Susan Hutchison’s call to put light rail on SR-520 instead of I-90 is as cunning as it is potentially ruinous for the prospect of expanding light rail throughout the region:
Injecting a new theme into the race for King County executive, Susan Hutchison proposed Tuesday that Sound Transit move its planned light-rail line across Lake Washington from Interstate 90 to a new Highway 520 bridge.
Seattle Transit Blog contributor (and all around transit nerd) Ben Schiendelman wrote a post last year in which he describes, in ridiculous detail, exactly why building light rail on SR-520 would be a big mistake. It’s pretty technical, but for some really good public policy reasons, crossing I-90 is the way to go.
Enter Susan Hutchison, Transportation Expert:
“There’s no reason to take lanes out of I-90, which is the major commuting road from the Eastside to Seattle, and turn it over to light rail,” Hutchison said in a televised debate with her opponent, Dow Constantine. The matchup was co-sponsored by KING-5 and The Seattle Times.
Hutchison said a priority in transportation planning should be to reduce auto congestion, and said after the debate, “I don’t think the voters care which route it takes, but people are upset about losing lanes on I-90.”
Since Hutchison’s anti-rail backers can’t beat light rail at the polls, they’re backing her instead. If Hutchison wins, she’ll have a big impact on transit policy in King County, and a big push to move light rail from I-90 to SR-520 could really muck up the works, as Ben explains:
A 520 crossing would also impose any delays attached to construction of the new SR-520 bridge on Sound Transit’s schedule. The risk added by working with WSDOT on the project would likely also make Sound Transit less competitive for Federal Transit Administration grants.
By favoring SR-520 over I-90, Hutchison still gets to claim that she’s pro-transit, while her backers get a shot at derailing the whole project.
Face it, if she could pave over Lake Washington and Elliot Bay, she would.
Where exactly is light rail on 520 supposed to GO after it gets here? A magic new station at the crossing with the University Link at Montlake? That would be stupid (almost as stupid as putting the Link station at Husky Stadium in the first place).
This is not unrelated to the stupidity of making the new 520 bridge a thousand lanes each way, as the “congestion reduction” crowd want to do; there’s no place for all those uncongested cars to go. The connection with I-5 is already plugged, and the neighborhood can’t absorb them.
It’s almost as if Hutchison doesn’t actually know anything about transit planning or road planning. Hmm.
The fact that she seriously believes in “reducing congestion” as a possible or desirable goal proves it. It all boils down to “get all these other assholes off the road so I can drive 70 from Seattle to Bellevue Square (or Microsoft) even at 8:59 AM or 5:01 PM”. That is not a sensible way to think about things, whatever the hell Kemper Freeman says. It’s the kind of thing a stupid, angry person thinks when they’re sitting on the bridge approach, not moving. It’s not a policy.
Where exactly is light rail on 520 supposed to GO after it gets here? A magic new station at the crossing with the University Link at Montlake? That would be stupid (almost as stupid as putting the Link station at Husky Stadium in the first place).
This is not unrelated to the stupidity of making the new 520 bridge a thousand lanes each way, as the “congestion reduction” crowd want to do; there’s no place for all those uncongested cars to go. The connection with I-5 is already plugged, and the neighborhood can’t absorb them.
It’s almost as if Hutchison doesn’t actually know anything about transit planning or road planning. Hmm.
The fact that she seriously believes in “reducing congestion” as a possible or desirable goal proves it. It all boils down to “get all these other assholes off the road so I can drive 70 from Seattle to Bellevue Square (or Microsoft) even at 8:59 AM or 5:01 PM”. That is not a sensible way to think about things, whatever the hell Kemper Freeman says. It’s the kind of thing a stupid, angry person thinks when they’re sitting on the bridge approach, not moving. It’s not a policy.
It’s worth noting that hte King County exec appoints 10 of the 18 sound transit board members.
