Top 10 US cities that have become more city-like since 2010. This isn’t the most urban cities, but the ones that have improved the most. (CityNerd)
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Top 10 US cities that have become more city-like since 2010. This isn’t the most urban cities, but the ones that have improved the most. (CityNerd)
This is an open thread.
Comments are closed.
1. Seattle, WA
2. Denver, OR
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Portland, OR
5. Oakland, CA
6. Washington, DC
7. Boston, MA
8. Madison, WI
9. Austin, TX
10. Miami, FL
I’m shocked Charlotte didn’t make the list. South End (Charlotte) has started to ooze farther South and now includes even more high rise towers largely along the Lynx corridor.
Maybe I’m biased, but these cities have made significant strides in developing new urban communities. Seattle’s CBD has a largely vacant urban retail core that’s fallen significantly over the last 10 years.
Maybe Charlotte isn’t the City-Like the CityNerd wants.
This video is ranking changes from 2010 to 2025. Seattle was a very different city in 2010. Amazon was still in the Pacific Tower. Link from Westlake to SeaTac had just opened.
Seattle’s CBD was quite busy until 2020, when a global pandemic upended the model of a CBD exclusively populated by commercial office towers. Meanwhile, Seattle built an actual new urban community around SLU, with new residential its east side (“Cascade” neighborhood).
CityNerd’s ranking system consists of a score based on changes in five stats: population density, households with no car, median home price, median income, and income inequality. Of course it isn’t a perfect ranking system, but the definition of “city-like” is open to interpretation.
“Seattle’s CBD was quite busy until 2020, when a global pandemic upended the model of a CBD exclusively populated by commercial office towers.”
The big retail decline came from closing Macy’s as the big anchor. That was announced in September 2019, before anyone knew of Covid. The closure was preceded by Macy’s going from 8 floors in 2010 to 6 then 3 then closure. The decline of a retail downtown in Seattle was well underway before Covid.
I will add that Pike Place Market is still quite popular, especially in the summer. If the market went away, it would probably destroy downtown vibrancy more than any other closer including Macy’s. I think that’s the main anchor keeping Downtown Seattle vibrant today.
The big retail decline came from closing Macy’s as the big anchor.
Hardly. One store really doesn’t make much difference. Not for an area as huge as Downtown Seattle. It doesn’t really need an “anchor” like a mall. Look at the report on Seattle Downtown Retail from 2024: https://downtownseattle.org/programs-services/research/economic-report/2024-at-a-glance/. Everybody had the same thing happen. A slow decline prior to the pandemic (probably due to Amazon) then a big collapse followed by a slow set of improvements.
This was for the “Downtown Core” which includes Macy’s. But the retail areas of downtown have grown considerably over the years. First Hill used to be mostly just hospitals. South Lake Union used to only have a handful of shops. The Denny Regrade area was mostly old hotels. Even Belltown and the waterfront were pretty rinky-dink. Sure, they had shops but not that many. Now they all have a big retail presence along with areas like Pike/Pine. If not for COVID, downtown retail would be in outstanding shape downtown (and they really aren’t that bad right now).
Macy’s closed due to corporate problems that led it to downsize. The downtown Seattle store wasn’t a top performer so it got was one of those selected. The upper floors had furniture and other lesser-used items that faltered in the face of online ordering, discount stores, and other specialty stores. I went in for the liquidation sale, and the escalators were tired and loud as if the corporation hadn’t invested in store maintenance for a while.
While Macy’s was one of the biggest retail destinations, I don’t think it singlehandedly slashed down overall retail. The lockdowns started just a few weeks after closure, so we’ll never know what effect Macy’s alone had amidst the larger pandemic slowdown and the simultaneous fentanyl wave and homelessness increase.
The criteria are laid out in the first few minutes of the video; you can compare Charlotte’s data against the other cities. Most of it seems to be pulled directly from census data
https://data.census.gov/
I used to head to Charlotte somewhat often pre-COVID (I lived nearby-ish, had some friends in the city, and it had/has the only IKEA in the area) and it’s improved quite a bit over the years but cities like Miami and Atlanta have absolutely exploded. I was blown away by ATL’s growth in particular every time I visited.
Ray is using metro-wide trends, so all of Pugetopolis. The ST district is the approximate extent of the urbanized area (although it doesn’t include Marysville and goes far into southeast Pearce). Even if the visuals focus on downtown densification in each city (because that’s what channel viewers want to see and is the biggest step to a walkers’ paradise), the statistics and ratings are the metro-wide average.
In Pugetopolis there’s densification in central Seattle, other Seattle neighborhoods, Bellevue-Redmond, all the other suburban downtowns, light rail to Redmond, Lynnwood, and Federal Way, all the RapidRide lines (none existed in 2010), Swift Blue was just one month old, expansion of bike lanes, a big expansion in nature trails (the suburbs love these), progress on minimum zoning, decreasing regulations on parking minimums and setbacks and permitting, etc. Seattle’s waterfront renovation is a major asset that will take years to recognize its long-term importance, as the Space Needle and Seattle Center and Pike Place Market were. All that goes into the results.
I’d argue that 1970s style USA downtowns are actually anti-urban. Sure, there’s a bunch of tall office buildings, but with nothing much around them they might as well be in the suburbs with nothing else around them.
Yes, that might seem like an exaggeration, but I remember visiting Saturday Market in Portland in the late 1980s, and that was where anybody was. A group of us walked through downtown Portland and saw maybe 5 other people wandering around. Even the homeless stayed north of Burnside rather than downtown proper.
The residential over retail buildings built all over our region is what put Portland on the list, rather than anything going on downtown (though there have been a couple of projects there too).
The one I’m surprised by is Austin, as they don’t seem to have put much effort into multi-family housing at all. It goes straight from tall office buildings to single family homes in many areas.
“I’d argue that 1970s style USA downtowns are actually anti-urban.”
Yes, but the word urban is overloaded with at least three different meanings so it gets confusing, but I can’t think of a better word for them.
1. A walkable, transit-rich neighborhood that people naturally want to live in (33% of Americans) or would be satisfied living in (66% of Americans). The built environment is 20%-25% like that. That’s what causes the gap between what the bottom 80% want and what they can live in, and why people flock to walkable neighborhoods and only the richest can afford it, and why Americans are so frustrated. This generally contains missing middle housing or up to 8 story apartments and/or similar-sized businesses.
2. The entire urban/suburban area (called the “urbanized area”), roughly the ST district. This includes large cities like Seattle, significant densifying cities like Bellevue, and other medium-sized cities that are at least partly like that (Kent, Everett, Federal Way, Bothell), microburbs like Medina and Beaux Arts, etc. It doesn’t include the exurban fringe like Highway 9, that doesn’t really have a city, just oversized lots and gas-station shopping centers.
3. Ultra-dense areas like Mahnattan.
4. Dense areas that are neglected or depressed and have mainly poverty, crime, drugs, litter, and nonwhite people.
#1 is the goal. #2 recognizes the entire metropolitan area is a unit and stands or falls together. #3 is one model for walkability, though not necessarily the only one or best one. (Urbanists in the late 2010s generally realized the best model is 3-8 stories, not highrises, and all the new towns/neighborhoods in The Netherlands are being built like that.) #4 is what bigoted city-haters keep asserting.
The 1950s-1970s American vision was anti-urban. It ultimately goes back to Le Corbusier’s Radient City (towers in the park), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (house-farms with general stores at freeway exits and big-box centers but no dense downtown), the bad aspects of Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden City (low density), and a religious belief that cities are places of sin. So their solution is anti-cities (medium density) and cul-de-sac neighborhoods (low density).
An example of this is 118th Ave SE in Bellevue between Main Street and SE 20th Street. That’s between Link and 405. It has 1970s office highrises and nothing else. It made me cry to see it as I was walking to the Bellefields woods. Eastgate is another example, on both sides of I-90 between Factoria Blvd and 150th (east of Bellevue College). Downtowns like this, well, Federal Way.
“The one I’m surprised by is Austin, as they don’t seem to have put much effort into multi-family housing at all. It goes straight from tall office buildings to single family homes in many areas.”
Seattle started off stronger, but has surpassed Seattle in permitting lately. Check out the King and Travis county comparisons of HUD data:
https://www.huduser.gov/socds/permits/report?geography=states&states%5B%5D=48&states%5B%5D=53&counties%5B%5D=48453&counties%5B%5D=53033&report%5B%5D=county_total&periods=annual&years%5B%5D=2024&years%5B%5D=2023&years%5B%5D=2022&years%5B%5D=2021&years%5B%5D=2020&years%5B%5D=2019&years%5B%5D=2018&years%5B%5D=2017&years%5B%5D=2016&years%5B%5D=2015&years%5B%5D=2014&years%5B%5D=2013&years%5B%5D=2012&years%5B%5D=2011&years%5B%5D=2010&series%5B%5D=1&series%5B%5D=5
15 year window!! Thats like comparing 1929-1944. The hot cities of the 2010s aren’t the cities of the 2020s. And how is Detroit not on that list?
Didn’t see this in earlier posts. Grab your pitchforks horde!
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/12/19/sound-transit-board-sets-aside-idea-of-skipping-second-downtown-tunnel/
There is a new King County Executive who gets to appoint half the ST Board.
Mayor Wilson will assuredly be one of them.
Lobbying for new members who will look at better options than the downtown disconnections could make a difference.
Lobbying for members who want to shut down light rail expansions in other parts of the district will probably go nowhere. And I certainly would not support applicants who bring such an agenda.
Brent White,
Katie Wilson will fall in 100% behind the “Build the Damn Trains Already” crew (and Seattle Subway and the Transit Riders Union BTW) because we were promised a second tunnel and, by Gawd!, we will get our second tunnel!
There’s no way to unwind any of the “promises” made in the past by Sound Transit. It’s a rather bitter political reality people need to learn to live with.
“Katie Wilson will fall in 100% behind the “Build the Damn Trains Already” crew (and Seattle Subway and the Transit Riders Union BTW) because we were promised a second tunnel and, by Gawd!, we will get our second tunnel!”
Did you miss the fact that she founded and led the Transit Riders Union, and ran for office to try to change what the city does and prioritizes? She has at least some understanding of what passengers need, and wants to implement it. She’s not going to throw all that away just to follow every misguided thing other boardmembers and other cities’ officials want, or be deluded that the board’s 2016 decision is clearly the best choice because ST and some officials say so, or even if it was the best choice in 2016 things have substantially changed and old decisions need to be reevaluated and old assumptions tested and confirmed or discarded.
Mike Orr,
I like Katie Wilson and I think she’s nobody’s fool. That points to her staying far, far away from messing with Sound Transit in her 4 years as mayor. The women has shit she wants to get done! Why get sucked into a loser issue like Sound Transit?
