Via STB, I’m glad to see the Bellevue City Council has chosen the Bellevue Way alignment. I’m still pretty concerned about the potential for Eastsiders to fight this, however. It strikes me that the Bellevue Way alignment will probably be as controversial as the MLK alignment for Central Link, with the difference being that the property owners along Bellevue Way can afford more high-priced lawyers. We’ll see.
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- Tacoma Link to run on extended hours Saturday
- Metro & Sound Transit to conduct transit tunnel travel-time test next Tuesday between 4-6 p.m.
- Changes ahead for I-90 Express Lanes
- Sound Transit train, bus riders reminded to prepare for snow
- Sound Transit train, bus schedules for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
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In the minds of some area bloggers, this had become a fight to the death between the South Bellevue Park n’ Ride and the NIMBYs of Surrey Downs. Lose the S. Bellevue P-N-R, they said, and the whole plan teetered in the balance, possibly dooming Redmond to a LINK that reached Bellevue but went no further.
Of course, the unseen forces making it impossible to continue up Bellevue Way and 104th weren’t NIMBYs, at least, not in the eyes of area bloggers, who appeared quite unaware that such a route was even possible.
Now the Bellevue City Council has finessed the NIMBYs and the bloggers, by the simple expedient of running a rail line through a wetlands park. It’s hard to miss the resemblance of this track plan to a paper clip folded by a monkey on methedrine.
Ironically, if the rail goes to the Wilburton P-N-R, the S. Bellevue P-N-R becomes entirely unnecessary, unless the plan is to gather all west Bellevue ridership and funnel it down Bellevue Way to the P-N-R- arguably noisier and more polluting than rail up Bellevue Way would have been.
None of this seems very likely to me, including, as it does, a tunnel with no funding and a rail line through a park. Institutionally, ST looks stronger than the Bellevue City Council, and I imagine the technocrats at ST will eventually muscle through their set of ‘must haves’. Who knows, maybe they’ll even look at the budgeting and decide they can build a tunnel after all.