Mike McGinn. Photo by flickr user justsmartdesign.
The election for Mayor of Seattle shows little hope of being resolved in a timely matter. Today’s ballot drop reveals that a small 515-vote lead puts Mike McGinn narrowly ahead of Joe Mallahan. From yesterday’s results, that is a net 53-vote gain for McGinn out of more than 25,000 ballots counted since then.
Mayor of Seattle
Mike McGinn – 65,172 – 49.78%
Joe Mallahan – 64,657 – 49.38%
The common wisdom on election day that McGinn was an underdog, but his grassroots campaign had a noticeably better ground game and a stronger get out to vote operation that is likely contributing to his impressive showing. Transit advocates should be pleasantly surprised by McGinn’s continuing fortune — Seattle Transit Blog endorsed him earlier in the general election season after Mayor Nickels was ousted in the primary.
Publicola reports that some 4,700 county ballots have been dropped due to signature discrepancies. (We remind people to check that their ballot was processed and be sure to return calls from the King County elections department.) These ballots could be party to any dispute between the campaigns if the election remains this tight. Speaking of, the King County Votes blog has an entry about the statues regarding automatic recounts of tight elections.
The final drop of the week will be posted tomorrow at 4:30 pm according to the King County elections website, but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to find out who our next Mayor is for quite some time.
The memorial procession for murdered police officer Tim Brenton is going to close a bunch of streets between 8am and 1pm Friday. Map of the Route (pdf):
On Friday, Nov 6, between approximately 8:00 AM and
approximately 1:00 PM, a Seattle Police memorial procession
between Husky Stadium and Key Arena will significantly
impact all traffic and travel – including Metro service on
many bus routes – in the following areas:
* University of Washington / Husky Stadium
* Montlake / 24th Av E & 23rd Av E
* Capitol Hill / E Madison St, Pine St & Broadway
* North of Downtown Seattle / Denny Way & Mercer St
* Queen Anne / 1st Av N & Seattle Center
In somewhat related news, “unpaid intern” on SLOG offers up a fine whine about Route 8, which degenerates into an epic comment thread complaining about Metro’s worst routes. A followup anecdote makes a compelling argument for the 150.
Of course, a “bad route” actually has three components: (lack of) speed, unreliability, and unpleasant fellow riders. Unfortunately, Metro doesn’t make data about on-time performance and incidents per revenue hour easily accessible, so it’s hard to inform these discussions with actual data. I happen to know that Metro switched the 8 for the 48 in the Rainier Valley largely because the data showed the 8 to be more reliable.
Sound Transit doesn’t have a lot of extra cash lying around right now, but should that change, surplus subarea funds might be used to construct an infill station — that is, an additional station on an existing line. There are 5 such stations that come up now and then. What follows is a highly speculative review of each of these; note that all of these have the drawback of increasing travel times by a minute or two. Click on each station name to see a Google map of the approximate location.
1. MLK & Graham St.- This station would plug the biggest gap in the Rainier Valley segment and place virtually everyone within a half mile of a station, potentially allowing cutbacks in Metro service in this corridor. It would also serve a minor retail district, middle school, and in the long run probably allow MLK to become a solid line of dense development instead of islands around stations.
2. Boeing Access Road - Long mentioned and long lamented, BAR station actually has fairly low ridership estimates, as there’s almost nothing to walk to. Additionally, potential building heights are unimpressive because it’s at the foot of a runway. However, BAR is the only place for an intermodal Sounder/Link/Bus transfer point aside from King St; the connection would facilitate connections from the Green River Valley to the airport, provide a bypass of the Rainier Valley for Link riders from Federal Way, and possibly allow the truncation of bus service along I-5.
3. S. 133rd St. A station here would also break up the huge stop-less stretch between Rainier Beach and TIB. It provides a superior transfer point to get I-5 buses like the 150 off the freeway before they enter town. However, there is no Sounder connection. Since it’s in Tukwila, this station would have to be paid for by South King funds, which might otherwise be used to extend the line another stop.
