If there's one thing Seattle loves, it's hypothetical transit porn. The Seattle subreddit posts a map like this every other week. I'll believe it when I see it in 20 years.

This is the kind of informative, local reporting that sucked me into the Slog. More of this please.

As someone who remembers a time when there was no operating light rail in Seattle, when there was a question whether the U-Link extension would even happen (this was the pre-Joni Earl days), when we couldn't even get our act together to build a Ballard-downtown-West Seattle monorail, when "personal rapid transit" was a thing, when the whole notion of this region mustering the political will to build reliable, fast mass transit was dismissed as passé and quixotic and a lost cause, well... These are heady days, almost surreal, for me between the U-Link extension opening and now this, momentum building around Sound Transit proposing a second downtown transit tunnel and "splitting the spine." I'm so used to the Sound Transit board needing to be coaxed and cajoled not to take half-measures in building out this system (because their constituents needed to be coaxed and cajoled not to take half-measures) that I still have to do a double-take at the possibility of ST wanting to do almost exactly what transit advocates like me want them to do.

I should take nothing for granted until the board releases its draft plan March 24. And I should really take nothing for granted about this ST3 campaign in November. That's a big ask to get more voters to say yes to than no.

This is a good start, but it seems to be missing a major component, namely, a "ring route" that essentially connects all those terminus points (Ballard, Burien, Issaquah, Redmond & Kirkland) to the main North-South spine. This configuration essentially shunts everything directly into downtown Seattle, which is good so far as it goes, but fails to address the significant issue of cross-region mobility (for example, this is completely useless if you live in Burien but work in Tacoma), not to mention creating a complete and utter clusterfuck in the event some accident shuts down the main line, leaving no alternate route around the central hub of the system.

COMTE @4: not to mention creating a complete and utter clusterfuck in the event some accident shuts down the main line, leaving no alternate route around the central hub of the system.

With two downtown tunnels, there'd no longer be a single main line.

Hell yes!!! Let's put on our transit big boy pants and do this.

A tunnel?

Why?

Haven't you learned about tidal mud flats filled with debris yet?

Just go from UW to Ballard and do West Seattle above grade, cheaper & easier to maintain

What about connecting Renton to Seattle and Bellevue? There are plenty of low income,working class people who live here. I personally drive the miserable 405 to Bellevue and back everyday for work and would love to benefit from light rail

Yeah, maybe by the year 2100 when everyone in this thread is long since dead.

What's great is that this completely made up pipe dream will be used by people to justify voting for more broken ST promises.

We've got to push for a Ballard-UW line, it's one of the most congested corridors in Seattle. If you agree, email the Sound Transit board and tell them: EmailTheBoard@SoundTransit.org.

http://seattletransitblog.com/2016/03/01…

@6:

That doesn't necessarily obviate the problem, since it seems likely both downtown tunnels would share station stops, otherwise the build-out is going to be ridiculously expensive if you have parallel stations from the ID to the Convention Center, not to mention being incredibly inefficient for moving riders between connecting routes.. If something such as a fire for example, shuts down either line and Gods forbid an entire station, it could potentially create a "choke point" that adversely affects the entire North-South corridor with no way to circumvent it.

But in any case, an outer ring-route would eliminate the need for everyone to have to funnel through downtown first before transferring to East-West routes. This could be accomplished with a connector from Ballard to Northgate, and one from Mountlake Terrace to Woodinville to Redmond on the north end, and from Burien to SeaTac to East Bellevue or Issaquah on the south end. Otherwise, imagine the absolute twice-a-day shitstorm 30 years from now of roughly 70,000 or 80,000 workers all scrambling to get off-and-on cars at the ID and Westlake every morning and afternoon commute in order to transfer to connecting lines going to Everett or Bellevue or Redmond.

Wilburton?

A Ballard-UW route would have to slow to 5mph going through Wallingford, so as not to offend local sensibilities. Even in a tunnel.

So I could someday rail it all the way from Tacoma to Capitol Hill??? That would sure make life easier for a gay guy who can't afford to move to the gayborhood.

Pardon me if I'm unthrilled. Not only does this map not include the obvious #1 priority of UW-Ballard, the projected lines do not even include certain vibrant transit-ready neighborhoods in Seattle such as Lake City and Greenwood. For that matter none of the SR-522 suburbs from Lake Forest Park to Woodinville are even named on the map. And "Kirkland" has been cleverly moved from where it actually is, along Lake Washington, to where the abandoned east side railway is, well inland. But oh yes, we can pay for a light rail line to Issaquah, to Everett, to Tacoma. By all means let's sign up to pay $20 billion in new taxes so we can get a cheap ride to Federal Way.

