If voters got the feeling the Amazons and Googles were being hit up for a fair portion of the funding for projects that will benefit those businesses, they might be more willing to go for it.

I support this all in principle, and will surely support it with my vote(s). It kind of sucks, though, that I'll be getting senior discounts before travel to West Seattle or Ballard becomes something one can do in reasonable time by transit.

@1, if companies like Amazon and Google paid their fair share in taxes we'd have more money sooner to compress the roll out of ST3

No offense, Heidi, but you don't know what you are talking about. Please, I beg of you, do a little research. Go out into the world, visit cities with huge rail systems and figure out which ones work and which ones don't. No city anywhere has been successful building a system like this. BART is probably the most successful long line, and it is a failure outside the urban areas (San Fransisco, Oakland and Berkeley). But those areas are short changed, while they build rail to cities like Fremont. The city of Fremont, by the way, is as big as Tacoma, and twice as big as Everett. It has pockets of population density way higher than either city. Yet ridership there is extremely low -- lower than many of our buses.

Compare this plan to SkyTrain, in Vancouver. One of the first things you notice is that it was designed from the very beginning to work with the buses. That is why overall transit ridership is so much higher in Vancouver (about three times ours). Between the rail and the buses, you can get anywhere very quickly. ST3 ignores bus service (and has from the very beginning). The other big difference is that SkyTrain does not go for miles and miles into the suburbs, but it carries way more people than our system. Even in Toronto (a city many times bigger) they don't extend that far. Hell, the entire Toronto subway system runs only 42 miles, yet they have higher North American per capita transit ridership than anyone but New York. It is about quality, not quantity. Rail that runs every to minutes and connects to urban and suburban bus service, not rail that runs every 20 minutes (at best) carrying half empty trains to the suburbs.

Rail isn't magic. Just because an area "has rail" does not mean that its transit mobility problems are solved. By the time this is built, the UW will likely have dozens of sky rise office buildings. Ballard will have its share of increased employment as well. But how will someone get from one place to the other? The same way they always have (on the 44). It is just geography. A ride from Ballard to downtown via the UW takes only a couple minutes longer than the ST proposal, but the reverse is not true. Going "around" (from Ballard to UW via Westlake) doesn't make sense today, and certainly won't make sense once SDOT improves the corridor. This means that someone in, say, South Everett that works in Ballard will get absolutely nothing out of this deal, even though rail serves both her city and workplace.

There are better alternatives for the city and the region, but Sound Transit has ignored them. They are a dysfunctional agency. Just look at what happened in Kirkland. The city of Kirkland hired consultants to figure out how to leverage the transit/walking path called the ERC. They came up with a plan that involved lots of buses (appropriate for an area as spread out as Kirkland). This would enable very fast one seat rides from places like Juanita to the UW (with connections along the way). Sound Transit rejected that approach. They wanted rail, despite the fact that ridership would be extremely low (the corridor isn't really next to anything).

Just another sign of a dysfunctional agency. Transit experts suggested a set of projects that will clearly be a bigger improvement in transit mobility, and can be built more cheaply (and thus faster), but all of those projects were ignored. it is clear that Sound Transit is an agency run by elected officials that know nothing about transit planning and are only interested in symbolic gestures (like measuring success by the miles of rail laid).

You just can't assume that adding lots and lots of light rail is always a great value. It matters where the rail is.

I don't know how feasible this would be but wouldn't Sounder trains, Ballard to Downtown work? Put a station in Ballard and perhaps even a station at Interbay. All you'd have to do is build the stations. The rail already exists, right?

Oh, a few other things. First of all, the suburbs didn't pay for our light rail. We aren't paying for theirs either. Subarea equity ensures that each area pays for their own piece. Although, since Sound Transit is not very open with their financing, it is possible that they are shifting money around (essentially loaning money from one area to another) in order to ensure that the "spine" gets completed.

Second, Sound Transit has been completely off in the past when it comes to ridership estimates. It is absurd to think that hundreds of thousands of suburban riders will be flocking to light rail, when a small percentage of that use the buses today, and the buses will remain the faster way to get to Seattle.

Third, this will cost around $12,500 for every person in the area. Not voter, not adult -- but person. In other words, a family of four would be on the hook for $50 grand. This, in an area with the most regressive tax system in the country. It isn't like we don't have other things we could spend the money on (police, health and human services, education, day care or even decent complementary transit).

