State Must Reform Sound Transit

151 Replies to “State Must Reform Sound Transit”

1. Highways are NOT exempt from NEPA.

   1. I stand corrected! Though they do not get nearly as much scrutiny as transit projects.

      1. Please correct it in the article as well

      2. corrected

      3. It’s absolutely not true that highway projects get less environmental scrutiny.

      4. I think it would be more correct to say highways get more political favor and resources on average. Even if the environmental process is just as rigorous, governments are more likely to wave highways through, give them funding without a public vote, and help them pass environmental hurdles. A significant subset of the public thinks it’s normal to have six-lane roads, interchanges with lots of no-man’s-land, one-story big-box stores surrounded by acres of parking, and gas-station mini-marts. They say they “need” the freeway, but then turn around and say trolley wire for a bus is a negative impact that harms the view and home values. So they’ll contest and obstruct the transit project but they’ll stand aside and won’t make objections to the highway, and will pressure their lawmakers to build it.

      5. Don’t forget the part where the public got to vote on the specific highway projects and was able to review the budgeted costs and what the benefits were.

         Oh, wait….

      6. The highway program in Washington is more about maintenance and widening than it is new corridors. There are the 167 and 509 extensions but they have been planned and studied for decades, as has the 395 project in Spokane. So the environmental concerns are not as significant.

         Is some major new highway corridor was being planned like a new freeway over the Cascades there would be a dizzying amount of environmental studies.

      7. Widening ain’t cheap.
         (and don’t forget the 4 lanes being added (31 mi.) to I-405, including massive interchanges at the 4 major intersecting highways which were budgeted at roughly $1.2 billion each)

         Just ask the public what path they want to follow.

         I’ve never seen any ballot proposal for these.

2. I signed it.

   1. Thank you!

3. permitting reform (talked about in the letter) would be exciting and hopefully stop local cities from holding up sound transit

   The sound transit board being local executives doesn’t look like the letter proposed a solution on that front

   1. Correct. I agree with the reform movement, but in my opinion it doesn’t go far enough. The main problem is the basic assumptions that go into the planning. This is the result of a board making arbitrary decisions based on their ignorance. What should happen:

      1) The board decides on a rough budget (say, $50 billion).
      2) The board hires a consulting firm (or employs consultants) to figure out how best to spend the money.
      3) The experts release several different options.
      4) The public (and other experts) debate the various plans.
      5) The board decides on a future path.

      What instead happens:

      1) The board picks an arbitrary goal (e. g. a subway line from Everett to Tacoma).
      2) They then debate how to actually achieve that.
      3) A rough plan to build that is then put to the voters.
      4) After the vote, experts then dig into the details and we have the problems that this reform group wants to solve.

      But the basic problem with ST3 is that it the goals (e. g. a subway line from Everett to Tacoma) are fundamentally poor. If ST3 was on budget and on time it would still be a huge waste of money. It would still result in a very poor transit outcome. We would still be spending way too much money on the wrong thing.

      And every transit expert in the world would agree. But since we have a fundamentally backwards process we end up with a fundamentally bad outcome.

      1. Well, Sound Transit had a sales brochure with a light rail line from Tacoma to Everett. That’s what the voters voted for, except Pierce County– we voted no.

         ST3 had a bunch of promises baked into it. Are some of those ” ST3 promises” bad ideas? Doesn’t matter, we voted it in, we’ll have to live with it.

         The Urbanist needs to be called out on this. Doug Trumm thought ST3 was the greatest thing since sliced bread when it passed. Now the Urbanist thinks Sound Transit is so out of control the State needs to step in?

         https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/11/09/st3-passed-heres-how-and-whats-next/

      2. Thanks Ross,

         I agree the reform effort we’re leading does not go far enough, today. But it is the necessary step for building the foundation for comprehensive reform.

         From the experience of the TAG and my personal experience previously working on project reform with Streets for All’s State Advocacy efforts, bringing a prescribed list of reforms (outside of the obvious like permitting reform) from the outset does not result in change. With SFA we interviewed researchers and authors on transit and rail costs at ENO Center, Transit Costs Project, and Berkeley Law then came up with a bill proposal that went – nowhere. However, that effort did lead the next session to exempting catenary from environmental review and a review of the LOSSAN corridor’s governance structure.

         While the answers are out there for those willing to look, establishing the case with electeds takes creating a process that educates them to the need and potential of reform. The TAG is a great example of this.

         The State is in a position to critically examine and generate recommendations with evidence compiled relevant to our context. This is what Minnesota did. Reform recommendations must be generated from the bodies that can implement them. Since although we know what they should look like, there is no route currently established for their actual implementation. The process itself of generating recommendations is how we build the political consensus necessary for any reform’s implementation and educate law makers in the process.

   2. The reality of Sound Transit is simple, every City with a stop the mayor is on some sort of Sound Transit board. Conflict of interest yes… unacceptable, yes.

      Let’s talk about the I-90 engineering. Will the train ever cross? Hmmm, rigid tracks on a bridge that moves 12″ or more. Amazing they haven’t figured it out yet. NOT

      Billions to go no where…… Inspections being rubber stamped by upper management strong arming within each City.

      In reality it’s a failed product and money grab

      1. The I90 bridge is pretty much done. The design uses sliding rails so they’re not even rigid where the bridge moves.

      2. I 90 section was designed in part by UWs engineering school who designed it with the paticulars of being a floating pontoon bridge in mind (rough waters, vibrations, etc) and was tested pretty extensively out in Pubelo, CO at USDOT Transportation Technology Center before any actual work was done on I 90
         https://www.ce.washington.edu/news/article/2017-08-15/enabling-engineering-first-light-rail-floating-bridge

4. I don’t see the problem as much being the way that the Board is selected as much as its Board members prioritizing the wrong things. Weirdly, the Board has bought into naive cultural biases about rail transit:

   1. Rail is always better.
   2. Current technologies are all that ST can use for expansion.
   2. It’s ok to have trains run mostly empty for half their route yet have overcrowding between a few stations.
   3. Light rail stations are a pawn in a real estate investment game, and pleasing investors is more important.
   4. Tracks matter and vertical circulation doesn’t.
   5. Light rail is more of a nuisance to be mitigated than a service to be offered.
   6. Underground is better because it hides the trains.
   7. Chasing the system expansion dream is more important than running what we have well.

   The fundamental way to address these cultural biases is to run the system. The original mistake was not being responsible for running the system. Had ST had its own employees driving and maintaining trains, the kinds of executives that get hired would have been different. Much of the expansion in ST3 gets terrible ridership forecasts because the proposed projects were designed to be appealing to voters rather than strategic or practical.

   And I agree that giving more authority to ST will not change things. Neither will changing the Board structure. The culture has to be changed directly.

   I would suggest these efforts:

   1. A rider’s advisory committee. Too many time the Board ignores the rider experience and usefulness. Riders should be the key stakeholders. Every system expansion plan should have a rider’s committee review before hitting the Board committees and Board.

   2. Executive management should have big city rail operations experience, and ST should hire their own drivers et al. Light rail isn’t about mainly connections to FTA nor is it an understanding of the region’s politics. It’s about running a rail transit system! Who hires a big district school superintendent that has never managed a school system before? No school board with 140,000 students would hire a DOE executive, an administrator who has only two or three years of relevant experience or a retired factory executive to run their system. Yet the lack of depth of relevant skills and knowledge from the ST executive team continues to be obvious and appalling for a system of 140,000 average weekday riders.

   4. A technical committee should review plans and budgets before the Board does. A board’s committee should not be asked and cannot perform technical reviews. This committee should have public works directors, planning directors and technical specialists who have no stake in the game of pleasing wealthy campaign donors or powerful moguls or elected officials who think that they’re royalty.

   5. System expansion should be threshold based. Show everyone the cost per rider! If cost per rider target can’t be met, don’t build it. Building it because it got sketched on a map is immature and flawed — and creates a waste of funds.

   The rest of the US has these things in place . Why don’t we?

   1. Sure, but this comes from how the board is selected. To be fair, some boards would do the right thing. When discussing the subject, I’ve often asked people a simple question:

      If you were suddenly on a board and given $50 billion dollars to spend on local transit, what would you spend it on?

      Answer vary. Some jump into the details right away, proposing trains here or there. Others shrug and said “I don’t know”. The latter is closer to what should happen. So I ask a follow up question:

      If you had to redo the wiring in your house, what would you do?

      Most people answer “I would hire an electrician”. By then folks get the idea. You hire someone who knows what they are doing.

      Yet the board has never done that. They have never hired experts — internal or external — and asked them to come up with the most cost effective way to improve transit. They instead picked places on the map and decided that we should run subway lines there. Then they worked backwards, considering options for getting there. When they found it was expensive (duh) they reduced the number of stations or followed the freeway as a way to cut costs.

      The failure to question these basic assumptions are the root of the problem. But is highly unlikely that a board made up of transit professionals would make the same mistake. They might make decisions we disagree with but it is highly unlikely they would build something so profoundly absurd as a subway line from Everett to Tacoma. Or Issaquah to South Kirkland. or Even West Seattle Link. Not before we run other lines to other parts of the city (at far less cost and way more value).

      1. Not hiring transit professionals is not a result of naïveté. It’s a choice that they have deliberately made. Surely they have had plenty of chances to hire reputable professionals.

         They don’t want to. They seem to like the current system and the power that comes with it.

         There are many wealthy investors working behind the scenes. They lobby heavily to protect their real estate interests. We don’t hear about it. But it’s going on and has been since 2014. You don’t get project changes like a West Seattle deep tunnel or the new CID scheme that wasn’t in the draft EIS without backroom dealings.

         It’s Seattle’s version of political corruption. Yes I said it! There are corrupt Board members. We are too polite to make such claims and like to instead blame “the system” but the blame needs to be less politically correct.

      2. At a minor level that sort of things go on. But deciding that it essential to build the spine is based on ignorance. It is an assumption that goes unchecked.

      3. Al S.

         No, hiring “transit professionals” isn’t a solution either. Who exactly is a “transit professional”? Who could we possibly trust to hire them? What stops them from being more of the problem than the solution.

         Gosh, you’re saying board members, developers and real estate speculators are in cahoots in Sound Transit? Really!?!? That’s the way shit has gotten done since Romulus and Remus built Rome.

         I will tell you this…. the longer a public project takes, the deeper the corruption sets in. If Sound Transit has been churning along for so long, and so much horseshit had gotten away with (Tacoma Link has breathtaking corruption and quality issues), the corruption will just continue to grow.

      4. “There are many wealthy investors working behind the scenes. They lobby heavily to protect their real estate interests… It’s Seattle’s version of political corruption.”

         What would politicians get in exchange for giving something to “wealthy investors working behind the scenes”? Campaign contributions? That’s not much of an issue in local elections. I’ve never heard of a local candidate having an outsized campaign budget, or anything about their fundraising for that matter. You think the companies are giving a job to a politician’s daughter or giving them cash? Where’s the evidence?

      5. Mike,
         The land around CID south is owned by a single developer who happen to be a good friend of Mayor Harrell. If the station gets built there, he will get paid nicely by SoundTransit for his property and the rest of the land will be more valuable because of all the amenities Sound Transit and the city will put in and it will get much easier to get to it. That’s a huge benefit for a developer in tough times we currently have.

      6. Martin,

         But that might not be a bad thing. Nobody wants the County and City buildings or the buildings around CID South. Mayor Bruce knows a nice urban renewal plan when he sees it.

         Oh, we’re talking about transit? Mayor Bruce isn’t running for 2nd term as mayor on transit. The promise of housing and downtown urban renewal? Yes! that’s the 2nd term tonic!

         And this was always going to the problem of ST3. Every local pol was going to twist into something else.

      7. Sound Transit should be restructured to have Board Members elected and not appointed. There should be financial accountability so that taxpayers are not forever funding mistakes.
         The current trajectory of the agency guarantees that Sound Transit will implode upon itself… it’s just a question of when.
         New administration coming in January will most likely stop any continued federal assistance, and that desired funding is in STs plan to help overcome current shortfalls.

   2. Al S.

      “Riders should be the key stakeholders”

      What???? I mean, who gets to pick “the riders”? Board members are elected officials we voted in to office. They are accountable to the voters in the end. “The riders”? Never heard of them. Don’t want them making choices with billions on dollars. I’d love to see a “transit congress” meet from all the self appointed transit nerds and see what they come up with. I’d guess nothing, because everybody is an expert after all.

