All posts by Martin H. Duke

1. Federal funding rules don’t allow transit agencies to take TOD into account when doing ridership projections. So a line through Sodo’s warehouses would have had lousy ridership projections, and probably not have earned any federal dollars. So a Sodo alignment means no alignment at all. People actually live near the Rainier Valley line.
2. Seattle’s neighborhoods are famously risk-averse, and likely to fight a rail line that will ultimately benefit them. Poorer neighborhoods are generally less litigious and less politically active, meaning that both political and engineering risk were lower for this segment.
3. The Rainier’s valley development pattern was unique. MLK is/was a fairly underdeveloped strip of auto repair shops and small, run-down apartment buildings, but also is two or three blocks from major arterials on either side: Rainier Avenue and Beacon Avenue. This made it uniquely suited to draw ridership from two vibrant and transit-intensive populations while still being capable of inspiring large TOD projects with minimal political opposition.
4. I would have liked to have seen our Ballard/West Seattle contingent — leading advocates of in-city before regional rail — come out a little more strongly for the Rainier Valley segment. I think the Seattle-first argument would have substantial merit if transit were being funded by a dictatorship, but fortunately we actually require democratic assent in this country. Unfortunately, the electorate is shackled with extremely narrow parochialism. At any rate, Central Link was an opportunity to provide substantial in-city service while also meeting regional goals: the best of both worlds.

• Pedestrian overpasses, instead of signalized, at-grade crossings.
• Crossing gates at all auto intersections.
• Fencing along the route to discourage pedestrian crossing at unauthorized points. It doesn’t have to be triple-strand concertina wire; even a tasteful, 4 foot black iron fence would be a sufficient deterrent in 90% of cases.
• Construction of underpasses for major arterials.

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So that’s my wish list for what they would do/have done differently. However, like any political process, the actual ST program is a mix of various interests, so that the result is not perfect from any one person’s viewpoint.

Opposing a system because it uses the wrong kind of rail car, or because its initial segment doesn’t run from your house to your workplace, or because it’s bundled with some other stuff you don’t like, doesn’t get us any closer to having a decent rail system; those decisions were made for a reason, and you ignore those reasons at your peril.

It’s with hesitation that I open this post to comments, because it invites a scattershot of random gripes. I ask that you focus on what I’ve suggested, or look forward to tactical changes that could still be made, as I’ve done.

And if your gripe is “go to Ballard and West Seattle before anywhere else,” we’ve already had that thread, several times. I wield my “delete comments” button as necessary.

This is just me guessing, but some of our readers may be energized about rail to Ballard and West Seattle.

One thing that’s come up in comment threads is that the adding that sort of demand through downtown is going to end up requiring another right of way. The money-is-no-object desire is probably a Second Avenue tunnel, a mere block away from the DSTT to facilitate easy transfers between the two lines.

Unfortunately, I have an engineering estimate in my possession that tells me running the tunnel boring machine from the stadium to, oh, Queen Anne will cost infinity jillion dollars. So, what’s a rail fan to do?

The analysis I’ve done in this amounts to crayons on a map, but it occurs to me that we’re already going to be digging up the waterfront to replace the Viaduct and seawall with, uh, something. Nickels’ highway tunnel died a quick but painful death, but it’d be somewhat less ambitious to replace that with a rail tunnel, possibly emerging to run under the viaduct through Sodo.

Now, Sound Transit isn’t anywhere near ready to take on running light rail through there, but Mayor Streetcar could certainly figure out a way to make it a “streetcar tunnel” for a decade or two, and then switch it over to light rail in 20 years when they’re ready for it.

North of Stewart St.? South of Sodo? That’s a problem for route planners and taxpayers down the road. But the critical and expensive downtown segment would be locked in.

So we leverage the state’s expenditures for viaduct replacement, lock in construction costs now, and set ourselves up for the future (assuming we make the station platforms long enough to accommodate four cars). We’d be screwed today if they hadn’t excavated the bus tunnel in the 1980s, and perhaps it’s time to make a similar long term investment in our future.

Discuss.

Crosscut published a piece by transit advocate Richard Borkowski last evening. In an unusual turn for Crosscut, he makes entirely practical arguments why a directly elected board not only doesn’t solve any actual problem, but in fact can make things worse. Money paragraphs:

However, there are lots of problems with this proposed cure. The districts would be huge (about 235,000 citizens in each one). Some fear that the elected directors would become like the Port of Seattle, a rubber-stamp arm of business and labor that leaves the public in the dark and draws little media or voter attention. A recent audit by the state’s auditor provided evidence of this fear with the Port of Seattle. The devastating audit was made more difficult by port employees who were uncooperative with the state auditor. The problems raised in the audit have led to an investigation by the FBI.

Sound Transit, on the other hand, has been audited on a regular basis over the 15 years of its existence. Each time, the results were a clean audit. Such an audit is a strong accountability measure that provides much clearer oversight than an election every six years, and it certainly doesn’t require a directly elected board of directors to achieve this accountability.

Good stuff.