If you understand anything about NW politics, it’s easy to see Sound Transit not changing anything that will make anybody disappointed and just grinding on for the 30 years, postponing all the projects to Hell freezes over.
Katie Wilson will fall in 100% behind the “Build the Damn Trains Already” crew…
I like Katie Wilson and I think she’s nobody’s fool. That points to her staying far, far away from messing with Sound Transit in her 4 years as mayor.
Wow, those are very contradictory messages. I think I lean towards the second one. I don’t think she will try and grab the bull by the horns because it is a complete mess. I think she is more likely to defer to folks on the board, especially Balducci, one of the few who actually seems aware of the mess that ST is in. ST is a long term project. We have a long string one-term mayors in Seattle. Thus there is very little reason to get involved in a major way. It is a loser’s game. Make as few mistakes as possible. Save your efforts to where it will actually matter in the short term: the buses. That, and main part of being mayor (police, social services, etc.). She will have to vote on what to do next but as I mentioned elsewhere that is actually fairly simple. Just build Ballard to Westlake as a stand-alone, automated line. Let a future board decide what to do after that.
Ross Bleakney,
I think you’re right about Mayor Wilson and Sound Transit. Just smile and give it the “thumbs up” and let it go by.
Wilson is not going to spend any political capital trying to change to financial mess ST finds itself in. She’s got other fish to fry.
She’s going to let folks like “Seattle Subway” and “Build the Damn Trains Already” just “rage against the machine”. These groups have zero money and they can be useful for a politician to use to their advantage sometimes (like getting bus lanes)… but honestly, these people are just political children. “Build the Damn Trains” is just an ill informed temper tantrum. Sound Transit has serious financial problems. Getting all pissed off about it doesn’t help much.
The. If TRU’s web site is any reflection of Wilson making changes at ST, I don’t think Wilson will change anything. TRU has only advocated for two transit-specific actions since the end of 2020 — fix Route 8 and advocate for UW employee bus passes. That’s it!
The organization appears to me to be misnamed. Most posts are about minimum wage, homelessness, rent protections, state initiatives, local political endorsements and internal fund-raising.
I suppose its supporters do ride transit — but they don’t actually do much to advocate for it.
And their silence about the WSBLE saga over the past five years is particularly deafening. They should have been on top of WSBLE all along and they haven’t been.
In the other hand, we have Harrell to blame to go along with the transfer-severing CID scheme that was never included in the draft EIS to miraculously appear and become the preferred alternative in a very short period of time.
“She’s going to let folks like “Seattle Subway” and “Build the Damn Trains Already” just “rage against the machine”.”
Um, we’re the ones raging against the machine. Seattle Subway is raging for the machine. Build the Damn Trains appears to be raging for the machine, although it’s not clear what their ST3 position is (no changes, or some sensible changes as long as things open on time — which may require changes).
TRU has only advocated for two transit-specific actions since the end of 2020 — fix Route 8 and advocate for UW employee bus passes. That’s it!
Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ve corrected you on this point before. Do a little research before making an audacious claim like that. Seriously, research the subject and you’ll find that TRU did more than that. Hell, I was involved in one of the efforts. Hint: It involved a single rail.
We discussed this when it came out (https://seattletransitblog.com/2025/12/18/st-downtown-tunnel-board-meeting/#comment-975729). I think Packer is overinterpreting things and declaring defeat prematurely.
As you can see in our archive between December 15 and December 20, the non-DSTT2 study was revealed to an ST committee Dec 11th. We had an article Dec 15 describing the two alternatives (“No New Tunnel Downtown?”), and another article Dec 16 advocating for the Stub-End alternative (“Build the Best Parts First”). The ST board meeting was December 18, and we had an article about it that evening (“ST Downtown Tunnel Board Meeting”). The Urbanist article came out the next day Dec 19, and I started an open-thread comment thread on it linked above.
Packer’s position in the article comes down to “Sound Transit likely won’t spend any more time studying the idea” (1st sentence), and “a plurality of board members concluded that both of those paths were too risky to spend time studying further” (5th paragraph). He’s taking boardmembers’ initial reactions to a just-released report. That’s not necessarily their final position. Balducci and Strauss won’t give up advocating for it. Several influential people weren’t present: Wilson wasn’t sworn in as mayor yet, and Zahilay just had a baby. We don’t know their views yet or their power of persuasion.
All the board members said the study was important for evaluating issues ST hadn’t previously considered, and that the board should keep its options open as it gets into the Enterprise Initiative cost-cutting debate over the next few months. So it didn’t reject the alternatives: it left them for further consideration and debate.
Somers is the board chair and one of the fiercest critics of abandoning DSTT2, so he has a structural advantage in pursuing that position, and it will be an uphill battle to reverse it. Both Packer and we came to the same conclusion on this.
But uphill is not impossible. No final decision has been made. The board had only had the results for a week, this was the first all-board briefing, and the first time they’ve been able to discuss their views in a meeting and see what each other thinks. Further questions will arise on whether DSTT2 is even financially feasible, whether reconfiguring downtown would really delay Everett’s opening much (Somers’s objection), what pressure ST gets from politicians and the public to go one way or the other, whether the study overstated the delay and understated the cost savings of the Stub-End alternative (the idea that it would save $0 is implausible), whether Wilson and Zahilay will join Balducci and Strauss in pushing for more serious consideration of the alternatives, whether the board would finally give automation a serious look, etc. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
We’re working on an article on Ballard automation. The “Build the Best Parts First” article briefly mentioned it but didn’t go enough into it. It will probably be ready this week or next week.
The study served its purpose. A stand-alone line is definitely practical. It would save billions. In contrast, interlining is not. It is too disruptive. This is very important information.
I think Packer is overinterpreting things and declaring defeat prematurely.
I agree. Much of the board is disillusional. They think we can build exactly what was in ST3 with at most a few minor changes. That simply isn’t the case. It also misses the point. Even if we do end up building West Seattle Ballard Link (WSBL) we need to address two key questions: What do we build next and how do we built it.
I think the first part should be obvious. As Nathan put it, build the best parts first. That means Ballard to Westlake. The other part isn’t so obvious but the vast majority of us agree: the line should be automated with smaller trains and smaller stations. This would save even more money and most likely result in better stations.
This means that if we do build a full WSBL (with a second tunnel) we are back to running trains from West Seattle to Ballard. This is actually better. With all due respect to Ballard Link, it is a secondary line. The folks coming from the south are far more likely to want to keep going towards the UW than towards Ballard. They are far more likely to want the old downtown tunnel stations than the new ones.
By building Ballard to Westlake as a standalone line you retain the possibility of a new downtown tunnel but you aren’t committed to it. You could build this instead. Note that this includes West Seattle Link. The trains simply go in the main tunnel. But again, that debate can happen *after* we build the most important piece first. Likewise, I feel very strongly that we can provide much better service for West Seattle by improving bus connections instead. But that debate can happen at a later date (along with the debate over the second downtown tunnel). Build Ballard Link as an automated line from Ballard to Westlake. Worry about the rest of it later.
And if you think interlining is disruptive, wait until you hear about the plan to add West Seattle to the existing tunnel (requiring a junction be built on the existing line) and move the existing line into a new tunnel (requiring at the very least a second new junction be installed on the existing line).
I still can’t believe this blog is to the right of Dallas transit planners.
Yeah I’m sure this stub idea is gonna go somewhere (not). What’s gonna happen is Sound Transit is gonna study it, see it’s not worth building a measly stub with an entirely different technology separate from the rest of Link, and because by that point building DSTT2 will be so expensive they’ll just cancel all of Ballard Link entirely.
But hey at least you maintain your one-seat bus rides to downtown!
The current buses actually serve Ballard rather than a single spot 1 mile east of Ballard. They also don’t require 11 floors of escalators to get to the surface at Westlake.
Opposing a bad plan that makes transit worse for a majority of people, while spending billions of dollars, is hardly right wing.
Nuggets, if you’ve got a way to get $30 billion of dedicated funding confirmed for ST in the next 6-12 months, by all means share it. In the meantime, there are hard choices to make and the obvious best answer is to build the Ballard-Westlake line first and the rest of the Seattle projects later.
What’s gonna happen is Sound Transit is gonna study it, see it’s not worth building a measly stub with an entirely different technology separate from the rest of Link, and because by that point building DSTT2 will be so expensive they’ll just cancel all of Ballard Link entirely.
That is the thing we are trying to prevent. We can’t possibly build West Seattle to Ballard Link. So at least build the most important part (Ballard to Westlake).
Or are you suggesting we should build West Seattle Link (interlined with the main line) instead of Ballard Link? Seriously?
Ross, momentum says that is exactly “what we will build”. They’ll finish West Seattle, probably all the way to The Junction and DSTT2 to “South Lake Union” on the Micawber Plan. Tacoma Link and Line 4 will be completed because Pierce and East King have the Buckos accumulated.
Then the money will run out. I expect that the Everett extension will die at the same time, somewhere around Payne Field.
It’s “Build The Crazy Parts First”
Whether the shortfall is $21 billion or $17 billion it is more money than the existing system has cost to date. [In YOE dollars]. The shortfall.
HELLO! ST3 as designed can’t be afforded. Really, the only element that can be “afforded” in full is the ridiculous Line 4 between Kindaemptyland and Nowherequah via BigDogvue. But that’s only because BigDogvue and NotRedAtAllmond have tax gushers. Connecting those points by 55 mph Light Rail trains is Saturday Night Live-level satire.
What will happen is that ST will plow ahead with the West Seattle Stub and the Spine extensions, dig the tunnel through downtown and run out of money about “Aurora Bus Intercept Station” and somewhere in southwest Snohomish County.
It will end up having severed the Spine to get trains for the new tunnel, and have West Seattle and Redmond to somewhere near Payne Field.
But it WILL have KindaEmptyLand to Nowherequah service because the Big Dogs have moneda by the billions.
Who else thinks that the school routes are a waste of money, barely anyone rides them, and Lakeside School already has the Shoreline South/148th Station, where I would expect students to ride the light rail (similar to how CT truncated UW routes at Northgate in 2021 due to the light rail). I feel like they are redundant, unusual, long, and run so far there’s probably no students that would ride that far or even live that far. If they are deleted when Cross Lake opens, I feel like that money can go to investing in better Metro service.
893: Idk about keeping this, though I might recommend the 250 and 255 as alternatives, plus the Stride S2 is going to connect 85th with Totem Lake.
895: I can recommend the 222, 245, and the B as alternatives.
981: I can recommend the Stride S2, S3, the 250, and the 2 Line as alternatives.
982: I can recommend the 1/2 Lines, 372, 75, 542, and 545 as alternatives.
986: I can recommend the 1/2 Lines, 372, 250, and 255 as alternatives.