      Not that having the State give the Sound Transit board more power is a good idea either. ST3 as approved by the voters (but not in Pierce County!) . It is what it is. Live with it.

      1. ST3 as approved by the voters

         They were given no choice! There was only one plan on the ballot. I am so sick of this “voters decided” bullshit. It is quite possible that voters would have chosen a completely different plan if it was offered. But it wasn’t. Holy Shit, Tim Eyman wrote the opposition editorial in the voter’s guide. At that point it didn’t matter what they proposed. Light rail from Covington to Cottage Lake — sounds good.

      2. Board members are elected officials we voted in to office.

         But not for this purpose! Most people aren’t even aware they are on the board. The various mayors, county executives and council members rarely, if ever, mention Sound Transit. When they do they are often pushing provincial interests. That is not how a functioning republic should operate.

         They are accountable to the voters in the end.

         Not for this they’re not. The mayor of Seattle or Tacoma can totally screw the pooch on Sound Transit and nobody will notice. But if they fail to handle the police department or crime — they are gone. That is the problem — it isn’t their main job. It isn’t even their secondary job. It is way down their list of priorities and they have neither the time nor the inclination to figure out what needs to be done. Worse yet, they assume the know what to do! They think that a subway line from Tacoma to Everett is a splendid idea. Why? Apparently it is self-evident. It just is. They can’t point to any report — any study — that says it makes sense to built it. It is clearly unusual — there are very few systems like it in the world — and yet it is apparently so obvious it is the thing to build that we don’t need to actually consider the alternatives.

         Yet I am supposed to vote out the mayor because he is just as ignorant as every other member of the board? Get real.

      3. Ross Bleakney,

         Ah, Democracy is all we got? I mean I didn’t vote yes on ST3 because voting on any 25+++++ year plan isn’t a good idea. I’m very pro transit BTW. Seattle should have just built its own light rail system and left the rest of the region out it.

         Back to the goofy op-ed in the Urbanist. How can the State step in and override a locally elected board? Democracy doesn’t work that way either.

         If you voted yes for ST3… you won! You can’t cry about winning an election in America.

      4. “Seattle should have just built its own light rail system”

         Seattle doesn’t have that kind of money. The unused monorail authorization can only raise $1 billion, which is about what Ballard-UW cost before the inflation. So you’d get one Ballard-UW line and nothing else. The reason Seattle went with Sound Transit is that was the only thing the legislature was willing to authorize big taxes for. And that’s because the suburbs are 4/5 of the region’s population and voters, and legislators from the rest of the state identify and sympathize with suburban cities more than with Seattle, and the suburbs wanted that Spine.

      5. @Mike Orr,

         “ Seattle doesn’t have that kind of money.”

         Actually, seattle does have that kind of money. More than enough in fact. The problem was that the State didn’t want to give Seattle the taxing authority to raise the money for a Seattle only effort.

         The concern was that if Seattle was allowed to fund and build its own system, then Seattle — and Seattle alone —would reap all the benefits. And the majority of the politicians on the State level didn’t want to see a better, stronger, richer Seattle.

         It’s the old “East vs West, and everyone against Seattle” mantra of State politics. If the LR system was going to be allowed to move forward, it was going to have to be regional.

         The monorail funding authority came later and was really only in response to the existence of ST. It was never going to actually happen. The funding was just too little, too late. And the people running the SMP were amateurs with no technical experience.

      6. @tacomee,

         “ Back to the goofy op-ed in the Urbanist.”

         Near as I can tell, this effort is one guy with a webpage and precious few facts on his side. This effort will go nowhere.

         “How can the State step in and override a locally elected board?”

         A bigger question: why would they even bother? The State has its own problems with its own mega-projects. Sound Transit “reform” isn’t even on their radar.

         And on the county level homelessness and crime are top priorities right now. Messing with a popular program like ST isn’t on the agenda.

         And the big story in King County specifically is how to keep a Metro from going over its financial cliff. I don’t see the county picking a fight with ST while allowing Metro to implode. First things first.

      7. Ah, Democracy is all we got?

         But the process is not democratic. If we elected a board it would be. If we were given more than just an up/down vote on a major levy it would be. But instead we have an idea (the spine) that some legislatures dreamed up way back when. Now each proposal is graded against it. Or consider West Seattle Link. The only reason we have it is because Dow Constantine was on the board. Should be vote him out? Fine — he is leaving anyway!

         This wouldn’t happen with an elected transit board. People would have to run on their transit credentials. They would be asked transit questions like “Do you support the spine or do you think it makes more sense to spend money on buses in those areas at this point?”. They would be asked about the planning process as well (e. g. there is nothing wrong with answering “I think we should study all options including enhanced bus service and then consider the advantages of each idea”). But there is none of that because people completely ignore transit when board members run for office. I don’t follow Tacoma politics but I can tell you that it was never an issue in the last mayoral race in Seattle. Nor any city council race. It just doesn’t come up.

      8. I’d love to see a “transit congress” meet from all the self appointed transit nerds and see what they come up with. I’d guess nothing, because everybody is an expert after all.

         That is not what we are saying. There are transit firms that do consulting work. Consider the City of Kirkland. At one point Sound Transit wanted to add light rail to the Cross Kirkland Corridor. Kirkland hired their own consulting firm to study the idea. Their conclusion was that it made way more sense to just run BRT on the corridor. That way some of the buses could go to Bellevue, but other buses could turn and go to the UW. ST basically ignored their study. They ignored the expert opinion. They instead went with South Kirkland to Issaquah light rail — a plan that no expert would ever recommend.

         This is one of the big problems with the process. They set arbitrary goals (e. g. West Seattle Link and work backwards). You will never find any report anywhere that says we should build West Seattle rail, let alone next. It is just something that the folks in charge wanted. Same goes for every other project. Alternatives were not studied. Choices were made based on what look good on a map to a gullible public. This is fu**ed up.

      9. “Actually, seattle does have that kind of money. More than enough in fact. The problem was that the State didn’t want to give Seattle the taxing authority to raise the money for a Seattle only effort. ”

         That’s what I meant. I’ll be more specific: Seattle doesn’t have authorization to use its latent tax capacity. That’s the same thing as not having money SDOT can spend on multiple rail lines.

      10. “The concern was that if Seattle was allowed to fund and build its own system, then Seattle — and Seattle alone —would reap all the benefits. And the majority of the politicians on the State level didn’t want to see a better, stronger, richer Seattle. ”

          Yes. It’s ironic that tacomee blames Seattle, transit advocates, and the Urbanist for ST3 and Link in general. It was the SUBURBAN counties/subareas who:

          – convinced the legislature not to allow Seattle to go it alone, because the SUBURBANITES wanted the Everett-Redmond-Tacoma Spine,

          – wanted SEATTLE’S/KING COUNTY’S VOTES to get it over the 50% voting threshold,

          – insisted on SUBAREA EQUITY to ensure that their revenue would go to their EVERETT/TACOMA/REDMOND SPINE instead of urban-appropriate lines and stations in Seattle.

          – have 4/5 of Pugetopolis’ population and political clout. So whatever Seattle wants is dwarfed by them and often smothered.

          Urbanists like myself wanted good rail in Ballard and the three Stride lines. We went along with the Spine extension and West Seattle — conceding to the suburbanites and West Seattle drivers — for the sake of regional consensus and to get something. The measure we voted on said nothing about wide/deep downtown transfers or Ballard 14th Station. If it had, I’d probably have voted against ST3. There’s no point in building a Ballard light rail line if can’t fulfill the requirements of a normal subway. What people want is convenient non-car mobility, not something that claims to be that but doesn’t solve the problem.

      11. @Mike Orr,

          Regardless of where the funding comes from, SDOT shouldn’t be in charge of building rail lines. Witness the CCC debacle if you aren’t convinced.

          ST is the regional rail experts, and they should be in charge of building rail. Even the Seattle streetcar.

          I’d even propose that all Seattle Streetcar staff be transferred to ST and become direct ST employees. Not Metro employees, not SDOT employees.

          It’s worked very well for the Tacoma Streetcar, and it should work very well for the Seattle Streetcar too. It might even serve as a model for transitioning Link O&M staff from being Metro employees to being direct ST employees. It can only help.

      12. “The monorail funding authority came later and was really only in response to the existence of ST.”

          Hmm, maybe. I don’t remember all the details of the monorail’s early days. What specifically motivated the first monorail supporters? There was no chance of ST building Ballard or West Seattle then: that would have to come after the Spine was further completed.

      13. “instead we have an idea (the spine) that some legislatures dreamed up way back when”

          It was King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties and their suburban cities who dreamed up the Spine, and convinced the legislators to establish Sound Transit. In 1990 transit was like this:

          – Metro had mostly 30-minute routes in Seattle and 60-minute routes in the suburbs. Three-quarters of suburban service was peak expresses to downtown Seattle.
          – Community Transit had just formed, and had mostly 60-minute routes, and the 400 and 800 peak expresses to downtown and the U-District.
          – Pierce Transit had mostly 60-minute routes, and no expresses.
          – The following didn’t exist: all-day expresses across the King-Snohomish border, any expresses across the King-Pierce border; all-day expresses to Redmond, Issaquah, Federal Way, or Auburn; or any kind of mass-transit rail in Seattle.

          What the suburbs specifically wanted was an alternative to freeway congestion, and bringing light rail to their cities to attract businesses and well-off residents. So they wanted something like Sounder, ST Express, and Link.

          The county-based agencies (Metro, CT, PT) couldn’t deliver all-day inter-county/inter-city expresses because that was at the bottom of their priorities behind neighborhood service and squeaky wheels wanting a stop near their house. So it just remained neglected, and the counties felt the only way to get past that was a separate regional transit authority that could have that as its mission.

          Seattle wanted city rail (although overall support/awareness of transit was less then) but couldn’t get sufficient tax authorization for it. So it joined the regional Sound Transit wave.

      14. “SDOT shouldn’t be in charge of building rail lines. Witness the CCC debacle if you aren’t convinced.”

          That has nothing to do with how SDOT could have built real trams on Rainier, Eastlake, and Westlake. The streetcar lines were all subject to individual local politics and deprioritizing passenger requirements. That’s the fault of elected politicians, not SDOT.

          SDOT could always hire ST to do some of the design and construction work now ST exists.

   3. We absolutely need a RIDER EXPERIENCE BOARD. It already has technical, fiscal, stakeholders’, and politicians’ boards — some permanent and others phase- or project-specific. But it’s missing the most important part: why we’re building Link and running ST Express and Sounder in the first place. It’s to make transit more feasible and convenient for people’s trips — a viable “first choice” for transportation; and the indirect benefits this has on the economy, staffing, and public health and morale. Yet ST often makes decisions that contradict riders’ interests for the sake of another stakeholder or local government.

      A rider experience report would ideally be treated like an auditors’ report and all its findings would be implemented. Even if it doesn’t achieve that, it can at least document and organize ST’s bad alternatives, decisions, and neglect, in a form any boardmember/staff/citizen can easily refer to later.

      1. Mike, Sound Transit claims that the https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/panels-committees/community-oversight-panel fulfills this role. The trouble is that Sound Transit runs it and they pick the members. When I contacted the chair in the past, Sound Transit’s PR person responded. I had to contact him through other channels, but even that was forwarded to Sound Transit I learned later. It’s another one of Sound Transit’s marketing efforts to convince the public that they have independent oversight and another way to improve their outreach statistics.

      2. Martin,

         You’re acting like you have some sort of special transit education or something. You are a single citizen with a single vote, so as far as Sound Transit is concerned, you are nobody special. Sorry, but that’s how democracy works. Everybody’s concerns about Sound Transit go straight to the PR department. There isn’t any backdoor for transit nerds.

         Because that’s the real dream here…. self proclaimed experts having a magic back door to the controls. I’ve known a couple of board members on a more personal level over the years….. and believe me when I say they’re not really interested in the pro-Seattle views on this blog, the Stranger , or the Urbanist. The Board isn’t going allow for pro-Seattle “riders experience board” to stab them in the back.

         Because ST didn’t pass in Pierce County and barely passed in several other outlying areas…. the Board was always going to a struggle to change anything that wasn’t in the sales brochure (the 3 County rail spine).

         That’s what you voted for, right?

      3. tacomee, what’s the purpose of an oversight board if you can’t even reach the members? Are they supposed to act only on their own information? Or get any information only channeled through Sound Transit?
         To me a real oversight board can do their own outreach and collect feedback and make their own recommendations to the Sound Transit staff or board.