COMTE @12, first you can't quite get straight that we're not talking a single main line, so the line getting shut down won't be quite the disaster you make it out to be. Then you make like the overriding shutdown risk is with the shared stations rather than the obvious, the tunnels (and the vehicles) themselves. Somehow I get the impression that Peter Rogoff and company at Sound Transit aren't exactly quaking in their boots over your little exercise in risk assessment. Having two separate lines running roughly parallel through downtown is a recipe for resiliency, not the opposite.

But I will admit that, if the outer ring route you propose were to get shut down, that wouldn't be such a clusterfuck. Why? Because there wouldn't be that many people riding it to begin with.

On a slightly related note, I happen to believe there's value in having a Ballard to UW line, but my recollection is that ST's studies show that route's ridership doesn't compare to Ballard to downtown's ridership. Plus, considering the terrain, unless you're talking a glorified streetcar, you're looking at a route that wouldn't be so much cheaper, if at all, than Ballard to downtown. Plus, its ability to be extended doesn't offer up the opportunity to open up the whole system the way that Ballard to downtown does as the driver for "splitting the spine."

But as someone who does want to see Ballard to UW happen, I'll tell you what the biggest thing I'm rooting for in that context is. Ballard to downtown. Committing to see Ballard to UW happen instead of Ballard to downtown happening is a recipe for neither happening. And I realize that's a bit of a strawman I'm raising up. Not all the folks advocating Ballard to UW are advocating for that instead of Ballard to downtown. Oh, just most of them.

transitwonk @15: Pardon me if I'm unthrilled. Not only does this map not include the obvious #1 priority of UW-Ballard, the projected lines do not even include certain vibrant transit-ready neighborhoods in Seattle such as Lake City and Greenwood.

Lake City. Greenwood. Yes, with any light rail expansion proposal that isn't made of magic fairy dust, it's possible to name neighborhoods that will not be reached by that expansion. And as someone who dares to call yourself "transitwonk," surely you realize that it would be crazy to try to reach the Lake Cities and Greenwoods out there before trying to reach Ballard. Or are we spending Moropoly money here?

But here's where your comment is so shortsighted. I'd love to see the day when a Greenwood or a Lake City will be reached by light rail, or at least when light rail will reach a little closer to those places. And I know that the one big game-changer that could really make that a reality is the second north-south transit tunnel that the Ballard-to-downtown route would enable.

transitwonk @15, so I take it you're a "transit wonk" in the same way Jenny McCarthy is an immunology expert.

Yes, it's possbile to take any light rail expansion proposal that isn't made of magic fairy dust and name neighborhoods that will not be directly reached by that expansion. I'd love to see light rail reach Greenwood or Lake City too, but I'd hardly put those neighborhoods ahead of Ballard. The sad irony of your shortsightedness is that the best chance we have to see light rail reach those neighborhoods or at least reach closer to those neighborhoods is to see it reach other, bigger neighborhoods first.

@15:

Kirkland encompasses a pretty good-sized footprint spanning across I-405 all the way over to Chateau Ste. Michelle on its northeast border, so quite a bit more than just the lakeside retail district. Based on this map, it would appear the "Kirkland" stop is sited at approximately the junction of 405 and NE 85th, which puts it right on a convenient East-West arterial between Kirkland and Redmond. And the northern terminus of the "blue line" looks to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, which, although definitely not reaching all the way up to the Bothell/Woodinville area, nevertheless provides for the possibility of a future extension in that direction along the West Ridge Greenbelt, rather than plowing through a large swath of suburban cul-de-sacs.

And what exactly is wrong with paying for "a light rail line to Issaquah, to Everett, to Tacoma"? It seems to me those are exactly the end-points to which a regional transit system SHOULD connect. As I understand it, the idea behind such a system isn't that it has to stitch together literally every single adjacent neighborhood in an urban environment, but rather to utilize major arterials (and making use of extant infrastructure such as existing rail lines seems like a sensible part of that) to connect to significant destination points (e.g. large cities and workforce centers), reducing single-occupancy vehicle traffic congestion along those routes, and augmenting with intermediary transit such as bus lines and trolleys to serve as connectors between contiguous areas.

Well, if I'm willing to take COMTE to task @4 and @12, I have to give credit where it's due and give COMTE a +1 for the comment @19.

One of the ways we have to combat the effects of urban gentrification is to make it more feasible for people who's been priced out of the city to live in more far-flung and affordable places like Federal Way.

