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This is an open thread.

71 Replies to “News Roundup: 100%”

  1. Is there some initative process we could run to expand Amtrak Cascades service? Relying on federal grants in the future seems dicey, and we ought to be expanding Portland – Vancouver service while researching other cross state routes…

    1. Sadly, it seems that passengers prefer the Bolt. Cascades ridership is receding.

      There is no useful “cross state route”. If Spokane were where Walla Walla is so that one train could serve them all, maybe. But then, it wouldn’t be Spokane. I do think that an expansion of “Ambus” would be a very reasonable use for State funds, because they don’t need so many passengers to recover a good part of their operation.

      But really, there won’t be enough folks who want to take the train between Seattle and Spokane or Seattle and Yakima/Tri-Cities/Walla Walla for fifty years. If then.

      1. If they had a train between Seattle and Spokane that matched the speed of driving I would take it right now.

      2. Actually there is: there’s a railroad line through all the largest cities in Washington. That makes sense because the railroads made the cities viable and connected the existing cities. The lines have deteriorated to just what slow freight needs, and there’s a minor dilemma in the middle where the route splits in two and later rejoins, but the lines or trail remnants are there, the state just needs to step in and invest in them and improve them.

      3. Mike – there is a good north/south rail line for Western Washington, but I don’t think there is an existing route that connects Seattle & Spokane at a speed that would be competitive with driving/bus without billions in HSR investments.

        I agree with Richard – the density in central & eastern Washington simply doesn’t merit HSR.

      4. 1a) I have another trip to Portland to take. Odds are unless I can get a seat on the Coast Starlight, I’ll use Bolt Bus round-trip. Bolt Bus is cheaper and more frequent – not to mention very convenient. Plus my schedule is my schedule… if I have to be in Hillsboro by 5 PM, then I need to check into my hotel by 3:30 PM if not 3 PM.

        1b) I also won’t consider flying as I’m renting camera equipment and the new TSA requirements – although understandable – put me at increased risk of paying my deductible of LensCap+ insurance and potentially losing my LensRental.com privileges. I’ve had some nerve-wracking experiences with TSA folks just doing their thankless jobs.

        2) I do think Amtrak Cascades is worth saving however. It’s a nice rail bridge to Olympia and our state government – used it TWICE this year to deal with some issues w/ the State Board of Health and give moral support to a state legislator. Even with the new Skagit Transit 90X weekend services starting 5 September, I’m still going to need the occasional Amtrak Cascades back to Skagit.

      5. I never said HSR, and Lazarus said “the speed of driving” which is 65-70 mph. Conventional rallroad speed is 79 mph. And I’m not concerned about it being “as fast as cars” because that’s a far larger step that the US is not willing to take — even though British trains are often faster than equivalent buses (Edinburgh-London) and sometimes twice as fast (Cambridge-London). Conventional 79mph trains or a modest 90mph improvement, knowing that it may have to be slower going through parts of the Cascade mountains, is a reasonable goal. This wouldn’t be just for Seattle-Spokane trips but also for the cities and residents in between, where the travel time may be only 2-4 hours and ticket prices commensurably lower. It could increase travel and commerce between the cities, and especially non-car travel. Even if the trains aren’t always full, it’s a question of the state’s values and priorities. Cascades is more expensive than just putting everybody on buses, but it’s a long-term commitment to building a non-congested and non highway-based mode. (Because our dependence on highways has led mostly to big-box, cul-de-sac, gas-station-mini-mart sprawl at the highway exits. In contrast, trains stop at city centers and at least give the opportunity to build them up.) There’s the environmental benefits too…

      6. “Odds are unless I can get a seat on the Coast Starlight, I’ll use Bolt Bus round-trip. Bolt Bus is cheaper and more frequent – not to mention very convenient”

        People who value short travel time and a choice of schedule take the Cascades, not the Coast Starlight. The Starlight takes an hour longer than the Cascades between Seattle and Portland, both because it’s not a Talgo tilt train, and because Amtrak is focusing on the sightseer market over the “just want to get from A to B” market (especially its lucrative sleeper berths). If none of the Cascades fit your schedule, then perhaps the only choices are Starlight or Bolt, but personally I only take Cascades where it runs.

      7. One would expect ridership to recede somewhat when an alternative service is launched. Your statement implies that Bolt Bus has more total passengers. Do you have data to back this up?

