On Wednesday, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson unveiled an amendment to the Sound Transit 3 realignment plan that would keep the Graham St infill station on track to open in 2031. The ST3 realignment plan was proposed by Board Chair Dave Somers in early May as a means of aligning the agency’s future Link extensions with the available funding. In the plan, Link extensions to West Seattle, Everett, Tacoma, Issaquah, Kirkland, and the new downtown tunnel would be built first. The extension from Seattle Center to Ballard and the infill stations (Graham St and Boeing Access Rd) would be designed with current funding but construction would be deferred until additional funds are available in the future.
Mayor Wilson teamed up with King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda to propose an amendment to Somers’ resolution. The amendment directs Sound Transit to “incorporate $25M in secured federal grant funds for project construction, apply identified cost savings opportunities, and pursue additional local and federal grant opportunities”. In addition, any cost savings from Pinehurst station should be allocated for the Graham St station. As Seattle owns the right-of-way on MLK Way, Wilson is committing that the City will “expedite permitting, resolve ROW-related risks, and support cost reduction efforts”.
If this amendment is adopted, Sound Transit will have to provide a plan with cost saving opportunities and additional funding sources by June 1, 2027. If the agency is not able to fully fund Graham St station in this plan, the City of Seattle will contribute up to $30M dollars to close the gap. Seattle Councilmembers Eddie Lin, Dionne Foster, and Alexis Mercedes Rinck voiced their support for the amendment.
Graham St station is a planned at-grade infill station on Martin Luther King Jr Way S between S Graham St and S Morgan St. The station was added to the Central Link Environmental Impact Statement in 1999, but deferred in the early 2000’s (along with the Boeing Access Road station). In 2016, Sound Transit included both stations in the ST3 package passed by voters. Following years of community outreach, Sound Transit decided to build the station with a center platform south of Graham St. New crossover tracks north of Graham St will also be needed to minimize 1 Line service disruptions during the station’s construction.
Graham St station is a one example of how a project can be significantly more complex than it looks. Sound Transit has strict requirements for track geometry at stations. Specifically, the agency allows a maximum of 1% vertical profile grade and zero horizontal curves. The existing track near Graham St has slight horizontal curves so it would need to be rebuilt to meet these criteria. Additionally, a 42″ sewer main runs under the southbound track. Any construction that requires moving this pipe would likely be prohibitively expensive. Finally, MLK Way runs on either side of the current tracks. In its analysis so far, Sound Transit has assumed the need to preserve all 5 lanes (2 each direction and a turn lane) on MLK Way. As a result, the agency has priced in buying additional property adjacent to the station to accommodate road lanes displaced by the platforms.
These complexities, along with broader inflation and cost increases, have increased the station’s estimated cost from $115M to $214M. Despite this higher cost, Graham St remains as one of the best value (dollars per daily boarding) ST3 projects. The station is expected to have 2,700 to 4,100 daily riders by 2046.
As Andrew Lindstrom outlined in a recent article, Sound Transit will likely find significant cost savings by not expanding the right-of-way around Graham St station. This will require support from the City of Seattle as it will impact the lane configuration on MLK Way. Sound Transit’s analysis may find other cost saving measures that reduce the project’s cost to an affordable level.
London underground has significant curves at some of its stations and gets on fine.
https://imgur.com/a/Z6Leiu5
Is this ST handicapping itself for no good reason per usual or is there some ADA aspect here?
Happy that Wilson seems to actually care and will do a lot to help get it built (way more than Bruce would’ve done)
It’s driven both by ADA compliance and legal liability.
Then get an ADA waiver.
In my experience working at ST, the design & engineering team treat legal guidelines as immoveable objects when what is needed is collaboration with a thoughtful and curious lawyer.
I’m deeply skeptical the track needs to be rebuilt. Instead, I think a lawyer gave an opinion with zero consideration on cost/benefit tradeoffs.
Yeah, it’s pretty silly that they can’t assume the lower cost for station construction given the only thing preventing ST from avoiding track reconstruction is their own design standards manual.
I seriously don’t get what’s the need of this station. It’s right next to Othello Station! Way to add 5 mins to the trip. The trains will probably crawl between the two stations.
Wilson should focus on directing her money and effort to Ballard, a line that people will actually use
“Wilson should focus on directing her money and effort to Ballard, a line that people will actually use”
I agree. Who’s willing to tell her that?
“I seriously don’t get what’s the need of this station.”
They really just want to serve the Hillman City neighborhood, that’s all. Graham and MLK isn’t much of an urban center. It only has a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a strip mall, and a gas station. It also has good ridership on the 106.
“It’s right next to Othello Station!”
Not really. That’s the biggest gap on MLK, Columbia City to Othello .
“Way to add 5 mins to the trip.”
If you were to add 5 minutes because of the new station then grade separate the MLK part you’d still have the same travel time.
“The trains will probably crawl between the two stations.”