      4. Of course a rider experience board depends on appointing good members to it. But even if only some of the members are knowledgeable about transit best practices (the Human Transit book, European/Asian/Canadian/Latin American experience), and some others advocate for the things they see (transfer experience, frequency limitations, safety, cleanliness), they can generate a report with substantially better recommendations than what ST is doing without them.

         Whatever ST’s Community Oversight Panel is doing, it’s not addressing this need.

         One of the criteria for being on the closest comparable boards (e.g., Metro restructure sounding boards), is having experience using transit. So they can start from their own experience and people they talk to. That would reveal some of these problems because they’re fairly universal, and shared by both urban and suburban riders with otherwise different views and trip/usage pairs.

      5. Look Martin, you complained to Sound Transit… who knows if they took your complaint to heart or just “round filed it”?

         I’m all for more community involvement in transit. By the actual community. Seattle Transit Blog contributors don’t get some special “back door” for their “educated input”

         Many go the ST3 boosters who helped push the vote over the line, starting with the Urbanist, feel entitled to have their transit opinions have influence at Sound Transit. But that’s not what we voted for.

         If you look at this from Tacoma’s point of view… it’s light rail to the airport and on to downtown Seattle. Tacoma doesn’t care if this messes up Seattle’s light rail system. Pierce County is already on the hook for the fucking money.

         What a “rider review board” smells like is Seattle trying to back out of the deal. Sorry, that’s not going to happen. We have a regional board that’s calling the shots here, as agreed by a public vote. I’m guessing you voting yes on ST3?

      6. You’re acting like you have some sort of special transit education or something.

         No he isn’t. You are accusing him of something he didn’t do. That is both arrogant and downright rude. Try to keep it civil. Got it?

         
         I’m all for more community involvement in transit. By the actual community. Seattle Transit Blog contributors don’t get some special “back door” for their “educated input”

         Again, no one suggested that. Stop accusing people of things they didn’t write. That is a clear violation of our comment policy.

         If you look at this from Tacoma’s point of view… it’s light rail to the airport and on to downtown Seattle. Tacoma doesn’t care if this messes up Seattle’s light rail system. Pierce County is already on the hook for the fucking money.

         No one said it did! Holy cow man, stop making these crazy assumptions. People don’t like Tacoma Dome Link because it screws up transit in Tacoma Get it? Instead of decent transit service they get a train that hardly anyone uses.

         But it doesn’t hurt Seattle in the least. Oh sure, the occasional person who heads down to Tacoma is screwed. Instead of frequent and fast expresses they will have a slow light rail line. But whatever. Most people in Seattle don’t care. Our problems are completely independent of that. Same goes for Everett Link. Go ahead Everett — knock yourself out. Spend billions on a train that only a handful of people use. Doesn’t bother us any.

         Except there are plenty of people who don’t like seeing Everett and Tacoma get screwed. I’m one of them. So is Martin.

         What a “rider review board” smells like is Seattle trying to back out of the deal. Sorry, that’s not going to happen.

         Bullshit. He never said the board would consist of just Seattle people. Stop lying! Of course a citizen board would include people from every region. Holy shit, why wouldn’t it? And it is quite likely that someone representing Pierce County would point out how crazy it is to spend money on light rail train — that doesn’t even go to Downtown Tacoma — given the lack of money for buses.

      7. “What a “rider review board” smells like is Seattle trying to back out of the deal.”

         It’s Tacoma riders and South King riders too!

      8. Pierce members on the rider experience board might have pushed back on the location of Tacoma Dome station, the fact it doesn’t go to downtown Tacoma, that Sound Transit provides relatively little service to the vast areas of south Tacoma, southeast Tacoma, and Puyallup, that the 19th Avenue T-line extension with the MLK hump in the middle is a solution searching for a problem, that Pierce County needs much more bus service more than it needs Link or the T Line, etc.

         South King members on the rider experience board might point out that more people would be able to access Link if it had stations at 216th & 99, 240th & 99, and 272nd & 99, instead of just Star Lake freeway station in the middle of nowhere. They could echo RennDawg’s complaint that more needs to be done for safety, cleanliness, and not having people tweaked our or sleeping on it. They could point to their own experience accessing Link from Kent and Auburn, or getting to the rest of the region from Kent and Auburn. Etc.

      9. That’s what you voted for, right?”

         tacomee, why do you care? You have escaped the “librul” cesspit of Puget Sound for the enlightened Theocracy of The Elect. Surely you have much bigger sand dabs to fry than “larnin” a squabbling nest of adolescent transit nerds.

         Since you seem to be completely disinterested in any of those icky “technicalities” of the transit system, I really don’t see what you get out of reading the boring histrionics we pour out. Why don’t you focus your powerful intellect on the chalkenges facing the FrontRunner service or the controversy surrounding moving the central Trax station?

         Surely The Brethren will appreciate your acerbic yet sage advice on all things transit related.

      10. What tacomee is missing is that if he rode ST or PT regularly, he could be on the board.

      11. @Mike Orr,

          “ if he rode ST or PT regularly, he could be on the board.”

          Putting riders on the board, or creating a special “Rider Board” is a dumb idea. Proper transit design and operation requires technical knowledge and experience with project delivery. Being a consumer of transit doesn’t give you that knowledge or skills.

          King County just did their little experiment of letting homeless people direct the homeless response, supposedly because they have “lived experience” and are therefore knowledgeable, and look how that ended up. Complete failure.

          This “Riders Board” idea wouldn’t do any better.

      12. Proper transit design and operation requires technical knowledge and experience with project delivery.

          Something only one member of the board has (and he works in Olympia). A citizen board would be just as knowledgeable — if not more knowledgeable — about transit design than the people who are in charge now.

      13. “Putting riders on the board, or creating a special “Rider Board” is a dumb idea. Proper transit design and operation requires technical knowledge and experience with project delivery.”

          It’s not overriding or eliminating technical management. It’s an advisory board that can tell the ST Board what passengers’ concerns are and what staff may have a blind spot on.

          As to the concern about a few passengers being unrepresentative or pushing for their narrow parochial concerns, there’s a large amount of ridership experience that’s practically universal. To quote Jarrett Walker’s value list, transit is good when:

          1. It takes me WHERE I want to go. [routing, coverage]
          2. It takes me WHEN I want to go. [frequency, span, capacity]
          3. It is a good use of my TIME. [frequency, speed, routing]
          4. It is a good use of my MONEY. [reasonable fare and tax rate]
          5. It RESPECTS me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides. [safety, cleanliness, comfort]
          6. I can TRUST it. [reliability, on-time, no cancellations]
          7. It gives me FREEDOM to change my plans. [frequency, routing, span]

          Most of what the a riders’ advisory board would say falls into one of these categories.

          You may get one squeaky wheel from one neighborhood, although it’s uncommon in the few agency citizens’ groups I’ve participated in. People tend to focus on issues facing most riders or typical riders. They have their own experience, people they know or talk to, and an instinctive understanding of what makes riding transit feasible, pleasant, and an attractive choice. That’s what they talk about.

      14. “King County just did their little experiment of letting homeless people direct the homeless response, supposedly because they have “lived experience” and are therefore knowledgeable, and look how that ended up. Complete failure.”

          What are you talking about?

          The problems with increasing homelessness and crime can be traced to five things: (1) the pandemic upending peoples’ support structure, (2) lack of housing they can afford, (3) fentanyl becoming so powerful and cheap and addictive, (4) criminals started selling stolen goods on the street, (5) counterproductive police restructuring that hindered addressing #3 and #4. There may have been cases of “self-managed” homeless services, but that’s only a minor part and is not one of the big 5.

          In any case, this board wouldn’t “direct” transit.

      15. “Putting riders on the board, or creating a special “Rider Board” is a dumb idea. Proper transit design and operation requires technical knowledge and experience with project delivery. Being a consumer of transit doesn’t give you that knowledge or skills.”

          Good grief man! Appointed committees always have vetting processes. No council or mayor would appoint a rider that didn’t have more expertise or knowledge in at least one relevant area.

          Lazarus’ comment would be like saying that we shouldn’t have a planning commission or police oversight committee either because anyone could be a member. That’s NOT how these things work!

          [Ed: Corrected last sentence.]

5. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think a lot the problem is a combination of an ignorant electorate and a system that requires a public vote before all the details such as what the project will cost and where the stations will go are fully worked out.

   The purpose of the spine is essentially to appeal to members of the ignorant electorate, creating the illusion of a line that serves the entire region, even if it does so poorly. A line that focused on intra-Seattle trips would definitely get higher ridership, but would have a more difficult time getting the votes of people in Everett and Tacoma needed to get the thing passed in the first place. Ideally, the outlying communities would be given more bus service, but the ignorant electorate has a strong rail bias and won’t vote for something that doesn’t check the box of delivering rail somewhere within a few miles of where they live.

   Another part of the problem is that there exists no honest mechanism of re-assessing whether a project still makes financial sense, post-approval, in the face of escalating costs. In many ways, this lack is by design, as we don’t want projects to die simply because a few anti-transit people got elected to board positions (due to issues having nothing to do with transit, of course).

   As I said, I don’t know what the solution is, but I agree, the current situation is indeed a mess. But, it’s a mess we have to deal with if we want to ever build anything at all.

   1. The vote could be later in the process, but then there would be complaints that ST was wasting money designing something that might not be approved. It’s to avoid that complaint that the vote is so early.

      1. Yes – this is a big part of the problem. I suppose, in an ideal world, you’d actually have two votes, one to authorize the design work, another to actually build it, once everything is shovel ready. Sort of like how private sector developers raise money from investors in multiple rounds – one round to do the engineering work, another round to actually build the building.

         In the real world, however, a two-vote strategy would impose a very high funding burden, which would most likely result in nothing getting built at all. The problem is that the actual cost-effectiveness of the project sways very few votes. What matters much more is the general balance of left-wing voters vs. right-wing voters that happen to turn out in a given election. If you think of every election as a roll-of the dice (pro-transit voters are only a subset of left-leaning voters, so even in a district that reliably votes Democratic in presidential races, transit measures are still a tossup), two votes essentially means you have to roll the dice twice, with two “success” votes in a row, 4 years apart, required to move forward with construction. Simply put, the odds of getting anything built are much greater with just one vote and that’s it.

      2. “ in an ideal world, you’d actually have two votes, one to authorize the design work, another to actually build it, once everything is shovel ready. ”

         Actually, the ST3 corridors received planning funds from ST2 before getting construction funds from ST3.

         The difficulty came about because of the timing of ST3 compared to ST2 and what happened in the ST2 studies from 2013-15. They weren’t extensive enough.

         On top of that, the referendum added the DSTT2 with no prior study. Probably the most expensive per mile and it was not studied nor vetted in community meetings. And it all happened just 8 years after ST2.

         So was the planning money from ST2 too little or the scope too narrow? Was it too soon (just 8 years after ST2)? Should ST2 have funded a systems plan rather than mere corridors?

      3. Al S.

         Naw, ST2 and ST3 are the same turd. I mean ST2 had plans that were never finished and over budget, right? Along comes ST3 with more money (and more plans) to finish what ST2 started. So ST3 started in a hole it never dug out of. In fact ST3 has been digging an even deeper hole. The people and culture of mega-transit projects in greater Seattle never changed, so why would the outcome? Sound Transit can’t even hire experienced long term leadership at this point. Sparrman is the “interim CEO” remember? Julie Trimm? Wasn’t really up to the job.

         The political solution would be ST4…. new taxes to bail out ST3 and ST2. But it’s clear that won’t happen. So what’s the next step? Try to sucker the State Government to get involved. I can’t see that happening either.

         As it rolls downhill, a snowball gets bigger…..

      4. Naw, ST2 and ST3 are the same turd. I mean ST2 had plans that were never finished and over budget, right?

         Right. But that just shows why focusing only on cost overruns is misguided. ST2 and ST3 are not the same turd. Not at all. While ST2 had its weaknesses, most of it is quite good. At worse you had implementation flaws (not enough stations, stations in the wrong place, too costly, etc.). But fundamentally it was sound.

         ST3 is a turd. The only fundamentally sound major project is Ballard Link. That’s it. But Ballard Link got tied up with a bad project (a second downtown tunnel) so even it is tainted. But consider all the other major projects in ST3: Everett Link, West Seattle Link, Issaquah Link, Tacoma Dome Link. Every single one of those projects is bad. Every single one should be replaced by enhanced bus service (and relatively minor improvements to Sounder). The vast majority of spending in ST3 is on bad projects. In contrast consider ST2:

         1) Northgate Link. This included U-District station. Thus this completed the section that many considered the most important mass transit corridor in the state (U-District to downtown). The extension to Northgate is also extremely strong.

