In the latest installment of uneasiness around ST3, Bruce Harrell rejected the idea ($) of jettisoning West Seattle or Ballard from the plan to balance the books. I would expect nothing less from the Mayor of Seattle. He also proposed another advisory group and some regulatory reforms.
No doubt, regulatory reforms would help. But it’s worth understanding why we’re here. Costs are spiraling ($) because construction dates keep slipping, and they’re slipping because the Sound Transit board — in particular, the Seattle delegation — is not making key decisions.
We are in year nine of ST3, and we still don’t know where many of the stations will be, much less started design. There is plenty of reporting, here and elsewhere, on all of these stations. But to illustrate, let’s focus on Chinatown.
The basic tension here is that anyone thinking about the interests of future riders can easily see that a station next to the existing one is the best for riders, easing key transfers between the Rainier Valley, Eastside, and West Seattle. Meanwhile, many Chinatown business owners are entirely rational in believing that a new station mostly means construction disruption in the short term and higher rents in the long term.
Any Seattle politician trying to maximize their popularity can most easily do so by deferring the decision. Punting it to another study won’t change opponents’ (correct) assumption about the future, but might delay a decision until it falls to someone else, or the decision environment somehow changes. Non-Seattle board members have plenty of other things to fight the City about beyond station locations in Seattle. And another year of our lives passes no closer to being able to ride the line.
As someone who places a very high value in the quality of the system for future riders, and not on the longevity of particular businesses in a particular neighborhood, it’s easy for me to root for the ridership-maximizing choice to win out here. Over twenty years ago, Greg Nickels and others on the Board ultimately ignored calls to serve Southcenter, bury the Rainier Valley segment, and keep First Hill Station. We are still enduring the consequences of that. But it was important that the Board made a decision, so that the project could continue. Today, it is equally important to do so in Chinatown and in the other contentious station areas.
As supporters disappointed with the board’s performance, what is to be done? There’s no transit agency B to come in take over the project. Dismantling the whole thing and starting over puts new service farther away, with all of the fundamental tensions still intact.
Instead, our leverage is the two figures that set the tone for Seattle representation: Mayor of Seattle and (especially) King County Executive. As it happens, both are up for election this Fall. A willingness to alienate a faction to build the system, as Nickels once did, is not a quality that obviously falls on the left/right spectrum that usually frames elections. I won’t pretend to know which two of the four candidates are most likely to make hard decisions that anger sympathetic constituencies. But keep it in mind when you vote.
If I had known this is where we would stand nine years after the ballot measure I wouldn’t have voted for ST3, let alone advocated for it. The whole ‘ST Complete’ idea was clearly a mistake as neither ST nor its stakeholders have the capacity to plan and execute this many projects at once.
The Spine should be finished first, with the expectation that Seattle and other municipalities will build off of it with their own additional lines and extensions, without the multi-county decision-making gridlock.
“The Spine should be finished first, with the expectation that Seattle and other municipalities will build off of it with their own additional lines and extensions”
Would that imply Seattle’s tax money paying for Link in Tacoma and Everett, in a ballot measure that Seattle, itself gets nothing for? Of course, the leaders of Tacoma and Everett would love something like this, but without Seattle’s votes, a regionwide ballot measure can’t pass. And, even if it did, Seattle has no taxing authority to build its own projects and, even if it did, taxpayers already burdened with paying for Everett and Tacoma projects might not want to pay for it.
Tacoma and Everett have enough money to build their segments. It’s Seattle who doesn’t have enough
But, the structure of ST says that the entire jurisdiction pays a uniform tax rate. And, without Seattle’s votes, you don’t have a spine. Remember, Piece County voted against ST3 by a fairly healthy margin.
@asdf2
I am just saying that building the spine has nothing to do with Seattle building or not building the tunnel.
Aka simplifying pierce and snohomish might have like ~5 billion each and north king like 10 billion.
The 5 billion is enough to build their segments.
For Seattle they still have the money they just need to decide to build something else.
If the Ballard segment can’t be built in this half-century, replace it with a Ballard – U District line (mostly in a tunnel) that can be built sooner and cheaper. Being able to delay a second DT tunnel could cover the revenue shortfall.
“Tacoma and Everett have enough money to build their segments. It’s Seattle who doesn’t have enough”
Tacoma link stops at Tacoma Dome rather than going all the way to Tacoma, as originally shown in the ST3 map.
Steve, there’s a problem with a Ballard-U District line: it has no place for a maintenance facility north of the Ship Canal; there just isn’t a large enough cheap parcel to host it.
Glenn has proposed replacing the old NP bridge at 12th Avenue NW and building an MF somewhere in Interbay. If the system were automated trains moving to the MF could wait as long as necessary for the bridge to close.
Trains going into service would be trickier; there might not be a timely window to close the bridge before the train gets late to service. So, you’d want to have one idle train on the north side of the Ship Canal just sitting in order to replace one needing to leave service.
So, it might work, but it would be a bit tricky.
A Ballard to UW line could involve a service or non-service connection to the main line. A non-service connection is much cheaper. You only need one track. It doesn’t matter where the connection is. For example it can be between the U-District and Roosevelt — whatever is easiest. In contrast a service connection requires connecting both tracks and you want it in the right place with the tracks facing the right direction — it is a lot trickier. Using a single service track with automated trains is also cheap. They can basically shuttle themselves to the existing OMF when the system shuts down overnight.
If they did build a separate facility it wouldn’t have to be that big. Automation helps. Every train in our current fleet has to be easily accessible by drivers in the morning. But with automated trains, some of them can be stored on the service tracks. You need a place for spares as well as maintenance and cleaning but the line is not that long. By my estimation we need about a dozen trains (each about half the size of a four-car Link train) to run the trains every 3 minutes (and have some spares). That isn’t a huge amount of space. It is worth noting that while the Ballard Terminal Railroad owns its tracks, the City of Seattle owns the land. ST could probably buy out the company. There is probably enough space to do maintenance on that land but if not you could work out an agreement with BNSF to run the trains on their tracks for a section (since the lines connect) which means you could put a facility somewhere else (like in Interbay).
“there’s a problem with a Ballard-U District line: it has no place for a maintenance facility north of the Ship Canal; there just isn’t a large enough cheap parcel to host it.”
It a heck of a lot cheaper to buy parcels and build a maintenance facility for an automated line than to bore a tunnel that’s at least $6B. The line would not be that long so it wouldn’t be that big. Certainly it would be nice to extend a Downtown to Ballard line to UW and that would require more train sets (and a bit bigger facility), but not that many more.
Looking at the maintenance facilities for Honolulu and Montreal (REM) a site almost as small as the Ballard Fred Meyer would provide almost enough land. In the Interbay and Smith Cove areas there are plenty of places where the soil doesn’t allow for dense development anyway — which is why there are things like a golf course, container storage yards and one story retail there.
I’m not a builder of these things, but I could see that the bigger expense would probably be building on the unstable soil; not buying the land. There appears to be plenty of low use property in the corridor so there are several options of where to locate. Of course, ST would need to do due diligence to make sure that the site could work (including soils).
I don’t see the maintenance facility location as a major reason to not build an automated line. I see it as an overly-hyped concern by those who don’t like the idea for whatever reason. It’s funny how people forget how ST has bought out houses just to move the Shoreline Station and the action never led to an outcry to not build the station.
Ross, ST is not going to break into one of the Spine tubes for a non-revenue connection. It’s just too fraught and messy.
They might agree to the idea I keep pushing of a connection at Third and Pine, because a TBM can just chew through the north wall of the station box as they always do. It would make a huge mess as it always does, but the mess could be hauled away in a few hours using custom made gondolas on the northbound track.
That doesn’t work with a tube because when the compression rings are severed it can collapse. You have to build a “station box” around the junction and carefully remove the top three-quarters of the rings. That BS “demonstration” that The Boring Company made was in a much smaller and shallower tube than a rail tunnel.
You can ask Gemini. It will tell you exactly the same thing about the crushing problem. I’m not making this up.
We all agree that an MF for a fairly short, Skytrain type Light Metro can be small for the reasons you listed, but I am dead certain that BNSF would not host frequent runs of such vehicles on its tracks across the Ship Canal.
For one thing, the connection to the Ballard spur is a trailing-point turnout in the northbound track. A train headed to Interbay would enter BNSF trackage headed toward Everett, would have to cross-over to the southbound track and reverse or just stop on the northbound track once the train has cleared the turnout. Whichever it did it would then push the cars southbound to the MF in Interbay. Returning would also involve running “past” the junction and pushing the cars into the interchange track.
This is how freight cars are transferred a couple of times a week between the lines; more frequent moves of the expensive and relatively fragile subway cars would be a headache unwelcome in Fort Worth.
Another is that if the system were actually a Skytrain-like Light Metro, the cars would probably use third-rail power distribution, especially if the had no connection to The Spine.
Such cars can have clearance issues with standard railroads because of the pickup arms.
So, that would be a pretty clumsy operation for an ongoing system. Glenn’s idea for returning the Twelfth (or Thirteenth, I’m not sure which it was named) Avenue Bridge is a lot better though certainly not cheap.
However, if the little spur railroad’s facilities on the north side of the Canal are big enough as you speculated — I’m skeptical, but maybe so — then that would certainly be the way to go.
“there’s a problem with a Ballard-U District line: it has no place for a maintenance facility north of the Ship Canal; there just isn’t a large enough cheap parcel to host it.”
