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Until we can get around soak-the-car-owning-Seattle-residents to fund what should be a regional (if not state wide) economic facility, this will not work.

I loves me some public transit (switched jobs just so I could ride light rail each day) but I fail to see anything other than convoluted enabling of the anti-government types with limited funding based on city residents backs.

It is outrageous that today urban residents are not only asked to ship tax dollars to anti-government suburbs and rural regions, now we are being asked to fund the economic facilities that makes it possible to do so.

I say charge a really steep toll at the city limits. And no discount for regular commuters, instead charge them a surcharge for living outside my city then coming in and taking up space.

Until we can get around soak-the-car-owning-Seattle-residents to fund what should be a regional (if not state wide) economic facility, this will not work.

I loves me some public transit (switched jobs just so I could ride light rail each day) but I fail to see anything other than convoluted enabling of the anti-government types with limited funding based on city residents backs.

It is outrageous that today urban residents are not only asked to ship tax dollars to anti-government suburbs and rural regions, now we are being asked to fund the economic facilities that makes it possible to do so.

I say charge a really steep toll at the city limits. And no discount for commuters, instead charge a surcharge for regularly coming into my city and taking up space.

As far as I can tell, Seattle Subway.org seems to think the funding for this grand scheme will come from the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, instead of the much more likely regressive increase in the sales tax.

Seattle needed this in 1968, and blew its best possible chance for it, not once, but TWICE. Something like this would be a very logical for serious stimulus funding from the Federal government, but there's about as much chance of that happening as of any individual winning a Lotto jackpot. Especially if Romney gets elected.

Your paragraph noting the hurdles can't help but recall the Mickey Rooney movie: "We could put on a show!"

You seem to have forgotten where we live. We have three things working against mass transit in Seattle:
1) Money. (Seattle has it, but the politicians from the city and the Democrats in general believe we should send our money to all points East, North, and South of Lake Washington to people who cash our checks and spit in our hippie faces.)
2) The Seattle politicians who might support this are hapless fools. They will allow the suburban Republican politicians to tie them up in knots about taxes, whilst those same politicians insist that Seattle taxpayers subsidize their communities. Wouldn't want suburban members of the Sound Transit board to 'get a little queasy' if they believe that Seattle residents might lose our appetite for sending our tax dollars to fund their regional transit expansion in favor of doing something for ourselves.
3) The people of Seattle who never met a community enhancing project that they couldn't delay.

Now, this article adds a fourth reason. If The Stranger is for something, then the powers-that-be will rise to defeat it.

You guys should come out in favor of a surtax on all King County households making less than $200k per year, with the proceeds going directly to Jeff Bezos and Kemper Freeman as a thank you gift for allowing us to occupy the same county as them. When the State GOP rises to defeat that tax then you'll know the depths of their hatred for your publication.

I'd actually favor another legislative proposal. King County, or at least parts of it, votes to secede from Washington State. We keep our tax dollars. The rest of the state doesn't have to worry about living with us DFHs. Until that happens, we are never going to have nice things around here.

5th reason: Once Rob McKenna gets elected you'll see the entire cost of the tunnel overruns shifted to Seattle.

By 2015 the City of Seattle won't have enough cash to run a toy railroad, let alone build one.

@5/6 Why are you making the "should be" the enemy of the can be? Good luck ever getting regional money for Seattle-only transit. But rather than giving up and sulking in a corner, let's just build the thing. We have the money, the desire, and the need. We even have Sound Transit, an agency now well practiced in the art of train building.

I like it overall buy why no south crosstown route?

"getting the board's approval may be easy, provided it 'does not jeopardize projects that voters have already approved.'"

Since when does Sound Transit give a fuck about projects that voters have already approved?

Oh right. This is only for projects north of SeaTac.

There are a lot of ideas to make traffic better in Seattle - but for most of them, we'd have to ask the legislature for authority. We just ended the special session with the legislature saying "no" to preserving existing bus service - much less providing new transit.

Today, we already have an option to accelerate Sound Transit - to build more of a system that we already have, and connect more of our city. Every day, we need it more - now is always the time to take the next step.

We're happy to answer a lot of these questions directly - please consider emailing us at contact@seattlesubway.org!

a one way express shuttle and back would be better and cheaper with a "high speed ferry" supplemented with the lame ass slow poke Metro sound transit? why pass all those places in between going underground? 40 riders at 3.00 for 8 rush hour trips comes out close to 20,000 a month.

all you need is some licence and a big fast gold bus with gold tinted windows and you got the gold line.

Want "me" to get your ass back and forth from Seattle to Ballard? ride the gold line that way if need be we can hit the Mc D's and grub. and or also move the gold line to a new direction like Seattle to Redmond?