987: I can recommend the 1/2 Lines, the 7, 50, 107, and 124 as alternatives.
988: I can recommend the 1/2 Lines, the 45, 72, 75, 48, G, 8, and 2 as alternatives.
989: I can recommend the 1/2 Lines, the 372, 75, and 203 as alternatives.
With the deleted redundant and underused services, how much money would be saved? This would cut around 17 trips, but that money invested in these long routes could go to other things.
NOTE: Fix the 372 and 75 to 72 and 77, because this will happen at the time or after the 2 Line crosses Lake Washington.
Don’t the schools pay for school routes? If they go away, that doesn’t mean more money for other routes.
I’m pretty sure that is the case. Lakeside definitely pays for those. It is basically a way for Metro to make a few bucks while the districts save a few bucks (a win-win).
Yeah, but it’s a way to save the school money, but I’m pretty sure a lot of students will be fine using light rail at Shoreline South/148th Station (with the 2 Line crossing Lake Washington soon), so this is something they should consider, I asked AI for help and it will save them 475,000+ dollars per year. Also to eliminate redundancy.
Even though hardly anybody from the general public rides them, I think students at the schools ride them. I also think the school district is paying for it, and if Metro’s school routes were discontinued, the school district would have to run the equivalent routes with yellow school buses, so it wouldn’t actually save them anything.
School districts are having a hard time hiring bus drivers, so they have contracted with Metro to hire the drivers and maintain the buses. Even with the contracted routes, school districts are still having to cancel many of their services every day due to lack of district-employed drivers.
Those school routes have been around for at least a decade or two. They predate the 2022 driver shortage, and were started for other reasons. School districts just became less interested in having yellow school buses, and contracted for special Metro routes and encouraged students to use regular Metro routes by giving them free passes.
Schools should use Metro more. The yellow buses only operate once in the morning and afternoon.
Metro routes could be used by middle and high schoolers who have after school activities. Run all day connects to nearby transit centers and major bus stops/parks /schools/ park rides.
Also allow adult commuters onto these buses that serve individual neighborhoods. No need for extra local bus service in the suburbs… Just have them take the Metro school bus and these school buses also drop people off at the transit center on the way before continuing to the school. Easy transfer to their main bus.
This is a nice ideal but unfortunately people riding the buses are not the safest and parents wouldn’t trust their kids on it… Some security would do good.
“barely anyone rides them”
Do you know that or are you just assuming?
“there’s probably no students that would ride that far or even live that far.”
I assume the reason routes from southeast Seattle to northeast Seattle exist is that people from that area attend that school,requested the route, and use the route. These decisions were made before Link was extended and Metro restructured, but that doesn’t automatically mean the routes aren’t needed. You have to look at the total travel time for students. If it’s approaching an hour, that’s likely too long and a more direct route is needed.
People underestimate how wide an area schools draw from. Examples:
1. I attended a small (100-student) alternative junior high in the early 90s located at Bellevue High School, and stayed on at BHS for high school. Most of the students came from walking distance or a couple miles around. There were no school buses for others, but but I came on a regular Metro route from eastern Bellevue (226), two of my friends came from Kirkland (235), one from Newport Hills (240), and one from Renton (240).
2. My roommate on Capitol Hill attended Shoreline College and Bellevue College at different times because of unique programs or superior teachers there.
3. An increasing number of high school students spend part of the day at colleges taking classes. When I was in high school this was very unusual, but now it’s so common that the head of North Seattle College was thrilled at the Link connection to Roosevelt High School because apparently a significant number of students attend both simultaneously.
4. It’s hard to find wrestling classes in Seattle, but Highline College has it. I’ve only attended tournaments there, but I could see somebody wanting that as part of their eduation traveling several miles to it.
Lakeside School routes seem to have good ridership which I’ve witnessed firsthand both on 23rd Ave and at South Kirkland P&R
poncho,
I’ve never been on a school route, though I might ride one in the future. So it’s my assumption based on the routing and how many trips there are.
@Scooby
Ridership numbers are posted on the metro dash. The routes generally do very well, at least for the few I checked they’re in the upper percentile of rides per service hour.
@jd,
Ok. Though I don’t really like to check it, I’m just too lazy and go out on a limb.
Sorry if this has been discussed. Does anyone have any insight into whether the generational transition at the Seattle Times (Frank Blethen to Ryan Blethen) is expected to make the paper more progressive on transportation? I know nothing of Ryan other than some nepotism criticism he received early in his career.
I know nothing about Ryan Blethen beyond his articles. It’s called the Suburban Times because it generally has a pro-suburban, pro-car viewpoint. I doubt one person’s change will make a difference. It’s still the same family, and Ryan has been involved with the paper for years if not decades, so any influence he has has probably already been incorporated.
I still subscribe to the Times because is reporter base and breadth/depth of coverage is unequaled, and can’t fully be replaced if the Times goes under. The editorial positions of the publisher leave room for improvement, but many reporters fill the gaps, and the op-ed editor publishes a variety of commentaries even if they contradict the editorials.
A few thoughts on the cool City Nerd video….
1. Like a number of his other videos, this one is a good jumping off point to think more about cities….
2. Median income was a pretty worth stat to use in this video. You can split Seattle into to basic income groups… households who bring home over $6,000 a month “take home” income that can afford $2,000 a month in housing costs and those who really can’t afford to live in Seattle. Nicer walkable neighborhoods are pretty much for the upper classes and a 2+ hour transit commute (per day) is pretty much for the lower classes.
3. For the last 30 years, the only reason Urbanism has happened is large corporations wanted to happen and largely funded it. Looking at who got paid in Seattle over the last 30 years…. it’s tech companies, real estate developers, property owners and anybody with a trust fund. What happens if Amazon and the like “go in another direction?”
Looking at the last big boom in Seattle, starting during WWII with ship and aviation production, a fair amount of the wealth ended up in home ownership for the working classes. Amazon’s South Lake Union didn’t do a thing for working class. Who paid for that South Lake Union streetcar after all? For whose benefit?
“Nicer walkable neighborhoods are pretty much for the upper classes and a 2+ hour transit commute (per day) is pretty much for the lower classes.”
That’s why we’re trying to get more and larger walkable neighborhoods, both in Seattle and in the suburbs. Then a broader range of incomes and more people will be able to live in them, and more people can live in the city they want to, whether that’s in King, Snohomish, or Pierce County.
It’s not inevitable or a law of nature that only the top 20% can live in walkable neighborhoods where they don’t have significant logistical hardships to meet their needs without a car. It’s just what Seattle/Pugetopolis/US has drifted into through policy choices, neglect, and denial. It’s not nearly as bad in many European, Canadian, Asian, or Latin American cities. Even a not-very-desirable location in the UK far from London probably have more transit choices and walkable destinations than average American cities. Certainly “the worst rail network in Europe” as the UK was called is ten times better than Amtrak.
Mike Orr,
I have a cousin who used to work in London at a desk job for the government. His commute was fucking unbelievable. We’re talking a a car pool and a train ride and then long walk. It generally sucks to be lower middle class anywhere in the UK and especially in London. It’s a city of haves and have-nots with a pretend socialist mayor. I have friends in Hamburg and it’s somewhat better, but it’s not some sort of socialist paradise if you’re lower income or not White. Seattle is a much better city to be low income in. We let even the lowest income people own cars and sometimes even buy houses they get to keep. Hamburg and Paris have slums full of people (many with jobs) who live in government sanctioned gettos…. for generations. The Turkish people in Hamburg I’ve met asked a whole lot of questions about how to get to America.
You can still buy a house in my old neighborhood in Tacoma for what many apartments rent for Seattle. I couldn’t afford Seattle by 1990!
I support many broad base “progressive” ideas. I don’t support lower income people without proper bus service paying taxes for higher income people to ride light rail miles and miles away. I don’t support government “low income housing” for people making $75,000 grand a year.
“We’re talking a a car pool and a train ride and then long walk.”
Where in London do you have to take a carpool? They must live on the outer edge. And I question whether there’s really no bus route from near their house to the train station. The principle advantage of London is along that commute route there are probably thousands of destinations and services and jobs that they could choose, and possibly do go to outside work.
“Amazon’s South Lake Union didn’t do a thing for working class. Who paid for that South Lake Union streetcar after all? For whose benefit?”
You realize South Lake Union is only 1% of Seattle and the SLU streetcar is less than 1% of Seattle’s transit. Why paint one part of it as if it’s all of it?
Seattle was doing fine economically in 2003 before Amazon’s big expansion. It wasn’t like 1970 when the region was more singlehandedly dependent on Boeing. I was able to find jobs in the early 2000s, and every few years I was able to gradually get into jobs that were closer to my liking.
Pugetopolis now is actually one of the top five or ten most creative places in the country where people are connstantly founding new companies and industries.
Subway Builder game – Seattle (This Realistic Transit Sim Actually Challenges You! – YouTube)
https://youtu.be/-JV4uivJT2A
If DSTT2 remains the official plan, but can’t proceed to construction due to lack of funds, the inevitable result seems to be the next ST3 component to get built being pushing Link northward and southward to Tacoma and Everett, using some “temporary” operational plan to avoid the line being too long, such as turning around Tacoma trains at Northgate and/or Everett trains at SODO.
Even though Seattle would not like such an outcome, it is very acceptable from the perspective of a Pierce or Snohomish ST board member. Which I’m guessing is the logic behind Somers being so adamant at not even bothering to study alternatives to DSTT2 – if the Seattle projects became cheaper, they might go first, causing Everett/Tacoma projects to go later. It’s the opposite of “build the best parts first”, but that’s the way politics works.
Indeed. The provincialism of the board causes and allows boardmembers like Somers to shaft a bunch of riders in the city, where the project would provide a significant transit improvement, in favor of a much smaller number of riders outside of the city, where the project is worse for most riders than an express bus and will never yield the density improvements and resulting environmental and social benefits that we can achieve in the city with a rapid transit line through dense neighborhoods.
> but that’s the way politics works.
I think this is just the way Sound Transit politics work: these terrible outcomes are directly downstream of the non-expert, non-accountable boardmembers for whom this is a secondary job and a political liability, and also the requirements for “subarea equity”.
June Foamer,
I got to call you out for this nonsense. You’re getting all hot and bothered about “riders”. Riders are NOT what powers Sound Transit. Tax payers do.
You posted…
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The provincialism of the board causes and allows board members like Somers to shaft a bunch of riders in the city, where the project would provide a significant transit improvement, in favor of a much smaller number of riders outside of the city, where the project is worse for most riders than an express bus and will never yield the density improvements and resulting environmental and social benefits that we can achieve in the city with a rapid transit line through dense neighborhoods.
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I hate Sound Transit because in the end it would always boil down to the selfish jerks in Seattle trying to steal sub area taxes because Seattle “needs them more” or has more “riders”.