      8. Id like to see proof. Boltbus certainly has more frequency and lower prices but the train is always full when I’m on it. I suspect the market is strong enough for both services, its crazy actually how little intercity service there is even now combined bus & rail between these 3 major metropolitan areas (PDX-SEA-VAN).

  2. …above Capitol Hill Station, but the design review board is not yet satisfied.

    This is the same design review board that crafted the Mt Baker black hole?

  3. I always think it’s funny when people use the seat belt law to defend the helmet law when, in actuality, seat belts aren’t always required. As long as all seat belts available are in use, and all passengers or drivers 16 or under are wearing seat belts, it is perfectly legal to ride without one. I think that this is how we should pattern our helmet laws–as long as someone isn’t riding with a helmet but not wearing it (not, I think, a particularly large concern), and all 16-and-unders are wearing helmets, it should be legal to ride without one.

    1. Interesting. I never knew that was the law. So basically you don’t need to use your seat belt if you are driving a really old car (unless seat belts were retrofitted). For almost all drivers, it is irrelevant (since very few cars lack seat belts) but an interesting little loophole nonetheless.

      Personally, I think they should just add a clause for bike share bikes. It would be a reasonable compromise. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that bike share helmets are unnecessary (and that the increase in ridership makes up for lack of helmet use). With bike share — especially in our current system — you aren’t sure if you are going to even use it. You could be in Fremont headed for the U-District, and notice a bike share bike. Or you could check your app, and find nothing. In the first case, you hop on the bike, while in the second case, you wait for the 31 or 32.

      That is in contrast with a regular bike, where the helmet can be simply considered part of the package. I attach my helmet to my bike at home, at work and sometimes after locking up the bike (someone could steal my helmet, but only after cutting the strap, and in many cases, I’m not worried about it). I never ride *my* bike without a helmet, but that is because it is *my* bike. With bike share, it is a different story.

    2. That’s not right. Here’s the WA state law.

      RCW 46.61.688
      …
      (3) Every person sixteen years of age or older operating or riding in a motor vehicle shall wear the safety belt assembly in a properly adjusted and securely fastened manner.
      (4) No person may operate a motor vehicle unless all child passengers under the age of sixteen years are either: (a) Wearing a safety belt assembly or (b) are securely fastened into an approved child restraint device.

      1. I misread…it’s under 16 years, not 16 or under.

        Here’s the citation for the available seatbelt portion:
        RCW 46.61.688 (2) b: “This section does not apply to a vehicle occupant for whom no safety belt is available when all designated seating positions as required under 49 C.F.R. Part 571 are occupied.”

    3. If bike riders aren’t required to use helmets, they should at least be required to carry biker insurance for accidents where they are found to be at fault. Brain injuries aren’t something to play around with, and not wearing a helmet increases that risk. Substituting convenience for safety is a poor choice. Ask most people in most types of accidents (auto, industrial, etc), and they’ll tell you that if they just took an extra step for safety their lives would be different. Ask people who’ve had a bike accident without a helmet and hit their head, they won’t tell you that they were sure glad they didn’t use a helmet because it would have made their life minimally inconvenient.

      2. “they should at least be required to carry biker insurance for accidents where they are found to be at fault”

        Most basic liability car insurance doesn’t cover passengers. So given that the risk of serious head injury for a passenger in a car in the US is significantly higher than serious head injury for a cyclist your insurance based argument would require some major increases in car insurance costs – which I don’t disagree with.

        I would just argue that based on current policy it’s a bit hypocritical requiring cyclists to have specific insurance coverage when riding in a car is inherently more dangerous and doesn’t have the same requirement.

      3. We should require pedestrians and everyone traveling in a motor vehicle either wear a helmet or carry insurance to cover brain injuries.

      4. If we had single-payer healthcare we wouldn’t need to have all this fault-based insurance and passengers going without coverage depending on the driver’s policy and companies suing people to try to get out of paying and victims being pressuredcyo name the property owner so the insurance company can go after them even if the victim doesn’t think it’s his fault or that he deserves it. Just have one single-payer plan that covers all medical problems regardless of cause and all these secondary problems go away.

      5. Sure, that sounds reasonable. While we’re at it, we should also require users of showers to either wear bathing helmets or purchase shower insurance. Perhaps we should also impose penalties against people who recklessly ascend and descend stairwells without taking the minimal precaution of wearing a climbing harness and clipping in to a safety line.

