Month: December 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The recent problems with the WSF’s Steel Electric ferries has focused some much-needed attention on the nation’s largest passenger ferry system. When former WSDOT chief Doug MacDonald resigned back in April, I wrote that the lack of focus on the ferry system “suggests a fundamental myopia at WSDOT. The ferry system is essentially a very large mass transit system, and the fact that the road-centric WSDOT sees it almost as an annoyance is troubling.”

As I acknolwedged at the time, there wasn’t much evidence to back up that assertion, but it seems to grow more and more correct as this saga unfolds. The ferry system appears to operate in its own little black box, off the radar of both WSDOT and the legislature, who are both trying to claim ignorance and blame one another for the lack of attention, as the News-Tribune reports in a whopper of an article on the state of things. Money quote:

State lawmakers approved the Steel Electrics’ retirement in 2001 and provided money for replacements two years later. But ferry officials opted to build boats too large to work as replacements. They wanted vessels that could serve routes anywhere in the ferry system. To make that work, however, they needed to replace narrow, shallow Keystone Harbor, a place where only the Steel Electrics could operate safely.

The state spent six years and $5.5 million studying a new Keystone terminal before abandoning the idea this spring. They blamed community opposition.

The new terminal was estimated to cost $1 billion over 30 years. It would have served about 3 percent of ferry system passengers.

While the authors are trying to make the point that it’s silly to spend so much money on a ferry terminal that serves so few people, surely there would be some big advantages to standardizing on a single ship design that could be used at all terminals. But, unfortunately, the cash-strapped system, still reeling from budget cuts due to I-695, can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The State clearly had to make drastic changes after the 1999 initiative decimated ferry funding, and, as one sailor in The Hunt for Red October says to his new trainee, “a boat this big doesn’t exactly stop on a dime.”

Read the whole piece to get a sense of just how hard it is to change direction, and give credit to new WSDOT chief Paula Hammond for trying to make it happen.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The northern terminus for the University Link, the station at Husky Stadium is nearing design completion. I saw some of the renderings at the UW open house on Wednesday, but I didn’t stay for the full talk.

The stadium will be mostly underground, as riders will descend 100 feet via several escalators to the station platform. Though there will be a large pedestrian bridge connecting the campus with the entrance near Husky Stadium, to a driver heading down Montlake Blvd. it will be almost invisible.

However, between 2008 and 2014 (or thereabouts), there will be a giant pit in the Husky Stadium parking lot as the station is excavated and built. It will not be a pretty sight. Sound Transit and its contractors are going to do all they can to minimize the mess, but there’s only so much you can do with giant hole in the ground.

On the plus side, ST will use two tunnel boring machines to dig the Northbound and Southbound tunnels between UW and Capitol Hill (the Beacon Hill tunnels were bored one at a time using a single TBM). This will speed up the process considerably.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Theodore Lane and Bill Mundy take to the Times’ op-ed page to argue in favor of routing the East Link via a new 520 bridge, rather than over the I-90 bridge. It’s an interesting thought experiment. After all, one could build the new bridge with light rail in mind, rather than retrofitting it and scraping off concrete to get the weight down, which is the current plan, I believe, for the I-90 alignment. They further argue that the real employment growth is along the 520 corridor, from UW to Redmond.

But that’s about where the interestingness ends and reality kicks in. The idea that you could save money by to Overlake directly loses weight when you consider how many fewer people you’d serve by going that route. Lane and Mundy try to account for this by advocating a “Bellevue spur.” But once you’ve built a two or three-mile spur into downtown Bellevue, you’ve removed much of the cost savings that was the basis for the route in the first place. Further, such a spur would abandon Seattle’s Central District and Mercer Island completely. Not so for the I-90 alignment.

It should be said that Ron Sims, in his now infamous op-ed, also pooh-poohed the I-90 alignment as “slow and cumbersome.” But Sims was arguing against Eastside rail altogether. And it’s hard to see how a grade-separated light rail would be any slower or more cumbersome than the expanded bus service he was advocating as an alternative.

Bottom line: if we’re going to do light rail across the lake, I-90 is still the best bet.