The past year in Seattle rail transit has been dizzying, and it appears, in retrospection, that transit fans may have wrong-footed themselves with respect to getting rail transit in Seattle in the near-term future. Let’s review…
At the beginning of last year, we had Greg Nickels working on the Central Line Streetcar project, and Mike McGinn opposed to streetcars and in favor of buses. Nickels, of course, soon lost the primary, and McGinn, thanks to the marvels of modern polling, experienced an 11th-hour conversion to the virtues of light rail. The Central Line Streetcar is not dead, as the City Council has endorsed it as an amelioration of the diversion of traffic from 99 to surface streets. Sadly, because the City Council envisions this happening in conjunction with the construction of a tunnel, McGinn remains unable to support the Central Line.
Next we have the First Hill line, originally intended to serve the major employers on First Hill, Swedish, Virginia Mason, and Harborview, as a substitute for a station originally planned in that area. With all of the discordant and highly-figured public input on the question of the route, the planners did the logical thing- drew a straight line on a map and called it good. Arguably the best choice, restoring Broadway to a primacy it hasn’t enjoyed since, oh, about 1920.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, McGinn supporters indulged themselves in discussions about the upcoming Ballard-West Seattle light rail line. When pressed for details on the plan that, admittedly, did not exist, supporters patiently explained that McGinn would “probably” have Sound Transit draw up the plan. Sheesh, some people! You have to tell them everything!
But a funny thing happened on the way to that forum. When McGinn recently asked for a bridge design that would accommodate future light rail, we saw transit fans and Sound Transit endorsing the construction of a new bridge, twice as large as the old one, but opposed to the inclusion of light rail. Again, the transit fans patiently explained that light rail on the 520 was “not in the plans” of Sound Transit.
The transit fans apparently have not figured out that if you can’t even get plans for future light rail included in the 520, you’re certainly not going to get any light rail on the West Seattle Bridge. Which is probably one of the reasons Sound Transit has no plans or intention of building light rail to West Seattle. Nor, in fact, has ST shown any interest in building light rail to Ballard, possibly for a very similar reason.
McGinn’s reservations about the 520 bridge are shared by community groups and Democratic districts, and he’ll be safe in supporting these community activists. But when it comes to rail transit, surely by now McGinn is having some Lucy-and-football flashbacks. He might have imagined that Seattle’s transit passion would support a little vision in planning the $5 billion bridge replacement- but he was wrong.
So, what are the odds that McGinn will be leading the charge to propose a new light rail route? My guess, at this point- very poor. And the odds that he’ll be asking ST to design it, I’m thinking, are even poorer. McGinn spokesman Matassa said recently “it’s just something to be discussed”, and I can’t imagine recent events have not affected those discussions.
All in all, a typical Seattle year in transit.
That’s not true about ST being interested in the Ballard-Downtown-West Seattle corridor. Light rail from Downtown to Ballard to the U District is in the long-range plan, and there are planning studies for light rail from Burien to West Seattle to Downtown to Ballard to the U District included in ST2. That definitely looks like interest to me.
Well, I haven’t seen any of that in the two long-range plans maps I’ve seen at Sound Transit’s website.
Sound Transit has included preliminary studies on the Ballard-West Seattle corridor as part of Sound Transit 2.
Go here:
http://future.soundtransit.org
and click on the interactive map > Light Rail.
For more details, check this out:
http://future.soundtransit.org/details.aspx
Ballard, Burien and West Seattle are all mentioned.
http://www.soundtransit.org/Documents/pdf/projects/seis/Long-Range_PlanMap_7-7-05.pdf Here’s the long-range plan. It has Downtown-Ballard-U District, though as I said the Downtown-West Seattle-Burien line isn’t in that plan yet, but its being studied.
I don’t know whether to be reassured or more skeptical by the variance between the plans displayed. I find no mention of rail to Ballard or West Seattle in the text of the ST2: The Future website, and in my experience you rarely get something that is shown in the picture but not mentioned in the text.
You’re at liberty, of course, to think things will turn out much better than they seem, but to me the 520-bridge denouement was a wake-up call that things can also turn out much worse than they seem. In any case, we should learn pretty soon how this is going to fall out.
You’re right, there’s not direct mention of light rail. The way Sound Transit works is that they designate a corridor for studying high-capacity transit. Then they do the study, and then they recommend a mode. Or, as happened with previous Sound Transit initiatives, they present a range of options: a 0.3% sales tax gets you A miles of rail and B miles of bus, while 0.4% gets you C miles of rail and D miles of bus. Then they present the options to the ST board, and the board decides what to put on the ballot.
You’re at liberty to be skeptical, but to me, the board has consistently shown a preference for rail over bus. They typically choose the most rail-heavy option they’re presented with. Only when the ballot measure fails at the polls (e.g. 1995, 2007) do they scale back their ambitions (though they never abandon them entirely).
The Sound Transit Phase 2 plan for 2023 is not as extensive as the new Sound Transit long range plan for 2040. Indeed there is no provision for construction of light rail to Ballard and West Seattle in the tax rates approved by voters for Phase 2. At best these lines will be studied.
However, Puget Sound Regional Council has just issued a giant 11 megabyte map in PDF of all the high capacity transit lines now on Sound Transit’s drawing board through 2040.
Click on http://www.psrc.org/assets/3683/T2040ledger.pdf
Unfortunately for Sound Transit, the PSRC computer model of personal movement in 2040 with all of the planned train lines shown has daily rail ridership at about half of what ST forecast for 2030 with only Phase 2 completed. An explanation is not yet forthcoming.
ST’s forecast was mailed to every household in the region in October 2008 to convince a majority to vote for the doubling of ST’s tax collections. PSRC’s reduced forecast has not yet made its way into public perception.
The source documents for the clashing forecasts are in the first comment under the essay “We’re still in denial about Sound Transit costs” at http://crosscut.com/2010/04/21/sound-transit/19756/.
[...] (I should note that our coolness on light rail over the new span is not the straw man that “it isn’t in the plans” but rather that there is no concrete destination in the Eastside suburbia to run another [...]