Not to mention trains have to crawl through Pinehurst Station when it’s not open yet and is kind of annoying. I wish it was already open since I use the Lynnwood Link segment a lot. If travel times from Seattle to Fed Way are bad enough already on the current line expect it to get worse.
maybe it’s not for you, but for the community which has been promised a station for 30 years? Just because you see no reason to go there, doesn’t mean there’s no reason to put a station there. It’s also cheaper than any of the parking garages.
I’m for canceling the parking garages in favor for actual connector buses and renting out parts of surface lots at churches and shopping areas that are mostly empty during commute hours.
I seriously don’t get what’s the need of this station. It’s right next to Othello Station!
No its not! It is over 3,000 feet or a kilometer. A kilometer! That is not an easy walk. It even farther to the north. Consider someone at this apartment here (https://maps.app.goo.gl/n9aNecVcszwjLVYJ8). They want to go El Centro de la Raza (on Beacon Hill). If they leave at 9:00 am they won’t get there until after 9:30. With a station at Graham they save at least ten minutes.
This is why subway systems all over the world have lots of stops. Trips like this are where most of the ridership comes from. The vast majority of transit trips are short. By adding a lot of stops you dramatically improve these short trips, thus justifying the cost of the rest of it. It means some riders from distant places are delayed (slightly) but that is a minor problem in the grand scheme of things. Many of those riders would be better off taking commuter rail or express buses (which are better suited for those types of trips).
You have to walk a kilometer from the downtown stations to get to the waterfront or SLU. It’s not difficult. Obviously for accessibility purposes but at that point a bus is way easier than walking across a road and track to access a station in the middle of nowhere.
People who are aversive to buses and need a train (that is not a tram and never was a tram) to stop every 1 km is the reason why our transit is so slow and useless and why people keep driving.
“You have to walk a kilometer from the downtown stations to get to the waterfront.”
I don’t think that’s accurate. For example, google maps tells me it’s a 0.3 mile (0.5 kilometer)/7 minute walk from Symphony station to the Great Wheel on the waterfront. Much shorter than walking a kilometer.
Having said that, I agree you should try to compare the travel time delay for some riders that results from an extra stop to the travel time savings for the riders who would use that stop as part of a cost-benefit analysis. Similarly, the delay may deter some people from taking the train, while the addition of a station may attract other people to ride the train when they otherwise wouldn’t. It seems that most people think an extra stop at Graham makes sense given the length of the gap it fills in and the minimal delay it will create. Perhaps it should be paired with an up zone though, so it will become more useful over time.
“You have to walk a kilometer from the downtown stations to get to the waterfront or SLU.”
Those aren’t “on the way” on an existing Link line. Graham station is an example of a missing station on the way between Columbia City and Othello, or between downtown and the airport if you prefer. SLU and the waterfront are much larger issues to get them onto Link. One Link line going north (the initial line) can’t serve both SLU and the U-District and Capitol Hill because SLU is west of the others — so it has to choose between going northwest or northeast. It chose northeast because that’s where the maximum ridership is and the existing express buses and streets couldn’t keep up. When the decision was made, SLU was still a decaying industrial area and the city hadn’t identified a growth plan for it yet. In any case, UW and the U-District is a much bigger transit hub than SLU, with people coming from everywhere for a wide range of purposes full time.
The issue is there is no reliable express bus or commuter rail. If ST builds that, then they can turn Link into a tram. But right now it’s not at all even close to a tram. It’s a metro.
Buses can serve way more stops, and way faster than a train which has to have even longer dwelling times and harder to access stations. If you have a train, it should go further and faster. A tram is different but MLK is nothing like a proper tram. Not much dense housing around Graham St. and terrible station layouts.
The reality is that Link is not and will never be an express train. Express buses and Sounder will pretty much always be the fastest way to access Seattle. Just look at the travel times for Sounder and the existing express buses versus Link.
If you want to talk density, the census tracts around Graham station area are denser than anything south of Seattle until you reach downtown Tacoma.
“The issue is there is no reliable express bus or commuter rail. ”
ST3 was never approached as something designed to improve regional travel as part of a unified system. It was instead a shopping cart of projects resulting from a supermarket dash to collect shiny ideas that were in pretty boxes in 2016. The goal was not to present the most value-added system; it was merely to get voter approval by spinning the projects as utopian as they could. There was never a regional system discussion before ST3 was packaged (outside of severing the Spine because drivers needed breaks — but with no consideration of the awful transfers created by doing that) and there still hasn’t been.
The public trusted that they made sense in 2016. Many still believe that ST3 is being built with honorable system goals. No one likes to admit that they were misled in 2016.
“But right now it’s not at all even close to a tram. It’s a metro.”
