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Council Releases 520 Study; Mayor’s Study to Drop Tomorrow

City Hall, Politics   March 31, 2010 at 4:32 pm Erica C. Barnett

The city council has released the executive summary of a consultants’ report on potential improvements to the new 520 bridge, including the possibility of putting light rail across the bridge. Today’s release only includes the council’s portion of the study, which focuses on how the bridge connects to Seattle on the west side; Mayor Mike McGinn will release his half of the study, which focuses on the feasibility of putting light rail on the bridge, tomorrow afternoon, his spokesman Mark Matassa said earlier today.

The council’s study, which will be released in full tomorrow, focused on how to improve the state legislature’s preferred “A-plus” option, which does not include rail; as such, it summary includes no reference to either light rail or “high-capacity transit.” Instead, it recommends the council ask the governor and state legislature to pass a law raising the minimum occupancy standard for HOV lanes, increasing tolls, or both, and suggests that the council stay “deeply involved” in a legislative work group established by Gregoire that will consider improvements to transit on the bridge.

“This portion of the corridor is sufficiently sensitive, environmentally and politically, that the probability is there will be but one opportunity to ‘get it right in terms of construction for the next 75 to 100 years.”

At a downtown forum sponsored by CityClub this afternoon, McGinn said he would be “bringing forward some ideas for how to accommodate light rail [on the bridge] from the start” tomorrow. He says that unless the state agrees to consider a different design alternative, it will be impossible to put light rail on the bridge.

“The question for the public is, do we want, 10, 20, 30 years from now, to be saying, ‘By golly, when we built that 520 bridge, we should have built light rail?” McGinn said. “The way it’s designed right now, there’s no design accommodation for light rail  It can’t be accommodated with what’s being built now.” Yesterday, Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed a provision of the state’s transportation budget that would have limited the bridge height to 20 feet.

McGinn’s office has not yet returned calls seeking a reaction to the summary of the report.


  • Lars

    One only has to look at the Airport terminus for Link to see the impact of not planning ahead for transportation. That several hundred yard walk that is necessary to catch this train is hard to understand given that the walk is through a building that the Port has built in the last 10 years (I'm not sure of the exact date). We have been planning on this transportation link for at least ten years but there does not appear to have been a interest on the part of the Port to plan for a light rail access. We as a region need to plan sufficiently far ahead for these projects and hold our elected officials accountable for doing so. This includes a design that includes light rail on 520.

  • http://spifflines.blogspot.com/ John Bailo

    I think McGinn and all the obsessive “leaders” in Western Washington should do the following. Take a 2 week vacation. Go out and see the rest of Washington State. Start by visiting the exurb towns around Puget Sound like Kent, Issaquah, Renton. Then go East on I-90 and see Ellensburg, Tri-Cities, Spokane.

    Get a feel for the world…the world that is not all one bridge and one tunnel in Seattle…the two things that are using up 99 percent of Political CPU time.

  • N8

    I think what Mayor McGinn meant to say was, “10, 20, 30 years from now we'll still be fighting over the design of the bridge, by golly!”