Lastly, you suggest that because Seattle is expensive, more and more people will move to the suburbs. That is absurd. Seattle is expensive because it is popular. It is expensive because people want to move here. This is where very expensive, high capacity transit makes sense (if it is designed well) not in suburbs that will increasingly become cheap alternatives (areas like Kent). This isn't the 80s -- Seattle is growing faster than its surrounding suburbs in absolute number and that is likely to increase, as we finally allow more housing. But if the suburbs (like Kent) do grow, and grow as a result of folks being priced out of Seattle, do you really think they want a light rail line that doesn't even go to their city (or at best skirts it) instead of the other services (like police, health, education and day care)? Don't you think they might want to spend a little bit on buses, a little bit on the rest of those things instead of spending it all on magic rail?

@5 -- The idea has been bandied around a bit. The most likely station would be in Belltown. If the Sounder train from the south (the one that is fairly successful) included that stop, then it would enable a quick connection from one end of town to the other (e. g. a Tacoma rider headed to Belltown would have a faster ride).

In general the problem with the Ballard stop is that it would be at Golden Gardens, an area so out of the way that buses don't even serve it. It takes a long time to get from there to the heart of Ballard (or even anywhere with any density). Interbay could work, I suppose, but that might be tricky. I don't know where the line is (that they lease from BNSF) but building a station might prove to be very expensive. Ridership in the area would be moderate unless you tried to serve it with shuttle buses, and that might be very expensive or involve a lot of congestion.

Whether it be light rail or monorail, every fixed-rail transit measure this city and region have been offered this century, and probably going back earlier, has faced sustained criticism from fellow transit supporters, or people who call themselves transit supporters. Every such proposal splits "the transit community." If it were up to the pro-mass-transit mass-transit foes, who support these projects in theory but never the particular project in question, this region would still be without any kind of light rail.

So prepare yourselves for more voluminous comments from folks like Ross who just can't satiate themselves enough with the endless comment threads in places like Seattle Transit Blog. Also prepare yourselves for their own brilliant alternatives that are always so superior to the crap the idiots at Sound Transit come up with.

Now, the transit perfectionists who always come out of the woodwork to opposite every concrete transit plan there ever was could cast folks like me in the opposite light and accuse us consistent yes votes of being a bunch of passive sheep who will support any rail plan, even if it's the Iraq invasion of rail plans.

Here's the thing though. ST3 is a great plan. Is it a perfect plan? No, but even its obvious weaknesses have the potential to do far more good than we give them credit for. We underestimate how different the world will be 20 years from now. Twenty years from now those farflung BART stations that the transit purists hold up as huge wastes could provide to be lifesavers. (Set aside the peculiar technology choices that were made with BART, choices that we don't have to worry about here.)

For me, the deal-breaker would have been if Sound Transit had decided to place the Ballard extension at-grade through downtown. If they'd made that choice, I wouldn't be cheerleading. Now I am, without equivocation. For Sound Transit to use the Ballard extension as the impetus for building a second rail tunnel should be cause for celebration.

Now if they can just figure out a way to speed up the timeline, even if it's by four or five years, even if it involves making additional demands of the voters. Twenty-two years is an awful long time.

Sadly @3 is correct. And scr3w the suburbs

There's absolutely no way that I'll vote for Sound Transit 3 with these ridiculous timelines for the light rail portions.

I'm sure the reasons are legit. But as much as I've gladly paid taxes into Sound Transit to date, I won't give a dime to this plan. If there's no way to build out light rail as fast as we've built out to date, if not faster, then maybe light rail is not the solution for these ST3 extensions.

And 2036...to add the Graham stop on the EXISTING Rainier Valley rail line? Twenty years? That sounds more like city-building politics than prioritizing a ridership's needs. I've been rallying behind Sound Transit for years, but I just feel gross after reading that. I don't live near there, but it's clearly a major omission on that line.

The complaining is downright insane. I read a lot about people wanting ST to build it twice as fast, but not one person stating they'd be willing to pay twice as much upfront, and even then it may be logistically impossible to accelerate the timeline due to the listed environmental, financial, and construction constraints.

"But I'll be 60 years old when the Ballard line opens!" Really? How old will you be if nothing gets built and we have a million more people here?

"Suburbs!!!" Well, they're paying into it, and they rightfully expect to get something out of it. The affordability crisis is pushing people further away as it is.

Is everyone getting exactly what they want? No, that's not possible, politically or financially. Is it better than doing nothing? Hell, yayuss! Duh!!!!
Christ, I wish people here would stop being so short-sighted--that's why we're in this damned situation in the first place.