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I’ve met Ryan Mello a few times over the years, and he’s about the nicest dude you’d hope to meet, but I’m pretty sure this sort of talk would piss even him off. I’m sorry, but Seattle isn’t going rip off Pierce County. Sorry the “Country Bumkins” plan to fight back. Sorry our neighborhoods aren’t “dense enough” for your liking, or your belief transit doesn’t deliver the “social and environmental benefits” to the folks not living in Seattle.
tacomee, I am not going to respond to all of the places in your comment where you strawman me (really: go back and count how many times you use quotes that do not appear anywhere in my comment). Nowhere do I suggest taking money from other counties; I am asking that we equitably distribute ridership opportunity costs and benefits in project sequencing.
There is a more important point to address, I think:
> Riders are NOT what powers Sound Transit. Tax payers do. This type of thinking is the core of the problem with Sound Transit. It is backwards. The point of a transit system is to get people around, not to collect money and send it to consulting and construction firms. It is a waste no matter the source of the money if a project is hardly used, or makes people worse off—see the West Seattle and exurban Link extensions, and DSTT2, respectively (note: examples in all subareas!)
June Foamer,
Nothing personal, but tax payers seem to like value for money. Money talks and bullshit walks as they say in trades. Pierce County voters want Sound Transit to deliver just like in the voter’s guide. Same with our friends up in Everett. Your opinion about those living in the “hinterlands” is your opinion, it’s not anything like the voters pamphlet we voted on for ST3.
Did you vote yes or no on ST3? I voted no, but I understand that I need to abide by the will of the people who voted yes. What you’re trying to do is usurp the democratic will of the people because why? Because you’re a self proclaimed transit expert?
At this point, it should take a public vote to make any radical changes to Sound Transit.
Building a subway that costs 3x more than advertised, and has far worse transfers, is itself a radical change, and by your standard it should require another popular mandate…
As a side comment, I think that “subarea equity” is such a misnomer. It does not result in equitable outcomes between subareas if you consider opportunity costs (since ST cannot work on all projects in parallel for bonding reasons): in the case of Ballard Link under the current plan, a small number of people in Pierce and Snohomish counties are actively being prioritized over a much larger number of people in north King County.
Taxpayers matter because they are paying the bills for a system that is recovering very little of it’s operating costs and (AFAIK) 0% of it’s construction costs from the riders. DSTT2 is going to be paid for by all sub areas, even though as has been pointed out numerous times here will result in a much worse rider experience for a lot of suburbanites. It amazes and angers me that Somers is pushing to build the tunnel. I have to hope that the theory expressed here that it is an under handed way of getting Everett built first is correct.
As a final point I would say you are totally mistaken about who is prioritized in this and virtually every other megaproject in the USA. Of course the highest priority is the politicians themselves, followed by the consultants, construction firms, and labor unions. They are who supplies the bribes (in this country we call it campaign donations) and promised voters.
It’s not about Everett first. West Seattle is scheduled to open first, then Tacoma Dome, then Everett, then Ballard. That’s the schedule ST set in 2016 and reaffirmed in the realignment in the early 2020s. What Somers is afraid of is that changing Ballard/DSTT2 will lead to unexpected major costs and delays that will throw Everett off track or suck up all the money so that there’s none left for Everett. That’s what Somers is trying to prevent.
Good value for your money means transit that serves the most people’s trips in the three counties and gets us toward a point that less than 50% of people have to have cars or drive for most of their trips. Sound Transit can’t do it alone because its mandate is only regional transit. You need a comprehensive regional+local network, which means ST, Metro, CT, ET, and PT together. But Link needs to be the best regional network it can be. That means good Link-to-Link transfers and the highest frequency possible, among other things.
The basic problem with subarea equity is that most taxes are collected at the pkace of residence. Car tabs are usually registered at home unless it’s a company car. Most sales taxes are collected near home where people shop for basic goods. Property taxes are on one’s home — and more and more companies want people working from home so that they can lower their office space rent.
And that doesn’t even get into income equity issues where some subareas have wealthier residents in aggregate who can generate more tax revenue than less wealthy subareas do.
Consider the SeaTac situation. Why is South King paying for getting to the station, when it’s a place that doesn’t really have a pronounced number of South King riders? The same can be said for places like Climate Pledge Arena or UW.
June Foamer,
You posted….
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As a side comment, I think that “subarea equity” is such a misnomer. It does not result in equitable outcomes between subareas if you consider opportunity costs (since ST cannot work on all projects in parallel for bonding reasons): in the case of Ballard Link under the current plan, a small number of people in Pierce and Snohomish counties are actively being prioritized over a much larger number of people in north King County.
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You know how this sounds to tax payers of Snohomish and Pierce County have been paying ST taxes for years? Seattle and King County entered into an agreement to build a regional transit network funded by a special tax district sealed with an historic regional vote (ST3). Who gave you the right to even dream of violating this agreement? It’s this sort of thinking that dooms public transit and overall trust in government.
Let’s talk equity, June. Ignoring the fact that we should be talking about the other type of equity, and discussing disparate impacts of forced car ownership on low-income people in South King and Pierce…
Ballard has 29 thousand people. Pierce County has almost a million.
It’s going to be 22 Billion dollars ( and climbing) to serve those 29 thousand people. It’s going to be a quarter of that to serve Pierce.
I don’t think we should be serving Pierce with Link, but given that it is likely politically impossible to avoid that, I think you have the small numbers and large numbers reversed.
“Subarea equity” is accurate. The term was specially invented to refer to the ST policy. It’s equity for subareas, not individuals or large concentrations of individuals or regional centers. The concept is all money raised in a subarea must benefit the subarea, where “benefit” is defined by the subarea’s board delegates. Usually it means projects within the subarea, but it can also mean access to border transit centers (Federal Way), access downtown Seattle or downtown Bellevue, or anything else that’s important to them.
The non-North King subareas insisted on this to avoid their money going to Seattle projects. Seattle is where transit infrastructure will be most utilized for several reasons, so it’s where a unified look at transit best practices would put it (as in Vancouver BC, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, etc). If you translate that vision to Pugetopolis you’d get several Seattle lines with closer stop spacing, and later three lines to Lynnwood, Bellevue-Redmond, and SeaTac-KDM-or-Federal Way. Beyond that would probably be frequent BRT feeders.
Subarea equity was created to prevent that. The subareas wanted priority for Lynnwood, Everett, Bellevue, Redmond, Federal Way, and Tacoma, before more than one Seattle line. They wanted the first Seattle line to have wide stop spacing to speed up trips to suburban regional centers. ST could have done a two-level thing like BART and MUNI, but it chose a hybrid between the two to save money. In either case, subarea equity blocked additional Seattle lines in ST1 and 2, hindered additional stations on the 1 Line, and probably hindered a two-level solution.
The problems in Pierce and Snohomish are entirely of their own making. In Pierce, Central Link will reach only a P&R in the corner of the county. Pierce forgot about the original plan to go to downtown Tacoma (per Troy Serad), and didn’t advocate for several Stream lines throughout the county or a larger Tacoma Link network, or extending Tacoma Link to Federal Way instead of Central Link.
In Snohomish, Somers and the other delegates insisted on Central Link to Everett Station and the Paine Field detour, and continuing Sounder North to this day. It missed an opportunity for ST contributions to a larger Swift network. And it did nothing about bringing Marysville and Arlington into the ST district even when it allowed major growth there and designated an Arlington regional industrial center.
Ballard has 29 thousand people. Pierce County has almost a million.
Washington State has 8 million. Sure, Link is expensive but it serves 8 million. But wait, Link is in the USA — a country of 330 million! Suddenly the cost doesn’t seem so bad.
Anyway, you get the idea. Link will never serve all of Pierce County. That is ridiculous. Only a handful will ever take advantage of what ST offers and most who will are using it right now. Sounder, ST Express, Link — they all benefit Pierce County riders in some form or another (just not that many).
In any event, subarea equity is a stupid idea. You don’t have to live in an area to benefit from a transit improvement. I’m sure people from Pierce County are taking advantage of Federal Way Link as we speak. But consider this: Imagine if Link never left Seattle but criss-crossed the city with multiple lines running very quickly and frequently. Would that benefit the suburbs? Of course. It would mean that they would take buses and transfer to the subway line (just like they do now) but they could easily get to places like Belltown, South Lake Union, First Hill or Fremont.
Should Pierce County pay as much as say, Bellevue for such things? No, of course not. Not that many people from Pierce County visit Seattle. They are far less likely to benefit from those improvements. But Bellevue sure as hell would.
Of course the worst part of subarea equity is that each agency is supposed to spend the same amount of money on transit. Then, on top of it all, there is the assumption that the money should only be spent on regional transit and mostly on rail. Throw this all together and you get really stupid projects like Tacoma Dome, Everett and Issaquah South Kirkland Link. The biggest transit weakness within Pierce County is lack of *local* service. The buses are way too infrequent. Yet they want to run a subway line all the way from the outskirts of downtown to Seattle? It is just a really bad idea.
Well over 100,000 people travel between Federal Way and Tacoma Dome every day. Can Ballard to Westlake say the same? Just because only a small proportion are transit “riders” has less to do with demand than the historic inadequacy of transit to fill the need.
How many people will actually use Tacoma Dome link though?
TriMet’s WES runs parallel to I-5 and 217, which are perpetually congested. It’s far faster than Link will be, as it’s designed for 79 mph. It currently gets about 1,500 riders per day.
Probably not that many, because it’s a poor route, using the wrong, slow mode, with a crap terminus.
I suggest we look at Ballard with the same discerning eye. A poor route, using the wrong mode, with a crap terminus. But serving fewer people, at a dead-end part of the city.
My suggestion for Ballard is the same as West Seattle (and Tacoma Dome).
Take a lane.
Take the bus.
Well over 100,000 people travel between Federal Way and Tacoma Dome every day.
You are claiming that 100,000 people start their journey at the Federal Way Transit Center and end at the Tacoma Dome? Really?
That is not what I said. Why would I claim that? Network effects. Or lack thereof.
Whoa up, Cam. BLE is about much more than the “29,000” people in Ballard. It is about integrating South Lake Union and “Uptown” into the regional system, something that benefits everyone to some degree. It could certainly do that better than planned, but it has three stations with regional ridesheds.
Ditto TDLE, except impacting an order of magnitude more humans than backwater ballard. If it were done with a functional network, using the proper mode and the right routing. Which it’s not.
Ballard is not a backwater. It is one of the more urban neighborhoods in the state. It is also relatively close to the other urban areas. The subway line would be relatively linear. Thus you have density, walkability, proximity and linearity — all the factors that contribute to high ridership. Not just in Ballard but with most of the other stations as well (leading to a network effect).