      6. Mike Orr, can you give an example of a place where single payer auto insurance is used? Most (if not all) countries, even with a “single-payer” health system differentiate auto (including bodily injury) and health insurance. I can just imagine some guy gets annoyed at another driver and bumps the other persons car, and since there’s no fault placement, as you suggest, the taxpayer pays for that potential injury (whiplash, what have you) caused by some guy with a temper.

        Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying?

      7. @GK
        It is obviously safer for any individual to choose to wear a helmet. But there is pretty overwhelming data that overall bike safety improves as bike mode share increases, the general explanation being that drivers improve their ability to navigate cyclists safely the more bikers they are exposed to. Thus, to the extent the bike helmet laws and their enforcement reduce bike mode share and make bike share systems infeasible, the actual impact of those laws on my individual safety as a bicyclist is negative. That’s a problem.

      8. I don’t know exactly how other countries handle injuries in car accidents, work, and other people’s property. But they could put less emphasis on it, and their medical care costs half as much as ours does which lowers the stakes. You’d still need liability insurance for car damage and property damage and maybe something related to the injury, but not necessarily all the medical costs. I’d be a little concerned about people bumping other cars to cause the drivers’ whiplash as you said, but intentionally doing that is an assault so it should be treated as a crime with its own fine. Careless driving could be treated the same way.

      9. @GK: owner-paid auto insurance would not be eliminated, because cars are expensive pieces of property. The point is that if we had single-payer health care, all of the bodily injury components of auto insurance shift to that system, and auto insurance becomes purely about property damage.

      10. Car CRASHES not accidents, there is a difference! You simply can’t equate most car crashes with “industrial accidents.” The very notion of an “at fault” car accident is a contradiction! Fact is having a patchwork of bike lanes with forced bike-car conflicts and over-relying on sharrows is killing/injuring way more people than bike share riders not using helmets. Either that, or I missed all the Seattle Times stories about the abrupt rise in casualties since Lime and Spin recently started, and nobody’s interested in covering the daily carnage of Dutch bicyclists.

  4. Any update on the King County water taxi proposal to have a downtown to Shilshole Marina (Ballard/golden Gardens)? I assume it would be too cost prohibitive for the amount of riders it would get, but has it formally been declared DOA?

      1. Ferries require significantly more energy to travel the same amount of distance as a car/truck/train. I doubt we’ll see electric ferries until well after electric buses are adopted.

      3. I take my comment back – I just heard on the radio this morning about Skagit county intending to build an electric ferry.

        I could imagine a short route – like the WS Taxi – functioning with an electric ferry.

      4. not wanting to pick on crosscut, nor to simply nit-pick, but that article about ferries is very confused about vessel propulsion technologies….

        it says that WSF is “…studying the idea of converting some of its 22 vessels to hybrid electric……”; then acknowledges that many of the ferries already use electric motors; and then suggest that “…hybrid engines could dramatically trim …” fuel use.

        okay, to start with, the term “hybrid engine” is just wrong in this context. The term ‘hybrid engine’ is sometimes used for units which use various types of fuel, but what they are talking about is a “hybrid propulsion system” — one which drives a vessel / vehicle via a variety of power sources. Such a vessel does this by spinning the props with electric motors, and that electricity is provided in a couple different ways.

        At the heart of this is that an engine which instead of directly propelling something mechanically, generates electrical power which is used to run electric motors which provides the “drive”. This has happened with trains and ships since the earliest decades of the twentieth century, The most common of these are diesel-electric (there are/were also steam-electric,nuclear-electric, gas-turbine, etc.)

        The diesel-electric power plants people are the most familiar with are train locomotives, though I doubt many people think of them as “cousins” to all those hybrid cars…. Within the WFS fleet, about half the ships (and all of the bigger-class vessels) are diesel electric.

        what WOULD be new & different would be the introduction of [ huge ! ] battery banks which could, at times, be used for the electrical power for the propulsion motors. The charging of these batteries would come from the diesel generators onboard; or conceivably by plugging in whenever the ships are at a dock. It’s hard to see that there’d be enough time during a normal turn-around between runs for much charging, but at least at night they could be charged.

        The bigger problem is that given the power needed to drive the ferry during normal operations, it’s difficult to see when (if ever) the propulsion could shift into the lower-powered batteries. Unlike the fairly low-friction of interface of car vs road (or train vs rail) — allowing a vehicle “at speed” to need less power to keep it going than it did to accelerate– a vessel never gets a break from trying to “push the water out of the way”. If you back off the propulsion, you decelerate immediately….