That’s what we need ST to study. We shouldn’t just dismiss it prematurely because an armchair engineer (I’m guessing you’re an engineer from your previous comments) thinks there’s no feasible space. Engineers who are paid to study this, in a team with accountants and real-estate people, and liaisons who can talk with landowners and the ST board, may be able to come up with alternatives that one armchair pundit can’t. There’s the entire industrial area in south Ballard. An underground line could zigzag to there or end-hook to there if necessary to reach the base. And the landowners’ needs keep changing: even if there’s no surplus parcel now, there may be by the time the study considers it.
For instance, the Fred Meyer lot was an industrial lot that became unused. It sat for years with nobody wanting it until Fred Meyer came along. It’s possible that Fred Meyer might leave eventually, like it’s leaving Lake City now. As a customer I’m fed up with Fred Meyer and QFC treating its customers like criminals (door checkpoints, closing the closest pedestrian entrances, no cash payment after 8pm), loyalty-card suckers (Fred Meyer went to loyalty-card-only discounts after the supermarkets did), and self-checkout mania (eliminating all traditional checkout lanes). To be fair, my biggest ire is with the QFC at Broadway & Pike, which has done all of these at various times. The Fred Meyers at Ballard and Lake City have done only a few of them. But it’s enough to make me avoid both chains as much as possible. If I’m doing that, others probably are too. So that may be contributing to why their sales are shrinking and the Lake City one is closing.
Automated airport people movers operate 24/7/375 and make do with tiny maintenance facilities underground.
The Ballard Safeway and Fremont Fred Meyer both have huge surface parking lots under which could be built all manner of stuff.
The UW end of things has several huge surface lots that could have something put under them.
Just to be clear, we are talking about two different things here. We could build a line from the UW to Ballard. We could build a line from Westlake to Ballard. Both would be independent lines with automated trains. Since they would be independent, you would need a new way to service the trains (and store spares). Since the lines would be short and the trains automated, you don’t need that much space. In both cases you could make a non-service connection to the main line. That might be the best option.
But there are other options. Interbay could work for either. In both cases the challenge is connecting to it. In the case of Ballard Link, the trains will go very close to it. In the case of a Ballard-UW line you would have to connect to the BNSF line. Fortunately the Ballard Terminal Railroad (BTR) connects to the BNSF line. But it is also possible that with Ballard-UW you might end up just building your own relatively small yard in Ballard (most likely as part of the BTR). As Al made clear, this is much cheaper than building a second tunnel.
But I also don’t think it is realistic. I don’t think there is any way they build Ballard to UW instead of Ballard Link. I think the most important thing we can do is build Ballard Link so that it can be extended to the UW. There are several ways to do this but I think the best option is to head west and cross closer to the Salmon Bay Bridge. It would be hard to make that work with an elevated line (politically). I think you have to go under the canal. Then you make a big curve to the east. After the canal you immediately gain elevation (underground). There would be two stations in Ballard. One would be at around 20th to 22nd; the other at 14th to 15th. That would cover the density fairly well in Ballard. It is worth noting that the streets south of Market angle northwest/southeast. This means a station at say, Russell, would connect very well to those coming from the south. One nice thing about that arrangement is that the main station (somewhere between 20th and 22nd) is built first, with Ballard Link. Then when the line gets extended it adds a station closer to 14th/15th. Until then people just walk to the main station or they take a bus (presumably the RapidRide D) which would turn on Market and run by the station before laying over somewhere in Ballard. The 40 would remain the same.
ST is not going to break into one of the Spine tubes for a non-revenue connection. It’s just too fraught and messy.
It is a lot less messy than building a second tunnel (and making the various connections).
They might agree to the idea I keep pushing of a connection at Third and Pine
Which is where I would put it even if I knew nothing about what is underground. The main line runs on Westlake then ends a bit below Fifth between Olive and Pike (close to the surface). Or it goes deeper underneath Sixth. But a second track curves from that line and connects to the main line somewhere around Third & Pine.
You have to build a “station box” around the junction and carefully remove the top three-quarters of the rings.
Which again is much cheaper than building a second tunnel.
I am dead certain that BNSF would not host frequent runs of such vehicles on its tracks across the Ship Canal.
Who said anything about frequent? Once a night a train (consisting of many train cars) goes to the maintenance yard. Once a night they head back. My guess is this would be much cheaper than North Sounder (which they’ve agreed to). I get that it is easier to push around freight but it shouldn’t be too hard to push around a passenger train.
But again, who knows? That is Mike’s point. We don’t know the cheapest way to service the trains. What we do know is that it is highly likely that it would be much cheaper than building a second tunnel. It would — in the opinion of many of us, be better.
I again go back to this point. It is one that Mike raised as well. The current plans are not only extremely expensive but they are very bad. The stations are in poor locations (e. g. 14th NW) . Many of the stations are very deep. There are really bad transfers. Trains would run infrequently. Even if money is not an object there is no advantage to implementing the current plans. Obviously we are optimistic they can do a lot better with shorter, automated trains but that seems quite reasonable.
“ I don’t think there is any way they build Ballard to UW instead of Ballard Link. I think the most important thing we can do is build Ballard Link so that it can be extended to the UW.”
Yes I agree fully.
South Lake Union of 2025 is not what it was in 2008. It’s reaching the density of midtown Westside New York. It now dwarfs Ballard or Fremont by orders of magnitude. Plus I would expect residents in Ballard and Fremont would not take kindly to blocks and blocks of 20 to 40 story buildings like what South Lake Union has become. (As an aside, Alaska Junction residents wouldn’t either.) It is now so massive that it should be the highest priority for getting rail service. It simply no longer makes sense to skip.
That said, an automated line has many advantages. Stations can be half-sized. There is more opportunity to address radius and slope challenges. Trains can be automatically and seamlessly reversed at a Ballard Station or Westlake Station as drivers don’t have to change train ends — and that expands how ST could add extensions in the future.
I would like to see ST take the current Ballard to Downtown alignment and stations north of Westlake as currently preferred and tweak it as a stand-alone automated segment as a first step baseline (especially with smaller stations). Then they can later refine the corridor concept to take advantage of the more flexible technology later through value engineering once that is done.
That could be done more quickly and cheaply than starting with a blank slate. It would establish a baseline automated alternative in a short period of time — and tweaking and extensions can be considered once this baseline has designs, costs and ridership numbers behind it.
There clearly is enough time to do this, given the huge lack of funds to build the BLE project as currently preferred. My guess is that this first step baseline could be done in a matter of months.
The cost of studying this appears modest too. It wouldn’t require much public involvement. Outside of a designing a new maintenance facility and a relocated Westlake station, the other elements appear to involve scaling back what’s already been designed.
The final issue is what to do about West Seattle Link in the meantime while there would be a wait. Given its horrible cost for no real travel time benefit most riders, I would suggest tabling the project a year. However that may be too politically difficult at this point.
The ST3 fiscal plan calls for the outer subareas to help pay for the second DSTT. So, there is a trade off for those funds.
Ross, I’m sorry man, but pretty much everything you wrote about Ballard-Downtown options are things I’ve been saying for months. The western crossing to make a fishhook, two stations in downtown Ballard, the Pine – Stewart – Westlake routing of the non-service connection because of the oblique intersections at Third and Stewart and Stewart and Westlake.
Even though I certainly didn’t come up with all of them, I’ve been arguing for them consistently, and you’ve even responded to some of them. At least give me the respect not to lecture me with ideas I already agree with. Even if you don’t remember that I wrote about them, I did. Others, both Martin and I at a minimum, and jas recently, have been arguing for the connection at the Third and Pine curve for three and more years. I’d include Jonathan as an ally on the general idea, because he proposed making a loop out of the south end of Ballard-Westlake by connecting to the southbound track for inbound trains somewhere east of Westlake Center and outbound somewhere to the west.
This would actually be pretty easy to do. Split Denny Way station into an east-west southbound platform and a north-south northbound one, drill west to Minor and turn south, tunnel under the Pike Street express off-ramp, turn into the stub tunnel, add a merging turnout at the curve from the TBM vault to the southbound track. That gets you to the southbound platform at Westlake Center. Then add a diverging turnout at the Pine to Third curve and punch through the west wall there, turn up Second to Stewart then follow the non-service connection route to Westlake and then north to the Denny Way station.
I’m glad you’re on board with that connection for a stub because you have lots of “pull” with folks and you dedicate a lot of time to posting, so it will get visibility, but please don’t just lecture like it’s de novo. Like everything in the Consensus plan, it has evolved from people bouncing ideas off each other. It’s good politics to acknowledge group efforts.
I will say emphatically that Sixth is the only practical street for an extensible stub for the simple reason that it goes uphill more sharply than Fifth does and it would miss one block of foundations between Fifth and Sixty when it makes the turn uphill. If you put the platforms north of The Spine tubes you can have another station between University and Seneca for “Midtown”, with a horizontal mezzanine connection to street level at Fifth like Symphony has to Second. You have to be deep enough to underrun I-5 safely, probably at least thirty feet below the southbound and reversible lane level, but at least you are starting your run into First Hill at the highest intersection in the traditional CBD.
There’s some possible conflict with the part of Freeway Park between Seneca and Spring; it has some pretty deep parts, but I doubt that they are nearly as heavy as the freeway structure. Ideally, with short two-car stations you could pull it off and get under the freeway far enough north to still make a curve into the Boren right of way for a station at Madison and Boren then wiggle a bit back west for one at Jefferson and Terry and a final “Central District / Yesler Terrace” one in the triangle between 12th, Yesler and Boren. These would all be underground, but small. Since the two near the crest of First Hill (Madison and Boren and Jefferson and Terry) would be pretty deep, they’d probably best be all elevator. With small trains running frequently, two stop elevator banks (platform and mezzanine) can be very efficient. There’s less of a huge pulse followed by a lull.