@16:

Of course, I fully realize I'm hypothesizing a "worst case" scenario, but that isn't the most important point. This system sends literally every single rider going from one outlying area to another through a single, central hub (mainly the ID Station, but Westlake as well), where many of them are going to need to transfer; the sheer bottleneck that will create, especially given what appears to be THREE separate spoked lines (see below) seems incredibly inefficient from a logistical, cost, and time-management perspective, whereas connecting the spokes would go a long ways toward not only relieving that congestion, but would serve to get people to where they actually need and want to go in a much more timely fashion. Or do you honestly believe there just aren't that many people who live in Burien or Lynnwood who work on the Eastside?

So yes, I get it: two separate tunnels running in parallel from the ID up to Westlake (although if I'm reading the proposals on the Sound Transit 3 site correctly, it's actually a second tunnel AND an at-grade surface line to handle the three proposed "arms": Tacoma-to-Ballard, West Seattle-to-Everett, and Redmond-Mercer Island-Everett). And it does appear each new line will require an entirely separate set of stations to connect them all together in the downtown core. So we're going to have an insanely complex (not to mention super expensive) engineering project that has to occur beneath and between existing building footprints and tear up a couple of major north-south arterials in the process (I'm guessing 2nd and 5th Avenues). Remember the cut-and-cover days of the mid '90's when the first tunnel went in? Imagine doing that all over again, but with a tunnel AND a surface line blocking off major north-south arterials through downtown where the surface streets are already going to be clogged beyond capacity with the increased resident and SLU workforce population AND all the cars trying to avoid paying tolls on the 99 tunnel to boot - good times, you betcha.

But this still doesn't take into consideration the fact that not EVERYONE wants, needs, or should go directly to downtown to get to the other side of the map; there actually are, even now, quite a few people who really DO need to go from Burien or Lynnwood to Redmond, which is why 405 is always such a hellacious mess every morning. So, it certainly makes sense to me to connect the spokes of the wheel as it were, by say, running a line connecting Burien with Seatac, then extending it to say South Center/Tukwila, and from there up to SE Bellevue to avoid running through the downtown hub altogether, and doing something similar on the North end to connect Ballard to Northgate, then extending from Shoreline or Mountlake Terrace through Lake Forest Park and on to Bothell and Woodinville to connect with the current ST3 Northeastern terminus at Totem Lake then take it all the way to Redmond. I don't know, maybe that's the plan for Sound Transit 4, which, the way thing go around here might get on the ballot sometime in the late 2100's.

And just think, this could have even better if our planners had 10% of the brainpower of a gerbil, and actually built the 520 bridge to include light rail instead of co-opting the 90 express lanes.

The yellow line needs to go north through Greenwood to Northgate, as well as being connected to UW via Ballard. Greenwood is growing like crazy, and our transit connections to NE Seattle are pathetic.

@22. I was told by a WSDOT engineer that 520 was designed with the option of adding rail. If, in a decade or 2, the will is to put rail across the bridge, stabilizer pontoons could be added, lanes reconfigured, and rail put down the middle. Talk to the engineers who surely will be out during the grand opening about it. But to borrow and spend the extra hundreds of millions up front when the system isn't there to connect to would be foolish. I'd love to see it, but it won't be soon.

As someone who lives just North of Whitecenter.... damn. Hopefully that Southern extension happens at some point (if this bill gets passed at all, obviously). That said, it wouldn't be hard to take the 120 up Delridge to White Center in about 10 minutes in the meantime.

Oh look! A fake map that intentionally makes north Seattle gigantic and Seattle to Tacoma look so close.

I remember very well when, back in 2001, The Stranger was adamantly anti-Sound Transit and anti-light rail, which was ridiculous. Very glad you've changed your tune.

Regarding Kirkland, you have totally simplified the issue. It's more than just people along the Trail who don't want transit on the Trail - it's over 2,300 Kirkland residents who would like to preserve the natural experience of the Trail. Check out the petition at Change.org and read their comments: https://www.change.org/p/sound-transit-b…

Imagine if Sound Transit wanted to put buses or rail on the Burke Gilman trail? How would Seattle react? Given there's an alternative solution proposed by Sound Transit (running buses on 405 and feeder buses into Kirkland), it's perfectly reasonable for the people (and now the City Council, at least regarding rail) to ask to not put transit on the Trail.

What a nice prediction by TCC. The hub and spoke thing is incredibly slow and outdated. The folks at Seattle Subway have some better ideas.

One has to wonder if Ed Murray's endorsement of Hillary Clinton didn't also kill ST3. To say there is an enthusiasm gap for Clinton would be an understatement. Many of the younger people who are excited about transit are going to stay home if Sanders fails to get the Presidential nomination.