        In the case of Foss Maritime’s hybrid tugboats, they are able to transit to a job using their batteries alone, since at that point its the relatively low-load of just moving themselves — and then the diesels are brought online to provide the necessary power when they need to do the heavy-load work of pushing ships around. The ferries really don’t have any low-load operations — if they are underway, then they are always at/near full load. The only big savings which might be seen from hybrid technology would be the latest generation of controllers which would quickly & automatically start/stop the diesels when the ship is alongside the dock.

    1. Boeing made subway cars and streetcars in the 70s. They were terribly unreliable products. PACCAR actually made trolley buses for Seattle Transit.

      1. Exactly. It’s almost as if they wanted to sell 707’s to local transit agencies…..

      2. https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/25563179925/in/dateposted-public/

        Everybody who already saw my Brill helicopter, don’t click this link. The PCC streetcar made a much better aircraft after they called it the DC3, added wings and substituted engines because the German ground troops kept cutting down the electric poles.

        But both ideas prompted by late 1970’s conversation with Boston “T” mechanic aboard a Boeing Vertol car in a maintenance tunnel under the shops. “This train works exactly as well as if the Brill Car Company built a helicopter.”

        He’d just mentioned that the designers put intakes to cooling fans under the sides of the train, best possible position for sucking carbon and copper talcum powder directly into the motors.
        Since most passenger planes used paved runways and flew above the weather by the time Boeing got into streetcars, the trade had forgotten how much dirt, bad handling, and passengers ground transit suffers from.

        Also, modern aircraft tend to be frequently taken apart, cleaned and repaired. And no matter how skilled the pilot, forbidden to land on cracked subway rails like the BART’s been doing lately.

        So might be better if the Councilwoman could get with somebody whose people worked on the original Airstream trailers. Any of Kshama’s constituents whose great grandfather worked with Flxible designer Ceylon Strong and CM’s Charles Kettering- pass this along:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flxible

        And meantime:

        https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/36715003986/in/dateposted-public/

        Hey, BOLT- Bet you need a road!

        Mark

      3. Their hydrofoil ferries, on the other hand, were well-received and are still in use to this day.

  6. I know about Vancouver, BC (my parents have a second home there, and the bylaws suggest that they may have to pay the tax even though their unit is occupied at least six months out of the year (if you count me housesitting their place)), but is there really an empty home issue in the city of Seattle?

    1. Probably not, although we don’t have conclusive data either way.

      Contrast Bartolet’s deep dive with the Moon/Mudede Stranger series. The former seems much more evidence-driven, while the latter looks for suggestive but inconclusive evidence to fit the theory.

      http://www.sightline.org/2017/07/05/stop-blaming-foreign-home-buyers/

      http://www.thestranger.com/authors/20043/cary-moon

      Now that her “tax the mysterious foreigners” schtick has been declared illegal, let’s hope she transitions to defeating speculators by aggressively withdrawing legal support for the artificial scarcity they’re betting on, and the double digit per-annum returns it creates.

      1. I agree with most of the Sightline article but one thing I’ve seen repeatedly really bothers me:

        “home prices are rising fast, but on average citywide, paychecks are keeping up (while some Seattleites are falling behind, median income is still climbing).”

        It’s not the same people! Thousands of newcomers with six-figure salaries are coming every year and displacing people with low five-figure salaries who have to move to the suburbs or out of the area and are no longer counted in the median. So of course the median goes up! Even if the two markets aren’t directly related (the six-figure person doesn’t move into the run-down apartment occupied by the low-five-figure person), their purchasing power has a chain reaction that ultimately affects the other. (And the solution is not to ban rich newcomers but to build tens of thousands of more units and as many public-housing units.) The only way to use the median income as a reliable indicator is to count across the entire metropolis, where people are displaced to. The ST district is a reasonable approximation, especially since the starting point is Seattle which is in the middle and thirty miles from the edge.

      2. (And the solution is not to ban rich newcomers but to build tens of thousands of more units and as many public-housing units.)

        Which is why I suggested that transit friendly places have mandated (i.e, no developer buy outs) low and middle income housing for new development (like Montgomery Co., MD– although it is for all development, but Montgomery Co. MD has a better transit system).

      3. We need a lot more than those 10% or 25% can provide, and I don’t think it’s really fair to put the burden on developers. It’s the entire community’s problem so the entire community should pay for the solution.