Then the guideway would pop out of the hillside just south of Jackson and mount an elevated structure down the middle of Rainier to the end. Put the first elevated station between Jackson Place and King, one between Judkins Park Station and Massachussetts with an aerial walkway, and end next to Mount Baker. A non-service connection could be created there as well, with a wye-like curve joining the northbound Spine track just east of the tunnel portal. That would be a sharp curve, but if it’s just visited by a given vehicle twice a month, it shouldn’t be too wearing on the wheels.
I’d also suggest studying elevated stations at Charles and Plum. The “flats” along Rainier are perfect for some mid-price highrise structures that would have views above about the sixth floor on the eastside and maybe the eighth on the west. I know “mid-price highrise” is a bit of an oxymoron, but this “tail” is an urban collector / distributor, not a commuter artery, though the transfers at Judkins Park and Mount Baker might be very attractive for people headed to SLU, even with a sane transfer at Westlake. There are lots of stations on The Spine between Mount Baker and Westlake, too, six to be exact. On the extension with the two alternatives there would be seven but it would be shorter.
So far as “frequent” I meant “once a night each way”. BNSF will not want to undertake even that responsibility and cannot be made to do so, because the equipment is not FRA compliant (even classic LR equipment wouldn’t be). But if we get the dream system with the fishhook — or Al’s idea of a stub and reverse with a drawbridge if that’s all that can be afforded or the sewer trunk makes the west crossing tunnel impossible — then it will be moot, because the Downtown to Ballard portion will pass by the MF as you noted.
Al, my question about building an MF on a strictly Ballard-UW line had to do with what I think is a reasonable desire to place it north of the Ship Canal to avoid building a bridge to access it. But Glenn’s idea of replacing the old 12th / 13th Avenue NP drawbridge would work, though it certainly wouldn’t be cheap. And both Glenn and Ross believe that a place could be found north of the Canal, so that would make the problem moot. I am a bit skeptical, though.
I understand and have said that there are PLENTY of places in Interbay for one on a Ballard-Downtown line. The cruise ship parking yard west of the BNSF tracks and north of the Magnolia Bridge wouldn’t affect any current building at all; it’s frequently empty. It would require a bridge over BNSF to access it. But maybe having the Interbay station west of the yard is better (especially if the western crossing is feasible) and the MF could be connected from the north rather than the south.
I *did* vote against ST3, because its priorities were completely out of whack. The long-distance suburban “spine” is a mediocre plan which should have been built, if at all, only after the actually-important transit service to high-density city neighborhoods had already been finished. Instead we are definitely getting marginally-useful sprawl service to the hinterlands while continuing to wait decades for the rapid urban transit which will significantly improve our lives, if it ever comes.
So it goes.
“continuing to wait decades for the rapid urban transit which will significantly improve our lives”
It won’t even do that. ST made changes to DSTT2/Ballard after the vote that created ultra-long transfers to ultra-deep stations, and moved the Ballard station to 14th that’s effectively eight blocks away from Ballard’s center. That’s what turned my moderate support of WS/BLE against it.
The most fundamental issue in a multi-line subway is good train-to-train transfers, because half the destination stations or more require a transfer. The point of a multi-line subway is not just U-District to downtown or Eastside to U-District, it’s also Rainier Valley to U-Distict, SeaTac to Capitol Hill, etc. The entire network should be at your fingertips, not just the stations on your home line.
West Seattle Link has always been a dud, but that hasn’t changed since the vote. What West Seattle really needs is multi-line BRT fanning to all parts of the penninsula, not something that will make 90% of trips slower than today.
I voted for ST3 in spite of West Seattle, etc, in order to get Ballard, the three Stride lines, the short extensions to Downtown Redmond and Federal Way, and Pinehurst station. Ballard was the reason urbanists pushed for accelerating ST3 and got it to a vote, although we envisioned a 45th line rather than McGinn’s Ballard-downtown line. But now ST is taking it away by creating long transfers that will hinder Ballard Link from achieving its transformative goal and maximum ridership. So what’s the point if it won’t really be the “rapid urban transit which will significantly improve our lives”?
We supported Ballard Link to get something substantially better than the D, 40, and 44. But if it won’t be that much better, what’s the point in building it? There will still be a 30-minute overhead to get to Ballard from most of the region. That was the problem we were trying to solve in the first place.
If ST really can’t make DSTT2 any shallower and get the transfer walk down to say 3 minutes (instead of 10), it should go back to the drawing board and say this alignment won’t meet its goals, and find another alternative that does or cancel the project.
I agree, Mars. The priorities are out of whack. It really isn’t that complicated. You build the routes that add the most value first. Generally speaking this means:
1) Build in dense, urban areas. First Hill should be a higher priority than Fife.
2) Proximity is a virtue, not a vice when it comes to ridership. No matter what you build, most trips will be short.
3) Consider the alternative to the metro (e. g. driving or taking a bus). If you are replacing something that is relatively fast (an express bus) then you aren’t adding much value. If you have trouble competing with driving you will struggle.
4) Keep costs in mind. Sometimes it makes sense to spend a lot for something great (e. g. Second Avenue Subway). But if a mediocre project (let alone a weak one) is bound to cost a fortune then it isn’t worth it.
Points 1 and 2 go together. A combination of dense, urban areas close to each other will outperform areas spread apart (even if they happen to be dense and urban). Likewise it is common that travel between these dense, urban areas is very time consuming by bus. In contrast the dense areas that are spread out tend to be well-connected by the freeways. I can’t think of any dense neighborhoods outside the city that isn’t fairly easy to get to by car (Edmonds maybe)?
There is a reason why long-distance metros are rare. The spine is just a very unusual thing to build. But the problems are not limited to the Spine. West Seattle Link fails when it comes to all of the points as well. There won’t be a combination of dense, urban areas from downtown to the south. The alternative (for just about all the trips) is traveling on what is essentially a freeway. It would be different if the stations in West Seattle were farther away from the freeway but they aren’t. And of course, it is extremely expensive.
Once you build an excellent network in the city it isn’t the end of the world if your metro goes out too far. Consider the DC Metro. The two stations on the far side of Dulles get a combined ridership of about 2,000 a day. That is way less than average stations. But so what? They overbuilt a little bit. At least they built the core which means that those riders can get around in the city. In contrast, by building in the wrong order we screw over urban and suburban riders alike. Riders from the suburbs replace their express bus with a train but still find it difficult to get around while inside the city so they just end up driving. We become even more dependent on the bus system despite spending a fortune running trains to the distant low-density suburbs and cities.
I voted for ST3 in spite of West Seattle, etc, in order to get Ballard, the three Stride lines, the short extensions to Downtown Redmond and Federal Way, and Pinehurst station.
It is interesting to see how many items on that list are built or will be built very soon. Redmond is done, Federal Way will be done this year and Pinehurst next. Stride is cheap (or at least it should be). So much of it comes down to Ballard Link. The strongest argument I heard (from a lot of people) was that we should just hold our nose and vote for ST3 because of Ballard Link. But I agree, that was based on good stations. Screw up the transfers and the placement of stations and it falls apart quite quickly.
“The Spine should be finished first,”
Except the Spine, as proposed now, will be much like West Seattle link: an expensive partial extension that will make transit slower for most transit users.
Witness Tacoma Dome link: instead of ending in downtown Tacoma as proposed in the ST3 map, it ends at Tacoma Dome. Most people coming from somewhere other than downtown Tacoma will have to transfer twice to get on a Link train. Except during peak periods, Link will be slower than the existing express buses, but peak period is when Sounder is running.
If I had known this is where we would stand nine years after the ballot measure I wouldn’t have voted for ST3
Interesting. Nothing has changed very much for me. I could see most of this coming. The problem with ST3 was that the fundamentals were weak. If you have weak fundamentals then you need to do everything else really well. Sound Transit has never done that.
For example consider the line between the UW and downtown. The fundamentals are very strong. You really can’t screw that up. It could have been better, it could have been worse, but in all likelihood it would have a good project and worth every dime no matter how you did it.
In contrast the other projects are much weaker. There are differences between them but they share a few things in common. West Seattle, Everett, Tacoma Dome and Issaquah Link are all very close to expressways. Both the stations and the pathways mimic existing freeway driving. This means that express buses are often faster. A train from Capitol Hill to the UW is faster on Link than driving. Not just when traffic is bad, but any time of day. There is nothing comparable to that with most of ST3. Ballard Link is the only exception.
There are differences of course. Everett Link has the good sense to leave the freeway (it at least pretends to be a real metro). But Everett is just too small (and there are too few stations) for that to work. Tacoma Dome fails to go to Downtown Tacoma. West Seattle Link is extremely expensive even if it had only one station in the entire line (at the Junction). But it all boils down to weak fundamentals. These lines really only make sense if you can build them very cheaply (and you’ve built a lot of other lines first). It is easy to criticize the engineers but they were dealt a really bad hand. It is extremely difficult to design any of these projects so that they are a good value.
The exception, of course, is Ballard Link. Ballard Link always had stronger fundamentals. Not as strong as UW-Ballard but at least promising. But there are some big weaknesses as well. It is a north-south line but it only has one potential east-west connection (Magnolia/North Queen Anne). It isn’t obvious how you serve Ballard. Ballard is a large neighborhood — difficult to serve with one station. You probably want to go east-west close to Market and have two stations. But that makes it hard to continue north. So they went with one station. That wouldn’t be the end of the world if it was very well placed (but of course it wasn’t). It runs next to a green belt or waterfront much of the way. Of course it isn’t as bad as West Seattle Link when it comes to stations per mile but it isn’t great, either (it doesn’t have a station every half mile or so like a typical metro). It also has a sharp curve in the most urban area. Curves of this nature mean extra costs without extra coverage. Just like with buses, you want the lines to be straighter. Then of course you have the cost. Despite the lack of stations (and following an expressway much of the way) you still have a bridge crossing and plenty of tunneling close to downtown. The fundamentals for Ballard are better than the other projected but still not that great. It isn’t like UW to downtown. With U-Link you can put the UW Station at the absolute worst possible spot and it still gets plenty of riders. You can skip one of the most important stations in our system (First Hill) and yet the line still gets plenty of riders. Ballard Link — while still a worthy project — is far more fragile.