         2) Lynnwood Link. At worse this is overkill (maybe you could have stopped sooner) but it still adds considerable value, especially for north end feeder buses. It is quite possible that stopping shorter would have been just as expensive (since you would have had to build the same freeway infrastructure that already exists for Lynnwood).

         3) East Link. Definitely a worthy project.

         4) Federal Way Link. Similar to Lynnwood Link. Maybe they could have stopped sooner, but it is essential that express buses from Tacoma to Seattle be able to easily serve a station (connected to SeaTac) and then easily get back on the freeway. They can do that at Federal Way.

         Thus at *worst* you have projects that are a bit too big. In contrast with ST3 *most* of the projects are just a bad idea. It is really hard to actually come up with a rail line in Seattle and have it be a fundamentally bad project, but Sound Transit did that with West Seattle Link. Yet West Seattle Link is not as bad as Issaquah Link and probably not as bad as Everett or Tacoma Dome Link.

         The reason why so many plans are poor is because the board doesn’t know what it is doing. It already picked the low-hanging fruit. Even Sound Transit couldn’t screw up a mass transit line from downtown to the UW. An East Side is also worthy. But as you start expanding, the choices get harder. Ballard to downtown via Interbay or UW? West Seattle Link or a Metro 8 subway? Now that we have good bus intercepts, should we extend it further from the core — and if so, where? Should new train lines run on the surface (like typical light rail) or should we automate them? Those are not obvious questions (the way UW to downtown or East Link is obvious). As the questions got harder they made more mistakes. Really big ones.

      5. I am in general agreement with what you say here, Tacomee.

         I don’t think that ST2 framers had envisioned that ST3 would be so big and be around for so many years. Had they known, the likely would have been more circumspect about planning for it.

         ST3 did backfill the revenue shortfalls of ST2. However that is really only a few years of revenue and only a small part of ST3.

         To me, the great shortcoming of ST3 is its lack of project alternatives selection based on objective analysis. It just declared “build”. It didn’t suggest things like dropping unproductive stations nor enhancing or modernizing the DSTT stations nor track. The Board ever since has been living in this happy-go-lucky fantasy of “build” with little regard to setting priorities or keeping within the revenues projected in the measure. Many Board members still refuse to face the basic mistakes of ST3 as they look to blame “inflation” as the budget buster rather than the bad cost estimating and conceptual system design that got done in 2015-16.

         2016 was also a heady time when U-Link was brand new and rail ridership was jumping. The impact of bad vertical circulation design had not sunk in. I think part of the eagerness to get it on the ballot was to take advantage of the feel-good excitement of the new extension. Had ST3 waited until 2020 or 2024 the new train freshness would have faded — and intuitively I think many saw this.

      6. To me, the great shortcoming of ST3 is its lack of project alternatives selection based on objective analysis.

         Exactly. The same thing happened with ST1 and ST2. They just got luckier with those projects. Just because you pick the low hanging fruit quickly doesn’t mean you are good at picking fruit.

      7. Al S.

         Oh, I totally agree with the timing of 2016 vote for ST3. Heady times indeed! Also Sound Transit went for the 25 year whole shebang home run, because I think the powers that be knew a smaller ST3 would likely mean a failed ST4 in 8-10 years. But here we are. There’s no ST4 to realign overall transit goals.

         The only way ST3 could pass voter muster as the promise of a 3 county rail spine. That was the sales brochure in 2016. Was that the best way to go forward with a tri-County transit plan? Doesn’t matter now… that’s what was promised and that’s what will be built.

         Are those trains from the far ends of the network going to run very often? As the trains approach the City, will there be any seats left for the last few stops? Will Sound Transit rework the system for more trains closer to Seattle?

         In the end, Seattle may very well end up paying for the sins of Sound Transit.

      8. “Actually, the ST3 corridors received planning funds from ST2 before getting construction funds from ST3. The difficulty came about because of the timing of ST3 compared to ST2 and what happened in the ST2 studies from 2013-15. They weren’t extensive enough.”

         The problem is the extent of the studies budgeted and planned. Delaying ST3 wouldn’t have helped it. The studies were already done when ST3 was put together, but they were only cursory studies. They weren’t detailed engineering, costing, and design studies like those done after the vote that revealed the flaws. That would require ST to shift those studies and probably the whole EIS process to before the vote. It would have to use existing money or ask voters for a supplement specifically for this. If ST had done this from the beginning or starting with ST2, ST2 could have included all those resources to prepare for ST3 properly, instead of doing just cursory studies. Then we could have had a more informed board review and public vote.

      9. Mike Orr,

         “The problem is the extent of the studies budgeted and planned. Delaying ST3 wouldn’t have helped it. The studies were already done when ST3 was put together, but they were only cursory studies. They weren’t detailed engineering, costing, and design studies like those done after the vote that revealed the flaws. That would require ST to shift those studies and probably the whole EIS process to before the vote. It would have to use existing money or ask voters for a supplement specifically for this. If ST had done this from the beginning or starting with ST2, ST2 could have included all those resources to prepare for ST3 properly, instead of doing just cursory studies. Then we could have had a more informed board review and public vote.”

         **************************************************************************

         Do you really believe ST3 supporters wanted a “a more informed board and public vote”? I think the transit cheerleaders just wanted to ram the thing though, future problems be damned. And they were likely right. ST3 had this little window of euphoria to get passed. Bringing up the shortcomings with more study? ST3 wouldn’t pass. ST3 was a vote on a tri-County rail spine. Trying to morph ST3 into something else is foolish.

         We bought it…. sorry no returns.

      10. Do you really believe ST3 supporters wanted a “a more informed board and public vote”? I think the transit cheerleaders just wanted to ram the thing though, future problems be damned. And they were likely right. ST3 had this little window of euphoria to get passed. Bringing up the shortcomings with more study? ST3 wouldn’t pass. ST3 was a vote on a tri-County rail spine. Trying to morph ST3 into something else is foolish.

          I agree. From a political standpoint there was no reason to delay. But this doesn’t contradict Mike’s point. Delaying would not have helped us build ST3 any sooner. It simply would have made passing ST3 more difficult. When the planning gets more detailed you are bound to have increasing costs. You are bound to have issues that are controversial. We have had that (big time) but it has largely happened after the vote. People assumed the best when they voted. Now we are stuck with reality.

          As folks have mentioned, the timing was also perfect. We were coming out of a recession. The national election only heightened partisanship (still does). It is very easy to assume that the Democrats are perfect when the Republicans act like idiots (and people like Dan Evans and Joel Pritchard can’t be found). Meanwhile, Link seemed to have solved their building problems. They also finally built most of what they should have started with (UW to downtown). Ridership on the train doubled. Doubled! It was pretty easy to make the case that as this grows it will get a huge number of new riders. More importantly, it was easy to convince an ignorant public that ST knows what it is doing.

          Meanwhile, folks in various places assumed that without a “Yes” vote, they won’t get light rail (and Sound Transit was in no mood to correct them). But mostly it was a yes-or-no vote on transit in general and Sound Transit in particular. With high liberal turnout (in a general election year) and the useless opposition (focusing only on taxes) it is no wonder it passed easily.

      11. The same thing happened in ST1 and ST2, so it’s not an ST3-specific problem.

          ST1:
          – The Portage Bay Ship Canal crossing turned out to be more risky than budgeted in the ballot measure, and risked sinking all light rail, so ST mothballed it for six years, and then tried the other alternative and fortunately it worked.
          – The public before the vote said surface from Rainier Beach to SeaTac was fine, but after the vote Tukwila objected to surface on TIB and we got a more expensive elevated alignment. This is an example of neighborhoods/cities hiding their tunnel/elevated demands until after the vote.
          – The representative alignment was on Broadway and had stations at First Hill, Pine~John, and Roy. The First Hill station was dropped when engineering studies revealed risky soil. The Roy station was absent in the Montlake alternative. When U-Link was revived in 2006, there was no review of stations, which could have replicated the Roy station at 15th & Thomas and added stations at Pine & Bellevue, 23rd & Aloha, and/or 520.

          ST2:
          – The Bellevue City Council obstructed East Link and demanded over a dozen alternatives for the south Bellevue area, as they warred between Bellevue Way, 112th, 405, and no East Link. That added a year to EIS planning.

          ST3:
          – Engineering studies revealed that DSTT2 transfer stations would have to be deeper than their DSTT1 counterparts, turning a 2-3 minute transfer into 8-10 minutes, threatening the usability of the network (because half or more the destination stations will require transferring downtown).
          – Ballard and West Seattle before the vote were fine with the elevated representative alignment, but after the vote they demanded expensive tunnels.
          – The Port objected to elevated on 15th Ave NW jutting into a corner of Fisherman’s Wharf, so ST added a 14th Ave station alternative that’s a significant walk from the center of the Ballard urban village.

          There are probably others I can’t remember offhand.

      12. “ST2 had plans that were never finished and over budget, right? Along comes ST3 with more money (and more plans) to finish what ST2 started”

          That’s a tiny, tiny part of ST3. The part of ST2 that ST3 bailed out was Kent Des Moines to Star Lake (one station). And ST3 fulfilled the vision of Star Lake to Federal Way (one station), and Redmond Tech to Downtown Redmond (two stations), that was the desired endpoint of those extensions but was not in ST2.

          The rest of it: Everett Station, Tacoma Dome, Ballard, West Seattle, 130th Station, etc — was not in ST2.

      13. “I don’t think that ST2 framers had envisioned that ST3 would be so big and be around for so many years.”

          They had no idea what or when ST3 would be or whether it would ever happen. They just had the long-term goal of Everett Station and Tacoma Dome. They probably assumed ST3 would be the same size as ST2 and ST1. In that case it would have been like ST’s smaller-scale ST3 proposal in January 2016. That would have had a Ballard streetcar instead of Ballard Link (to afford West Seattle Link), and it wouldn’t have gone all the way to Everett Station. Then ST4 could have followed after it with more add-ons. But public/politicians’ feedback was against the smaller-scale proposal. They didn’t want just a Ballard streetcar, or Everett Station punted to ST4. So ST enlarged the phase to fit those in.

      14. “There’s no ST4 to realign overall transit goals.”

          ST2 and 3 never realigned previous goals. They just fulfilled more of the long-term goals.

      15. Are those trains from the far ends of the network going to run very often? As the trains approach the City, will there be any seats left for the last few stops? Will Sound Transit rework the system for more trains closer to Seattle?

          Gasp! A reply which shows an understanding of rail transit operations! Congratulations and please accept my apology for some of what I said above. This does show the budding of an interest in actually solving a genuine problem, rather than just trolling.

      16. The ultimate root of the problem is a political structure and process that was built to favor sheltered suburban interests, much of it at a time when it looked like urban areas were inevitably to be left to crime and blight. Things have not really improved that much from the days when Forward Thrust needed supermajority approval. Highways do not need public votes at all, while transit has to adopt substandard alignments to pander to suburban interests that will likely mostly never use rail no matter where it’s built and often reflexively oppose “taxes” no matter what their value.

   2. Part of the problem is the nature of the vote. It gives the illusion that the process is democratic. It isn’t. We have only two choices: Transit Yes or Transit No. When people vote “Transit Yes” we paint ourselves into a corner. People use that a mandate for that particular project. But again, the only alternative was to vote against transit.

      Consider this blog and ST3. There were plenty of people — myself included — that felt like ST3 was a terrible plan. There were some good parts (of course) but way too many bad parts. But the folks on the blog made it clear that while they shared my concerns, they sure as hell weren’t going to recommend voting against transit. The same was true of other organizations (e. g. the Sierra Club) that likely spent way less time digging into the details. Those spearheading the charge against the measure were simply against transit spending (Tim Eyman, Seattle Times). They would be opposed to the measure no matter how it was designed.

      [For what it is worth I voted against because I felt like ST would then come back with something smaller and better. But that was a strategy that could have failed. ]

      If we are to ask for voter input, then it should not be in this manner. There should be more choices. For example some say we should just spend all the money on buses. So at a minimum that is three choices. But there were others saying that we should add rail, but in a different manner. One suggestion was building Ballard to UW along with a Metro 8 line. Thus you could have a ballot measure like so:

      1) No additional transit spending.
      2) Spend money on buses.
      3) Plan A (The Spine, West Seattle/Ballard Link, etc.)
      4) Plan B (Metro 8, Ballard-UW, lots of buses)
      5) Plan C (…).

