Month: November 2009

Sound Transit will have its fourth public neighborhood workshop for East Link on Wednesday, November 18th, from 4 – 7pm (presentation will begin at 5pm) at Bellevue City Hall.  This workshop will be specific to the Downtown neighborhood and will likely be similar to the ones held last month for South Bellevue, Bel-Red, and Overlake (you can read our recap of the South Bellevue workshop here).

From Sound Transit:

This workshop will be focused on the downtown Bellevue preferred route and stations, identified by the Sound Transit Board, as well as the tunnel alternatives. Additional public meetings will be scheduled throughout the East Link project area as Sound Transit continues to progress into preliminary engineering along the preferred alternative.

We expect a lot of folks coming out against the preferred surface alignment and South Bellevue residents still continuing to lobby for the B7 alignment coming into Downtown.  Also expect input regarding the new C9T tunnel option.  This is all part of a public outreach period to collect comments before Sound Transit publishes its FEIS (Final Environmental Impact Statement) next year.  I will be there to cover the workshop and we’ll have a recap up soon afterwards.

[UPDATE:] On Thursday, the Sound Transit board was briefed on yet another new Downtown alternative.  This alignment would be an elevated-surface hybrid with the  main downtown station being just south of the Bellevue Transit Center along 110th Ave NE.  Considering that a surface segment is still part of the plan, it’s unclear how the council members-elect will react to the new alternative.  We expect to hear the details of Kevin Wallace’s full plan soon, so stay tuned for our continuing coverage of East Link.

There’s been a fair amount of overheated rhetoric in the comment threads in response to one Bellevue City Councilmember proposing a bad alignment through his city.  Indeed, there’s reason to believe that a majority of Councilmembers agree with him, at least nominally.  And Tukwila’s 1999 lawsuit (H/T: Jim Cusick) provides a reason to believe that a city can force Sound Transit to ditch their preferred alignment.

Some are perceiving this as “Bellevue” rejecting East Link, or go so far as to question the point of the whole East Link project.  I think either position is way off base.

First of all, there’s no reason to think a low-information election based on any number of local issues is a better signal than Bellevue’s vote for Prop. 1 in 2008.  As interested outsiders, the useful contribution is to help inform and mobilize Bellevue voters, not dismiss them.

Secondly, a BNSF/I-405 alignment is not the end of the world.  We don’t have the specifics and the studies to see if the Wallace plan would reduce ridership so much that it imperils federal funding, in which case ST has a really strong case to win in the court of public opinion.  Otherwise, the coming Bellevue fight is just the Tukwila fight writ large.  The final outcome in Tukwila is a terrible one for those that live or do business there, but for the rest of us it just means we go around the heart of Tukwila at 55 mph rather than through it at 35mph on our way to the Airport.

All transportation projects have to, at some point, make some routing compromises to get built.  Suburban freeway alignments are (unfortunately) standard practice in most American rail systems.  Indeed, for those with no stake in Bellevue, the Wallace plan might even speed up trips to Redmond and free up enough cash to get to Redmond Town Center.

As people interested in building a good regional system, we should help our neighbors in Bellevue who are fighting to make sure that their City gets maximum benefit from such a large investment.  But it does no one any good to spite the whole city and give up on a project that would still be a huge leap forward in regional mobility.

Now, if you are a Bellevue resident,  part of your city council is scheming to make sure that East Link serves as few homes and jobs as possible in Bellevue.  That would be something to get excited about.

Kevin Wallace, currently leading Patsy Bonincontri in the race for Bellevue City Council Position 4, disagrees with Sound Transit’s preferred alignment through Bellevue.  From the Bellevue Reporter:

Wallace, a top executive from Bellevue-based Wallace Properties, has said he does not favor the preferred route along Bellevue Way and 112th Avenue Southeast. He also said a tunnel option through the heart of downtown would likely be financially unattainable, while a surface route there would be unacceptable.

Wallace is developing an East Link routing alternative that would run light rail along the abandoned BNSF rail line through South Bellevue and close to the I-405 expressway downtown.

Needless to say, running this far from Downtown Bellevue and the Transit Center, built on the cheap and specifically designed to be far from where anyone lives or works, would be disastrous for near to medium term ridership.

The Reporter article indicates that a small group targeted Bonincontri in this election when she turned out to be the swing vote in recommending the Bellevue Way alignment.  That implies that determined citizen action in favor of an alignment that serves people and jobs can have big impact on what the City Council ultimately does.

(H/T: Zed)