The one that makes me moist is that purple line across town, on 45th. I told some city finance wonk, name long forgotten (personal friend of my boss), almost 15 years ago, that I wanted to see monorail running right down the middle of 45th, and he almost spit at me. I still want to see it today.

I can get downtown in a hurry now, on a bus. I can't get across town in a reasonable time for love nor money. I can drive to the airport in 15 minutes (until the viaduct comes down); even a drive from Ballard to Sand Point takes well over an hour. Ditto West Seattle to, say, Othello.

- However, King County Council member Larry Phillips, who currently sits on the board, says suburban members "could get a little queasy" if they believe that Seattle would lose its appetite to fund regional transit expansion (to suburbs) if we're already funding our own system.
-

So Phillips admits that Seattle is already subsidizing transit to the burbs. Seattle tax dollars already subsidize most of this state. Our own city leaders should just admit that. Seattle should quit asking for subsidies from the state to the city for projects when that is just begging for our own money. Keep it here to begin with, and let's do our own thing.

I for one am all for lite rail and subways and such but you can't build an effective transit system by running trains on roads. Trollies are just electric busses forever stuck on one line. Then there is the existing rail line from the airport that gets stopped by stop lights, traffic and people in cars making left turns in fron of it.

wtf is that about?

I've been on the el in Chicago, sub ways in Paris, London, DC and New York.... yeah they don't stop at stop lights because they didn't build them on roads.

So yes build a subway system.... or el or hybrid, but get it off the roads or don't waste the money. Do it right or don't do it at all.

I for one am all for lite rail and subways and such but you can't build an effective transit system by running trains on roads. Trollies are just electric busses forever stuck on one line. Then there is the existing rail line from the airport that gets stopped by stop lights, traffic and people in cars making left turns in fron of it.

wtf is that about?

I've been on the el in Chicago, sub ways in Paris, London, DC and New York.... yeah they don't stop at stop lights because they didn't build them on roads.

So yes build a subway system.... or el or hybrid, but get it off the roads or don't waste the money. Do it right or don't do it at all.

@19 - the current light rail line is grade-separate or underground for much of the way. The part that is at-grade, through the Rainier Valley, has signal priority and its own lanes so it does not get stopped by stoplights, traffic and people in cars making left turns.

The at-grade portion is definitely less than perfect but what you're describing is just not accurate.

Good luck at getting voters to approve of a 100$ car tab increase, every few years.

@16: Many have, independently, arrived at the conclusion that the "purple line" between Ballard and a U-District junction would provide far and away the most dramatic improvement to intra-Seattle mobility and connectivity, and at a fraction of the cost of anything else on that map. Hitting every major population and activity center north of the Ship Canal, without demanding new waterway crossings or downtown landtakings, keeps the price in check while still allowing us to spring for the grade separation to truly make a difference.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schiendelman, the visionary/demagogue behind "Seattle Subway," will demand that the Ballard-downtown segment MUST happen first, and will go out of his way to discredit or co-opt those who disagree, resorting to specious logic and even more specious expectations of financing. (This is someone who truly believes Seattle will be built up like Manhattan or Shanghai in 40 years time.)

The ugly truth is that Seattle lacks the funds to build the many-billion-dollar radial lines he desires - we'd be looking at $10,000+ from every man, woman, and child in the city - and that none of those long, expensive spindles would be able to demonstrate sufficient cost-benefit to earn Federal dollars. But rather than honestly debate the merits of starting with something less costly yet of uncompromising quality (unlike the dumb streetcar plans), he will shout down anyone who doesn't fall into perfect step with his "vision."

Sadly, the plan above, just like the Monorail before it, is doomed to fail.

@20 umm yes it is accurate and does happen because regardless of how you describe it or priority it has at lights, a train cannot physically drive through a car in front of it.

I ride 4 times a week and this very thing happens at least once a week. Car making left is blocked by traffic, train has to stop and wait for traffic and car to move. So I don't know what to tell you but yeah it is affected by traffic.

@23 Like I said, it's not perfect, but having taken the line from Westlake to the airport at least a dozen times and down to Columbia City and back countless times, I find the train to be pretty consistent. 36-38 minutes to the airport almost every time and ~17 minutes to Columbia City.

This is not comparable to the MAX in portland or other light rail lines that routinely wait at lights or sometimes actually share lanes with traffic. Yes, what you're describing may happen occasionally (in my experience, much less frequently than you describe), but it has a minimal impact on travel times. The biggest time holding back that line is sharing the tunnel with buses.