Which is why so many of us are basically saying we should improve Ballard Link and just run buses for the rest of it. Sure, someday we should build a UW-Ballard metro but that isn’t realistic now. We should honor the corridors of ST3, no matter how arbitrarily they were chosen. That means better bus service along most of them and a better metro line (with automated trains) to Ballard. Here is the thing that folks often ignore about our argument: It would be better for riders. Not just cheaper, but better. I get the focus on cost — they are shocking to be sure — but the big problem is that if we do manage to build all of ST3 (as planned) it won’t be that great for riders. But if we make Ballard Link better and improve the bus system it will be.
Need a space for an O&M facility? BNSF is closing the Interbay Balmer Yard facility. If ST wants to build the Ballard line using something other than Siemens or Kinki Sharyo trains, they should be looking at Balmer Yard.
Guy, how certain of this abandonment are you? Is BNSF going to move freight-all-kinds marshaling for the Stevens Pass line to Everett? Or are they going to run only Intermodals (and Amtrak) across it? Interbay isn’t what it was in the GN days, but it’s the only in-city marshaling facility left.
Before the question of how a second tunnel through the CBD should be configured can be answered, it’s necessary to presume what Seattle’s CBD is going to look like in 2050 and beyond. My crystal ball says that the CBD of 2050 is going to extend from Lake Union/Seattle Center to the SODO/Stadium District with much of the current CBD taking a much less prominent role in Seatle’s economy. Construction projects in the expanded CBD will be (and have been) much more focused on offering urbanist working and living spaces that co-exist and offer better work/life balance without the need for long commutes.
Yeah, I know I woke up with the rose-colored glasses this morning, but I’m really frustrated watching transit planning that’s trying to correct what could/should have been built in 1995 when we need to focus on what’s going to be needed 30 years from now.
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That’s probably correct, but it’s hard to imagine the City of Seattle being able to construct anything more complex than a simple streetcar line.
Oops, my third paragraph is a response to Concerned’s comment:
“The Spine should be finished first, with the expectation that Seattle and other municipalities will build off of it with their own additional lines and extensions, without the multi-county decision-making gridlock.”
Guy, the fill that covers the land between Jackson and Lander west of I-5 isn’t suitable for very tall buildings. The stadiums have pretty deep piling below them and aren’t really all that tall. I doubt that entrepreneurs are going to want to undertake the risks of building there, even granting that the views would likely be excellent from the outer ring of structures.
But yes, the CBD will probably grow a little way into SoDo, certainly into the hole between the International District and the I-90 viaduct and maybe south between Sixth and Airport Way where the land is less fill.
I did the T-Mobile stadium tour this year. I had no idea that the building is essentially a compilation of separate pieces all joined together so they can handle the earthquake we all know is going to happen eventually.
Everybody missed the fact that highrises in SLU would require high-capacity transit. Both the city and ST and King County and transit activists. The first I heard about it was in early 2016 when SDOT proposed rerouting Ballard Link through SLU instead of Belltown. The debate should have happened in the 1990s and 2000s when the city was deciding on SLU’s future role and zoning.
Similar things happened with Lake City and Ballard. They should have been designated regional centers then. They weren’t because they didn’t reach King County’s threshold, which required a minimum zoned job capacity but didn’t count housing. The suburbs zoned the required job capacity for the Spring District, Totem Lake, Issaquah, etc. But Lake City and Seattle already had a more even balance of jobs and housing — the ideal of an urban village — but that housing got in the way of job capacity, so they lost out. If Lake City had been a regional center in the 2000s, it would have been must-serve by Sound Transit, and that would have affected Lynnwood Link: it would have favored the Lake City Way alternative instead of the I-5 alternative. Likewise, if Ballard had been a regional center, that would have affected the long-range plan in the 2000s and thus what ST2 and the next plans after that might have been.
Ballard was belatedly designated a regional center for ST3, but an INDUSTRIAL center (like Paine Field and Redmond Tech) instead of an URBAN center. The industrial center is mostly south of Market, while the urban center is mostly north and west of the industrial center.
Appreciate this meta-analysis. Mike
Did it ever occur to this blog that the reason no politician wants to make a decision about Sound Transit is because they don’t wish to get trashed by this blog? And Seattle Subway, The Urbanist, The Stranger and every other Lefty blog in the City?
Go ask Katie Wilson what her plan is. Because people like Ms. Wilson are the problem here. Read her platform. https://www.wilsonforseattle.com/platform How on earth would Seattle pay for half of this? Not that Mayor Bruce is living in economic reality right now… nor Ryan Mello or any other ST board member.
And to be fair, who wants to win an election only to be handcuffed by the silly Sound Transit “mandates”? This a disaster was brought upon us by Seattle voters, not elected officials.
The only solution is the democratic one. A vote of the people to unwind all the ST rail projects and turnover all the lines to local transit companies. No more tunnels, no more rail, no more Sound Transit. Just a clean slate and fresh start for transit.
Umm, you can’t do that because the bond holders will sue, and win. There is no unwinding ST short of a revolution or civil war in this country. That would result in the debt being repudiated followed by economic collapse as the government would be unable to sell any more debt. Those of us who were adults during the 20th century have seen this movie played before.
Sound Transit can continue as a financial entity to collect tax dollars to pay off the bondholders.
That does not require them to be at all associated with ever planning, constructing, or operating anything.
William C.
I believe you are correct. Yes, the Sound Transit tax district needs to go on to pay off bond debt. Maybe there even would be some extra money to transfer to local districts? It’s not like Sound Transit doesn’t have trains and buses that are currently serving the public that don’t need to continue. We’re not going backwards here, but we shouldn’t even be thinking about rail expansion either.
Sound Transit needs to quit building crap it can’t afford. Hard stop. Because whatever numbers Sound Transit has put out about future projects, the truth is much, much worse. Does anybody reading this really believe the Ballard line is going to cost 22 billion? All of the ST projections are the most rosy scenarios…. so the actual cost of building the Ballard line is likely well over 30 billion.
Tacomee, you specifically said in your post no more Sound Transit. I’m just pointing out the obvious problem with that. Now, I’m pretty confident none of us have actually read the bond covenants, nor done an end to end read of the enabling legislation that the state passed oh so many billions ago. We’re starting to do the same thing that all the fan boys on this blog do when they start pontificating about what redesign to do because they are a rider. Yeah, I drive cars, boats and motorcycles but that doesn’t mean I have the qualifications to design any of them. Nor do I have a CE degree or a PE license to qualify me to design a train station, much less an entire rail network. I’m as sick of this fiasco as anyone who has paid beaucoup taxes for something they use once or twice a year, but we should all probably learn to “stay in our lane” a bit better. And you are also probably correct that the latest cost estimates are just a wet dream, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that. Just a casual observation of human political behavior will do. With that comment I will get back in my lane for the day, which involves a nail gun and a chop saw.
“drive cars, boats and motorcycles but that doesn’t mean I have the qualifications to design any of them.”
What is transit for? It’s to facilitate the circulation of people between home, work, errands, and other trips. That doesn’t just benefit the individuals and allow them to survive; it benefits the entire city/community and allows it to survive. People have to get to work, medical appointments, supermarkets, and other necessities. Mass transit is the most scalable, cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and city-fabric sustainable way to implement that. Large cities require a high-capacity transit circulation trunk, and the most effective form of that is a grade-separated metro. That’s the reasoning behind Link. Even if it’s flawed and could have been better designed, it’s already functioning as that trunk between downtown and Northgate (very impressively), Seattle/Shoreline/Lynnwood and the airport, and in southeast Seattle.
Passenger are the ones making those trips and experiencing the transit infrastructure. So they have direct insight into what works for them and their fellow passengers, and are primary stakeholders in the process.
Most passengers are not transit experts as you note, but transit experts do exist. There’s a general set of transit best-practices, which Jarrett Walker has been trying to articulate to the public and to transit agencies/politicians who make the decisions.
The problem is that Sound Transit, Metro, and the cities and counties have been ignoring some of the transit best practices, and what has proven to work around the world. That’s where groups like STB shout out for the politicians to follow transit best practices, hire transit-network experts as necessary and listen to them, and consider a wider range of alternatives. The best-practice alternatives should at least get a fair study and consideration alongside ST’s preferred alternative and what non-transit stakeholder interests want.
STB isn’t saying “do our alternative and trust us above all else, even the experts”. We’re saying ST should study and consider alternatives that reflect transit best-practice principles that they’re ignoring. Even evaluating whether they are best-practice instances is part of what ST should be studying and giving fair consideration to.
For instance, automated train lines, specifically the Ballard alignment. Higher frequency across the board. Platform screen doors. Prioritizing convenient train-to-train transfers. Open-gangway trains that can increase capacity 20% for practically free if you include them in the procurement spec. Station locations that work for pedestrians in the center of neighborhood villages. Station design issues like full down escalators. Putting more resources into operations and reliability even if it cuts into capital projects a bit. All these and more are obvious best practices the experts have called for again and again, not just the whims of “ignorant proletarian passenger revolutionaries”.