In contrast, consider Tacoma Dome Link. Downtown Tacoma is certainly dense and walkable but the train won’t serve that neighborhood. There is very little density close to any of the stations south of Rainier Valley. You have SeaTac, Highline College and that is about it. Thus you don’t have much of a network effect. You also don’t have proximity. It is a long ways from say, Fife to Highline College. About all it has is linearity (which an express bus would have as well).
In terms of bus alternatives, there are major differences as well. At noon, the train will be faster than driving from Ballard to Downtown. Yet it will make all of those additional stops (that will greatly increase ridership). They could make the bus faster but it would require a major investment in infrastructure spending. Even if they did that the train would still be faster. In contrast, the fastest way to get from the Tacoma Dome to Downtown Seattle at noon is via an express bus. During rush hour the fastest way is via Sounder. Tacoma Dome to Federal Way is roughly a wash. But again, the Tacoma Dome is not really a destination. Downtown Tacoma is. Thus a bus that ran from Downtown Tacoma to Federal Way and then continued to Downtown Seattle would compete well with a potential train. Riders headed from Downtown Tacoma to Downtown Seattle would get there significantly sooner. Riders heading to places like SeaTac or Highline College would get there at about the same time (instead of transferring in the Tacoma Dome they would transfer in Federal Way).
I’m not saying Ballard Link is the best rail project they could build right now (Ballard to UW is) but it is by far the best ST3 rail project.
Well over 100,000 people travel between Federal Way and Tacoma Dome every day.
So what? I’m sure thousands of people fly over Kansas every day. That doesn’t mean that they should build a subway line there. The main reason people drive from Federal Way past the Tacoma Dome is because there is a freeway there. That doesn’t mean they are actually going to places close to the Tacoma Dome or Federal Way Station. Nor does it mean that connecting the two with a train will somehow benefit them. Right now, if someone is driving from a typical location in Kent to a typical location in Tacoma they will drive on that section of the freeway. The same is true for a typical place in Federal Way as well (https://maps.app.goo.gl/kNixDokmAkFywxDQ8). Subways connect neighborhoods, not cities. Yes, people can transfer but at some point it just isn’t worth it — especially when it is so much slower and the vast majority of people are used to driving.
This is why Lynnwood Link doesn’t get that many riders. It has everything going for it from a suburban/urban standpoint. The trains deliver riders to major Seattle destinations quite quickly. The stations are designed to interface with both local and express buses. Community Transit does a very good of providing both types of service. Yet even with all of that, Lynnwood Station gets fewer riders than Roosevelt. You may consider the latter to be a “backwater” location but it gets more riders than the highest performing station of Lynnwood Link — a station that feeds most of Snohomish County. That’s because the county is so spread out it can’t possibly serve all of it. Someone in Edmonds heading to some place in Shoreline is far more likely to just drive, even if it means driving right next to the light rail stations (on the freeway).
The point being, the amount of freeway travel is meaningless. You have to look at where people are actually going and figure out whether the improvements will actually make a big difference in their trip. They definitely have for Roosevelt. It is much easier to get to places like Capitol Hill (again, proximity, walkability, density, linearity). Lynnwood Link is a nice addition but it really doesn’t have all that. Neither do any of the stations on the Tacoma Dome Link.
Ballard isn’t Roosevelt.
Ballard isn’t on the way to anywhere, except maybe the beach and the locks.
It has very little in the way of anything with high interest until you get to Seattle Center. And that’s already served by the monorail.
Sure, it has a shit load of new townhouses (which I suggest is actually going to stall any future growth) and a few taller apartment buildings and 5 over 1s along the busy corridors. It doesn’t really have any industry to speak of except the restaurant industry. Nothing that a ton of people or going to ride to a dead end in the far reaches of Seattle.
It simply isn’t worth the 10s of billions of dollars to serve, when a bus can serve it almost as well for a teensy tiny small fraction of the investment.
The amount of freeway travel is very far from meaningless. I would argue it is far, far, far more important to address in order to reach our climate goals than whether someone take a bus or a train from Ballard.
We should be doing all we can to get those cars off of I-5 and the drivers in buses and trains. It’s a freakin emergency that we do. And you say it’s meaningless.
@ Cam:
I don’t disagree that Ballard isn’t as prominent as some want to say it is. In the project’s defense I will say this for Ballard Link:
>The Ballard Link station boardings all by itself are forecasted to be higher than all three West Seattle Link station boardings combined. Like West Seattle, many of those riders are transferring from buses so they could transfer elsewhere — but it would be a more productive station location.
>Ballard has an active Swedish medical clinic that does get regional use.
>The Ballard bridge is a huge reliability issue for buses because it is a drawbridge. The high West Seattle bridge is not a drawbridge and does not pose a major reliability concern.
ST has not been forthcoming about the costs of various Ballard Link and DSTT2 segments. It’s always been presented as one big loaf of bread. Maybe the EIS will contain details by segment and it would be possible to assess project phasing. But until that happens, it’s strictly a more qualitative discussion.
It’s just one more instance where ST ignores looking to rational metrics like cost per rider and transit travel time savings in aggregate (including transfer time and effort) to make decisions. As long as there aren’t hard calculations of forecasted value, ST will ultimately get to do what they feel like doing with the money pot the taxpayers give them annually with the 2016 vote. With all the decisions coming up for ST3 Link, the lack of metrics to guide decisions is really obvious to me that the executive staff and Board just want to build Link but don’t want to maximize its usefulness to the taxpayers, especially riders. It’s seemingly a toy train project that they’re building to satisfy their real estate friends rather than riders or taxpayers.
“Sure, it has a shit load of new townhouses (which I suggest is actually going to stall any future growth) and a few taller apartment buildings and 5 over 1s along the busy corridors.”
Did you say it has taller apartments, 5-over-1s, new townhouses, and busy corridors? I’d add from experience: walkable retail, nightlife, tourist attractions, and reverse commuters (I was one). In fact Ballard is Seattle’s 4th-largest urban village after greater downtown, the U-District, and Northgate (assuming it’s larger than Lake City), especially if you add Fremont to it. All that sounds like a good reason for high-capacity transit to northwest Seattle. (If not necessarily the exact Link project.) We need the largest villages to be part of the non-driving housing solution, and we can only do that by getting fast/frequent transit to them.
“It doesn’t really have any industry to speak of except the restaurant industry. ”
You jest. Southern Ballard is a productive industrial area, the second-largest after SODO. It’s now a designated Regional Industrial Growth Center like Paine Field, Redmond Tech, and probably northwest Kent, Arlington, and the SODO industrial district.
“new townhouses (which I suggest is actually going to stall any future growth)”
Why is that? The buildings will be filled within a year or two of opening, so the population will increase, and that’s growth and more potential transit trips.
If you mean developers won’t build more until the townhouses are filled, so what? It’s still growth. We need appropriate transit for the current population level and near-future level, not just long-term development. That has been the problem for a century in Ballard and all of Pugetopolis: transit has lagged decades behind the population’s needs. Better to err on the side of overbuilding a little after so much underbuilding.
If you mean new townhouses prevent denser buildings on those same lots, that is a significant issue. That’s probably only happening at the periphery of the village, the longest walk from the center or major transfer points, where it can do the least harm. Although the proposed 15th or 14th station is close to the townhouses rather than close to the center, grr. (I’m guessing where townhouses are, since I don’t actually know; I just know where the lower-density houses were when I lived next to them.)
True. Fisherman and boat builders are enthusiastic transit users.
Ballard isn’t Roosevelt.
You are right. Ballard is much bigger and broader in pretty much every respect. It has higher residential and employment density and is a bigger destination for outsiders. Not just Old Ballard of course but you’ve also got a hospital there. It is basically more urban.
The only advantage Roosevelt has from a potential ridership standpoint is its proximity to the UW. But otherwise Ballard has higher ridership potential. Whether ST will maximize that potential is another issue. They actually did a very good job serving Roosevelt (they didn’t put it under the freeway as planned). This makes it close to a lot of apartments although unlike Ballard, it goes from apartments to single-family homes fairly quickly. But one of the nicer things about Roosevelt Station is how well the buses serve it. By putting it on Roosevelt Avenue (and not under the freeway) the buses from the north and northeast (Lake City) can serve it without having to do a stupid detour (like at Northgate). With Ballard there is a similar issue — going to 14th or 15th will screw up the 40. But if they build the station at 14th the bigger hit will be walk-up ridership.
True. Fisherman and boat builders are enthusiastic transit users.
Yeah, and everyone in Ballard is Scandinavian. So much lutefisk — Uff Da!
Seriously though, you really should go to Ballard sometime. It has changed quite a bit over the years. Don’t drive though — old timers complain about the fact that it is now really hard to park in Ballard (another sign of the increased urbanism there).
I walked around it for an hour last week.
A shit load of townhouses than won’t be torn down for 40 years, no matter how high they upzone.
Good $60 pizza though.
Cam, how many townhouses are there within walking distance of any of the TDLE stations?
I can’t think of any.
There are a handful larger apartment buildings around the Tacoma Dome, one in bankruptcy. A bunch of parking lots and parking structures, a few dozen long-running businesses, and a a fair amount of light and heavy industrial. Fife has some apartment complexes around the casino.
It’s definitely got a bunch of TOD opportunities. Talking to the chamber, they are banking on a Dome District blossoming. I am not so sanguine.
A shit load of townhouses than won’t be torn down for 40 years, no matter how high they upzone.
Are you sure you were in the main part of Ballard? I mean, sure, there are bound to be townhouses close to the High School but that isn’t really the main part of Ballard. Here is a typical view of Ballard: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xHpzQD7ueHaAr1eq5. Note the really big building. As you rotate the map clockwise you can see some old buildings (Loiusa, etc.). That is basically the edge of Old Ballard. Then there is another big building followed by some place to “EAT”. My guess that building won’t be there in ten years. That is where folks want to put the station. A block over is Swedish Ballard. It is part of a growing medical area (kind of like Northgate but with a lot less parking). Market, of course, is a retail area (similar to The Ave). North of there you have more of the big apartment buildings (https://maps.app.goo.gl/3tRYeLxs8ueAUpmB7). The building that is going up is definitely not a townhouse. To be clear, there are townhouses — it is just that they are old. Many are being replaced by bigger apartments.
Another way to look at it. Go to this site: https://www.seattleinprogress.com/. Filter out the small stuff. Look at projects in the pipeline as well as those completed over the last year. Ballard has a lot. Select a handful. Just about everything west of 15th and east of 24th (i. e. the main part of Ballard) is 8 story buildings. Then of course, there is census information. Even before they built those buildings the area had density that is fairly high (38,000 people per square mile). Good luck finding anything like that in Pierce County.
I know Old Town well enough.
I was interested in what had been going on where they were planning to put the Link station, east of 15th. You need transit for TOD. That’s all quite new townhouses, which severely limits any growth around transit.
