Beginning at 4 p.m. today, Sound Transit will hold a press conference in the wake of ST3 passing and what next steps the agency will take to expand mass transit in the region. ST will have a Facebook Live stream to watch, and we will be live blogging and live tweeting comments made by Sound Transit Board members, CEO Peter Rogoff, and other officials.
The daily King County tally update just dropped 10 minutes ago:
https://info.kingcounty.gov/KCElections/Results/web-results.aspx
Search for “transit” to go to Prop 1.
Updated districtwide results are here:
http://results.vote.wa.gov/results/20161108/king/Breakdown-113817.html
Let the celebration begin!
So even though Tacoma defeated it, it still passes?
ST3 results rely on the total overall vote. Pierce County (not just Tacoma) may have rejected it, but the support from King County and Snohomish County carried the vote.
Yep, this is the principal advantage of uniform taxation — non uniform taxation would almost certainly require the measure to pass in all taxing districts.
Also, without looking at the precinct data, I can’t say this for certain, but I suspect strongly that this passed in Tacoma and that it’s the rest of the ST district in Pierce County that drags the numbers down.
Does anyone have per sub-area breakdowns of the King County vote. I’m curious, but too lazy to do the work to figure it out myself.
On the other hand, couldn’t we have a non-uniform taxation system which would basically work like passing five different measures in the five subareas? So, if it failed in Pierce but passed everywhere else, we’d just delete the Pierce County portions.
Of course, that’d have problems with stuff like the outer subareas’ share of the new downtown tunnel, but it’d have a lot of advantages too.
It would require a separate vote in each subarea for its own projects. It might also require splitting the ST board or the entire agency, or allowing only Pierce boardmembers to vote on Pierce decisions or Pierce ballot proposals.
I think you could keep the ST board as in, but the differentiated taxes would have to point to distinct capital projects (with O&M and overhead funded with a common regional tax).
That would have been very hard with ST3 as many of the project benefits crossed subareas. In the future, I could see a package that has a light investment in one county and big investments in another. Or a Seattle only or King County only tax that funds capital projects within only those areas – Seattle could tax itself for a minor light rail extension and then contract out the work to ST
I seem to recall West Seattle voting less for transit in general than the rest of Seattle. It would be interesting to see if this is still the case, for a package that directly provides rail to West Seattle.
Separate tax districts would have to have mostly separate projects. For an all-district project like the downtown tunnel, you’d have to make it contingent on all the district measures passing (which is precarious given Pierce), or split it into a separate tax across all subareas (which is also precarious for the same reason, and is non-viable if the central infrastucture and suburban extensions depend on each other).
Tacoma voted 53.7 percent in favor of ST3. It was in the rest of Pierce County that voted no.
“ST Capital Committee Meeting adopts recommendation for prelim engineering for Downtown Redmond light rail. Funded by #ST3”
Good. Let’s get it fast-tracked so it can follow onto East Link almost immediately.
Pierce County executive McCarthy “ST3 will free highway capacity for higher priority usage, like freight”. LOL. I think if there is any freed highway capacity that freight is not the highest priority usage.
Freight lanes are politically a possibility. Consider a plan for N I-5 to have HOV lanes until Link gets far enough, and then converting them to freight lanes.
The LA transit package includes funding for new freight lanes, I believe
Freight highways and lanes exist in other places, and aren’t a bad idea in the state that’s most dependent on international trade in the country.
Mike: what happens to that number once you exclude the goods that literally fly away to be delivered, and the goods that have no physical existence at all?
Between aerospace and agriculture, it still significant
There’s enough freight in deliveries to stores and warehouses, let alone trucks taking things outside the metropolis or through it. They should have been built as the metropolis grew, the way high-capacity transit should have been.
There’s a solid urbanist case that if you have a freeway, freight is the highest priority thing that can be on it, after transit.
Yes, but if it’s just freight and transit, maybe it could be something less distruptive than a freeway with its large footprint and exits and destroying the street grid, Maybe something more like a boulevard or small expressway.
Rail works very well for freight, and is generally a lot safer than large delivery trucks on the freeway.
Rail works well for bulk commodities, containerized cargo and long-haul point to point freight. These days there isn’t a siding in every town and boxcars full of mixed merchandise going every which way.
Trucking is going to remain important for short-haul freight and local deliveries even if rail may be best for cross-country delivery of large amounts of stuff.
So, we all know when and where we will be getting Light Rail, but what about a timeline and project scope on Bus and Sounder improvements?
BRT has firm timelines, but Sounder is a bit vague as negotiations are still ongoing
In the case of ST2, bus improvements started rolling out about one year after after the measure passed, but it was a gradual roll-out, which took a good 3-4 years to fully complete. Off-peak service improvements tended to happen first, since it was something that Sound Transit could do with its existing fleet, while peak hour improvements took more time while Sound Transit ordered new buses and waited to have them delivered.
BRT service and facilities for 405 and 522 are scheduled to come on line in 2024. This is consistent with wsdot’s schedule for completing the HOT lanes on 405 between Bellevue and Renton.
Naturally none of this encourages PIERCE TRANSIT to cooperate with ST and provide better bus services at Sounder stations. 15+ years of Sounder service and PT’s time tables basically don’t care for Sounder riders and the last few miles of their trip. Nothing beats stepping off the train only to watch your bus leaving the station. The bus driver sees the train arrive and does not wait – I regularly observe this happening, no amount of feedback to PT elects an interest in them giving a sh1t.
Sound Transit’s solution is more park and rides.
I get the feeling PT doesn’t like ST a whole lot.