      People could mark their preferences (not just pick one). Even if it wasn’t binding, we would have an idea of how people feel about the various projects. There would be a real debate as to the benefits and drawbacks to each option instead of the overly simplistic transit-good-or-bad argument.

      Or they could just reverse the process. Allocate the money first and then decide what to do with it later. Consider school levies. They don’t have a detailed budget when you pass a school levy — that is up to the school board.

      Which brings up the core of the problem. The board is neither elected nor appointed. It is a part time board made up of members who are elected to completely different positions. The folks in charge are representatives, but very few people vote for or against them based on their actions on the board. So the vote is not democratic and the board is not representative. Nor is the board full of experts appointed by representatives. They have no special skills when it comes to transit (and it shows). It is simply not a good process.

      1. I’d agree with this to some point…. but let’s lay the blame where it belongs, starting with the Urbanist. When we had a chance to vote for this, The Urbanist is 100% full tilt pro-ST3, and they were not alone.

         The idea of voting for an 8 year, or 10 year regional transit plan? Check in with the grownups at the Seattle Times. Their editorial board thought ST3 had too long of life span and overreaching goals. We’re not even 10 years into ST3 and it’s roundly disliked.

         Call me a pessimist, but behind closed doors, maybe the political class never believed in ST?. Was the goal always to have the State or Feds bail out the project when it failed? Because that’s what the Urbanist is asking for now. Blind cheerleaders 9 years ago….. now begging for State intervention? Doug Trumm needs to write an op-ed to admit he was dead wrong about ST3 before anybody should believe the Urbanist has any solution to the transit mess we’re in.

      2. When we had a chance to vote for this, The Urbanist is 100% full tilt pro-ST3, and they were not alone.

         That is not entirely true. The Urbanist published this: https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/01/11/ballard-spur-and-metro-8-subway-serve-seattle-better-than-interbay-light-rail/. This is strong argument against the ST3 projects (at least in Seattle).

         But when it came time to vote that wasn’t an option. There was no “other” on the ballot. It was vote for ST3 or vote for nothing. A vote against ST3 could easily be seen as a vote against transit. Tim Eyman would have been dancing in the streets. He would say this is a mandate against further transit spending. The Seattle Times editorial board would join them in slightly less inflammatory rhetoric.

         I don’t blame anyone for voting for ST3. They likely thought it was the only way we would get any improvement in transit. Sound Transit — in their campaign — never explained that even without ST3 the train line to Lynnwood would be built. Thus a lot of voters in Snohomish County probably thought that voting yes for ST3 was the only way that trains would make it to Lynnwood.

         Voting for ST3 was reasonable, even if you hated the plans.

         I voted against it, but only because I thought that the board would lick its wounds and come up with something smaller (and better) if folks rejected the plans. But this vote was far more of an up/down vote on transit than it was a vote for a specific plan. That is not bad enough on the surface, but the worst part is that is used as excuse to stick with the current plan. It is bad enough that things have changed and people could right now may prefer an alternative. But it is quite possible they would have voted for the alternative the day original vote was taken. They just weren’t give the choice.

      3. Ross Bleakney,

         “Voting for ST3 was reasonable, even if you hated the plans.”

         I just have to disagree with this. Also disagree with the idea that ST3 core structure was going to able to be changed years down the road. I mean the idea that State government would want any part of the ST3 shit show is a pretty good joke.

         You broke it, you bought it.

      4. Ross,
         I also remember that before the vote Sound Transit focused on the transit portion and claimed that detailed design still needed to be done and promised lots of outreach to select the best alignment. But as soon as the vote passed, the focus changed to build what “voters approved”. Outreach became marketing, not adjusting the plan to meet transit outcomes.

      5. The reason the state created ST3 was so that it wouldn’t have to be directly involved in the project/alignment decisions.

         Funding transit is a different matter. The state has never been interested in funding transit. That’s why all the local transit agencies and ST have to raise all their funding locally. The state sees its responsibility as funding highways, ferries, Amtrak Cascades, and statewide bus routes like the Dungeness Line. If you want to use something other than those modes, you have to turn to local funding, which is also subject to state tax on the tax rates.

         The state does have a small grant fund for small transit projects/operations. It’s used mostly for inter-county coverage routes like in Skagit-Island county. Metro has gotten some grants, like to add weekend service on the 164 (Kent-Maple Valley) for a period of time. And the state has grants to fulfill its goals, like free fares for youth under 18.

      6. “the idea that State government would want any part of the ST3 shit show is a pretty good joke.”

         The primary request is for the state to help fund existing transit operations and expand bus routes. That would benefit all the agencies: Metro, Community Transit, Skagit Transit, Sound Transit, and those in Eastern Washington and the rest of Western Washington. That’s what some other states have that Washington doesn’t.

         Secondly, different people are requesting different things for Sound Transit: contribution to capital projects, making structural changes to Sound Transit (which wouldn’t necessarily require state money), or taking over Sound Transit.

      7. Mike Orr,

         The State government already has enough transportation problems to deal with… starting with the State ferry system.

         Why would the State want to get involved more in local transit? Or local public education for that matter? Or any number of other local issues? The latest op-ed in the Urbanist is just the latest Seattle cry of “We need the State to bail us out!”. This viewpoint is real popular with the Urbanist, the Stranger, maybe even with Seattle voters in general, but not any elected officials outside of the Emerald City.

         There’s no outside help coming here.

      8. “Why would the State want to get involved more in local transit?”

         Because it would be better for the state and for people all over the state if we had better transit all over the state.

      9. I think, ideally, you would have multiple “build” options on the ballot, but for that work, you pretty much have to have ranked choice voting. Otherwise, the pro-transit camp would end up splitting the votes between the various plans, while the anti-transit camp would be united in the “no build” option, with the end result being that nothing ever gets built.

         Even in an imaginary world where ST was required to select three different build alternatives (plus no-build) and all 4 options before voters with a ranked-choice vote, the ST board would not really pick the alternatives in good faith. Instead, they would start with the option they really want (ST3 as proposed) and go through motions of making the other two options as awful as possible, so that they option they want is the option that gets picked.

         Somehow, you need an ST board that is really and truly dedicated to good transit outcomes, isn’t married to a particular technology, and is willing to seriously propose multiple alternatives for voters to consider. But, I don’t have any good ideas of how to get that. Try as you might, you can only legislate actions, not intentions, and, even making the ST board directly elected doesn’t really solve the problem, as the average voter knows very little about transit, so people will end up voting for ST board members based on where they stand on the general left-right political axis, or on how they stand on hot-button issues such as fare enforcement or homelessness, elections would not actually be decided based on their ideas for transit expansion.

      10. Dude, the State Legislature created Sound Transit (it has a different legal name Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority). It is indeed “broke”, but there’s nobody to “buy” it.

          The Leg might try to disband it in a fit of remorse, but there are a lot of implicitly State-backed bonds that have to be retired before any foolishness like that would be countenanced by the State Supreme Court.

      11. I think, ideally, you would have multiple “build” options on the ballot, but for that work, you pretty much have to have ranked choice voting.

          Yes, of course. That was one of the problems with the non-binding vote on the viaduct. People were not allowed to rank their preferences and since none of the three options had a majority it became impossible to figure out a consensus opinion. If people ranked their choice it would have been much better.

          There are alternatives. One option would be to have a two phase vote. For example:

          Do you support spending this much money on transit? If you marked “Yes”, please choose from the following options: …

          Another alternative is to have separate votes. One for funding and one for how to spend the money. Another option is to operate the way schools often did. You have a levy, but it is up to the (elected) board to decide what to spend it on. The advantage to that approach is that the board can be more flexible. They may change their mind based on escalating costs, detailed studies or just new board members.

          The same thing would be true if Sound Transit was able to raise taxes on their own. Then they would be like the state. You elect representatives and they spend as much money as they want on whatever they want. That too would be preferable to what we have. All of those systems would be more democratic than what we have now.

          Our current system is flawed and misleading. We have representatives on the board that are elected to other posts. Technically we can vote for or against a candidate bases on their approach to Sound Transit but I can’t think of that ever happening. My guess is it never happens. The attitude towards Sound Transit is irrelevant. That would be fine if ST was a small agency — a small part of their job — but it isn’t.

          Then we have a vote, but the whole thing is conflated. Instead of a two part vote (do you want to spend money on transit and if so, how?) we have a terrible choice (do you want to spend money on this particular transit project or nothing at all?). It is worse than no vote, because it gives the illusion of choice and a misleading representation of our intent. It implies that a majority of people wanted that project, even though it is quite likely that a majority simply wanted to spend more money on transit. Yet this is seen as some sort of mandate — that people wanted *this* transit. That is simply not true — they were never given the choice to vote for any other type of transit. They weren’t even given the choice of spending money on transit but letting the board decide. It was this or nothing, which is no real choice at all.

      12. even making the ST board directly elected doesn’t really solve the problem, as the average voter knows very little about transit, so people will end up voting for ST board members based on where they stand on the general left-right political axis, or on how they stand on hot-button issues such as fare enforcement or homelessness, elections would not actually be decided based on their ideas for transit expansion.

          You don’t know that. It is quite likely that the people who would serve on the board would be people who are interested in transit just as the people who are on the school board are interested in schools. There are numerous outlets that would grill the candidates on the issues. Organizations like The Urbanist, The Stranger, The Seattle Times and this very blog would interview candidates and have meaningful things to say about them. Even if the average person ignored the race, they would pick candidates based on the endorsements.

          One of the main advantages is that there would be a real debate. It is highly likely that several candidates would run as just-spend-money-on-buses candidates. They would get publicity and be considered seriously. There would be people questioning the need for a second tunnel and train to West Seattle, the Tacoma Dome and Everett. Again, these are serious approaches that are not seriously considered outside of this blog because no one elects the board. But it is highly likely serious candidates would emerge with those opinion. Even if they lose it is quite possible that people would be made aware of the various issues surround Sound Transit.

          Right now people are blissfully unaware. Oh, they’ve heard about the cost overruns, but they just assume that the plans are the best that we can do for the area. There is no real alternative but to just keep building. That is completely untrue, but there is so little coverage of that idea that it doesn’t matter.

6. So what’s the cost of *not* having reliable, affordable public transit across the city and Bellevue?

   Is it too much of a burden for you while you’re sitting in traffic

   GFY

   1. I wouldn’t worry too much about this. This effort will go exactly where it should go — nowhere.

      This region isn’t going back to the 80’s.

   2. No offense, but that is the problem. It is viewed as one extreme or the other. Either a terrible plan or no transit at all. That shouldn’t be the only options.

      We can have very good transit without building stupid projects. But it would take real analysis, not baseless assumptions. We are building things with no science or even common sense behind them. Tacoma Dome Link for example. Why? Sounder is faster when it is running and the buses are faster when it isn’t. So the goal is to serve those areas in between. Why? Why would an area so lacking in density, destinations and even a basic level of transit service spend billions of dollars on one line connecting places like Federal Way and Fife.

      Because someone at one point thought it would be cool to connect Everett, Seattle and Tacoma with a subway line. Not a high speed line, not something that leveraged the existing rail lines — but a subway line.

      It is a false choice. We can have really good transit if we invest in the right things. Just look at our neighbors to the north.

7. If I was to reform Sound Transit I’d say that the state needs to actually chip into the cost of building said infrastructure than it being on the sidelines in the equation. Because they benefit from said infrastructure being built from a economic and tax perspective so should have skin in the game. Alongside the fact that Inslee has talked a big talk about the state being green and environmentally friendly, yet was unwilling to put money towards public transit projects in the state that wasn’t free fares or youth fares is frustrating for someone who keeps talking avout the climate so much.

   And to people who would say “But what about Eastern Washington” Give Ellensburg, Moses Lake, Tri Cities, Wenatchee, Pullman, Spokane, Walla Walla money for public transit as well, extended operation hours, expanded bus service, money to build BRT or Trams in said cities. I’d be perfectly fine with such an arrangement if it meant Seattle gets more infrastructure funding. Honestly most of the major cities in Washington state should have a BRT or Tram/LRT line running through their city.

   1. State financial support for transit in Washington is remarkably absent. And with majorities of population and representation in the Puget Sound region it seems possible to change this.

      Some states actually own and operate their public transit like Rhode Island, Maryland and New Jersey. Other states have transit performance oversight as part of getting state funding like California.

      If the state wants to get more hands-on they should look to providing g financial support too. Otherwise they are just meddling in and bureaucratizing the system.

      I note that the State runs a transit system — the ferries. Plus the State leads the Amtrak Cascades effort.

