These rails require complete dedicated ROW because cars or pedestrian who walk on them get electricuted.

The news sounds pretty good on transportation. Did Mercer Street in Seattle get anything or King Street Station renovation? I know that the Mayor is confident he has the funds anyway.

It seems like the biggest challenge is getting additional funds for Sounder to make it down to Lakewood.

I’d like to thank Rep. Clibborn as well as others on the transportation committee who worked hard on keeping things alive.

Tim

If you mean the state government itself, which is what Ben was talking about, than the chart John links to disproves your point.

This is like the difference between ten dollars or five dollars when you need a thousand, though – perhaps I shouldn’t have used the state of Oregon as an example.

If we have $2.4B for a viaduct that moves 110,000 a day (and the replacement less), we could be spending that money on transit and getting better long-term bang for our buck.

This may be hard to believe, but Washington actually funds transit to a much higher degree than Oregon does (or has in the past).

I think per capita they’ve got us beat: http://seattletransitblog.com/2009/03/04/chart-of-the-day/

It seems our state invests more in small transit agencies than big transit infrastructure, too. As for whether heavy rail is really the end-game… I think that misses the point. I don’t look at light rail as a step toward heavy rail.

TriMet has only gotten to where they are because they sacrificed bus service to provide light rail. And their light rail is cheap compared to Seattle because they haven’t had to build to such a high capacity.

If Seattle at some point were to want to convert to heavy rail (such as New York or Atlanta), the only infrastructure improvements that would need to be made would be an elevated or subsurface path to replace on-street running through the Rainier Valley. If somebody says “what about 3rd rail” I’ll say that 3rd rail in and of itself does not define heavy rail. There are systems that fit the heavy rail category that use overhead cantenary. Boston’s blue line comes to mind.

Much of Portland’s lines would have to be rebuilt, and in fact a limitation of their system is that they can only handle 2 car trains because of the 300ft block size in Portland.

Don’t get me started on the whole Colorado Railcar sillyness. That is the reason they’re cutting their bus service this year.