@NOTA, the same thing I said to Tacomee applies to you. We also may not be CE’s but we know about transit best practices because it matters to us. There is PLENTY of solid information about it available on the Intertubes. Read a little and you’ll be surprised at how simple the maxims are:
build high capacity transit in dense areas that cars cannot serve well
use trains only when ridership exceeds volumes that buses can accommodate
put the trains on the surface if there is reserved right of way available
if right of way is not available elevate or bury them
if they are in protected or grade-separated right of way automate them
Sound Transit has violated maxim one egregiously with its sprawling “Spine”, proposes to violate the second with pie-in-the-sky extensions like ELE and Line 4, and has a burning hatred of the last one.
In short, they have fallen deep into the “gifted child” illusion that Puget Sound is some unique snowflake of a region that can rationally violate the conclusions that one hundred and fifty years of public transportation have shown to be true.
Exactly. Thank you, Mike. There may be good reasons not to adopt a Skytrain-like technology for the in-city lines, but given how much the cost of the 400 foot LR train standard has ballooned, spending even ten million nailing down those good reasons if they exist seems like money very well spent.
This is insanity, going full scorched earth is seriously your solution? What a joke.
Chicken Nuggets,
Well, we disagree. I believe sitting around planning a second tunnel that won’t be built for over 20 years is the joke.
I often bring up “Strong Towns” on this blog to introduce basic urban planning to readers. One of the biggest mistakes in urban planning is locking up money in decades long projects that always underperform while underfunding projects that could actually help the City in the near term. Sound Transit wasn’t on firm “urban planning” ground from the day it passed.
https://www.strongtowns.org
“Strong Towns” on this blog to introduce basic urban planning to readers”
Yet you ignore 90% of what Strong Towns is or would recommend. Strong Towns recommends making cities walkable through density, mixed use, good local transit, and good regional transit. You focus on one regional transit project — Link — and claim it’s going off the rails in terms of unaffordable costs and how it should be canceled — and ignore the entire context it’s in.
When we try to expand urban villages or set citywide zoning that would make the entire city walkable and reduce upward pressure on market-rate rents and home prices, you just dismiss it as impossible and say people don’t have a right to convenient and reasonably-priced neighborhoods and should move to the most inconvenient and car-dependent small towns and rural areas instead. That’s completely the opposite of what Strong Towns stands for. Strong Towns wants to make both the cities and the small towns and the rural areas more convenient to live in.
NoneOfTheAbove,
Well, do any transit workers actually work for Sound Transit? All of the operators and other workers are from other local transit companies, right?
Does Sound Transit have an actual physical contracting division? All the physical work (and much of the engineering) is done by private contractors, right?
So yeah, I’m not an expert on these things, but it looks to me like Sound Transit only does 2 things. It writes checks to pay down bonds and to pay vendors ( like construction companies and Metro) and it plans more light rail and bus projects. What I believe needs to happen is a public vote kill off Sound Transit and all future projects not under construction, keep the tax district and subareas intact and have a new regional transit outfit that is prohibited from building any more light rail or tunnels by the will of people. Let’s focus on keeping what we have now.
Sound Transit has built some really great projects… I think the current rail system works well and needs better care to keep running. The problem now is twofold…. we can’t pay for rail projects that have less value than what’s already been built, so why not call it mission accomplished?
Tacomee, just because none of us can solve the differential equations used to compute how thick to make the walls of a station box and how much rebar to include in them does not mean that we should shut up and be mindless fanbois of a plan that was not much more than lines on a napkin when it was passed by voters.
Nor should we acquiesce to the Suburbanista dream of Seattle paying for multi-billion dollar extensions deep into transit-hater territory so that the transit-hating Joe Lunchbox construction workers who live there can suck at the government tit for a decade while Seattle gets nothing for its contributions. That’s essentially what you are advocating: “Finish The Spine!” is a ‘Burbanista battle cry to rip off Seattle.
Many of us have a strong familiarity with transit best practices from around the world and do not believe that the people living on the eastern shore of Puget Sound are “special” in some mysterious way that means we should — or can — ignore those best practices
Pkease don’t project your own ignorance rooted in your dislike of public goods onto us.
[Note to Reader: if you can solve those equations and see the logic in the Blog Consensus solution, please get yourself down to ST headquarters and apply. They need you badly!]
Tom Terrific,
As a long time booster of Tacoma…. I don’t support building a light rail line to Tacoma that’s slower to the airport or downtown Seattle than the current bus. And I oppose any future development at the Tacoma Dome because it’s not a neighborhood and nobody wants to live there or even go there unless it’s to see Garth Brooks… Tacoma has so many problems with transit, housing, education. Sound Transit is planning no solutions. The T line might be the worst rail project in North America.
I’m guessing the light rail line to Everett is likely about the same quality of project? Eastside rail? It’s under construction, so let’s finish it. After that?
Let me fill you in on what’s going to happen on this blog. No matter what choices the ST board makes, the majority of posters are going to hate it. Armchair transit planning is easy. Real life is hard.
Tom, do you really want to see Sound Transit take 40 years to finish all the planned projects while failing to maintain the stuff it’s already built? Because that’s the course the board is currently choosing.
“No matter what choices the ST board makes, the majority of posters are going to hate it.”
Critiquing decisions is not hating them. It’s simply saying that better solutions clearly seem to exist — and that ignoring an exploration of these better solutions is irresponsible given the massive cost and shortfall time required to build them.
That kind of dualistic thinking says more about the mentality of the poster than the overall content of the blog. Sadly, the “one alternative to support or hate” concept is also what ST puts on the table for public discourse — turning any constructive critiquing into a similar dualistic perspective.
@ Tacomee:
I think most posters here would agree either way your general assessment that the Pierce subarea transit planning is misguided and that ST3 delivers poor value given its investment size.
At its core, I think that the problem is the transit capital planning process itself. There never has been any willingness to develop and analyze (costs and benefits) a wide range of rail technologies in Pierce by a multi-jurisdictional group that wants to maximize the cost-benefit. Instead, we encourage leaders to limit the modes that they can consider and then to pick just one systems alternative way too early. Then after pushing through the “preferred alternative” based on lobbying and whims and limited analysis, cost and constructibility problems create more years of delay and billions more in cost for little benefit than could gave evolved.
Add to that is a clear avoidance by many of looking at any productivity measures. As you note, what ST wants to spend billions on will be significantly slower than express buses in HOV lanes get today.
I would love to see Pierce transit advocates encourage local leaders to go back to the drawing board with a blank slate (and technical resource support) and assemble a range of Pierce transit users in a series of workshops to propose several new ways to spend ST3 funds with an eye to maximizing things like transit ridership and aggregate travel minutes saved. I don’t think that merely tweaking the existing technologies would shine in such a process.
Those of us posters that live in Seattle certainly don’t have the depth of understanding of Tacoma that you would by living there, but we are all frustrated in our “fantasy” transit planning process created by the 2016 ST3 dance in the “dark” (no discussion of productivity or realistic costs) — and its steadfast obsession to follow though with that mindless event nine years later.
OK, I stand corrected on your personal evaluation of TDLE-Links and Ellie. And I’m not blind to the great value that Seattle has already gotten from ULink and North Link. IDS to Northgate is a tremendous asset for the city and region, certainly the best seven miles of transit on the West Coast other than Civic Center to Berkeley Downtown on BART.
As long as “Stop!” means “Stop ALL extensions!” under Sound Transit when Federal Way and the Eastside connection are completed, I would agree to that. But, I would add the caveat that North King must be granted a similar taxing authority to that which the Leg gave Sound Transit but heretofore has denied smaller administrative units. For one thing, North King will need to pay Pierce back for a portion of its contributions to the line already built, because Pierce has received relatively little thus far. But more critically, North King needs the ability to bond itself to build an urban collector / distributor between Lower Queen Anne and First Hill / Central District. And “No, the other ‘sub-areas’ don’t need to chip in on it.” It can be a part of the ORCA cluster like the streetcar and Monorail but built and owned by Seattle. And it should go farther north in SLU before it turns west; the planned Aurora station is too close to Denny Way to be useful. Obviously, if you’re going to LQA extending to Smith Cove in order to host a maintenance facility is both a bit useful and not that expensive.
North King should be allowed that extra bonding capacity in perpetuity since there will be other reasonable extensions that it can build over the decades.
In such a scenario Sound Transit also needs the right to extend regionwide taxes permanently at a lower level in order to fund O&M for The Spine as completed and for the intercity bus network.
“I don’t support building a light rail line to Tacoma that’s slower to the airport or downtown Seattle than the current bus. ”
I do too, but that’s what Tacoma’s and Pierce County’s elected representatives chose. And due to subarea equity, what they choose prevails. If Pierce County residents don’t like it, they should have elected other people in the 1990s and 2000s and now, or tried harder to convince them to change their minds.
“Go ask Katie Wilson what her plan is”
I don’t know what Katie’s transit plan is, and I wish she’d articulate it more now. But she has proven experience supporting transit, being pragmatic, and joining STB and others on specific sensible transit issue like Metro, Link, and Seattle measures and policy decisions. So I’m hoping she shows the same pragmatism and sensibleness on transit issues as mayor that she’s been doing. By that I mean supporting increased bus service, opposing Metro cuts, and not being anti-rail. Her other issues like low-income fares don’t fit into the alignment/service/mode issues that many on STB are primarily concerned about, but it’s a legitimate transit-supportive position to prioritize.
I was satisfied with Schell, Nickels, McGinn, and Murray on transit and general city leadership, and voted for all of them for another term. But Durkin and Harrell haven’t done anything substantial in my book, haven’t made any new suggestions or vision on improving transit, and I can’t point to much else they have done, so I haven’t been inclined to vote for him again. Though I will give Harrell credit for trying on the downtown-sketchiness and policing issues.