      4. These constitutional provisions against taxes for speculation (“unequal property tax”) and foreign homebuyers (as the 14th Amendment is interpreted) are becoming increasingly problematic. They were passed at a time when housing was cheap and if you couldn’t find something in one neighborhood you could in another. Now it’s leading to a situation where speculators and trophy-house collectors and foreign investors could someday buy up our entire housing stock and we’d just have to stand by and let it happen because we can’t counteract it like Vancouver can. That equal property tax thing is the same reason ST can’t charge different rates in different subareas according to how much investment they want, because it’s all one tax district.

  8. The ST map: The amateur graphics artist in me bristles at how some lines have angled jogs and straighter segments (Redmond, SLU) while others are shown with hard 90-degree jogs (TIBS, 272nd, Eastgate). I think it seems to be better to generally avoid 90-degree jogs using gentler angles would suggest a faster train. Regardless, the map needs to be consistent.

    1. The alignment at SoDo, Richards Rd, and TIBs are actually 90-degree turns, if you zoom out as far as this map does. I’d argue it’s accurate?

      2. The KDM track won’t have any 90-degree jog and it’s only a few hundred feet west of I-5 so there’s no good reason to jog there but not at a similar situation at Federal Way.

    2. It is very common for subway maps to take geographic liberties. Things are not drawn to scale. It makes for an easier to understand system, and this map is no exception. They basically cram as much as they can into the map, which makes for some misleading distances and angles. For example, the West Seattle stops and SoDo all look neatly lined up in a row, equidistant apart, when of course, they aren’t. Still, overall, I think it is a fairly nice looking map. You can read every stop and see where things are going to be. I don’t think it is misleading, as long as you understand that is largely a schematic (the outline of Lake Washington should be a good clue for that).

      If you want a more accurate view of things, then you can often find web pages out there with them. For example, this is an ST3 map (https://tinyurl.com/ycwnskp3).

      1. I fully understand about the benefit of taking geographic liberties in schematics.

        I am simply bothered that the graphics people at ST inconsistently take broad schematic liberties in some places and not others — and actually even put in unneeded 90-degree jogs in some places where there won’t even be 90-degree jogs!

        I think that ST staff should critically go through this map’s design details and remove at least half of the 90-degree jogs and put in just straight lines or lines at least make jogs at 45-degree angles to be more schematic and appealing, like they already did for Downtown Redmond and SLU here. I would even say that anywhere that has a 90-degree turn remains should have the line edges rounded. That’s what most other rail system schematic mapmakers around the world would do!

        Past ST3 maps from Seattle Subway and Zach Shaner have been much better done than this one. This map almost looks like it was made in the late 1970’s with an Exacto knife and mapping tape. Perhaps the problem has to do with the clickable web design for projects, but the line inconsistencies on this map look graphically amateurish and mediocre.

  9. I don’t recall the previous system map showing that the Green line (current portion from Angle Lake to International District) would no longer stop at Stadium station. Has this always been the plan and I simply missed it before?

      1. Interesting. It does show it stopping at SODO, so if it were elevated at Stadium, it would presumably do one of the following:

        1) descend from the elevated track at the OMB, cross Lander street and stop at the existing surface SODO station, then ascend to an elevated track bypassing Stadium, only to descend once again to enter the new, expanded ID Station.
        2) stay elevated from the OMB track, crossing Lander at +20′, then stop at a new elevated portion the SODO station before continuing on the elevated track bypassing Stadium, before descending to enter the new ID station.

      3. The point of elevation is either to make it faster (fixing a mistake made in the original alignment, incidentally giving West Seattle a privilege that Rainier/Beacon doesn’t have), or a judgment that surface tracks can’t handle the number of trains. Since MLK is limited to 6 minutes and the Red Line alone will be 6 minutes peak, that probably applies to SODO too. This is still just a representative alignment, the station location studies haven’t been done yet.

    2. The WSTC had a presentation a few weeks ago with a preliminary design for the West Seattle segment of ST3. It appears to show a new center platform station at Royal Brougham Way just to the west of the current one, replacing the SODO Busway. Again, only preliminary, but I think it’s safe to say that Stadium Station will continue to be served by Rainier Valley-bound trains.

      http://westseattleblog.com/2017/06/happening-now-talking-light-rail-routing-with-west-seattle-transportation-coalition/

      1. kind of a shame to route a second line right next to the existing line with almost no new benefits… not serving any new area in SoDo, not utilizing the existing track. might make sense to route it to the west by/near 1st and serve Starbucks and that area, not thats a huge destination but is still new territory

    1. Beware that the frequency and span may be less than the bus it replaces. If you think another route should be boosted instead, by all means tell Metro that. If the form doesn’t allow it, email it. However, with this program Metro intends to spend less than the equivalent number of bus runs would cost, so there may not be enough for any meaningful increases on those routes.