“There’s no reason to take lanes out of I-90” except for the MOU that mandated using the express lanes for high-capacity transit in 1978, and the fact that 24-hr HOV lanes will be added in both directions. We cannot elect this ridiculous person. Vote for Dow!
I love the fact that the light rail would take away a lane “That is a major commuting road” and “turn it over to light rail” – like it’s some sort of conspiracy that nobody wanted.
Who the hell does she think will be on the train? Tourists? Snobby West Side city dwellers taking day trips to see the quaint East Side?
The commuters will be on the trains, thereby lessening the number of cars that need the G** D*** bridge. Why is this so difficult for some people?
So she’s in favor of screwing over Mercer Island and Factoria area commuters? It should be the magic choo-choo to Microsoftland?
“The commuters will be on the trains, thereby lessening the number of cars that need the G** D*** bridge.”
AND increasing the capacity of the bridge, making it more useful and efficient. Except if you are a conservative tool. They use a different math.
Just another in a long line of things she will fuck up royally if elected. Tell all your friends.
@4 for the insightful win.
Why can’t we have trains on both?
520 is clogged in both directions at all times. I90 still has one-way problems at different times of the day.
From and to Seattle, mass transit over 520 is already almost useless to people living north of the ship canal because the routes start downtown. Getting to mass transit takes so much longer then dealing with the traffic problem. Light rail over I90 does absolutely nothing for a North Seattle commuter who typically uses 520.
Where is Reality Check? I wanted to read his/her spin on Hutchinson’s completely ridiculous angle.
Hutch has won this race.
Hutchison is lying about lanes being removed on the I-90 bridge; part of the transit project will construct new HOV lanes adjacent to the existing general-purpose lanes, in both directions. The number of general-purpose lanes will not change, and reverse-commuters gain an HOV lane that they don’t have now. She’s simply making stuff up.
http://www.soundtransit.org/Projects-and…
Who briefed Hutchison on Sound Transit issues? We can only guess….
Fact remains, Ben’s right, the whole regional rail transit system is based on crossing the lake on I-90. Doing it on 520 upsets the balance of traffic on the three legs (north, east, south) and reduces service to many riders — assuming it could be built within the current timeframe.
If she has any smarts at all (i.e. exceeds Sarah P.) then she’ll contact somebody at ST and get the story from the engineers.
Raindrop, how in the hell is 520 more centrally located? It would have to connect to University station which is north of the Ship Canal. I suppose you could route it through a multi-billion dollar tunnel that intersects with Central Link on Capitol Hill, though such a route has never been studied. Or you could route it through Madison Park (which I’m sure everyone will gladly give up for the purpose) and along the surface od Madison Street to downtown without linking it to Central Link at all, which is stupid. Any other ideas? I’m sure none of this would take extra time and add billions to the project and give more time for anti-rail people to scrap the whole thing.
Also note that if you do go to University Station with this thing everyone would have to transfer there to Central Link, because North Link’s ridership is too high to allow for East Link passengers to be added to it. So you take the major east-west transit line and make people transfer in a north Seattle neighborhood. Fucking brilliant.
Susan Hutchison is an ignorant and unqualified candidate and it’s a sad indictment of the King County electorate that she’s actually ahead in the polls and might win this thing.
/facepalm
1. Transit will get people out of their cars, which is the best way of reducing congestion. You can’t build more roads to reduce congestion, they’ll just fill up again. It’s called induced demand, and anyone with even a basic understanding of transportation planning is familiar with it.
2. Lanes are not being lost on I-90. ST is paying for the new HOV lanes in each direction so that the express lanes, *which were designed and intended for light rail in the first place*, can be sold to ST (who will also be able to count the HOV lane construction as a credit for the purchase of the express lanes). So at this point, if light rail were to go on 520, ST will have built the I-90 HOV lanes for nothing.
3. We already fucking voted and approved to put light rail on I-90!!!
This is just one of the ways that electing this woman would be a foolish move on King County’s part. She is reckless, inexperienced, and ignorant. This is what republicans do. Bitch about inefficiencies in government in order to get elected and then, once elected, do everything they can to make sure government doesn’t work.