The state authorized capital and operating taxes for Sound Transit, not for those other agencies or cities. If it had, Seattle and Metro could have done their own things. The only other large thing the state allowed was Seattle’s monorail tax, which was estimated to max out at $1 billion. That might just be enough for a 45th line, but not enough for downtown-UDistrict or any of the other Link projects that Seattle has or will/might have. If Seattle had gone that route, UDistrict-downtown express buses would still be melting down in congestion, overcrowding, and bus bunching.
“How on earth would Seattle pay for half of this?” Well, I just looked at the platform you linked to. I skipped directly to the transit section (because this is a transit blog, and honestly, I don’t care about the rest of her platform, whether it’s fiscally possible or not). It says:
“Expedite the delivery of Sound Transit Link Light Rail projects by providing needed leadership on the Sound Transit Board and using the City’s powers to lead on planning, minimuze permitting burderns, leverage existing right-of-way, and avoid excessive process.” This is cheaper than what the city has been doing. Note specifically the “leverage existing right-of-way” – this is the only way I can see that will get us a real citywide rail network.
“Expand bus service through the renewal of our Seattle Transportation Benefit District in 2026, and work with King County and other partners to chart a path to regional bus service expansion.” This identifies an existing revenue source, that (I assume) would be increased.
“Improve speed and reliability with dedicated bus lanes and signal priority, to make bus transit competitive with driving.” This is cheaper than what the city has been doing.
I guess you could read between the lines and imagine that she is implying more transit service than is really possible, but so what? She is promising to try to get better transit. The things she is promising to do are totally reasonable and would result in better transit.
On the other hand… I just looked at the Harrell campaign platform, and, hilariously enough, he is promising much the same things that Wilson is. I guess I didn’t really expect him to put something like “I think cars are the only real way to get around. Buses are for losers. I will usually cave to NIMBYs.” on his campaign web site, but it would be more honest.
Giving up on rail expansion is not an option. Bus service in a high-wage city such as Seattle will inevitably fall victim to Baumol’s Cost Disease. The cost of bus drivers rises faster than inflation, because bus drivers are not getting much more efficient. We can do some things to make them more efficient – basically all the RapidRide stuff like offboard fare collection, stop consolidation and signal prioritization – but in the end, we need to switch the bulk of our transit service to rail. Train drivers are much more efficient (because each vehicle carries more people per driver), and we can eventually automate train service entirely.
Christopher Cramer,
I honestly hope Wilson wins the election, but I doubt it matters much. Seattle, like pretty much every other Blue City in America, is drowning in debt. If you’re into to new, more socialist solutions to Seattle’s problems, the Sound Transit budget is part of what’s not going to let that happen. Add in the public schools budget disaster, the City’s budget and the long list of Seattle infrastructure that should have been replaced for fixed decades ago…. and the it doesn’t really matter who’s mayor next year. Big City mayors just manage the debt of the past administrations and do damage control when shit goes sideways.
If you think the Mayor has any real power…. look at the Seattle Police Department. The Boys in Blue call the shots…. not even the Federal government could rein them in. It’s not like any City worker actually works for the Mayor, so Katie can sing those “Union City Blues” as city workers continue to slow roll Sound Transit projects (and everything else. It takes months and years to build anything in Seattle)
For all its faults, the Constantine / Harrell Gambit (moving the Chinatown station out of Chinatown) was an attempt to make a decision.
And they got burned for doing so on this blog!
Haters gonna hate I guess? The pols are in a no win situation here.
Perhaps you could create your own blog that cheerleads all decisions made by politicians, if that is your end goal. You have the power!
No. The decision wasn’t “made”. It was “changed”.
The adopted ST3 map put a big dot for IDS and implied that there would even be a cross-platform station by expanding the northbound IDS platform. Then the preferred alternative adopted in 2020 still had transfers happening there. The current preferred alternative did not appear in that step.
Finally, when the opposition became more significant, our leaders proposed only one solution. Not ten solutions; just one. That solution was also sketched out months before it was made public. This “single solution” mentality pervades our transit planning in the region and is so institutionalized that it’s just considered normal. It’s how we got the debacles like the crawling FHSC and the failed monorail saga a few decades ago. When transit plans change in a major way like this, several new alternatives should be put forth — especially when the single solution is unaffordable.
That’s a perfect example. It was a change in ST’s preferred alignment, which went against the decision in the ballot measure. Even then it could be justified as ST starting to make a decision — because it’s not finished: the EIS isn’t final yet, the station isn’t designed, questions about the design are still unanswered, and it hasn’t been approved for construction yet. Approving for construction is the “final decision”.
STB spoke up against this change because we have to: it harms passengers, the usefulness of the Link network, and maximum ridership. That is, the long DSTT1-to-DSTT2 transfer exacerbated by this change, and the longer walking distance from the station to the center of the CID. That doesn’t mean STB should be able to override political or regional decisions, but as responsible citizens we must advocate for what we think is best and try to convince the politicians to do it. At the same time, ST needs to make final decisions one way or the other, and to some extent, any decision is better than this years-long murkiness and uncertainty we’re going through.
We should build the Ballard west Seattle link similar to San Diego or Portland light rail.
1) itd actually be affordable to build
2) we won’t need to wait till like 2080+
Just build the segment at grade through downtown and make it compatible for a future tunnel for the sections north of lower Queen Anne and south of sodo.
Your solution misses the point, WL. Ballard and West Seattle don’t need rail transit. It’s a “nice to have”, but they can get along with improved and prioritized bus service just fine.
South Lake Union needs grade-separated rail transit much more critically than either Ballard or West Seattle need any kind of rail transit. The current plan is “sub-optimal” to say the least, and should go farther north before it turns west, but it’s something to relieve the suburban-style auto congestion there.
@tom there is not enough money to build the second tunnel either way.
For slu if we want to build rail there then we can just add on building the rail line via Leary and Westlake connecting Ballard to Fremont and slu similar to route 40. It’d still only cost like 2~3 billion. Just have it branch at 1st and Westlake.
There is no “1st and Westlake”. Westlake ends at Fifth now, though it used to extend to Fourth. Do you mean “use Stewart” to get between them? Because of the oblique intersections that would probably work.
However, I would not run the line on First because of the large unruly crowds at First and Pike; it’s just not safe as would have become clear had the CCC been built. Second is much better for a surface rail line and not quite so dauntingly far below the office core around Spring and Madison. Also, it would avoid the vaults below Pioneer Square.
But why would it “branch”? You’re not proposing two lines to Ballard are you?
I get that the way downtown fans out north of Pine is a hard problem for transit to solve, but ST made a good start on solving it half of it when they moved the line from Fourth through Belltown to Westlake. They didn’t choose the smart option of three stations in SLU (Denny, Republican and Aurora and Roy) that short automated trains would allow. But then they assume four hundred foot trains on every line, ignoring that transit systems throughout the world have different classes of vehicle sized appropriately for different tasks.
A four-hundred foot train every ten minutes on Line 4 is ridiculous.
Continuing the question on branching.
You’re not proposing running a stub of the surface line up to Lower Queen Anne and stopping are you? That would be pretty useless and would certainly be a huge intrusion into the entertainment district in Belltown along First Avenue with very little benefit to the neighborhood.
That’s another reason to use Second should your idea prevail.
“the large unruly crowds at First and Pike; it’s just not safe as would have become clear had the CCC been built.”
The “unsafe unruly crowds” are concentrated at 3rd-Pine-Pike. Not 1st & Pike. Visit Pike Place Market anytime to see this, and window-shop the busy restaurants on 1st South of it. Or watch last week’s Sunday Movie, which had a camera on it for an hour as an urban expert and an interviewer discuss the Pike Place area.
@tom
It was discussed earlier in the Ballard link at grade article
Mike, I mean the jaywalkers not the tweakers. On Saturday in the summer it’s frequently almost impossible for traffic to cross the First and Pike intersection on First Avenue because people just keep crossing.
WL, when was that? Can you post a link? Thank you.
Look it’s obvious with the new generational autocratic government we won’t get anymore transit money. Since seattle is the economic hub of Washington. The state should withhold all tax money. Contract with China rail builders and an entire system will be built by 2030. Problems solved!
It seems like from discussions on the board and the comment section here, regionalism is not doing well.
We need Sound Transit not to fund our projects (the sub areas can easily do that themselves) but to create an integrated, regional transportation system. Transit in *my* neighborhood is way better when transit in *your* neighborhood is too. It’s all connected.
We need to work together and as the article says, that means making decisions. We all have our crayons and our plans (“build the spine!”, “build Ballard!”) but none of that matters at all if we don’t have a board that can make a decision.
The Spine is proceeding at normal pace. It’s only Ballard/DSTT2 that has been subject to station changes, EIS restarts, imposing a deeper tunnel than in the ballot measure, and huge cost overruns.
West Seattle has smaller cost overruns but not all that other stuff.
The board agreed on a balance of subarea interests. They generally support other subareas’ projects so that others don’t demand their subarea subtract anything.
That has partly broken down as WS/BLE and Everett/Paine Field have stretched their budgets to the breaking point. Now that Everett, Tacoma, and Seattle are worried they may not get everything they’d expected, they’re starting to turn against each other to ensure their subarea’s projects get finished. Snohomish and Pierce don’t want Seattle to use up debt capacity that would delay/jeapordize the Spine. Seattle doesn’t want the Spine to hold up the higher-ridership Ballard and West Seattle projects.
Underlying this is a debt ceiling: ST has a maximum debt:asset ratio. It was going to scrape along the ceiling from the late 2020s to the mid 2030s. That’s why Ballard’s and Everett’s openings were scheduled so late. That was all before the realignment and second realignment, so I don’t know where the debt ceiling window is now.