    2. On the weekends and holidays the # 372 doesn’t go north of 130th and Lake City Way so Metro would need to run the route on its weekday routing on the weekends to Bothell before you can even talk about increasing its weekend frequency.

      1. That would be redundant with the 522 which surely has open seats on the weekend. The 372 overlay to Bothell is probably because of the huge number of students going to both UW campuses on weekdays. Increasing the 372’s Sunday frequency to 15 minutes would help with transfers between it and the 522.

  11. Good for Mountlake Terrace for keeping the pressure up on ST. Lynnwood needs to follow the same strategy. ST is clearly nervous about being able to keep their commitments on costs and timelines for delivering two big pieces of the ST2 system expansion, East Link and Lynnwood Link, the latter of which has 50% of its pay-for dependent upon FTA New Starts funding. Sound Transit needs to be reminded about it’s $850k Capitol Hill station opening boondoggle each and every time they attempt to go cheap on system expansion elements promised voters in ST2.

    1. Yes, the boondoggle that was immediately canceled out by additional fare revenue raised by the party. But hey, we totally don’t need event security and coordination to herd 45,000 people around very small spaces!

      If cities want additional parking, they should tax themselves for it. ST should be in the transit business, not parking business, period. Keeping the region locked out of light rail over a few parking spaces in a single city is petty, to say the least, and cities shouldn’t be rewarded for going down that route so late into the process.

      1. Your first point is nothing but a false talking point. Did those 45,000 supposed party celebrants all pay close to $20 in fares to attend? The party was an expense and an excessive expense at that in the minds of many district taxpayers.

        You need to do your research about Mountlake Terrace’s issues with ST and the ROW the latter is seeking from the city. Parking is only one of the issues. Every jurisdiction is within its rights to look out for their citizens and their vested interests and not be steamrolled by an agency that has a reputation for broken promises. (Case in point, check out Appendix A in the 2008 ST2 package, specifically pages A6 and A7, that detail Link’s extension into Snohomish County.)The “lateness” of which you speak is due to ST ignoring the city’s concerns. Perhaps ST should spend a little less money for station opening parties and massive ad campaigns to sell ST3 to voters and hire the necessary outreach and planning staff to address the various jurisdictional stakeholders’ issues.

        Cities like Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood should absolutely do what they’re doing.

      3. The party issue is a red herring. The cost was tiny compared to the total project, it was a marketing technique, and ST agreed with the criticism that it was too much and scaled back subsequent openings. Harping on it now sounds like those who keep harping that ST hasn’t met its 1996 estimates. One, they are estimates. Two, ST acknowledged they were overoptimistic, the agency was restructured, and all estimates since the early 2000s have been conservative.

        The galling thing is that Mountlake Terrace has a small population and is mostly single-family and not very willing to add residents, yet it demands special treatment like Mercer Island or South Bellevue. The most interesting is, “While Sound Transit officials assured councilmembers Aug. 17 that they would not remove restrooms without the city’s consent, Sonmore remained steadfast Monday in her efforts to keep the transit agency accountable to the city.” Seattle stations don’t have restrooms yet by golly Mountlake Terrace better have a restroom and we don’t trust ST to follow city law. I guess Seattlites who have to go will detour to Mountlake Terrace and back. (Although Northgate will probably have a restroom since it’s a transit center.)

      4. To add a log to the fire, the only reason Mountlake Terrace is getting Link at all is it’s in a straight line to Lynnwood on the chosen I-5 alignment. If anyone is making specific demands of ST it should be Lynnwood, which can point to its large transit center and jobs/housing plans to show that it will benefit a large percent of the region’s residents rather than a few people who bought houses fifteen years before prices went wild

      5. It’s not a red herring at all. It’s a valid criticism, as is the criticism of the agency’s failures with executing on Sound Move and multiple aspects of ST2. Your comment about estimates, attempting to downplay their significance in the process of getting voter approval, is frankly silly. And what you refer to as “harping” many of us taxpayers consider as holding an agency accountable.

        Your disdain for the residents of Mountlake Terrace and that community’s concerns with Link’s extension is truly remarkable. (This concludes my monitoring of this thread.)

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