I was interested in what had been going on where they were planning to put the Link station, east of 15th.
Yes, and they planned on putting the Roosevelt station under the freeway. That is beside the point. As I wrote before, Central Ballard* is a dense area. Whether Sound Transit puts a station there or not is a different issue.
*There is no good moniker for the area everyone has been talking about for a long time. It is not really “Old Ballard” since that is the historic district that is not particularly dense. It is basically the area just north of there. Market & 20th for example. This is why you get posts like this or this. The second one implies that 14th & Market isn’t even in Ballard. I get that, seeing as it is basically West Woodland. Of course you can argue that West Woodland is merely a neighborhood inside Ballard. But the point is it isn’t Ballard Ballard. 20th & Market is.
Oh, and you could say the same thing about the Tacoma Dome Station. I’m sure some realtor somewhere considers it part of Downtown Tacoma. It would not be crazy for Sound Transit to name the station that (given it is the closest station to Downtown Tacoma). But it really wouldn’t be in the heart of Downtown Tacoma (or even that close).
Then we agree.
They are both shitty projects that probably shouldn’t happen, particularly with the price tag involved. A bus with a dedicated lane, signal priority all the way to Westlake, and new bridge (which is needed anyway for cars, bikes and peds) and going right to 20th and market would be superior, and pennies, in comparison.
A project where Sounder left 15th and Pac Ave every half hour, on tracks that are electrified, dedicated and improved (which is needed anyway for Amtrak) would be superior and very likely cheaper if Amtrak, BNSF and Sound Transit all worked together, is the answer, not TDLE.
But that’s not the projects Sound Transit is dead-set on building. They are building things for 10s of billions of dollars that will make things worse, and bankrupt big-transit in the region for decades.
So I find myself routing against all of it.
Rooting. lol.
And I suppose routing too.
“… using some “temporary” operational plan to avoid the line being too long, such as turning around Tacoma trains at Northgate and/or Everett trains at SODO.“
LA Metro, with the longer A Line, just changes drivers with every train trip at a Downtown LA station. It’s easier than trying to slot train reversals.
That works too.
The A Line is grotesque. It should be split and overlapped. That is, trains from Long Beach should continue to Pasadena, while trains from Pomona continue to Washington or Slauson. This would give three lines in the downtown tunnel where there are the most short hops.
As a side note/prediction, D line ridership is going to explode in 2027 or 2028 when it opens to Westwood.
If DSTT2 remains the official plan, but can’t proceed to construction due to lack of funds, the inevitable result seems to be the next ST3 component to get built being pushing Link northward and southward to Tacoma and Everett…
I’m guessing [that[ is the logic behind Somers being so adamant at not even bothering to study alternatives to DSTT2
Wow, that is some fancy 3-D chess politics. Make sure projects in the city are stuck so that you can then offer to build things to the north and south first. Of course that is completely the opposite of what they are arguing (that we shouldn’t change plans since that would delay things). But that makes it all the more devious. After folks finally agree to stick to the original plan but put it off for several years (to raise more money) the north and south areas graciously agree to build their projects next (might as well).
I don’t buy it. I don’t think anyone on the board is that clever or devious. It is far more likely they just don’t know what the hell they are doing. They honestly think this is the best approach — for all involved.
“If DSTT2 remains the official plan, but can’t proceed to construction due to lack of funds, the inevitable result seems to be the next ST3 component to get built being pushing Link northward and southward to Tacoma and Everett…”
“I’m guessing [that[ is the logic behind Somers being so adamant at not even bothering to study alternatives to DSTT2
“Wow, that is some fancy 3-D chess politics”
It’s a misread of what ST IS doing in North King, Snohomish, and Pierce, and the impact of DSTT2 getting stuck before construction starts.
Per the 2021 realignment timeline, which is the closest we have to a construction schedule at this point:
1, The West Seattle-SODO stub starts construction as soon as ST2 is finished and opens in 2032.
2. The Tacoma Dome extension starts construction around then too, and also opens in 2032.
3. The Everett extension starts construction sometime around then or a bit later, and opens in 2037. There’s a potential to split into two phases, one to “SW Everett” phase, and and the rest needing a $600 million funding increase for the rest of the way to Everett Station.
4. The Ballard/DSTT2 extension starts construction after the West Seattle stub finishes, and opens in 2037. There’s a potential to split it into two phases, the first to Smith Cove, and the second needing a $1.8 funding increase for the rest of the way to Ballard.
All this is to proceed in all subareas simultaneously while staying within the debt ceiling limit.
Tacoma Dome and Everett will probably open close to schedule, because they don’t have tunnels or dense areas, and Pierce has saved up for a large down payment.
If ST rejects the non-DSTT2 alternatives but then can’t construct DSTT2 due to costs, that may help Everett finish a little early, but probably not much, and Somers probably isn’t trying for this.
If ST chooses the Stub-End alternative for Ballard, we estimate it will decrease costs substantially, especially if it automates the line. That may open Ballard early, if the savings from DSTT2 isn’t fully eaten up by the Ship Canal tunnel. If the Ballard stub costs less than Ballard/DSTT2, that would free up debt capacity to finish Everett sooner.
What Somers is afraid of with both the non-DSTT2 alternatives, is that they’ll add unknown costs and delays that the report didn’t identify, and that could jeopardize finishing the Everett extension on time or at all.
Somers sees himself as accountable to the voters in Everett and Snohomish County. He thinks what they most want and need is the Link extension to Paine Field and Everett Station, and they need it urgently and can’t wait. They could care less whether Ballard or DSTT2 get built or not. What they want is Link to downtown, Link to the airport, and Link from King County to Everett Industrial Center jobs (e.g., Boeing workers, and Link attracting more companies to the EIC).
I think that’s the rough idea. But, I’m skeptical that “All this is to proceed in all subareas simultaneously while staying within the debt ceiling limit.” is still actually true considering cost escalations post-2021.
But, the fact remains that, even if DSTT2 is unaffordable, keeping it the plan doesn’t really impact the timeline of Link to Everett and Tacoma. Link to Everett and Tacoma would just go first while Seattle work happens later. Maybe they built a west Seattle stub at the same time, or if it causes debt ceiling issues, maybe they don’t, but Pierce and Snohomish don’t really care.
Logically, cancelling DSTT2 shouldn’t delay Link to Tacoma or Everett either, as these are separate projects in different corners of the region. But, I think the fear is that, in the legal world of high-paid lawyers in suits arguing in courtrooms, DSTT2 and Tacoma/Everett Link are officially one big project, since ST submitted one big EIS in order to avoid the overhead of multiple EIS’s. And that any change means redoing the EIS and rolling the dice on how long it takes the new EIS to get reviewed/approved, including the exhaustion of appeals from wealthy people who just don’t want any new Link track being built at all.
I would like to say that the above concern is unfounded and, under any sane system, it would be. However, I am not an expert in U.S. environmental law and I do know that our system is a complete and utter mess, and that environmental laws routinely get weaponized by people who simply want to delay/block construction of anything they don’t like. I also know that any approvals coming from the federal government cannot be depended on under the current administration.
They have already pushed Tacoma Dome out to 2035.
Somers sees himself as accountable to the voters in Everett and Snohomish County. He thinks what they most want and need is the Link extension to Paine Field and Everett Station, and they need it urgently and can’t wait. They could care less whether Ballard or DSTT2 get built or not.
Yeah, but the point all of us are making is that he has it backwards. Go back to the first item (West Seattle to SoDo opens in 2032). If that project is a lot more expensive than originally estimated (and it will be) then everything else gets pushed back years — including any expansion in Snohomish County.
In contrast, if Seattle focused on Ballard-Westlake then things change. Thus projects in Snohomish and Pierce County no longer have to worry about West Seattle overruns. In fact, they don’t have to worry about West Seattle spending at all. Thus they can be built sooner. The same is true for Ballard Link. It doesn’t have to wait until all the West Seattle money is spent. Not only that, but it no longer involves a second downtown tunnel. Thus it might get started a little earlier and build quicker. The only thing that could delay it (other than its own cost overruns) is cost overruns outside the county. But that is the case either way.
It is clearly better for Tacoma Dome Link, Everett Link and Ballard Link (to Westlake). The only thing that is worse is West Seattle Link to SoDo. That is how it should be. West Seattle Link to SoDo is a largely useless stand-alone project. It is only when it is connected to downtown that it adds value. Even then it provides far less value than Ballard to Westlake. The timing on the projects is just backwards and should change.
“… , since ST submitted one big EIS in order to avoid the overhead of multiple EIS’s.”
An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is mainly about identifying whether the impacts create major detrimental impacts so significant and unavoidable that they need to be mitigated. It mostly is the equivalent of grading your own paper. It’s also more about disclosure than it is about halting projects. There are EIS’ published all the time that don’t stop projects but instead modestly change their design.
The bigger power of the EIS is that it has to provide thorough information to the public before decisions can be made. For example, it has to disclose things like ridership and cost for Link expansions to help make decisions on what or how much to build.
Ballard Link and Everett Link are due to have new EIS documents shortly. The findings will help clarify how much of ST3 can be built in terms of cost and additional mitigations suggested.
One legal aspect that I think ST risked is calling West Seattle’s most recent study a “Final” EIS. It’s a gray area but this appears to be done because there was already a WSBLE “Draft” EIS. I think it should have been a “Revised Draft” instead. But I’m sure ST attorneys advised that such a move would add time for additional EIS comments and that would slow West Seattle Link by two years.
Anyway, one can sue over all sorts of technicalities EIS or not. However, state and Federal laws are such that the likelihood of it doing more than delay the project or requiring minor design changes are pretty slim. The primary afence obstacle is money; there’s not enough money to build it by many billions of dollars.
The Board seems to think of ST3 as party trays rather than nutritional sustenance. They won’t talk about its “nutritional value” (like cost per rider or aggregate travel times once transfer times are added between rail-rail or bus-rail) and instead seems to focus on how pretty each dish looks and smells and occupies the five subarea tables pushed together for ST3. Us riders at STB keep pointing out that this isn’t a healthy meal and we get pinged for our wisdom.
The unfortunate truth is that ST3 was rushed and ended up with mostly wildly unproductive projects. The biggest — West Seattle and SLU / Ballard — had terribly low cost estimates that could be called big mistakes at best and deliberate deception at worst, in addition to terribly deep station proposals and awful transfer setups that were never made clear to voters. It put all these projects into the shopping basket and headed to the cash register. The Board wasn’t astute enough or wasn’t realistic enough to realize that they didn’t have the money to build them, even with Federal support. (Remember it was at a time when Obama was President and the Feds offered grants and loans for transit more easily so projects could be afforded.)
