Given that McIver's favorite transportation project, Sound Transit's light-rail line, was penciling in at $5 million less per mile than the monorail (with the Feds ponying up $500 million of the costs), McIver tried to use his monorail numbers to persuade voters to reject the second monorail initiative.
A lot has changed since then. First, voters reanimated the monorail by approving the second monorail initiative. More important, federal support for Sound Transit has caved in, and the light-rail project costs have soared to at least $1.1 billion over budget. However, the most embarrassing update surely came last week. Sound Transit staff pitched an eight-mile light-rail plan that would cost about $1.6 billion: running from Convention Place in downtown Seattle to South Henderson Street in Rainier Beach.
Inspired by Richard McIver, The Stranger did the math on that one. Get this: Seattle's light rail is going to cost $200 million per mile! That estimate doesn't even include the costly Capitol Hill tunnel. At $200 million per mile, the basic route that voters approved in 1996--a $2.5 billion (in year-of-expenditure dollars), 21-mile line from the U-District to SeaTac--would cost $4.2 billion. We're talking about a nearly 70 percent increase over the voter-approved price tag. Moreover, the cost is 110 percent greater than McIver's monorail per-mile figures. (And by the way, monorail estimates are more like $75 million per mile.)
How fitting then, that on June 14, the state senate passed S.B. 5362. The bill calls for a second vote on Sound Transit among King, Snohomish, and Pierce County residents. If voters give the thumbs down to Sound Transit, tax dollars originally slated for the agency would be divided three ways, between local road projects, state road projects, and local transit projects--like the monorail.
At $95 million per mile, according to McIver, the monorail was too expensive to even contemplate building. But now that the latest light-rail estimate is coming in at $200 million per mile (and expect that number, like all Sound Transit numbers, to rise), has McIver rethought his support for light rail?
