By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, we did a deep dive on the Sound Transit board’s decision last week to indefinitely defer the voter-approved light rail extension to Ballard, a stretch that boasts by far the highest projected ridership of any line in the Sound Transit 3 package voters approved ten years ago.
Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents Ballard, has been beating the drum on this issue for months, arguing it would be irresponsible to renege on such a significant commitment to Seattle voters. The new plan preserves the “spine” to Everett and Tacoma, along with a second light rail tunnel through downtown Seattle, leaving Ballard in limbo unless Sound Transit can come up with cost savings and unless someone, most likely Seattle voters, can provide the funds to build the expansion.
The board adopted a couple of amendments last week that will move planning for a potential Ballard line forward and that commit to looking for ways to make the plan more affordable. But they rejected a proposal from Strauss that would have switched up ST3’s sequencing to build a “starter” line between Westlake and Ballard before adding a second transit tunnel.
Suburban Sound Transit board members said last week that prioritizing Ballard would doom the rest of the system. As a result, Sandeep noted, the suburbs got everything they asked for, leaving Seattle without any leverage to get additional funds for its projects in the future. Indeed, several board members made that explicit, saying Seattle would need to find its own money if it wants to build to Ballard and complete the West Seattle line in the future; there will be no regional Sound Transit 4, they said.
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One suburban Sound Transit board member and longtime light rail proponent who voted (along with Strauss) against the entire proposal, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, told me last week she thought it was time to take a serious look at Sound Transit’s governance. Currently, the agency is run by an 18-member board of elected officials who represent every “subarea” of the region—an ever-changing cast of characters with no specific transit expertise. This structure, Balducci suggested, has made it difficult to anticipate and forestall cost overruns like the $34.5 billion hole Sound Transit is currently attempting to fill.
David, Sandeep, and I also discussed some of the potential reasons for Sound Transit’s persistent overruns—excessive process, changes in response to neighborhood complaints, and engineering decisions that add millions to even relatively simple projects, like the long-deferred Graham Street Station, which the latest plan at least moves into the “funded” column.
Finally, we had to spend a few minutes on the latest shakeup in Mayor Katie Wilson’s office—the departure of housing and homelessness advisor Jon Grant, who was at the center of the mayor’s plan to add thousands of new tiny house-style shelters around the city. Grant, along with Wilson’s former chief of staff Kate Kreuzer, reportedly clashed with council members and staff while the council was working to pass emergency legislation to expedite Wilson’s shelter proposal.
Once Metro cancelled the # 29 route running exclusively during rush hours from/to Ballard to/from downtown (pretty much where light rail would go) due to paltry ridership, this canard “a stretch that boasts by far the highest projected ridership of any line in the Sound Transit 3” was exposed as only in theory and a failure in practice. Should have taken that bus, Uff Da!
The 29 served Ballard – Queen Anne – Downtown, which is a different route. The D is a near-exact parallel (though it doesn’t serve SLU), and has been doing good post-Covid. The 17 runs express on a similar route, and I believe that Metro is considering reinstating the 15 (which is the express variant of the D) to alleviate crowding on the D at rush hours now.
Fascinating discussion. I live in Seattle and am a big rail cheerleader, but I don’t see this as Seattle getting “screwed” at all! Seattle accounts for less than 1/4 residents in the taxpayer pool for light rail, yet we’ve gotten near half of all stations so far. Did our progressive elected really “get played,” or are they making nice with other cities in the sandbox who have been patiently paying their taxes and waiting for service?
Also, agree with the assessment that Seattle voters/taxpayers are a bit checked out on tracking outcomes promised by their elected officials. They’ve been very generous with all amount of levies for capital and operating levies, but weak accountability creates some serious vulnerabilities for achieving goals and maintaining public trust. Wish I had a better sense of why the disconnect in a top five most educated city in the US.
I would suspect that well over 50% of transit ridership regionally is within the City of Seattle, and that this trend predates Sound Transit existing. Metro still carries more rides than all other Puget Sound transit agencies combined (including Sound Transit). Of course, some of that is outside the City of Seattle, and most people don’t really care about municipal boundaries in their day-to-day existence. But a cursory look at ridership numbers for Link will show that Seattle is the primary trip-generating area — especially Downtown, Capitol Hill, and UW.
It’s also misleading to imply that suburban communities have somehow gotten nothing this whole time. Sounder and Sound Transit Express buses predate Link and are really quite good by US regional transit agency standards (well outside of Sounder N anyways). Since 2002 (first year of NTD records), Sound Transit has supplied 11.4 million vehicle revenue hours to buses (Sound Transit Express) and 1.0 million vehicle revenue miles to commuter rail (Sounder) compared to 4.3 million to Light Rail (Link). Of course, all these services benefit everyone, so it’s not really useful to try to do some accounting, but in general Sound Transit Express and Sounder are suburban services run in the interest of suburban commuters, with only a few routes being aimed at reverse commutes (mostly from Seattle to the Eastside). But of course, Sound Transit never ran any Capitol Hill -> Redmond services despite the obvious demand evidenced by the Microsoft shuttles.
The question of if Seattle got played depends largely on what you consider the purpose of Sound Transit as an agency to be. Normative ideas about what transit agencies do (provide public transit to the public) don’t really apply in a sense, since Sound Transit is clearly an agency tasked with the nebulous idea of “regional mobility”. This generally means suburban -> urban services, which almost definitionally mean poorly serving urban parts of Seattle without strong job/social links to the ‘burbs (aka places that aren’t downtown, UW, or a sports stadium). I personally think cutting part of the highest ridership line to assuage suburban mayors with extremely long extensions to poorly placed park and rides is silly, and that Seattle residents got the short end of the stick on the ST3 vote. But I’m a person who thinks metrics like “ridership” and “ridership per capital dollar spent” are worthwhile, and that Sound Transit express buses are very good services that more people should be happy to use.
Let me say this… most people in Everett and Tacoma disagree with you. Express buses are not for the City of Destiny, my friend, Bring on the light rail. Mello and Somers carried the day here. Great job gentleman!
The real story here is “No Show Katie”. I’m saying it would have made much of a difference, but what big city mayor takes this without making a big stink and rallying support? Get pissed at Mayor Wilson if you have to be angry at somebody. She let Seattle down.
Let’s say the power team on the ST board (Somers and Mello) wouldn’t have carried the day in this last fight? Seattle would have beaten the “hicks from the sticks” and Pierce County would have gotten stuck with paying billions in taxes for light rail that never leaves Seattle City limits? I doubt Ms. Barrett or many of her readers would have felt the least bit bad about Tacoma getting a terrible deal… because Progressive Seattle’s idea of ‘social justice” dies at Skyway.