4. Broad Street Sounder. A station on the Belltown end of downtown would improve anemic ridership on North Sounder by providing better connections to jobs in Seattle Center, SLU, and Belltown. It’s not entirely clear that the logistics of terminating South Sounder here work out, but if they did that would be an additional bonus. One drawback is that fixing the street grid could be messy and expensive.
5. Ballard Sounderwould bring Sound Transit service to an otherwise ignored quadrant of the City. It would provide a traffic-independent means downtown and boost ridership on North Sounder. However, the tracks run well away from the population and business centers, hurting ridership. Furthermore, this station would credibly require North King operating funds to contribute to North Sounder operations, which is a either a feature or a bug depending on what else is going on.
The latest results from King County Elections have been posted and it looks like the race for Mayor is going to down to the wire. Joe Mallahan has slowly gained on Mike McGinn’s 910-vote margin last night to a narrow 462 vote lead today.
Mayor of Seattle
Mike McGinn – 52,238 – 49.77%
Joe Mallahan – 51,776 – 49.33%
According a campaign staffer in the McGinn camp, the last minute attempt to get out final votes netted an additional 203 ballots. That could prove crucial in a tight race that may end up heading to an automatic recount. King County will release the next round of results tomorrow at 4:30pm.
Today’s results have effectively finalized some results: Tim Eyman’s I-1033 has failed statewide and Constantine has defeated Hutchison for King County Executive. On the Seattle City Council: Conlin will hold on to his seat against a challenge from Ginsberg; Bagshaw has defeated Bloom; Licata has defeated Israel; and O’Brien has defeated Rosencrantz. With the small exception of Nick Licata, Seattle Transit Blog had endorsed these very results. The results from Bellevue, on the other hand, are just as disappointing for transit advocates as last night’s results were.
If you’d like to track your mail-in ballot and make sure your vote was counted, check out this useful widget on the King County Elections website.
Dominic Holden of The Stranger interviewed likely Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin, christening him the “new mayor” while the titular mayor gets situated. He didn’t waste any time before pandering to the STB crowd:
• Building Light Rail to West Seattle and a Streetcar to Ballard
“I would like to see us extend the South Lake Union Streetcar over to Fremont and over to Ballard,” Conlin said. He envisions using the same sort of traffic-signal preemption light rail uses on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South to allow a streetcar to move quickly through traffic. But that’s only a stopgap until we can afford to build a Ballard-bound light-rail line, he said. In the meantime, Conlin thinks the city can build a light-rail line to West Seattle within a few years. “I think that that one is relatively easy from a logistic standpoint,” he said. “We have to come up with the money, but I don’t think it’s terribly expensive.” A member of the finance committee of Sound Transit, Conlin thinks the voters would approve “a financing plan that makes sense” to pay for the project. He proposes a small utility hike, buy-in from businesses closest to the line, and other tax increases.
Yowza. This isn’t exactly the McGinn vision, but it would certainly appear that the chances of this kind of thing actually happening just went way up.
There’s a lot more about the tunnel and the 520 bridge, which you should click over and read.
It’s probably a bit early to draw broad conclusions about this election, but please indulge me.
If McGinn holds his lead and wins, this election will be a significant setback for WSDOT’s three largest projects. Together totaling over $13 billion dollars, the deep-bore tunnel, SR-520 bridge and the I-5 Columbian River Crossing (CRC) will all face significantly altered local political landscapes. One that is not entrenched in the establishment like the former mayoral incumbents of Seattle and Vancouver, as well as one that is hostile towards key aspects of WSDOT’s projects. The establishment knew this, and that is why they lined up behind Mallahan. Not because they liked him, but because they knew he was malleable or pragmatic, depending on your point of view. Not so with McGinn.
While Seattle’s mayoral election was epic, there are other cities in Washington. In Vancouver, transportation also pushed its way to the forefront, dominating a contentious, $400,000 dollar mayoral contest.
[UPDATE 10:15am: Let's not over-interpret the Bellevue results. This isn't a comprehensive voter repudiation of East Link, it's a local election with inscrutable forces, whose outcome is a Bellevue City Council that is less likely to make good decisions about Light Rail. "Screw Bellevue" comments are totally unhelpful.]