      It isn’t perfect, but I think a compelling argument could be made to transfer Sounder and ST Express to the State. T-Link can be handed to PT. The Link system could be transferred to Metro with some joint powers arrangement for each of the two extensions into other counties — One now open and the other still not ready for construction.

      That leaves what to do about the referendum and revenue collection authorized in ST3. To me, that suggests that Sound Transit shouldn’t be running or building anything. They should simply be charged with distributing funds to others to do the building and operating. They should be the oversight — as opposed to what we currently have with ST doing the building with little oversight.

      And to get things built, the State could benefit from a separate transit capital department that can design and build transit projects anywhere in the state. Whether it’s for a new transit center in Pullman, a BRT in Clark County or a light rail extension in Seattle, this department could add value in planning, costing, measuring benefits, funding and building projects — as opposed to each transit operator doing it on their own.

      1. Al S.

         Sorry of this is a little harsh, but there’s no way the State wants anything to do with Sound Transit. Just think if you were the Governor…. taking over a dysfunctional transit company in just 3 Counties of the entire State? Not real high on the “to do” list I’d guess.

         But honestly… every time Seattle paints itself into a corner….. housing, public schools, etc…. the answer can’t be, “Let’s have the State or Feds bail us out”.

      2. Tacomee, Seattle didn’t “paint itself into a corner”. Stop with the absurd statements as they make you look ridiculous.

      3. tacomee the pitiful “only three counties in the whole state” which comprise the Sound Transit District are two-thirds of the State’s economy and a bit over half of its population, so a wee bit more important than you paint them

      4. Rhode Island, Maryland, and New Jersey are three of the five densest states in the union. They are states that are small in area but have significant urban areas within those states that can have a significant impact on state politics. Washington is 22nd, between New Hampshire and Texas. We have to deal with significant rural interests in our legislature that want nothing to do with subsidizing Seattle.

8. Just chiming in as an uneducated amateur who happens to live in Seattle not far from the Mount baker stop. I don’t mind the spine idea. I like being able to take a train from my neighborhood and get to the airport, cap hill, and downtown, and sometimes I do find myself even up by the u district. What I never, ever do, ever, and never want to do, is get on a bus. Busses are the worst form of transport available, and if you don’t agree with me, then I think you’ve never ridden the bus in Mount Baker. It is not something that can be fixed with infrastructure. I don’t want to sit in a closed box with mostly sick coughing people who can’t pull their pants up. That is not a glib statement – that is literally most of who rides the bus around here. It is disturbing and not the transit experience I want for myself or others. I would never take money from good trains to throw after bad busses. Sorry guys.

   1. @Stephen You’re commenting in a Bus Is Worth Any Fuss forum. You’ll get eatn alive here, trust me.

      Viva New Flyer!

   2. ” I don’t mind the spine idea. I like being able to take a train from my neighborhood and get to the airport, cap hill, and downtown”

      The Spine means Link connecting downtown Seattle, Lynnwood, Everett, Bellevue, Redmond, the airport, Federal Way, and Tacoma. All those trips you talk about are add-ons, not the Spine’s mission. The Spine could have bypassed Rainier Valley, and then you wouldn’t have a train to the airport or your other trips.

      Capitol Hill and Roosevelt Stations exist because they’re on the way to the U-District and Lynnwood. The Rainier Valley segment exists because officials wanted to route it through there for equity (serving historically unrepresented groups; i.e., minorities, low-income), partly because that would make the line higher priority for federal grants. There’s also some sense of improving walkability and urban villages: that also helped Rainier Valley get the alignment, and also led to stations on University Way and Broadway (instead of I-5/Eastlake). Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to get Link on Aurora (north Seattle/Shoreline) or Pacific Highway (Kent, Des Moines, Federal Way).

   3. You do realize that very few people actually ride the train. Even after we spend billions completing the spine more people will ride the bus. The train will only cover a tiny part of the city. It won’t serve places like the Central Area, Fremont or even First Hill.

      So what your saying is that a handful of people should be lucky enough to ride the great and wonderful train, but everyone else is just out of luck. Screw those people. Get a car, right?

      This is one of the most arrogant, elitist statements I’ve read on this blog. I’m sure you can find this attitude in other parts of the world, but it is usually found only within a privileged upper class. But most people in Europe or Asia just wouldn’t write such a thing. It is absurd. Everyone (other than the very rich) takes the bus.

      Unfortunately this attitude towards the bus is quite common in America and like so many similar problems, it has it’s roots in racism. If live in a wealthy (white) suburb you take the train into town. But mostly you drive. Only poor people (especially people of color) take the bus. Of course it isn’t accurate, but it embodies the very attitude you are presenting here.

   4. > you’ve never ridden the bus in Mount Baker. I don’t want to sit in a closed box with mostly sick coughing people who can’t pull their pants up.

      I’m assuming you’re using the route 7, route 48, and route 106.

      > It is not something that can be fixed with infrastructure.

      It’s not really to do with it being a bus but usually the route the bus takes. aka the route 550 is generally fine. Or for opposite scenarios the green/red line in wmata has problems with more crime.

      For the conversion to rapidride r of the 7 that was one of the pros/cons debated by the community is having more enforcement on the buses as part of the it’s conversion.

      https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/01/04/metro-shelves-rainier-rapidride-and-some-route-7-riders-like-it-that-way/

      1. “It’s not really to do with it being a bus but usually the route the bus takes.”

         That’s a point. You can usually map bus problems with the neighborhoods they go through.

   5. “I don’t want to sit in a closed box with mostly sick coughing people who can’t pull their pants up.”

      That’s only 10% of riders maybe, not most of them. Most people on the 7, 8, 36, 50, 60, 106, and 107 are ordinary working-class and middle-class people going to work, shopping, school, etc.

      1. @Mike Orr,

         “That’s only 10% of riders maybe”

         If anywhere near 10% of the people can’t pull up their pants, then that is a problem for me. Just saying.

      2. I think it’s less than 10% total. 10% is the maximum you might see on one bus, but then the next bus might have zero, and the next bus might have one or two on the opposite end of the bus from you.

         I’m assuming “can’t pull up their pants” refers to the hip-hop style of wearing them around the hips rather than the waist, not actually being undressed. I’ve never seen that.

      3. @Mike Orr,

         ‘ I’m assuming “can’t pull up their pants” refers to the hip-hop style of wearing them around the hips’

         I was assuming he was referring to some of our local fentenal addicts, that also seem to have trouble with their pants.

   6. “ I don’t want to sit in a closed box with mostly sick coughing people who can’t pull their pants up. “

      I think you’re less crowded on a SE Seattle bus than on a Link train (as I live in this neighborhood too). On Link you may not even get a seat! And there are often more people inside a Link train car closed box than a Metro bus closed box.

      All joshing aside, it’s contradictory that if you claim that you’ll never ride a bus you can’t turn around and claim to know the typical health status of a bus rider. And the rider density and health status vary by time of day and route pretty significantly. I’ve ridden the busy Route 7 on a bus with 5 people on it.

      If a bus is too crowded just wait for the next one as the crowding usually means that the bus behind schedule and the next one arrives shortly. It’s called bus bunching.

      Or maybe you didn’t realize that posters cannot edit things once submitted. Posting on STB is like getting a permanent tattoo on your face.

      1. @Al S,

         “ I think you’re less crowded on a SE Seattle bus than on a Link train”

         You are correct about that. Even though a Link train has something like 10 to 12 times as much capacity as a bus, the Link train is often much more crowded. Link is just that popular.

         But one thing I do like about the train is that I don’t need to sit facing forward with my back to a large number of people I can’t see. I just feel safer sitting sideways and seeing everyone near me — in all directions. I don’t like being surprised.

         The other nice thing about the train is there is a stronger security presence. And I find that reassuring too.

         And the crowding on Link should get much better when Full ELE opens.

      2. “Even though a Link train has something like 10 to 12 times as much capacity as a bus, the Link train is often much more crowded.”

         One Link line is comparable to multiple bus routes. There’s no way a bus could do the same thing as Link with comparable travel time. The 124, 36, and 106 overlay parts of south Link. The 49, 43, 70, 67, and former 41 overlay parts of north Link. One bus route couldn’t serve all those stations with the same speed, so it can’t match all of Link’s trip pairs. There was never a bus route from Rainier Valley to SeaTac airport before Link; it on its own was deemed too low ridership and priority. The more Link is extended, the more buses can’t keep up while serving all Link stations. My friend in north Lynnwood would have loved to have had Link’s performance on Lynnwood-Capitol Hill or Lynnwood-UDistrict before Link, but it wasn’t possible.

         The people you see on Link at Mt Baker, some are going to the airport, some to Rainier Beach, some to Beacon Hill, some to downtown, some to Capitol Hill, some to the U-District, etc. They all overlap, multiple bus routes’ worth of people all in one train.

      3. @AI S
         Given equivent ratios of space to passengers, in addition to the reasons given “light rail is generally considered more comfortable than a bus because it rides smoother due to its fixed tracks, has more legroom and space for passengers, produces less noise, and experiences less swaying or jolting from road irregularities, making for a more stable and pleasant journey; essentially, the rail system provides a more consistent and controlled ride compared to a bus navigating traffic on roads. “

      4. @NewFlyer5StarService

         “produces less noise, and experiences less swaying or jolting from road irregularities, making for a more stable and pleasant journey”

         Absolutely true. And that is part of the basis of the so called “rail bias”. But it is also more than that.

         The smoother, more consistent ride also factors into higher capacity and higher ridership. Why? Because the smoother, safer ride allows the agencies to configure the vehicles for a higher percentage of standing passengers. And that increases total capacity.

         Additionally, the smoother, safer ride leads to higher acceptance of standing loads.

         I can attest to the fact that I will avoid standing on a bus in pretty much all circumstances. I just don’t feel safe standing on a bus in city traffic.

         But standing on a train? Not an issue for me at all. I’ll do it for miles and not even think about it.

      5. @Lazarus

         Yes, so true about ridership, and this is a point that gets so lost through
         and through on this blog site. Build it and they will come, bus not so
         much.

         I was just reading where Vegas is finally bailing on the Bus Only Fuss mentality and has finally decided to splurge and go with Light Rail.

         hallelujah brother

      6. @newflyer

         Vegas is moving forward with brt and also with the elons loop tunnels. I’m not aware of any lrt projects moving forward in Vegas. Unless are you talking about the monorail?

         https://urbanland.uli.org/development-and-construction/las-vegas-betting-on-bus-rapid-transit-to-spur-development-along-key-corridors

      7. @NewFlyer5StarService

         “…..and this is a point that gets so lost through
         and through on this blog site.”

         This blog is about buses, and there are a lot of inconvenient truths that get “ignored” in the praise of 1980’s Metro colored amber. But LR is here, the ridership base loves it, and the genie is not going back in the bottle.

         “Build it and they will come, bus not so
         much.”

         Another inconvenient truth. LR gets higher ridership, even on the same route, even with the same operating characteristics. Ditto for streetcar. As they say, “Quality sells.”

         I had not heard that Las Vegas had finally given up on buses, but it is generally knowledge that they need to.

         Bus only isn’t cutting it, and the LV Monorail keeps going bankrupt every couple of years.

      8. @Lazarus & WL

         I can’t find the link for Vegas. I saw a blurb somewhere in which LV was set
         to seek out 25 billion for LR. Who knows, it could have been an old Yahoo
         link from years past that appeared current. Yes, I too found it odd that LV would do such a 180.

      9. The streetcar doesn’t get high ridership, I’m not sure how that proves your point Lazarus

         Anyways regarding west Seattle link I’m alright with light rail but the costs need to be decreased heavily. We can build elevated or at grade but a tunnel isn’t justified there.

         For the Everett / Tacoma link extensions I’m supportive of them. I’m actually more positive on the detour to Paine field after I checked the density near the proposed stations.

         Issaquah and south Kirkland link I really do not see how would imagines transit riders using them. Someone going from Issaquah highlands to slu would go from 2 routes 554 and rapidride C to taking 4 routes and transferring 3 times

      10. This blog is about buses

          This blog covers all transit.

          Another inconvenient truth. LR gets higher ridership, even on the same route, even with the same operating characteristics. Ditto for streetcar. As they say, “Quality sells.”

          Simply not true. Rail ridership is a tiny subset of bus ridership. It is highly unlikely that Link will ever come close to the ridership of the buses before the pandemic (over 400,000 riders a day).

          Despite major investments in Link — including finishing the most productive, most important section — overall transit ridership is still well below what it was before the pandemic. Yes, trains have replaced buses in some areas, but overall transit ridership is down.