Schmucky the Cat @ 12: We can eventually have both. But just not for the next few years. The new 520 bridge is being designed to eventually take on light rail, but the I-90 bridge is ready to go now with only modest structural upgrades and some re-striping of the lanes. Susan Hutchison is just doing Kemper Freeman’s bidding in trying to kill light rail on the East side of the lake.
@12, that’s why you don’t send the trains downtown. There’s already a train downtown. You have a transfer station somewhere. A 520 train MIGHT make sense if it hit the University line somewhere, preferably University Station (and preferably then or in the future continued across town to, say, Ballard).
But the stupid University Station is at the stadium, which is asinine in the first place, but exponentially more asinine if you run a SECOND line to it. And, of course, Sound Transit people are constitutionally incapable of addressing cross-town needs, as opposed to yet more N-S, so forget that Ballard link.
So where else does the 520 link go? Capitol Hill? There’s no way to get to the station. A brand new station underneath the Roanoke on 10th? Why? Eastlake? There just aren’t any good routes. So: downtown? Waste of time, unless you turn off and go straight down Madison or something.
An I-90 train makes all kinds of sense in comparison. Right of way is already there. It shouldn’t go downtown, though; it should stop at the ID, say, and go straight to West Seattle. That’s the whole point of trains; you can TRANSFER without pain. Think GRID, not SPOKES.
@16, the mental image of engineers trying to talk to Susan Hutchison and vice versa is giving me a migraine.
The plan is to insist on the project that is the most difficult and expensive, and then using that as an excuse to kill transit.
I’m surprised she’s not advocating that the trains dive down a tunnel to the center of the earth in order to access the heat energy that is stored there.
Cascadian @17, making people transfer north of the ship canal is not on the face of it a bad idea. It’s no worse than making them transfer downtown. Very few of eastside commuters are starting their trips downtown, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more of them come from north of the ship canal to start with than below it. And a intra-modal transfer isn’t a big deal (INTER-modal transfers, on the other hand, are fatal).
The problem is she doesn’t understand the impact one part has on the whole plan. Or rather, she DOES understand, but that’s her goal — to fuck up the whole plan, so it gets killed. Her puppetmaster Kemper Freeman wants that train dead.
Also, light rail on 520 means *NO* service on Mercer Island. I’d honestly be surprised if this wasn’t also a ploy to kill tolling on I-90.
I don’t think service on Mercer Island is a big deal. Those people aren’t going to take the train anyways, are they? Jesus Christ, we already built them the most expensive stretch of Interstate in history, and now they want MORE?
The biggest problem we currently have with our disparate mass-transit systems (Sounder, Metro buses, Sound Transit buses, Link light rail, ferries, etc.) is their lack of a coordinated connection. There needs to be a transfer point within reasonable distance of ALL those systems, where a person with a single regional transit pass could transfer from any one of them to any other.
The closest thing we have to that now is the point at which the Sounder trains terminate at King Street Station, with the ID station stop for buses and Link in the tunnel across Jackson, or bus stops for both Metro and Sound Transit runs on Jackson, and the ferries a short ride away. That is FAR FAR closer to I-90 than it is to 520; it just makes sense to have the Eastside Link run from the closest thing we have to a universal transfer point.
Fnarf dear, when I worked downtown and took the tunnel buses home, the buses to Mercer Island and beyond were PACKED. So much so that a few times I literally could not get off at the Rainier Avenue transit stop, and had to ride over to Mercer Island and catch a bus back. The buses would empty out about half way at Mercer Island, enough so that everyone could get a seat.
Fnarf @20,
Every rail system in America — with the possible exception of LA’s when it’s complete — is hub-and-spoke.
It’s very fashionable to talk about using rail to run errands and such. That’s great, and I use it for that quite often. That shouldn’t obscure the fact that the bulk of riders are going downtown and that the system should generally convenience them rather than the exceptions.