In hindsight, I would have liked if they built the Rainier Valley portion grade-separated, but the fact is most of the line is underground or grade separated, and the at-grade part is much better than most other at-grade light rail portions.

We are in agreement, though, that the next lines should be totally separated from traffic. I'm glad North Link is mostly underground and that East Link will be grade-separated.

To sum up my point - yes, Central Link is not perfect, but still very good by most light rail standards and by no means does the at-grade portion ruin it.

An excise tax of 2.5 percent. So, for a $40K car, that'd be $1000, per year. For 30 years or however long this takes to build.

Oh, sure - everyone will go for that.

Free Lunch - nobody's suggested a 2.5% excise tax. That's just the maximum authority possible. We'd ask for as much as polling showed voters would be interested in.

This map has no stop at the smoke shop. WEAK.

@26: You're assuming the excise tax wouldn't decline with the car value. In fact, even the full 2.5%, which seems high, would look more like $1000 -> $850 -> $722 -> $615 -> $522 over five years. It's still steep, but let's at least be intellectually honest here.

Looking at a more reasonable 1%, we're talking $400 -> $340 -> $290 -> $246 -> $209. And I think it could be pitched to voters as "you'll save at least that much in gas by using the cool new subway."

An American Public Transportation Association study found that Seattlites would save 12,000/year by switching to transit. It puts those numbers in context. A Subway is the cheapest way to move people around a city (per ride). -- this is an investment that pays us back.

I'm a huge transit advocate, but our plate of billion+ dollar projects is pretty full...and just wait until the asks come for he next school levy ($750 million) and seawall levy ($400 million) come up, not to mention the waterfront park and mercer west. some of those last two will come from local property owners but most will not.

Despite the overwhelming tide of glib pessimism on this board I believe that the pursuit of this subway and/or extension of the light-rail is in everyone's best interests. Anyone who boards a bus daily in Seattle can see without a doubt that our transit system is strained. Full-to-bursting in fact. This city is in desperate need of a transit alternative and everyone feels the affects of a grid that is choked with nearly LA-like traffic.

Despite the sometimes laughably idealistic projections common among Stranger articles, the author here raises some valid points. Seattle has been urbanizing in a big way for the past thirty years. Without investing in new transit options we risk suffocating our own growth as a city; which is just bad for everyone.

Now in the environment of so many big projects underway - the light rail, the Aurora tunnel, even just fixing the mercer mess - I sincerely believe that Seattle is on the verge of another economic boom. A boom that cannot happen without significant infrastructural adjustment. Regarding some of the valid concerns raised by others on this board such as self-serving rich guys with cars and especially state money being sucked into over-stretched suburban development perhaps the only thing really standing in our way is our own sense of urban exceptionalism. If we slap on some can-do attitude and come together as a community we can move mountains - or at least scoot a train from Westlake to Ballard.

On a political note, check out this guy Evan Clifthorne running for the 36th district in Seattle. He's an all out advocate for transit and labor. If anyone can represent the common Seattlite in the state legislature, he can.

Despite the overwhelming tide of glib pessimism on this board I believe that the pursuit of this subway and/or extension of the light-rail is in everyone's best interests. Anyone who boards a bus daily in Seattle can see without a doubt that our transit system is strained. Full-to-bursting in fact. This city is in desperate need of a transit alternative and everyone feels the affects of a grid that is choked with nearly LA-like traffic.

Despite the sometimes laughably idealistic projections common among Stranger articles, the author here raises some valid points. Seattle has been urbanizing in a big way for the past thirty years. Without investing in new transit options we risk suffocating our own growth as a city; which is just bad for everyone.

Now in the environment of so many big projects underway - the light rail, the Aurora tunnel, even just fixing the mercer mess - I sincerely believe that Seattle is on the verge of another economic boom. A boom that cannot happen without significant infrastructural adjustment. Regarding some of the valid concerns raised by others on this board such as self-serving rich guys with cars and especially state money being sucked into over-stretched suburban development perhaps the only thing really standing in our way is our own sense of urban exceptionalism. If we slap on some can-do attitude and come together as a community we can move mountains - or at least scoot a train from Westlake to Ballard.

On a political note, check out this guy Evan Clifthorne running for the 36th district in Seattle. He's an all out advocate for transit and labor. If anyone can represent the common Seattlite in the state legislature, he can.

@30

You assume a person would own the same car for 30 years. Hybids and EVs are not cheap and there everywhere in Seattle. State is already asking them to pay an extra 100$ per year because they use less gasoline (paying less gas tax). To expect green car owners to cough up close to a 1,000$ every year, is going to be a hard sell.