From a necessity perspective, the essential part of Link is Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way. That will be finished next year. That wiill give a cire like BART that people can transfer to and go 30 miles to stations throughout the highesr-density core of the region and transfer to another bus at the other end. The other lines/extensions are less important, so it doesn’t matter as much whether they’re built or not, so we can just watch to see what happens.
I’d like to see your math on West Seattle. Saying it has “smaller cost overruns” and implying it has the high ridership like Ballard are counter to my understanding of things.
I didn’t mention West Seattle’s ridership as far as I can tell. But I think that even if it isn’t high, it will be highER per station capita than Everett or Tacoma Dome. Lynnwood has shown itself to be mostly peak-oriented. Everett and Tacoma Dome will probably be similar. West Seattle is more likely to have more off-peak trips. All those off-peak trips add up.
Martin praises the earlier Board and Nickels for making decisions. One good one was shifting the Roosevelt station east to commercial center from 8th Avenue NE in the I-5 envelope. But many of the Nickels-led decisions were poor ones. In 1999 it was known that the north King subarea did not have enough funding to build Link between NE 45th Street and the south city limits; Executive Sims and Mayor Schell suggested that the north subarea funds be concentrated on the NE 45th Street to Mt. Baker segment that had the greatest ridership potential; great bus projects and service would have been provided in the Rainier Valley and I-5 south. Nickels and the suburban boardmembers said no. The board stewed for two years. In 2001, the board decided on south-first; it opened in summer 2009. This decision put tremendous pressure on downtown Seattle, SDOT, and Metro to carry a large load longer. When ST2 was being settled, Nickels led the board to opt for the I-5 alignment in the north instead of SR-99; he led them to choosing the NE 145th Street station site with its full interchange and congestion. Note freeways are to pedestrians as dams are to fish.
I disagree with the premise that “But it’s worth understanding why we’re here. Costs are spiraling ($) because construction dates keep slipping, and they’re slipping because the Sound Transit board — in particular, the Seattle delegation — is not making key decisions.”
In my opinion, the situation is the way it is because the initial ST3 proposal lacked sufficient technical background. If the ST3 proposal had been adequately informed, they would have known that the proposed DSTT2 tunnel would have to be 9 floors under Westlake, and to get there tunneling would have to start around Holgate.
When TriMet was kicking around the idea of a tunnel under the West Hills as opposed to the original surface alignment proposal, they spent at least 3 years doing test cores, exploring ways of dealing with the unstable slopes at the various proposed tunnel entrance, figuring out how to deal with fire department demands for emergency access points, etc.
Planning for TriMet’s Orange line started 30 years ago. When the time came to build, they knew where the bad soils were, had a plan on how to deal with the several wetlands they needed to cross, and even were able to work with two highway overpasses that had MAX infrastructure in mind when they were rebuilt 10+ years prior to MAX. (You can argue the routing is bad, but that decision came from our regional planning agency rather than TriMet. TriMet technical execution of that bad plan went extremely well.)
As originally pictured, West Seattle Link was depicted as surface running or elevated. Putting it in a deep tunnel is the majority of the price increase for that line, and the delay primarily because of hand wringing over that huge cost. The failure to account for the space required for the desired turning radius in West Seattle is another example of drawing a line on the map before adequate understanding of what that line means.
The resulting delays in making decisions, which definitely have also added to the costs, are because the ST board is trying to deal with a host of really bad options it has been handed. Many of those really bad options it’s working with are a primary driver of the price increases.
ST3 should probably have been two ballot measures:
1) Here’s some lines on a map. We need $100 million to do a detailed analysis of what this will cost and what the obstacles will be, plus $250 million for a station at 130th Street.
2) Ok, this is what we can actually build with a reasonable budget and time, while dealing with the obstacles we found.
Glenn in Portland,
Oh boy! You must of missed the ST3 vote ram job! Before the ST3 vote it was all butterflies and rainbows with a steady stream of falsehoods by supporters who knew damn well at the time it was 100% bullshit.
The back story to this whole mess is pols in subareas trying to fuck other subareas into paying for shit for their subarea. You don’t seem like a political rube. Right now it’s Dow and his Seattle crew trying to sucker the other subareas into this stupid 2nd tunnel option AND Sound Transit buying a bunch of shitty City and County buildings at a trumped up price AND Sound Transit paying to tear those worthless buildings down AND Sound transit building a transit center/shopping mall for a crossover hub for that second tunnel.
And you thought this was about transit!
Based on Deep Westlake Escalatorpalooza Plans, I’m pretty sure it’s all about a retirement plan for escalator repair contractors.
I agree. It is easy to assume that the costs are much higher because we waited too long. That is not true. This is one of the big misconceptions about ST3 in general. People think the “Seattle Process” is slowing it down. But it isn’t. Go back to the original plans and guess what? We can’t afford it. We never could afford it. That’s because it isn’t as cheap as what they originally assumed.
Because it wasn’t cheap we can’t start earlier. We run into bond limits. You can’t spend billions building something until you’ve raised enough tax money. As prices rise, this causes more delays. Yes, building the same thing costs more money than before and those costs are rising a bit faster than tax revenue. But the real problem is that we had no idea how expensive it was to build this because we hadn’t done enough research.
The uncomfortable truth is what you’re saying here Ross: ST way underestimated what they could afford in Seattle to create a sellable package to voters. ST likes to instead blame the higher costs more on inflation because that gives the both cover for their bad planning process in 2014-16 and blind motivation to start building West Seattle Link project right away.
Every time ST tries to primarily blame the cost problems on inflation and pushes to start WS construction as soon as possible, we need to make sure that they’re exposed for this egregious lie.
“ST way underestimated what they could afford in Seattle to create a sellable package to voters.”
ST didn’t investigate the feasibility of a shallow tunnel until after the vote. Everybody including ST assumed DSTT2 could be as shallow as DSTT1 with stations at the same level. That was the assumption until around 2017 or 2018 when ST said it would have to be ultra-deep to go under building foundations, and have ultra-deep stations and ultra-long transfers.
I wouldn’t call that underestimating the budget, but underestimating the feasibility of the initial assumptions. I also wouldn’t say it was a deliberate lie or misleading, because every indication is that ST was as surprised about it as we were.
The strategic implication is what Glenn said: ST should have studied the engineering/design more thoroughly before scheduling a build vote. Even if it would have required an extra vote to authorize a small short-term tax increase for this, it would have put the entire expansion plans in a much better position.
This would have required ST to restructure the votes, to front-load more engineering/planning before having a huge build vote. I don’t think we should single out ST on this, because Metro/SDOT/highway projects and other public projects probably follow the same logic. “We can’t spend money on that level of study until building is approved, because if it’s not approved, the money would be wasted, and taxpayers wouldn’t like that.” And, “We’re not sure if we like the idea of a small vote for more preliminary planning.”
“The strategic implication is what Glenn said: ST should have studied the engineering/design more thoroughly before scheduling a build vote.”
ST did study things before the vote.
1. ST undertook the Southbound King County High Capacity Transit Study. ST hired a lead consultant (Fehr and Peers) that to this day does not claim any light rail engineering experience — all in a corridor that’s clearly the most expensive and complicated per mile to build in including a bridge over the Duwamish. The result was a cost estimate to build all the way to Burien and Renton for less than just to Alaska Junction for West Seattle Link as now projected. The study was instead mainly a rubber stamp for using light rail rather than BRT and for going to Alaska Junction rather than one to peg actual realistic costs — and not one to lay out a DSTT2.
2. FTA has for a few decades recommended a 40 percent cost contingency going into the EIS. ST3 assumed a 10 percent contingency.
3. ST did not commission a study to examine DSTT2 closely prior to ST3. It was pretty much rushed into the plan as a sketch concept several months before the vote. Thus no practical alignment depth was ever presented before the vote. Keep in mind that this was just after the 99 tunnel challenges were known about building in soil in SODO.
It’s easy to excuse ST for being naive about not knowing. But there was clearly the ability to know things well beforehand as well as anticipate their costs better early in 2016. ST kept making deliberate choices to avoid facing the cost issue a decade ago.
I’m not sure there was an intent to mislead the voters. But I think there was no attempt to be pessimistic about the estimates despite a long history in the past of being wrong. That is one of the many problems with ST3.
It actually doesn’t cost that much to do in-depth engineering. In some cases it is overkill. For example the Second Avenue Tunnel should be built no matter what the cost. It is that valuable a project. I would put UW to downtown in the same category. Pay whatever it takes to build it — and built it right. In the long run it will pay off.
But none of the future projects are in that same category. That is because none of them are obviously what we should build next. There are many options: UW to Ballard, Ballard Link, Metro 8 Subway, West Seattle Link, some sort of line including Belltown or First Hill. It isn’t obvious what adds the most value. As a result, cost matters, a lot. Yet ST’s choices seem arbitrary. Neither based on cost nor benefit.
Thus you have an agency that seemed to pick the projects out of a hat while hoping that very tentative estimates were correct. That is just a recipe for a mess, which is the situation we are in.
Mike Orr,
You don’t believe that crap about “soils” somehow costing Sound Transit more money to dig tunnels do you? Because all of the “soils” data was in the public domain long before Sound Transit dug anything. Seattle has lots of buildings and engineers have mapped out all the underlying geology in the past 100 years. Sound Transit wasn’t “surprised” by anything under the ground. It’s called geology! That Earth Science we studied back in the 9th grade?
Just face up to the facts that Sound Transit hid facts about the “numbers”
and the “science” of projects before the vote.
Good lord there is so much wrong in these comments. First off, the planning requirements ST must follow are prescribed in state law. They followed the law for system planning the way they always do. All the steps they took were reviewed by the board and the expert review panel in concurrent open public meetings.