The hard, hard core truth is that the ST Board is now at the cash register and can’t afford what’s in the basket after their giddy 2016 spree. Uncle Sam is not going to help. They won’t easily take things out of the cart because each one was added for a reason. The main entree (“The meat or the protein”) is getting the connection to SLU and Seattle Center from Link and the other projects are side dishes, desserts or condiments. And those side dishes have little nutritional value but they make some collection of people happy. And all of this shopping was supposed to be 30 years of food (extended to 35 or 40 a few years ago) rather than a normal 10 to 20 years. STB has suggested changing the main entree (to an automated Ballard or Smith Cove stub) to keep a main entree in the basket. However, ST stubbornly keeps saying that they must follow their original dinner plans — and still won’t admit that the only way they can “check out” is to have no main entree with their ST3 meal.
The best thing to do at this point is to use the EIS documents as reference material as ST must finally face this cash register.
One final note is that I think ST still has not been honest about the West Seattle Link timeline. Building the Alaska Junction bored tunnel segment with its deep station in the middle of the neighborhood will add several years to that part of the project. Remember Capitol Hill Station was fenced off for seven years once construction started. ST could get the stub opened to Delridge with a miracle by 2032, but it’s going to take to at least 2035 to get the rest of the way even fully funded. Believing otherwise by staff or Board shows that they either still don’t know what they’re cooking or they are too arrogant to admit it publicly.
“I’m skeptical that “All this is to proceed in all subareas simultaneously while staying within the debt ceiling limit.” is still actually true considering cost escalations post-2021.”
I’m just laying out the past to counter asdf2’s notion that “Which I’m guessing is the logic behind Somers being so adamant at not even bothering to study alternatives to DSTT2 – if the Seattle projects became cheaper, they might go first, causing Everett/Tacoma projects to go later.”
Everett will probably start first under the 2021 schedule, and Everett and Ballard will be mostly simultaneous. If Ballard is less expensive, that just means its construction period is shorter, not that it would start earlier. What Ballard is waiting for is the West Seattle stub — that’s what North King’s construction money is going to first. Why? Because Dow Constantine put his thumb on the scale in 2016 and said it must come before Ballard/DSTT2. Because West Seattle privilege I guess, or to get something open sooner because Ballard/DSTT2 will take a long time.
Two other things about the Stub-End alternative. That would probably cancel the other subareas’ downtown contributions, giving Snohomish more money for Everett. And if Ballard’s costs are lower, that frees up debt capacity that could be given to Everett, accelerating Everett’s opening.
“DSTT2 and Tacoma/Everett Link are officially one big project,”
Ballard/DSTT2 is one project with one EIS. Everett is another project with its own EIS and timeline. Tacoma Dome is a third project. One doesn’t affect the other, unless their EISes have clauses that depend on the Ballard/DSTT2 project (in which case those clauses would have to be revised, as the last board meeting said), and any operational dependency. The West Seattle tie-in to DSTT1 is part of the Ballard/DSTT2 project, so without it, Everett can’t go to West Seattle, so it would have to do something else, such as turning back at Stadium. We know ST opposes an Everett-Tacoma Dome operation, so it would have to be something shorter unless it changes drivers mid-run. (Which it could do at the SODO base, BTW.)
Originally Ballard and West Seattle were three projects: Ballard-Westlake, DSTT2-SODO, and West Seattle-SODO. ST combined them into one for a faster EIS. Later it split off West Seattle-SODO again so that its EIS and construction could start more quickly while ST resolved controversies on alternatives and costs in DSTT2 and Ballard.
If ST pursues DSTT2 and then has to delay it because it can’t afford it, that’s actually not a bad situation. Everett and Tacoma can just continue as they’re eager to do. Passengers will be spared the ultra-bad transfers for another decade or more. Ballard can get other improvements, like speeding up the D, 40, and 44. And even reinstating the 15 and making it all-day and beefing up the 28 if we want.
“If ST pursues DSTT2 and then has to delay it because it can’t afford it, that’s actually not a bad situation.”
It’s actually is —- assuming you mean a delay of the whole tunnel. That’s because ST will have enough money to build to the County buildings but no further. That means that they’ll shift the 1 Line, create really terrible transfers to and from the 1 Line and actually add total transit travel times once transfer and walking to existing Link riders. It’s the worst operations scenario that could happen.
Those West Seattle people with clout will push however they can to finally get a train direct to downtown! It’s the only way that the WS Link advocates can create a market for it and save themselves the embarrassment of low ridership.
ST would rather kick the poor people from South Seattle and South King out of the current tunnel and into a deep and less convenient one, and put those post wealthier liberals from West Seattle into the current tunnel instead. It’s akin to segregated drinking fountains with the one for people of color made harder and further to use — then deny that they’re against white privilege .
“It’s actually is —- assuming you mean a delay of the whole tunnel. That’s because ST will have enough money to build to the County buildings but no further. That means that they’ll shift the 1 Line, create really terrible transfers to and from the 1 Line and actually add total transit travel times once transfer and walking to existing Link riders.”
I don’t understand any of this. I can’t see ST building half a tunnel. And do you mean the northern part (Westlake2-PSQ2) or the southern part (SODO2-PSQ2)? It can’t put trains in half a tunnel. It could connect DSTT1 to West Seattle, but it was going to do that anyway, and our Stub-End alternative assumes it would still do that.
What do you mean by shifting the 1 Line? It can’t put it into half a tunnel, so what would it do? If you mean a Tacoma Dome-PSQ2 (Midtown) line, that’s putting farfetched assumption on top of farfetched assumption.
@ Mike Orr:
I’m predicting that ST will build DSTT2 only between the SODO portals and the County buildings and not build anything north of there for a long time. Then I’m predicting that they’ll move 1 Line into DSTT2 and out of DSTT.
ST will say —
>We don’t have funds to go further for a few more decades.
>We can extract the TBMs at the County buildings.
>We have to give Link drivers from Tacoma Dome a break.
>Building the Westlake station takes several years and we promised voters we would open at least a part of DStT2 sooner.
The only way I don’t see this happening is if SLU building owners and tenants lobby elected officials to not do this. Then King County may placate them by agreeing to renting their buildings during the long construction period between initial county building demolition and new buildings opening on top of the station vaults (probably a 10 year period).
I don’t see this as unlikely. I see this as VERY likely.
When has ST ever given any inkling that it might do this. The first objection will be that it doesn’t get Tacoma/Federal Way to the center of downtown, which was the primary purpose of the Spine and what they most want. Then, it may finally dawn on them what the transfer experience will be like from “Midtown” (PSQ2) to Westlake — or to anywhere north of it. It’s one thing if they can imagine transferring at Westlake, another thing if they can’t because it terminates short of it. So that may get pushback from Pierce and South King, as well as Seattle (since Rainier Valley would be affected too).
they also turned my favorite tennis court into pickle ball.
THAT, I will not forgive.
In all the discussion and arguments about dstt2, what’s lost is that we have yet to see if sound transit can effectively run 2 lines in the existing tunnel. If they can do rhat, and history says they can’t, that might be the time for real discussions about a second tunnel versus more lines in dstt1. When cross lake opens, getting to the stadiums from the eastside will require a transfer in the existing tunnel stations which is already hardly ideal. We continue to really miss that long gone centervplatform at pioneer square..
I live on the Eastside and would plan on using Chinatown for a Mariners or Seahawks games. It’s if I was going to SeaTac that I would curse under my breath shlepping a wheelie bag up and down. But I agree, a center platform at Chinatown makes so much sense.
“It’s if I was going to SeaTac that I would curse under my breath shlepping a wheelie bag up and down.”
Transferring at CID will honestly be a breeze compared to some metro stations I’ve transfered through, like Châtelet les Halles, Auber, Saint Lazare, and Montparnasse–Bienvenüe in Paris.
I’m hoping at some point that CID does get a renovation to have more escalator and elevators available for transfers.
It’s if I was going to SeaTac [from the Eastside] I would curse under my breath shlepping a wheelie bag up and down.
The other alternative would be to stay on the train until Capitol Hill (which has a center platform). That would involve a lot of back and forth but I could see that if you had a lot of luggage.
In contrast if they build a second line as planned then everyone from the UW (or anywhere north of Westlake) would have to transfer at either Westlake, CID or SoDo. My guess is SoDo would be by far the best but it might be similar to the Eastside-to-SeaTac CID transfer (that will occur much sooner).
Transit agencies around the world run multiple lines in the same tunnel. If Sound Transit can’t effectively run two lines in the existing tunnel, we need to fire them and get new people who can.
What “history” is that?
“If they can do rhat, and history says they can’t”
What history? ST has no history of operating two Link lines.
History says ST can’t even run one line reliably in the existing tunnel. Hopefully all these maintenance closures will make it reliable by midyear. Otherwise if there are as many outages on the 2 Line as there are on the 1 Line, sharing the tunnel will add additional challenges (1 + 1 > 2) and service may be worse than it currently is with only the 1 Line.
that might be the time for real discussions about a second tunnel versus more lines in dstt1
Again that misses the point. West Seattle Ballard Link has three pieces:
1) West Seattle to SoDo
2) SoDo to Westlake
3) Westlake to Ballard
There is no point in trying to build all three at the same time. That wouldn’t save any time. So what do we build next? Obviously the third one. Just build it as a stand-alone line. Worry about building the other two lines later. Maybe West Seattle Link runs in the new tunnel. Maybe it runs in the existing tunnel. Maybe we never build West Seattle Link at all. Just the build the most important thing next, which is Ballard to Westlake.
Ross Bleakney,
How about we leave Sound Transit to build a regional light rail network connecting the 3 counties and Seattle voters pass another levy to build whatever sort of light rail Seattle thinks it so badly needs in the City Limits?
I’m just joking (a little). But it’s no worse than screwing over the “hinterlands” because Seattle has more “riders”.
I do have a request from STB however…. at what point does inflation and operating costs stop all unfinished ST projects from going forward? I know Sound Transit goes underwater sometime in the early 2030s (by the best estimates!) but does that just delay projects? (by years? by decades?) or does it just kill Ballard and everything afterward? It’s think behind closed doors, after a scotch or two, many board members would be fine with projects being set back a decade or so. It’s not like Sound Transit can raise any more money!
You could go across enemy lines and ask the folks at Center Square to help with the math and projections. Get a team together to really sort out the numbers for an honest assessment. There are plenty of people in the insurance business and financial services who do this sort of stuff for a living.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/
The only stand alone segment that can attract ridership is what you said as your segment 3.
Politically, the first question to me is: Can the West Seattle Link project be stopped or at least paused? Every other decision is dependent on this. .
Fallback questions about West Seattle Link are:
1. Can West Seattle Link can be stopped at Delridge, saving $4B but losing some riders?
2. Would automation (and a long-range plan to eventually attach it to Ballard instead of Everett) save the West Seattle Link project money?