Im with 4 & 6, the tax is immense, the routes are nice but if this went to a three county vote those in the suburbs of pierce and Snohomish county are never going to let this fly. People who read this blog love to bag on the burbs but seriously should tens of thousands of Pierce & SnoCo county residents who could give two shits about going to the city really be on the hook so we can have light rail out to Ballard?

No FUCKING way I'm voting for this. Too much rail that isn't grade separated, and timeline is insane. Screw the suburbs; build the Ballard-West Seattle line underground or elevated FIRST.

@ 14, Do you realize that if ST3 fails, the soonest we're likely to see another proposal on the ballot is 2020? You can add four more years to those timelines if that's the case.

You will be hard-pressed to find someone who supports light-rail more than me, and I think ST3 is a big pile of shit.

Ballard, which is being rebuilt with more density and less parking NOW (hooray!), doesn't get anything for 22 years (say what?!?!?) ... What a fucking disaster.

Keenan C @14: Too much rail that isn't grade separated, and timeline is insane.

This reminds me of that Groucho Marx joke (or was it a Woody Allen joke?), the food at this restaurant is terrible, and the portions are too small too.

Original Andrew @12: Christ, I wish people here would stop being so short-sighted--that's why we're in this damned situation in the first place.

Original Andrew, don't you realize, we don't need to bother with such quaint, old-fashioned notions as sacrifice or investing in our long-term future or thinking about the next generation, we have the power to Make America Great Again simply by electing Donald Trump president.

@12 - I am willing to pay more for a reasonable timeline. What is proposed is a non-starter. It's not a matter of capability, but priorities. I shudder at the thought that I could move to north to the suburbs for a faster commute downtown than from many points within the city limits. How does that not encourage more sprawl? What about all of the density and urban villages that are being built within the city limits NOW?

Mahtli69 @17, I'll put my money on this plan's ability to combat sprawl vs. your alternative.

http://classifiedhumanity.com/post/29463…

How in the fuck does it take this long? We put down an entire fucking Interstate Highway system in the amount of time it's taking to get a small light rail system down. But that's what happens when the real priority is giving Boeing and Amazon and all the rest lots of tax breaks; the rest of society gets fucked up the ass with a rusty chainsaw minus the lube.

@18 trust me, the economy in the Puget Sound will have gone tits up long before light rail is going to be done. There won't be anyone left to ride it let alone pay for it

Cato @21, thanks for the refreshing dose of nihilism. I'm sure you have just as much foresight as your predecessors decades ago who asked, "Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?"

So I guess you're looking forward to this vision of our transportation future, and you'd just as well we hastened it. Now that I think about it, you'd probably just as well see our economy go belly up.

@18 - I doubt it. My alternative is for Seattle to go it alone and fund transit within the city on its own. We already did this last year to save some bus lines that Metro was going to cut (despite them being packed to the gills during commuting hours).

Sound Transit doesn't seem to be up to the task, and has too many constituencies to please. Some of those longer proposed suburban lines are just stupid, and are only there to get votes.

@22, seriously? You line of bullshit is what you got from the reality we live in an economy that's cyclical and largely based on unstable bubbles like housing and Amazon?

And you deluded piece of shit: if you took time to read you'd have noticed that I'm FOR a compressed construction schedule and paying more upfront to get this built before the election of 2032. It's ignorant assholes like you who drive people like me to vote NO

So because of Cressona I'm NO for ST3. I'm sure it wont' matter though, right Cressona but I'll be back here on election night. Hope you are too!

re: the supposed continued influx of people to downtown Seattle because it's the cool place to live; already reversing towards the suburbs according to this Crosscut piece:

http://features.crosscut.com/understandi…

Cato @24, I appreciate the kind words. I don't think I've ever been called a "deluded piece of shit" before. I always considered myself more of a pragmatic piece of shit.

My original response to you was that it's vastly more likely that we'll enter into more boom-and-bust cycles than just bust-and-deeper-bust. If our region is going into a deep, generational decline, then we've got bigger problems.

But beyond that, much of the point of investing in infrastructure is to prevent decline, to make this region more competitive with other ones.

But even beyond that point, there's the point that, should our economy someday fall on hard times, we'll be much better off weathering those hard times with a functioning transportation infrastructure, especially one that doesn't require ownership of an expensive motorized vehicle. Or perhaps you prefer the more ruggedly individualistic survivalist response to the future your nihilism needs.