Second, Ross, incorrect. The ST3 cost estimating methodology was based on Sound Move/ST2 ACTUALS for completed and baselined projects. This methodology was the subject of much debate by the ERP.
Those estimated included an aggregate 35% percent contingency for planning and design phases. The right of way contingency was increased to 40% at the urging of the ERP. In addition the program has an additional 7.5% reserve (although it was reduced to this amount from 15% by the board to buy more goodies).
But that’s all water under the bridge, The staff did its job, followed the law and acted in good faith. The issue — now and then — was/is the board. They just couldn’t exercise discipline then to scale the program reasonably. And after it passed, they kept adding more and more stuff. These are POLICY decisions made by politicians, not staff decisions, I really really wish this community would do a better job focusing criticism where it belongs: on the agency leadership and the quality (or lack thereof) of their decision-making.
> Good lord there is so much wrong in these comments. First off, the planning requirements ST must follow are prescribed in state law. They followed the law for system planning the way they always do. All the steps they took were reviewed by the board and the expert review panel in concurrent open public meetings…. Second, Ross, incorrect. The ST3 cost estimating methodology was based on Sound Move/ST2 ACTUALS for completed and baselined projects. This methodology was the subject of much debate by the ERP.
@another_engineer
Well obviously something went wrong with planning otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about a 20, 7+ billion dollar cost for the link projects. i’m not sure what you are expecting us to say, the planning all went well and we should just repeat the mistakes. obviously something went horribly wrong with planning from the very beginning
> The issue — now and then — was/is the board. They just couldn’t exercise discipline then to scale the program reasonably.
Even excluding the board’s changes, the second ballard tunnel was horribly much deeper with the westlake station at 135/140+ feet. This was even before the chinatown station changes. The design was much deeper than the presentation they showed in the beginning with a westlake station interchange similar to the say la or wmata stations.
It’s quite clear to everyone, that sound transit did not seriously actually study the second tunnel alignment and just threw it onto the ballot
“ It’s quite clear to everyone, that sound transit did not seriously actually study the second tunnel alignment and just threw it onto the ballot.”
Yes I agree. Not only that, but much of the energy spent on the WSBLE effort in 2017 until 2019 after the vote focused mostly about the West Seattle and Ballard segments. There was almost no discussion of Downtown or SLU for at least two to three years — even though anyone with a half a brain would understand that this would become the most complicated and expensive segment to build.
Has this very blog ever said, “someone make a decision, even if we don’t like it”? I sure can’t recall. It’s been analyzing and re-analyzing every alignment and acting like the world is ending if it isn’t perfect, just like all the other pro-transit voices out there. I get it, you want what you think is best. But to complain now that nobody has made a decision is a bit absurd when you have been one half of the same coin demanding Sound Transit look at alternatives when it was clear even pre-COVID there wasn’t funding for most of it.
But to complain now that nobody has made a decision
Who is complaining about the lack of a decision? I think the essay is just pointing out how difficult it is. Sound Transit has painted itself into a corner. It assumed that a lot of this would be cheap. It assumed that world-class transfers wouldn’t upset the neighborhood. Now there is no consensus as to how to move forward.
There actually is a consensus on the blog. We don’t want to look at alternatives we can’t afford (as you imply). We want to look at alternatives that are cheaper. Replacing West Seattle Link with better and faster buses is cheaper and better. Replacing Ballard Link with an automated line that ends in Westlake would definitely be cheaper and a lot of people (myself included) think it would be better. So yes, we want them to go back to the drawing board. Most definitely.
That is because the delay has little to do with planning. It has to do with costs. We simply can’t afford the current plan. At some point someone has to make a tough decision. This means choosing something quite a different than what the voters asked for. It may mean building similar but much worse (e. g. a second tunnel and a “starter line” from Smith Cove to Delridge) or it could mean building something much better.
“It may mean building similar but much worse (e. g. a second tunnel and a “starter line” from Smith Cove to Delridge) or it could mean building something much better.”
On this affordability issue, I no longer think that Smith Cove to Delridge is even remotely affordable either. Given the financial hassle I’d be surprised if even Denny is reachable if Link just goes to Delridge. The cost tea leaves suggest that it may not even get past the awful Pioneer Square East escalator-palooza.
Of course we have to wait for the EIS costs to drop and they’re due out shortly. But the cavernous and deep stations between SODO and Smith Cove are surely the biggest cost items by far.
This hit the nail on the head: “A willingness to alienate a faction to build the system.”
The problem with decision-making of seemingly all entities around Seattle is that they want to please everybody, whether it be a business, a transit agency, a not-for-profit, or even an HOA board. The fact is, it’s chasing an impossible dream. In addition, relying on those who don’t necessarily have access to all of the information or have considered all aspects is a foolish way to operate.
Example 1. I was on a transit advisory board. I proposed truncating a route to an underused transit center (~33%). Another member from a wealthy area west of there said they could instead cut the corner and get close, 1/4 mile west. I countered with what about the non-abled bodied who would have to get themselves up and down the hill in-between? They were able-bodied, and they hadn’t thought of that. My proposal passed unanimously. The aforementioned park & ride jumped to being at capacity for the 20 years until Link made its way north. Fact: most transit planners are able-bodied and don’t always think of those who aren’t.
Example 2. Transit advocate on county council pushed through their idea of serving a certain suburb. The route was long and meandering. Ridership was abysmal. Same transit advisory board, I proposed a criss-cross of two routes in that area that each went by differing, desirable destinations. This passed, too, but a closer vote, yet it’s been the same routing for the past 24 years. Fact: most board members don’t ride transit regularly, those who do rarely ride more than “their usual.” They are not the most informed people to be making transit decisions for those who do ride regularly, chase after buses, miss transfers, wait in the wind and the rain, etc.
In summary, the decision makers should listen to the users of the system, but they should be aware that not all think holistically or are all-knowing, just as the staff presenting to them and their fellow board members.
Martin, it is great to see your voice here once again. It has been missed. It would seem perusing this comment thread that most readers are missing your point. And making your point at the same time.
We have very detailed microscopic arguments about optimal station locations or new lines entirely and their respective connectivity and merits. We have variations on the age-old spine-first debate, which hilariously ignore the fact that 34 miles of the spine is already built and operating, and 21 of it is wholly within Seattle. It makes your point over and over again. We’re part of the problem, because we all think we know best. And same goes for the demographic forces that press on the policy makers. The reality is, the region knows enough to commit to projects’ scopes and sequence them. But we fear the commitment of making those decisions. It really makes me sad.
But it also makes a larger point that requires attention and action by voters. We are in YEAR NINE for crying out loud. And not one ST3 project is under construction. (And don’t throw the technicalities of Redmond and Federal Way at me; those DECISIONS were made before ST3 ever passed.)
The only decisions the board has made have added time and added cost to the program, making permanent decisions on projects to move forward more and more difficult to make: adding a tunnel where there was none to WS; adding a tunnel where there was none in Ballard; adding another station and a deeper more challenging tunnel than the original plan in the C/ID area. A larger, more expensive bridge to WS. Ever larger and more intensively programmed maintenance facilities. The original plan contained funding for none of those additions. And the list goes on.
The voters trusted the ST Board with billions of their tax dollars, the board has utterly failed to do its job and uphold that trust. And the guy at the middle of it all, and with the most influence overall the time has now be installed by that same board as CEO. It defies logic. By any objective measure, the board’s stewardship of the ST3 Plan has been an abject failure, and it really deserves repercussions at the ballot box.
Modest Proposal 1.
The second DSTT should be made from the little used lower half of the SR 99 tunnel. The top half, cars could remain, becoming 1 lane in each direction.
ST would need to talk over some of the tolling fees.
Exiting in SODO, the ballard line would then go directly east on the mostly elevated Royal Brougham way, joining east link on the elevated track there.
The major transfer point from 1 line to 2 line would then be escalators and elevators to the easily expanded Stadium Station.
Modest proposal 2: cross the ship canal in the middle lanes of the Aurora Bridge and wind down to Ballard elevated above Leary Way.
think how happy ID property owners would be.
think how cheap it would be.
gates foundation happy. great
amzn could build a people mover to the SLU trolley.
fremont gets a station.
if feeling generous, use all the suddenly excess dollars to dig a new station somewhere in Belltown, or near SAM.
It would be quite difficult to add stations to this tunnel.
I think you could do
i mean if WSDOT was willing to sell the sr99 tunnel, it’d honestly be the ‘easiest’ way to get a new tunnel
You’ve forgotten one important thing. To stop in downtown Seattle!
While, yes, you could put a track in the lower half of the tunnel, that’s all you get, two tracks without a stop between Republican and Dearborn. There can certainly be no station stops, and even if you were able to construct a couple of enclosing station boxes at enormous to keep all that high pressure water out, the stations would be between First Avenue and Western!
And God help the Aurora Bridge if some fool put a double-track train line on it.
“A willingness to alienate a faction to build the system, as Nickels once did, is not a quality that obviously falls on the left/right spectrum that usually frames elections.” Isn’t this Balducci?
I appreciate the discussion around ST3 and the implications of decision-making on our transit future. It’s crucial we consider the needs of all neighborhoods, including West Seattle and Ballard. Balancing the budget should not come at the cost of essential services for our communities. Let’s keep the conversation going!
This looks like some sort of AI generated response.
A uncommon defeat of the site’s spam filter. We’ll have to be more vigilant with moderation.
It’s not so easy to “balance the books” when most ST3 projects so far are off by well less than 50 percent but both Ballard and West Seattle are off by 300-400 percent.
Al: the wording of these replies basically just summarizes what everyone else is saying. I’m pretty sure they’re being generated by someone training their AI system. It’s probably not worthwhile interacting with it.