3. Can West Seattle Link trains run through the DSTT from day one as the third line?
I don’t think we can stress enough that a West Seattle stub is a colossal waste of $8B for what others say has been disclosed as 5K riders on a weekday m. The entire WSBLE was budgeted at about $8B!
West Seattle Stub is now twice the cost of Tacoma Dome Link but for the same number of forecasted riders. And the only way to delay or stop it is to point out that the Board needs to look harder at travel time and cost per rider metrics.
It’s important to mention the “mST “doublespeak”. ST touts 13K for West Seattle Link average daily rudders — but that assumes that the line runs through the DSTT and riders aren’t forced to transfer. If the downtown tunnel can’t have three lines running through it the 13K is a false assumption until the 1 Line runs through the second tunnel. .
A final note: ST has shifted the DSTT capacity discussion from the passenger throughput per hour to trains per hour. The Purpose and Need in the original DEIS was that Link could not handle the passenger demand. Now the stated worry is that the trains can’t be squeezed in. That’s a very different question. If ST has committed to running 16 trains through a two-line tunnel in 2026, could the tunnel handle just two or four more trains an hour per direction? This is a subtle but important shift in capacity discussions. Frankly, West Seattle demand itself only would seem to require four trains per hour given what the forecasts are.
“at what point does inflation and operating costs stop all unfinished ST projects from going forward? I know Sound Transit goes underwater sometime in the early 2030s (by the best estimates!) but does that just delay projects? (by years? by decades?) or does it just kill Ballard and everything afterward?”
We can’t predict the future, and we don’t know what ST boardmembers are thinking. We can say what should happen or might happen, but not what will happen. The precedent and default option is to continue the construction taxes indefinitely until everything is finished. If that goes far beyond the 2041 target it could become politically difficult.
What do you mean by underwater? ST expected to be at its debt ceiling from the late 2020s to the mid 2030s, so that limits how much it can spend each year. Now with so much changed, I don’t know what the year range is.
In the 2021 realignment it extended construction dates and reordered projects, but didn’t delete anything. This year it’s debating an Enterprise Initiative to adjust things further. Who knows what it will do.
@tacomee, as long as Seattle and East King voters don’t pay anything for “light rail connecting the three counties,” I’d be totally fine with that.
In fact, I think it’s a great idea. You set your tax rate for the projects you want; we set ours for the projects we want.
Mike Orr,
Yes, we can’t predict the future, but we can build mathematical models that can guess the best and worst outcomes. I have modeled my 401K retirement plan many times, putting in various rates of return and inflation numbers to find a withdrawal rate (over 30 years) that I feel comfortable with. It’s not exactly rocket science.
For Sound Transit there are more moving parts than my retirement plan, so you’d need to get a team of insurance actuaries and/or financial planners to run a series of “stress tests” to guess ST financial performance with different amounts of general inflation, construction costs and tax revenue coming in. This is actual urban planning. I had a couple friends in Tacoma, both passed on now, who retired from Big Insurance who used to stress test Tacoma and Pierce County projects all the time. Needless to say elected officials just hated them for the most part.
My gut feeling is Sound Transit dies at West Seattle. The project costs balloon even more, the debt ceiling is reached before 2030 and servicing the debt and finishing West Seattle takes all the tax revenue until something like 2045. At this point operations costs chew up a big part of the budget so new projects are pushed back even further.
When the numbers don’t add up in real estate, there’s often a ballon payment at some point to realign things. In the back room for Sound Transit, I get the feeling they knew the numbers were bullshit all along and a “ballon payment” (that’s more taxes in ST4) would be needed down the line. Pisses me off, and I’m not alone on this, that Sound Transit would pull some stunt like building half of the Tacoma project before running out of money as leverage to push the ST4 vote though.
Tacomee, I asked the same question of this forum a week or two ago and never got an answer. I don’t think this group is very mathematically inclined, and don’t look to spreadsheets for answers. Mostly what gets thrown around is opinion and trite statements like “nobody goes there” or “everybody knows this”.
But I’m with you, there should be a mathematical answer. I’d guess that internally, ST has a model, but they are not going to share what it says with the public.
tacomee and None, if you’re genuinely asking about long-term projections, you can answer your own questions (and subsequent questions) by reading ST’s long-range plan financial plan. The plan is updated every year. In each one, they state all their assumptions, limitations, and projections clearly. The 2026 budget and long range financial plan was published this October and includes the current financial deficit.
also, to both tacomee and None, if you continue to accuse commentators of being financially illiterate but refuse to read or understand the financial projections yourselves, it won’t be tolerated.
“You set your tax rate for the projects you want; we set ours for the projects we want.”
The ST district is a single tax district. There has to be the same tax rate and vote across all of it. The state constitution says property must be taxed equally in a tax district. So you’d have to split the tax district into five in order to give the subareas different tax rates and ballot measures. I don’t know whether it would require splitting the board or splitting the agency too. I imagine only subarea boardmembers could vote on subarea tax/ballot/project issues.
We aren’t financial experts, or at least I’m not. The rest of the STB staff isn’t either, and those who are financially inclined aren’t intimately involved in ST’s budgeting to give a professional-level analysis or alternative financial plan. What I know is “costs more” and “costs less”. If you want to study the financials and form your own opinion, you can put the result in the comments or a Page 2 article.
What I care about is the passenger experience using the system. I want to nudge ST into making better choices about that, and avoiding the worst ones, within the scope of whatever it can afford.
@ Tacomee:
I think most of us have come around to the realization that the taint of politics keeps ST3 Link from becoming a system as valuable as it could be — in addition to being unaffordable. Most of us increasingly realize that many current transit riders will have worse travel experiences than today if the system gets built.
I doubt that Link will stop short of Tacoma Dome. ST needs buy-in from the Puyallup tribe to route the tracks through reservation land and the tribe likely won’t want to see a train line end next to their casinos, creating additional parking demand. ST will cut back other Pierce projects before that.
And why should any of STB have to get into the weeds if costs and financing anyway? The Board doesn’t seem give a crap. We just watched West Seattle Link cost go from under $3B to $6B to $8B. Most Board members ignore it and call it inflation, and then say full speed ahead. The staff come up with the token ways to only reduce a few million and threaten to cut a station to save a few hundred million — and they all go home like nothing is wrong. They believe they’re doing society good by nobly defending their low-value transit plan — rather than get that they’re planning to build something that will create such a cost burden to operate and maintain that they’re actually hurting transit in the long run.
The moderation here gas taken an interesting turn.
On the one hand…
If you try and post a thoughtful and mostly respectful reaction you get told you’re missing the point and don’t understand the details of transit expertise
On the other hand…
If you post something more explicit * (and possibly incediary) you are seemingly threatened with being silenced. i don’t know the answer and i wouldnot want to try and moderate this forum but it seems inconsistent.
The rules governing the forum have remained consistent for years. The basic idea is to avoid ad hominem attacks as well as personal attacks (they are two different things). I think personal attacks are obvious whereas ad hominem attacks are not. An ad hominem attack is merely a logical fallacy. It isn’t obvious why it is signaled out as being in violation of the comment policy. Sometimes they seem innocent enough — just pointing out facts about the author that may have colored their opinions on the subject. But in my experience they are banned because they tend to devolve into personal attacks and become a huge waste of everyone’s time fairly quickly.
For example, assume I say I think we should make bus improvements for West Seattle instead of West Seattle Link. Rather than provide a logical rebuttal, someone writes that “I hate West Seattle because I’m not from there”. So I then defend myself, not the argument. I explain that actually, two of my siblings live there. My mom lived there and died there. By now I’m getting a bit emotional, so I can’t help but add a little “and who the hell are you?” at the end. Now we are wrestling in the mud and wasting everyone’s time. That is a fairly extreme example but even more subtle ad hom attacks can quickly go that direction. That is why the policy is in place.
We err on the side of allowing comments but this can obviously vary. For example consider this comment above:
I don’t think this group is very mathematically inclined, and don’t look to spreadsheets for answers. Mostly what gets thrown around is opinion and trite statements like “nobody goes there” or “everybody knows this”.
This is in clear violation of the policy. It is insulting by nature. It is an outrageous attack on the people who comment on the blog (which is a very broad group). It is also absurd. We don’t know math? Seriously? I majored in math. I was a programmer for years. We don’t look at spreadsheets? We constantly look at ridership data. We have to petition the various agencies for access to the data. We then take the data and then analyze it. For example this: https://seattletransitblog.com/2025/08/25/ridership-patterns-for-link-1-line/. This was information taken from two different sources that we merged (in a way that was not obvious). It isn’t perfect (and we make clear it is isn’t perfect). But it sure as hell is “mathematically inclined” and involves “looking at spreadsheets”. Hell, it is basically a spreadsheet! A spreadsheet we created. It is worth noting that it is very difficult for me not to add “you moron” on to the end of “A spreadsheet we created.” (which is why the policy is in place).
Anyway, I am only one of many on this blog. Obviously there are a bunch of people here that know a lot about math, probably a lot more than me. More to the point, they know a lot more about finance. We’ve written numerous articles about the financial aspect of the projects. Just look at Dan Ryan’s articles: https://seattletransitblog.com/2018/02/28/sound-transits-debt/, https://seattletransitblog.com/2019/09/30/financial-risks-to-st3-plan/. Yet somehow those posts aren’t enough. The graphs aren’t graphy enough. The math isn’t mathy enough. Some commenter wants a detailed assessment of the financial situation of the various projects as if presented by an actuary, yet boiled down into a two paragraph summary. And then, when they don’t get the personalized assessment, they think everyone else is ignorant. Keep in mind, they aren’t presenting their own analysis. Nowhere in the criticism is there any attempt at taking a stab at this. There is no “Well I used to work and Milliman and Robertson and from what I can gather, here is the situation…”. No, there is a pleading for a simple answer to a complex question (even though we’ve actually presented a rough outline of the situation). It is as if they are asking “Please explain relativity for me” and then when folks don’t answer it becomes “the folks on here don’t understand physics”.
So yeah, for many reasons, comments like that could be removed. The fact that we didn’t just shows how much we lean towards allowing things go.
I’m not sure what instances you’re referring to, but I agree that the commentariat can be unkind to thoughtful disagreement. Unfortunately, moderation can only take comments away; it can’t generate supportive or agreeable responses.
Regarding inconsistent moderation: as Ross mentioned, the comment policy has been relatively unchanged for years, including the warning that moderation will be inconsistent. It’s largely up to the how much the current editors are reading and how offensive the comments are. I’m more easily offended by certain commentators than others, so I not to resort to actually deleting comments very often but can’t help calling it out sometimes.
The SODO station northbound maps are forward-looking. They have both the full 2 Line and Pinehurst station. There’s no residue of stickers being removed.