          There are several reasons for this, but it boils down to the fact that the network isn’t that good. Link isn’t that good and neither are the buses. Worse yet, they don’t work together very well. In many cases they never will — they can’t. If you ignore the buses while designing your system then the buses can’t connect to it easily. The buses are stuck making numerous turns before finally reaching the station. This hurts the network in many ways. It takes longer for those riders to get to Link (and their final destination). It makes the buses less efficient, which means they can’t run as often. This is what happens when you ignore the network when building your subway system.

          The worse part is with ST3 it continues to ignore the network. The most productive project (by far) from both a ridership as well as network standpoint would be Ballard to the UW. But none of the other projects are built that way. Again they largely ignore the network. With few exceptions there is no enhancement of the grid. Other than the 50 (a relatively minor route) West Seattle Link has no crossing routes. Most of Ballard Link has no crossing routes — it can’t, as it is sandwiched between the waterfront and a greenbelt. Similarly there are few major improvements in speed. Most of the trains replace buses that are actually quite fast. They could be even faster if we invested even a tiny portion of the money being spent on Link. The most popular trips on some of the extensions (e. g. Tacoma to Seattle on the Tacoma Dome extension) are faster using transit alternatives, let alone faster with a car.

          Yet this is massively expensive. We are spending more on transit per capita then anyone in the US and most likely anywhere in the world. Yet we are not building anything great. Of course it adds value. The problem is that it is just very poorly planned. The choices were made in an arbitrary manner. Might as well have thrown darts at the wall. We will spend a fortune building something that isn’t very good and then complain that the buses — forced to do the heavy lifting — are underfunded and not that good.

      11. @WL — I don’t see how any of those projects can compete with a similar investment in bus infrastructure and service. The bus projects would come out ahead in terms of ridership per dollar spent. The same would be true for time savings per dollar spent. Of course both of these metrics are controversial (https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2016/04/22/which-riders-matter/). But far more riders would come out ahead if we focused on the buses.

          Which is not to say that we shouldn’t build any more rail. It is just that these particular rail projects are a very poor value. Ballard Link is borderline. Something serving First Hill or SLU could work. Ballard/UW rail could definitely be worth it. But most of the ST3 plans are too expensive and add too little to justify the cost.

      12. @NewFlyer5StarService,

          “I can’t find the link for Vegas. I saw a blurb somewhere in which LV was set to seek out 25 billion for LR”

          I haven’t seen anything indicating that they have formally launched a LR system, but I have seen plenty of articles complaining about their 100% bus (and MR) system and how it is failing the city. There seems to be consensus on moving towards LR, but they need to launch a more formal process.

          LV is the last major city in the West that hasn’t yet committed to a shift towards rail. $25B should do a lot towards closely that gap.

   7. “ I would never take money from good trains to throw after bad busses. Sorry guys.”

      The problem is, good trains isn’t what the current plan builds. When the current spine is done, it will still be slower than driving most of the time. Link right now is ok-ish for what it does now, but it really doesn’t have the speed necessary to attract significant ridership for the cost over longer distances. SoundTransit’s own 2019 ridership estimates show huge drops in ridership past Federal Way and Lynnwood.

      For the types of distances involved, to attract significant ridership, you’d want something like Berlin’s Regiobahn RE1, which operates at an average speed of ≈70 mph including station stops and 100 mph maximum. It’s basically their equivalent of Sounder, only fast enough to attract a significant number of people away from driving.

      Link is costing an awful lot of billions and I can’t help but wonder what those billions could have built if something else were considered for the longer distance trips.

      1. True that, Glenn. We are building a system that has top speeds slower than the freeway. Keep in mind that the stop spacing is over 2 miles for much of this so the top speed will be commonly hit outside of Seattle.

         Add to that the 21 stops at ST3 buildout to get from Tacoma Dome to Westlake, then a deep station multiple escalator transfer there followed by another 16 stops to Everett. We are spending billions on a streetcar speed system.

         So that’s 37 total stops for a rider with 24 ribs counting both sides. That’s some spine! And that’s not counting the T line in Tacoma.

      2. Though the RE1 also only runs every 60 minutes (assuming this wikipedia page is correct) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_routes_in_Mecklenburg-Vorpommern#Regional_services

         Most of the time link would get you there earlier for a similar distance.

      3. Frequency depends on time of day and where.

         Full RE1 goes pretty far outside the urban area of Berlin. It’d be like Chehalis, since that’s really where the edge of the heavy commuter traffic starts. Potsdam would be more like a Tacoma or Everett, a second city within the actual urban area.

         The map is here:
         https://www.vbb.de/fahrinformation/zug-um-zug-mehr-schiene/re1/
         Notice the single lines showing less frequency at the edges.

         But it is also true in a more dense city there just isn’t that much demand for long trips. The frequency matches the demand.

         Considering the 2019 Link ridership estimates for Federal Way – Tacoma Dome are less that 1/4 that of Seattle – SeaTac, I really don’t picture SoundTransit running that service very often either. They might start that way, but I imagine they’ll cut frequency south of Federal Way back to something more in line with ridership demand at some point. The farebox recovery ratio on a bunch of 3/4 empty trains just doesn’t pencil out.

      4. Oh!
         Also:
         RE1 may only operate every 15 minutes most of the time on the core route, major places such as Potsdam (equivalent to say Tacoma or Everett) have other RE lines. So, in Potsdam, your RE choices are every 4 minutes or so. So, you’d get something like a Tacoma – Seattle train every 15 minutes, a Tacoma – Redmond train every 15 minutes, and a Tacoma – Bellevue – Marysville train every 15 minutes.

         Except every hour one of those Tacoma – Seattle trains is a Chehalis – Bellingham train, and every hour one of those Tacoma – Redmond trains is an Olympia – Tacoma – Redmond – Woodinville train.

         But what really drives the possibilities here is the speed. By being faster than driving, it drives high ridership, which justifies the 15 minute core frequency, and also drives ridership on all the other transit modes that serve as ribs to the spine.

      5. That’s the problem with trying to build a hybrid system. It is like a car that can operate as a boat. It isn’t a very good car or boat.

         Which is not to say that an S-Bahn approach couldn’t work in the area. But it would require us to own the tracks. Then I could definitely see an all-day Sounder with fast trains that become part of the subway system as they reach Seattle. But it would still be a small part of our system. It is much more important — for everyone — that we have an extensive subway system in the city. Being able to ride the train from Auburn to Seattle is great. But if you have to then take a slow and infrequent bus to get to your destination (in Seattle) you give up and drive.

         But even if we built it well it wouldn’t get many riders outside Seattle. Every system in North America gets more riders inside the urban core than outside it. Even systems with really good regional rail and really slow buses in the urban core get more riders inside it. People just don’t take that many long distance trips.

         Consider Baltimore. It has arguably the best regional rail system in the country (MARC). Riders can quickly connect to the bigger city (DC). Not only that, but since DC has a first-class metro, riders can easily get around within DC. Yet MARC carries fewer people than the local (underfunded, slow) buses in Baltimore. Baltimore riders have outstanding regional transit and really poor local transit and yet more people ride the local transit.

         Which is why Pierce County should spend more money on its buses and not waste it on “the Spine”. Keep running Sounder during peak and express buses off peak. Buses should run every fifteen minutes from Seattle to Tacoma all day long. (That was the plan, but it got suspended because of the driver shortage.) If we can speed up Sounder that would be great. But because we don’t own the tracks I don’t think all-day service would ever make sense financially. Meanwhile, running the subway that far south is just stupid.

   8. Some of you are missing the point. Even if the train magically excludes the “undesirables” (and it doesn’t) it can’t possibly serve the needs of the vast majority of the people in the city, let alone the region. You need the bus.

      The question then becomes where should we run the trains and where should we run the buses. What should the network look like?

      The answer is complicated but Sound Transit picks rail alignments the way a five-year-old picks an ice cream flavor. There is no science or reason behind it. No deferring to professionals. No attempt to mimic cities that have highly successful transit systems. Just a seemingly random assortment of choices based on a whim. Even when confronted with a study put together by a transit consultant (as in the case of Kirkland) they reject it, preferring their gut.

      Stephen seems to love the train because it allows him to get to various places. He doesn’t explain how he gets to neighborhoods that aren’t served by the train. Nor does he explain how the vast majority of the city — which will never be close to a train — is supposed to get around. The implication is that we are all supposed to drive unless we are lucky enough for our trip to take place on the train or unlucky enough to be stuck on the bus with the unwashed.

      No great city operates that way. Even cities with outstanding rail systems (e. g. London) depend heavily on buses. They invest in the buses for the same reason they invest in rail — it allows people to get around without a car. For a city like Seattle — that will never have a comprehensive rail system — buses are critical to our transit future. There is simply no way that a high percentage of the trips will take place only on the trains. Unless we want to continue to a be a city where the vast majority of trips are taken by car (with ever worsening traffic congestion) we need to improve the full transit network (which is mostly the buses). That doesn’t mean that rail isn’t important. But it means that we need to spend the money wisely and focus our rail spending on where it can be most effective.

      If you want an example of that sort of thing, look to our nearest neighbor: Vancouver. 800,000 people ride the bus — third in English-speaking North America (behind only New York and Toronto). 500,000 ride the train — fifth in North America (behind New York, Mexico City, Toronto and Montreal). The two systems are very well integrated and designed the way most cities would design them. In contrast, we are designing our system in a bizarre, unconventional way. Unless we change course we will end up spending way more than Vancouver for a system that is way less effective.

      The reason transit ridership in this town is so low is really simple. It has nothing to do with “sick coughing people who can’t pull their pants up”. That happens on the train and the bus (and it happens in Vancouver as well). It is because our system just isn’t as good as the one in Vancouver. The train doesn’t serve as many places or run as often as it should. The buses aren’t as frequent or as fast they should be. The network just isn’t very good, so people drive.

      Spending billions on projects that add very little from a mobility standpoint won’t help. It will likely hurt. Thirty years from now — if we continue on the current path — it is quite likely that our transit system will continue to be second-rate. We will have lost our appetite for spending huge amounts of money on something very few people use. We will lose faith in our leaders who claimed this was going to solve our problems and make getting around the city easy.

   9. Sheesh… a new person posts here in Lord knows how many months, stating what is THE most common opinion regarding buses VS trains in the entire city of Seattle, and the first response is to call him a racist? Do you guys want to win hearts and minds here or not??

      As someone who rode both trains and buses in Seattle for many, many years (mostly the RRE) I think there should be some grace given for how shocking it can be to be locked into a small space with the actual poor and mentally ill. We spend a lot of time and effort in this country trying to wall ourselves away from these conditions, and to have that bubble forcibly popped feels akin to an assault.

      One thing I will say to Mr. Weiss: if we build enough trains, eventually that population will be on the trains as well. To the degree you haven’t seen them there much, it’s because the buses go more places, and are more established in the region. Any policy solution to the issues you raise will not be transportation-related.

      1. @spokaneresident,

         No comment on the personal attacks.

         “if we build enough trains, eventually that population will be on the trains as well.”

         Absolutely true. But there are two kinds of safety, perceived and actual, and both work in the favor of rail

         Larger, more open rail vehicles allow most passengers to sit or stand in positions that allow them to see the entire rail car and be more aware of social disorder that might be occurring. And the more open design allows passengers to move further away from issues that might be occurring. This increases perceived safety.

         But actual safety is increased on rail vehicles too. A small number of security staff can more easily patrol one large Link train than they could patrol the equivalent 12 smaller buses. And it is of course much easier to patrol the smaller number of Link stations than it is to patrol the large number of Metro bus stops.

         “Any policy solution to the issues you raise will not be transportation-related.”

         This is also true. Increased security on Link trains isn’t addressing the core problems leading to social disorder. Addressing those core problems is not a transportation issue per say, but as we haven’t been making much progress on these issues as a society, I think we are sort of stuck with increased security for the foreseeable future.

         But hey, I’m just glad that we have Link and are expanding the system. And I’m glad that I feel safe using it.

9. I really think the simplest solution is to elect a board. There are always potential problems with that approach but it is clear we have big problems right now. The board should be able to recommend major changes in various projects — including replacing the rail projects with bus improvements. The board would consist of people who are focused on transit. With any luck there would be members who understand the basics (which is more than I can say for just about everyone on the existing board).