One of the problems with the assertion that people will save money by riding the train instead of driving is that everyone will be expected to start paying for the train right away, when the first lines won't come online for five years, and if you're not interested in where that first line runs (Ballard to Downtown for example), you get what seems like nothing for your significant personal outlay.

That is not an easy sell.

Obviously, we don't have the money. If we had had the money, we would have built the monorail. What sank the monorail wasn't "bloated financing," it was the fact that it is impossible to construct mass transit with only a car tab fee. (The "bloated financing" came about because the Monorail refused to seek voter approval for increased funding after Sound Transit provided them with faulty data; instead, they tried to borrow against 70 years of an insufficient income, which would have cost $9 billion in interest for a $2 billion project.) Put it this way: if a local car tab alone could sufficiently fund mass transit, every city in America would have done so by now. As you can see, no city has done so. No city has ever constructed mass transit without massive federal assistance, because it's too damned costly.

I love this idea, but the trick will be keeping the moralists away from the reins, the sort who think the best way to build support is to shame everyone who hasn't joined yet.

@37 "The "bloated financing" came about because the Monorail refused to seek voter approval for increased funding after Sound Transit provided them with faulty data;"

And part of the problem came from people registering their cars out of city, protesting the 1.4% excise tax.

Another money pit? jump the Sounder and dont get off until you reach Canada.

http://www.soundtransit.org/Schedules.xm…

Even North Korea has trams that the people use to commute! Seattle is the last major city on the west coast to have any kind of light rail, and yet was the first to have a monorail! We're a laughing joke!

"we could have everything on this map in 30 years," lolz. I'll just move to a different city. It'll be cheaper, easier, and it'll get me access to transit much faster.

I like how this plan looks nearly IDENTICAL to the monorail proposed network about, oh, a decade ago.

Thank. you. for. doing. this.

I think nearly everyone would love to have what is proposed, ASAP. Can do, means nothing without money. No one is going to even think about taxing themselves more until a full scale enconomic recovery is well underway. And while there are some positive signs locally, it is stll very, very fragile, and not even close to passing what would be necessary to get this done.

As others mentioned, Seattle had a few chances and they blew them. What we have now is the result. Until you can get it shovel ready and Federal Funding, it just ain't happening. We are tapped out with Sound Transit (too much for too little), and have dug a literal hole with DBT. Plus the Seawall is coming up. All this crap for others and nothing for us has left nothing for this...

Subway, take a number, and it's a high one...

How about move to live close to where you work? Or find a job close to where you live. Instead of waiting decades and spending billions of dollars.

Gotta love you deluded fuckers. We just voted down 60 bucks a year, and now you want a 2.5% car tax for your subway fetish? Where do you get your mushrooms? I want to see in colors too.

The monorail failed because of a financing error. They made a mistake in determining how much money would be raised by the specified tax (the mistake was geographical). Then the board tried to hide it as long as possible. They received no political support from the mayor or the city council, so they had one last vote. It failed. This (along with the way he handled the snow storm) played a part in mayor Nickels loss.

I voted for the monorail every time, but both the technology and the financing for the monorail was flawed. The law limited the financing options, but other technology could be used. There is a reason why monorails aren't that popular world wide, while a number of different steel wheeled rail systems are. A Seattle Subway would operate above and below ground as needed. There are advantages to each approach. But a system that is the same as the existing light rail would make a lot of sense.

While a functional rapid transit system, that is not beholden to stop-lights, flimsy, electric buses that fall off their wires if the wind blows the wrong way, hobbled by traffic. The system is still hobbled by ridiculously high per-use fees. $2/per trip, not graduated by distance of trip or with monthly pass-rates that are discounted for those who use transit heavily (ie. daily) is a huge mistake. The cost to use the metro to and from work, would cost me $80+/month, whereas the use of my small, relatively efficient old car costs me a max of $20/month and has a fairly hefty utility of allowing me to get the f-out of city when I want. The additional windfall of the $60/month I don't spend (and the ENORMOUS of TIME saved) more than makes up for the largely insignificant costs of maintaining a 12 year old 4 cylinder manual transmission car. With faster, transit, and a system that rewarded heavy use of public transit, (like most larger cities that value public transit), I would probably use it more regularly.

Otherwise it's a waste. Another failure of imagination is to think that public transit is supposed to turn a profit. That has never been the case and doesn't have to be. The social benefits of a successful and heavily used transit system pay for themselves.

Please please please let this happen... and sooner than 30 years.

@54, maybe the "failure of imagination" is to want to install rail at all. Subways, light rail, etc., are built around a concept of cities as they existed in the 1950s and '60s, when a far higher percentage of work, commerce, and recreation was concentrated downtown.

