of the debate and with the support of former Councilmember Jim Street we were able to successfully get a design which served the denser neighborhoods of Seattle enroute to the suburbs, on the north alignment.

This same argument was used successfully by Councilmember Martha Choe(most recently Gary Locke’s CED Director) in gaining Rainier Valley service, to be followed by Roger Pence advocating for a Beacon Hill tunnel.

Perhaps the most aggregious of these Station cuts was the second University District Station – definitely more important than the Roosevelt stop. That would be a battle worth fighting, but not alone.

The issue of passing is not in the bus tunnel. EVERY train will stop at EVERY station in the CBD. There’s no need for “express” service there. Central Link would need “express” service only along MLK and north of Roosevelt. The tunnel between Capitol Hill and the UW Stadium passes under single family homes and is WAY too deep to make it worthwhile to intermix stations. Ditto the section through Beacon Hill. The elevated stretch along the freeways south of Boeing Field passes through such sparsely developed and inaccessible land, it won’t need stations either. However, it was a mistake to cancel the Marginal Way station. There are still a few homes in the area but more importantly, it offers close access to the Boeing facility.

Basically Link is a bit of a hybrid, which has resulted in the longer station spacing than is normal for LRT. In fact, Link is a regional rapid system, NOT a light rail system. It just happens to use LRT technology so that it can run down the middle of MLK and alongside the busway from Lander to Royal Brougham. Because people are expected to ride from as far away as Federal Way, and perhaps eventually even Tacoma, the stations cannot be closely spaced.

I think the way to separate the two functions is to build a single-track “express” connector alongside the railroad lines between Boeing Access Road and Argo yard, under Airport Way and north above Sixth South to the flying junctions at the maintenance facility. This would remove five station stops and probably would cost only a couple of hundred million, since the right of way is already graded.

Now the BN and UP might not be happy about losing the car storage that taking a track would require, but some sort of compensation could be made.

Elevated or elevated/at-grade is far more likely.

One factor certainly was the soil conditions under Portage Bay. This forced the tunnel depth to be much greater than originally planned and would have made the station at 45th deeper than Beacon Hill.

Another factor was the $800 million bid for the tunneling contract on the 15th/Portage Bay alignment and the near collapse of the agency in its wake.

The UW was a factor too, since with the deeper tunnel ST needed more co-operation with the UW. This put the UW in more of a position to impose its own demands on ST.