@20 It takes so long because it is so fucking expensive. 50 billions dollars (roughly 12 grand for every man woman and child in the region) is a shit load of money. They don't want to float bonds, because then they couldn't complete the spine, their reason for existence. So they have to wait for the money to trickle in before building each piece.

It is shit. As folks have said, time to kill this thing and come back with something that makes sense. That means going with a different agency that knows what they are doing. Who was the third party transit agency that came up with this proposal anyway? Oh yeah, there wasn't one.

@10 screw you back. actual people live in the suburbs - a lot more than live in the city.

@8 -- Bullshit. I was alive during Forward Thrust, and can tell you that the transit community was not split. There was strong support for it, because unlike this pile of shit, it made sense. It only failed because of suburban automotive interests, and because we were in a recession.

Likewise with the first (passed) light rail plan. Just about everyone knows that light rail from downtown to the U-District makes sense. Of course it does. Likewise with proposition one. There was huge support from the transit community for those proposals (that will speed things up immensely in a few years).

This is not perfectionism. This is not like opposing a proposal because it is on the surface for part of the way (which, oddly enough, you seem to consider a deal breaker). This is building expensive crap, that simply won't work. I notice that not once have you bothered to explain why my argument is unsound. Why is this plan better than the one I cited? Oh wait, now I see. People will be flocking to Fife so that they can enjoy their one hour rides to downtown Seattle, just like ... just like ... well, like nowhere in the world.

This is a crazy experiment when every similar experiment has failed. It will not make transit better, but will make it worse. Do you really think people will be eager to spend a huge amount of money on more transit after spending money on this? Don't you think we have other concerns? The vast majority of the city will be left with inferior bus service, while we spend billions on half empty trains to nowhere.

@23 is right. Time for Seattle to do it alone, and to do it with their own, independent planning department. The goal should be obvious. Save more people more time for less money. This doesn't do it (obviously).

@12 I read a lot about people wanting ST to build it twice as fast, but not one person stating they'd be willing to pay twice as much upfront, and even then it may be logistically impossible to accelerate the timeline due to the listed environmental, financial, and construction constraints.

I know my first post was a long one, but I specifically addressed that. The main reason this takes so long is because it is so expensive. The main reason it is so expensive is because you are talking about a lot of rail -- two new bridges and a couple new tunnels. Float some bonds and other projects can be built a lot sooner. Build the WSTT first. Then build the Ballard to UW line. That's all cheaper and easier than Ballard to West Seattle rail.

@15 -- That is a legitimate concern, but given the timeline on these projects, probably misplaced. You could probably have this fail, come back with a cheaper, more sensible and yet more effective set of proposals and still get it built faster. You wouldn't necessarily need to pass it in a general election year. Hell, we just passed a fairly sizeable transit package on an off year election (there wasn't even a congressional election and it passed). It is only if we tie ourselves to suburban voters (a very dubious and misguided approach) that we need the higher, more liberal turnout of a general election.

Cressona,

"transit advocates" don't really exist, and they certainly aren't a monolithic block, because—in the same way that transportation itself doesn't exist for its own good—transit is just a means to an end, and it is that end that inspires people to bellow at one another online and in person. Among so-called transit advocates, there is disagreement about what Sound Transit should be trying to accomplish in this package—finish the spine (a political/entitlement/equity goal)? Offer folks an alternative to being stuck in traffic (reinforcing the current travel and development patterns)? Build transit that will help shift the fundamental unit of urban design from cars back to humans (something that involves changing travel patterns and urban form)? Build something will be useful to the most people (similar to shifting the urban form)? Build something that will be useful to people who "need" an affordable alternative (another form of an equity argument)? And on and on. Transit is a tool that can help achieve all of these things, but not all at once.

I completely agree #1. I'm a big transit advocate but the wealthy corporations that are displacing small businesses and people in this city should bear the brunt of the bill. Instead of taxing housing, we should tax commercial real estate on a progressive curve based on square footage so that small businesses don't suffer but big businesses like Amazon pay their fair share.

Also, this timeline and bill is crazy. We need to encourage companies to bid for these projects, like Denver did, and see who can offer us the quickest timeline and the lowest price, with major penalties for going over the expected time. Otherwise we may end up spending way more than we absolutely need to for a worse system that many of us will never have the opportunity to ride because we die before it is built or, even worse, we get prices out of the city before we have the opportunity to use it.