In the other races we’ve endorsed, the early returns are not good. Apparently the power of the STB endorsement (in bold below) does not extend much past the Seattle City limits. Other results are here.
Transportation Benefit District No. 1 (Burien) YES – 958 – 23.50%
NO – 3118 – 76.50%
Bellevue City Council Position 2 Vicki Orrico – 6817 – 46.55%
Conrad Lee – 7800 – 53.27%
Bellevue City Council Position 4
Kevin R. Wallace – 7012 – 50.95% Patsy Bonincontri – 6730 – 48.90%
Bellevue City Council Position 6 Michael Marchand – 5320 – 38.72%
Don Davidson – 8385 – 61.04%
Bellevue City Council Position 8 Mike Creighton -5622 – 40.68%
Jennifer Robertson – 6493 – 46.99%
Betina Finley – 1681 – 12.16%
With Kemper Freeman’s apparent clean sweep in Bellevue, it’s clear just how much work we still need to do in the suburbs. The likelihood of a B7 alignment — missing the population centers and blocking Eastside Commuter Rail forever — just went up.
The King County and State election departments have posted early results from the ballots received so far. Given that the state votes by mail now, we’re going to have to wait days to see who the official winners are.
The county has reported a turnout of 35% so far, with an expected final turnout of 56% — so the county expects that 38% of the expected turnout were mailed in recently but not yet received by the county. That could have a significant impact on the final results.
Early reports show Tim Eyman’s I-1033 failing big, Dow Constantine showing a large lead in the King County Executive race, and Mike McGinn leading in the race for Mayor by less than a thousand votes. Over-all, a pretty exciting night for supporters of transit.
"SeaTac/Airport Station Almost Complete", by Atomic Taco
Financial engineering comes back to bite transit agencies; Congress likely to step in to avoid the pain (H/T: Mike Fisher). Sound Transit would be on the hook for $15m ($, via mickymse) were Congress to fail.
Warren Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, is buying BNSF.
We apologize for the site outages you may have experienced in the last day or two. There have been issues with our hosting, which was selected to be as inexpensive as possible, but we’re hopeful that we’re now through the worst of it. They’ve moved us to a faster server.
Most people who are going to vote have already done so, but we won’t get any results till 8:15 pm tonight. Put your predictions, last minute exhortations, etc. in the comments.
And by all means don’t forget to drop your ballot off today. If it’s a mailbox, make sure you do it before the last pickup of the day; better yet, save postage and drop it off at one of the Elections Dept. dropboxes by 8pm.
Dedicated procrastinators can check out our endorsements here, but why not do it later?
And don’t forget that I-1033 is hidden in the lower left-corner of your ballot.
*We all know the actual answer to this question is “Greg Nickels.”
Frankly, I wasn’t around actively advocating for Sound Transit’s Central Link when it was being conceived, but one common criticism that I’ve heard rail opponents iterate time and time again is that the Central Link alignment was some sort of a political ploy or gimmick. “Why Tukwila of all places? People don’t go to the airport on a daily basis. Why not the suburbs first?” First of all, it’s rather ironic that the same people wanting to block light rail to the Eastside (and anywhere else in general) are tied with those who criticize the Central Link alignment and throw their hands up in the air asking why the suburbs were not Link’s first destination. It’s a fair indication that these people are just against rail transit in general under the pretense of a number of other excuses up their sleeves.
Alert readers Michal Bryc and Dick Burkhardt have gotten responses from Sound Transit on when we can expect to have next train announcements at Link stations:
Due to the work being done in the Airport Station the train arrival message will not be activated until the end of November. We have been working on integrating this station into the Central Link system and it requires us to use two different train tracking approach one for the Central Link and different one for expanding to the Airport. As we are so close to opening the Airport Station we decided to hold off on implementing arrival messages for Central Link until we can include Airport Station and its new schedule, and to facilitate our testing of Airport Station.