The difference between a tram and a metro is surface vs grade-separated, and whether the technology is street-compatible. Link is tram technology being used as a quasi light metro in its grade-separated segments. That’s part of its problem: full light metro would have been in the grade-separate segments faster and less expensive. When ST chose light rail technology in the 1990s, it envisioned that the network would be mostly surface except where hill or water barriers prevented it or the existing DSTT had been already built. if ST had realized then the overwhelming public clamor for grade separation that would emerge, it could have grade-separated all of it and chosen from a wider range of technologies. That would also have sped it up, meaning it wouldn’t take an hour to reach Everett or Tacoma. The tunnels would have been smaller, since it wouldn’t need the space for overhead catenary and pantographs, which force a round tunnel to have a larger diameter.
Someone please tell the mayor and her team that not only can she “resolve ROW-related risks,” the city can use levers like street & alley vacations and spot up-zones to acquire incremental ROW for literally zero cash.
Except, that the mayor’s term is only 4 years, and the construction timeline is longer than that. No matter how supportive the current mayor is, the ROW risks remain, as the next mayor may be less supportive, depending on the outcome of the next election.
Nope. The mayor can work with local property owns and acquire the needed ROW during her term, even if construction occurs later.
One of the few good ideas around cost reduction that ST has actually tried to implement is to acquire ROW earlier. Given that land prices are rising faster than inflation and the cost of debt, acquiring ROW sooner generates early savings all else equal.
I don’t see a future mayor sabotaging a station-area plan that has been agreed on with ST and is in late design or construction. Most mayors have continued their predecessors’ concrete plans and projects. Voter support for housing and transit and non-car mobility is only increasing over successive administrations, in spite of short-term reversals.
The Board is in unison. The most important line to build next is the one closest to them.
This is for sure the most cost-effective addition to Link we can make right now. It’s promising that Wilson and Zahilay are trying to make it happen.
I expect the mayor would support forgoing road capacity to reduce the cost, but I don’t know if the city council would.
I think council could get onboard if SDOT were to do some long-term planning for Beacon Ave, MLK, and Rainier Ave and present that to council.
In my opinion, these 3 streets are all eventually destined for greater transit/bike connectivity. Vehicle capacity across all would need some rethinking
I wonder if any Quid Pro Quo has happened. If so, I wonder what kind of horse trading it was, and what was discussed. Your vote for Graham gets my vote for 220th?
Quid pro quo implies something illegal. There’s nothing nefarious about Snohomish supporting advancing Ballard to 100% design in return for North King not pushing back on Everett.
No, it doesn’t imply something illegal. It can be illegal, but it’s often not illegal. Political give and take is very common in politics, and doesn’t necessarily break any laws.
I’ll give you this, maybe Quid Pro Quo wasn’t the correct term to use. Perhaps I should have just said horse trading, or some other euphemism for backroom negotiations. I still don’t think term automatically means illegal, and I certainly didn’t mean it in that sense.
Horse trading is OK and the most common term. Quid pro quo is too closely tied in political debate to its legal sense, even if the underlying basic term can be neutral.
Just an interesting tidbit about Graham Street utility per the admittedly outdated boarding forecasts for 2040:
https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/01/27/sound-transits-station-ridership-in-2040/
Graham Street boardings are higher than …
… All planned 4 Line new stations.
… 3 of 4 planned TDLE new stations.
… 2 of 3 planned WSLE new stations.
… 4 of 6 planned Everett LE new stations.
… 2 of 3 FWLE stations now opened.
… the new Pinehurst (130th) Station and planned BAR station combined.
It’s even to projected to have higher ridership than all other MLK stations by 2040.
“It’s even to projected to have higher ridership than all other MLK stations by 2040.”
That one is surprising and hard to believe. Is Columbia City going away? Is Graham expected to get a library, movie theater, performing-arts center, park, and trendy historic neighborhood better than Columbia City? Where’s the plan and commitments? Will Mt Baker no longer be where Rainier and MLK converge and bus transfers in all directions and have a high school?
Graham will grow and increase ridership if the poor commercial land use Sam has identified get sensible mixed-use development with popular destinations. But I don’t see how it could overtake Columbia City or Mt Baker. Maybe Othello, although Othello has a big head start on retail.
I can’t defend ST forecasts. I see bigger overall problems with them (like Downtown Redmond is insanely low).
I only provide the info as a curious factoid. And generally, ST has deemphasized using forecasts in decision making over time. So these odd results only get noticed by few people.
Of course, ST doesn’t want forecast factoids to get in the way of their project development unless it’s a handy side point for a particular narrative.
We don’t know what caused Graham to appear higher than Mt Baker, Columbia City, or Othello, and since the estimate was done in 2020 it may not be worth trying to find the estimators and asking them what factor or assumption pushed it above the others, or whether there were multiple factors, and why that seemed plausible at the time. It’s possible that the others are too low, that Graham was appropriately raised but the others weren’t.
Of course.. save dstt2 at all costs to save the infill. An interesting choice.
I wouldn’t mind this further delay on the 1 line, spending 215+ million to add no riders, if they had an express bus from king street station.
God I hate how slow the train to the airport is. Already.
Yes