   One key aspect of that is to keep an open mind when it comes to planning. At this point there is no obvious direction for mass transit in this region. My guess is the most cost effective project would be Ballard to UW. But I could be wrong. We would need to study it and consider all the ramifications (including the network as a whole). It is quite possible that the best option would be a massive increase in the number of bus and BAT lanes (along with lots more spending on the buses). It is quite possible that no additional rail makes sense — not until we dramatically improve our bus system (which has slipped over the years).

   1. An elected board was not part of the tri-County Sound Transit agreement. There’s no real way to have an elected board at this point. Even if there was…. how would that change the political make up the board? The elected ST board might very well be more anti mass transit than the board is now. Then what???

      Light rail goes to Tacoma! We all voted on that. Is it good idea? Who knows? But elections have consequences. There’s no rolling ST3 back.

   2. A directly elected board would have it’s own flavor of problems. I would know because I lived in Denver and RTD BoD is a citizen elected board. Most of the board is made up of normal people who have the money and means to sell themselves as politicians rather than experts who know what’s best for Denver transit. Said board is suburban heavy and has very few regular transit riders on its board. Even most of said board members haven’t always been good at answering basic transit questions because they don’t ride enough to be confident in their knowledge. And there’s always the issue of getting an anti transit board member on the BoD who can derail projects for ideological reasons rather than logical reasons.

      If you want transit experts, then you want what Vancouver, BC has with Translink BoD being people nominated by local and provincal officals but is approved by an independent body to look over their credentials and approve or deny candidates from the shortlist for upcoming vacant director seats.

      https://www.translink.ca/about-us/about-translink/governance-model

      Do I think local leaders should still have a say, yes mainly through something like a Regional Mayor’s Council who can write up a shortlist of projects that can be studied and agreed upon should be future projects for the Seattle metro. I think if you were to ask most ST board members they don’t mind being on the board but it adds another thing to their plate that could be done by someone else in their place on the board who can devote their entire energy into it.

   3. I’d be happy with an appointed Board like Zach suggests. That’s how several other major systems are structured including SF Muni , Boston MBTA, Chicago CTA, New York MTA, DC’s WMATA and plenty of others.

      Having an elected official Board is fine when the tasks are serving a small number of riders daily with the buses and trains run through other transit operators — and otherwise be a visionary group selling ballot measures. But ST has chosen to now join the big leagues and carry 140K riders daily in total. They want that number higher too.

      Eventually those elected officials who get their jollies by serving on the ST Board will come to an understanding that running a system is not as pretty as pitching a system. Then that’s when they’ll decide to look to having an appointed Board.

      And usually transit board appointments are management types more than developer pleasers. Most appointees are vetted to be on these boards have years of experience in transit systems performance, representing underrepresented citizen interests or budget development.

   4. An elected board would not be perfect, but at the very least it would shake things up. At the very least there would be people presenting ideas that run counter to the assumptions that got us into this mess. Right now there is no organized opposition — other than people who don’t want to spend any money on transit. It is a breakdown in democracy.

      An appointed board might work, but it could very easily have the same problem. An appointed board might just do the bidding of the people who put them in place — there would have to be complete independence. Otherwise it is quite likely the board would be stuck with implementing the same stupid ideas the leaders wanted. At best you have minor modifications (e. g. serving 20th NW in Ballard, that sort of thing).

      But that isn’t the problem. We need a rethinking of the basic assumptions that got us into this mess. It isn’t the details — it is the big picture. The Spine is stupid. So is Issaquah Link. So is West Seattle Link. You can add as much lipstick as you want — those are still pigs.

      If an appointed board is allowed to rethink those assumptions then it could work. But I fear it wouldn’t.

      1. “An elected board would not be perfect, but at the very least it would shake things up.”

         I worry about that kind of reasoning. We’re about to get an incoming federal administration that wants to shake things up but has little idea what it’s doing and a lot of malicious motivation, and could end up destroying the government, harming everybody.

         What we can say is, an elected board would be a targeted reform that may have some advantages and disadvantages. It may structurally allow having a board with more knowledge and interest in transit issues on it, and more time to focus on them.

         The current system appointing local politicians to basically a “committee” does not allow this interest and focus to emerge. That was perhaps wishful thinking, that there wouldn’t be many technical issues or tradeoffs they’d have to address; the Spine would just happen easily.

      2. I don’t agree with the analogy. If anything it is backwards. Consider RJK Junior. Look at his biography. He has only worked in environmental law. He would be an outstanding choice for head of the EPA. He would be doing what he has been doing most of his life (sue people for harming the environment). No one would object to the appointment, even if it was a political payback for his support of Trump. Even if goes after windmills (literally) it would at least be a choice based on competence.

         Yet that isn’t the post he is being nominated for. He is to be head of Health and Human Services. This is a massive bureaucracy. He has no experience in government nor any experience handling something one tenth that size. Nor does he have any experience or education in the health or human services fields. He would be completely incompetent for that job.

         The current board is similar. It is quite likely they can all do their current job — the job they were elected to do — quite well. I may disagree with Dow Constantine or Bruce Harrell on a few issues, but there is no question they are capable administers of the county and city (respectively). But they are completely incompetent when it comes to the planning aspect of Sound Transit. They could defer, of course. They could hire a bunch of experts and ask them what to build. But they don’t. They pick arbitrary lines on the map and then ask the experts how to run trains to those places.

         Yes, an elected board could also be just as incompetent. But at least it would give us (the electorate) a chance to change direction. During the race there would be a real discussion as to how best spend our transit dollars. This has been missing for a very long time. People just accept the spine as a fait accompli. At the very least a public race would question that assumption (and similar ones). That is what I mean by “shake things up”. Not that we would get a new breed of highly educated experts in power, but that at worse we have a real discussion about transit in the region.

         Part of the reason I feel this way is because I really can’t think of things being much worse than ST3. There was only one good project (Ballard Link) and it has struggled mightily with cost overruns and poor decisions. At this point the Maggie Fimia’s of the world are right: we would be better off just spending money on buses. To be clear, I would build more rail. But I’m saying the rail projects are so bad that simply focusing on bus improvements would be a better value. I never felt that way before. But as soon as the current extensions (to Federal Way and the East Side) and infill stations are complete, there is nothing wrong with focusing on the buses. At worst we revisit adding rail in the future.

10. It’s hard to know if the remedies in the petition will really help. The strength is barely able to go a full day much less a week without at least one major disruption. The real time arrival board system is out of service until sometime next year. There are a lot of operational issues ti be solved in addition to the planning and construction problems. It seems a little dire..

    1. “The real time arrival board system is out of service until sometime next year.”

       What? Is it? It goes up and down with reliability or being on. I haven’t heard that that’s changed. If it is off for an extended period of time, why?

11. “Sound Transit has a large staff for outreach/publicity and some project management while operation, design, and construction are mostly outsourced to local construction firms. ”

    It is not like you know those stuff, give the right guidance, and they will just do it right.

    If ST doesn’t have staff in house with the knowledge, they definitely hired construction management consultant to guide contractor in the process. In my experience, even if you tell contractor exactly what they need to do, they will still bargain with you, dig hole in the contract, or just ignore whatever guidance you provide. That’s why we saw news like WSDOT / SEATAC airport sued contractors after some projects were done.

    Even if the agency won the lawsuit eventually, it always looks like the agencies screwed up from general public’s view.

    1. Also, I’d like to add that the reason that public sector always have to outsource complex design work is that ST simply doesn’t have the diversity of work to organically grow their own staff in such expertise.

       Imagine you are full-time Sound Transit rail designer and you just have ST projects to work on, how did you get as much project experience from all ST projects as your private sector counterpart.

       In this country, building urban rail transit project happens much less often than than building interchange in highway project, so it is more difficult to find resource who are expert in the subject, not to say hiring them to working for ST in-house.

       From employee standpoint, working with ST may bring you some local connection and public sector experience on policy and politics matter, but it doesn’t have much benefit on getting more experience in design and construction of transit project because what you were exposed on technical side is just very limited..

       Therefore, ST’s best chance is to hire exceptional design consultant and keep them very closely in the loop.

    2. Part of the challenge is that the “big firms” want the lucrative design contracts so they aren’t empowered to question the usefulness of the project. What firm would have the guts to say “don’t build this” or “this is the wrong technology for what you need” and not only sacrifice the future project design work and hurt their reputation for going against what staff members or Board members want?

       There are specialty firms out there that don’t want the design work so they can be much more objective and “tell it like it is”. Firms like Charles River and RL Banks come to mind. However ST never hires for those kinds of studies. Instead they want to BUILD BUILD BUILD so they tend to hire the mega firms like WSP, AECOM and HNTB who are predisposed to prefer designing and building expensive things to get those design (and now design-build) contracts!

       I think the core problem is that the agency that pursues the planning and funding should probably not be the same one that builds and operates expensive transit projects. ST is a closed system from getting taxes to building to operating. There is not a system of checks and balances in place.

       The Federal government saw this problem when they set up MPO’s in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Reforms like in 1991 tried to give MPO’s more power, particularly on the highway side opposite state DOT highway building.

       In our region, that’s PSRC. But when is the last time PSRC flexed its muscle? Our elected officials seem to want to keep the agency uninvolved in our region’s transit investments other than to be a bookkeeper. And with future Federal New Starts funding in jeopardy I don’t think PSRC can exert much financial pressure to affect an agency like ST.

       It’s part of the reason that I think ST should only manage the income from their referenda but hand off building and operating to other agencies. That actually is more akin to the original intent of ST in Sound Moves. However the subsequent tax measure votes have turned ST into a mammoth entity that can do what they want — and yet ST was never forced to change their governing structure to respond to their greater role that spends tens of billions of dollars.

       1. “That actually is more akin to the original intent of ST in Sound Moves. However the subsequent tax measure votes have turned ST into a mammoth entity that can do what they want”

          The original intent was to build a Spine from Everett to Tacoma and Redmond, and the light rail mode was chosen early in the process. The subsequent tax measure votes are just fulfilling more of it, so I don’t see how they’re doing something different.

    3. I thought the whole premise of providing a 20-year tax measure was to provide Sound Transit long term funding to hire their own staff and deliver projects one after another, gain internal experience and repeatable processes, reuse design experience with standardized station design. That has allowed Istanbul and Madrid to build out their network, why can’t we learn from those cities?
       Sound Transit may still hire some experts, but at least the internal staff can learn from it and reapply it next time rather than having to hire experts every time. Those experts often come up with other solutions and therefore other issues.

12. The more Sound Transit is made to submit to the whim of the legislature, the more it’s at the mercy of rural legislators whose only perceived interest in how Seattle does is that their constituents hate it. Any elected board that’s tasked with a specific purpose that most people don’t feel the need to follow intently runs the risk of being captured by special interests; look at the mess the Port of Seattle has been over the years. Having a head elected by the entire Sound Transit district could help with the parochial nature of the current board, though.

13. Is STB going to explore this? The piece basically muses openly about Dow being the next CEO of ST. I can’t of anything more disastrous than that. ST has essentially fallen apart on his watch, under the incompetence of his hand-picked CEOs Rogoff and Timm. He’s forcing a ludicrous 7 Billion dollar vanity subway to West Seattle on the region that will carry as many people as a productive RapidRide line. It’s a scandal.
    https://publicola.com/2024/11/19/seattle-nice-dow-constantines-legacy-as-king-county-executive/

    1. I think the editors would be open to working with you to compose a post if you’d like to opine on the topic. The contact email is on the About Us page.

    2. @Shift change,

       I alluded to this awhile back. Do you think Sparrman’s extension was just by chance? Na, Dow is being greased as the next ST CEO.

       Something tells me that he will commit the region to WSLE before the s**t hits the fan with the revenue shortage.

       Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

    3. The article does not say anything or hint at Dow being the next ceo of ST.

       It talks about him being the “He served as chair of the Sound Transit board during the campaign and successful passage of the $54 billion Sound Transit 3 ballot measure” but nothing about him becoming the ceo.

       Are you referring to a different article?

       1. The actual podcast episode is where the hosts speculate on whether Dow would go for ST CEO.

    4. “ ST has essentially fallen apart on his watch, under the incompetence of his hand-picked CEOs Rogoff and Timm. ”

       I see the problem as more structural. When ST2 and ST3 were passed, the Board made no effort to restructure or refocus itself to go from an operator with less than 100K daily riders to one that is proposed to be something like 250K. That’s on top of the different kind attention required to inspect and maintain an actual station rather than gawk at pretty artist renderings.

       And why did the Board choose Rogoff and Timm in the first place? There are dozens of people in the US who literally know how to “run a railroad” because of many years of experience doing so.

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