Today, "the city" is decentralized, yet we still have mass transit "imagination" focused 50 to 60 years backwards. To top it off, those who advocate all of this actually have the nerve to call themselves "progressive."

One of the dumbest articles on The Stranger, ever. This isn't even close to news, it's just random bloviating. there is NO CHANCE IN HELL of Seattle having a subway system in 10 or 20 years.

Got to love the logic: monorail failed in part because it required creation of new public agency, and a subway wouldn't: just use the agency created for the subway! Monorail system shut down because it's too expensive? Just max out the potential revenue sources for that project and (hopefully) pay for this, so simple.

Ugh. what a waste of paper.

@57:

Sound Transit, in 08s ST2 vote, already allocated money for studying these corridors and getting cost estimates. However that money won't begin to be put to use until 2017 at the earliest, and it will be spread out over even more years.

Seattle Subway is about collecting the money for the studies NOW, getting started on those studies NOW, so whenever ST3 comes around we can hit the ground running with construction instead of waiting 5 or 10 years for studies and analysis.

Seattle Subway is about collecting the money for the studies NOW, getting started on those studies NOW, so whenever ST3 comes around we can hit the ground running with construction instead of waiting 5 or 10 years for studies and analysis.

This is just an effort to make sure that no one figures out the uncomfortable truth, which is that the city government has way, way too many planners on its staff, and that they have far, far too little to do.

Time for someone to swing the budget ax at City Hall. Instead of letting the streets go to shit, why not fire half the planning staff? Yes, I know: They are white, college educated, and so articulate. But they don't actually DO a single fucking thing.

We have real needs in Seattle, and a money shortage. Why the fuck are we paying so many city planners to produce nothing but worthless reports?

@58 I really couldn't give a shit about a study if you know in advance it's meaningless. Subway will cost more than monorail would and that was too expensive before "this economy". Straight up, there is no local money to build a subway system.

@59 I'm also a planner (in NYC, not Seattle) and I can assure that the problem isn't "too many" planners sitting around getting board. The impetus for this dream process is coming from outside the government structure and should really just be ignored alltogether.

@60, in Seattle we get a steady stream of detailed "plans" from the city government for pie in the projects that will never be funded. At the same time, the physical infrastructure here is falling apart. If the planners can hold shovels, great. Otherwise, fire the planners and hire some more street repair crews. More concrete, less paper.

fetish:

Seattle has a subway line under construction right now, in Capitol Hill and the U-district. We believe the right choice today is to get the same system expanded to the hundreds of thousands of people in West Seattle and Ballard who are fighting traffic every day.

If the suburban people don't want to pay taxes to support a Seattle Transportation infrastructure then let's charge them extra to drive into Seattle and park here. Every tax paying resident gets a special sticker that allows them to use special local-only discounted parking spaces. Out of Seattle commuters pay double what few spaces are permitted for non-resident parking. The extra income goes into funding subways and elevated trolly lines, and perhaps elevated special bicycle viaducts and new bike routes. And we build Park & Ride lots at city limits that charge extra to non-residents. They take the trollies into urban core and neighborhoods. And residents get a discount of rapid transit by buying monthly passes.

Build it and I'll give up my car.

@16 -- Totally agree, don't underestimate the extra transit potential of this line due to the simple fact that car transportation on this route sucks at all times of day.

To pare this plan down to something feasible (meaning potentially cheaper than the monorail) but still ambitious enough to get support, fund 15th NW to Brooklyn, and a surface line on Fauntleroy that joins Link at Lander station. If that's too many trains running through SODO, elevate the southbound tracks through SODO too. Don't ask for funding for a second line through downtown until you show success elsewhere that gets people excited.

@64 -- I'd support this. The city can't toll I-5 or 99, but we can do congestion tolling the minute people leave them.

The monorail extension was unfortunately a financing debacle. The concept was great: a small footprint (a parking spot) for a pillar, constructing pillars off-site (less traffic displacement), far quicker construction than light rail (it would have been done years if not a decade before light rail from the current expansion). I'd hope we could see similar advantages from this.

I'd hope that this group could get the similar advantages that the monorail extension had vis-a-vis Link light rail: (1) small footprint, i.e. the pillars would have taken up the equivalent of a parking spot or 2; (2) off-site construction, with the pillars then being moved in place, therefore less traffic disruption; and (3) as a result, much quicker and less expensive to construct. We would have had the monorail extensions done in a few years from now instead of a decade from now.

We are in desperate need of a major transportation system to move the people around Seattle and the East side, I would think an elevated system would be cheaper than a bored system?
Let's move forward into the future instead of standing in traffic