No-one has a fix for "bad governance" other than voting for better candidates.
Most people don't vote.
All the problems being addressed by less-than-ideal government will continue to get worse while you fret endlessly about "better governance" and "cutting overspending".

"The perfect" is the enemy of "the good" or even "the mediocre".

Have you ever worked at a large company? Have you ever seen a large organization that was efficient?

As organizations get bigger, they ALWAYS get stupider and less efficient. Since nobody can take in the operation of the entire thing, they'll always be composed of chaotic groups of suborganizations with their own goals and priorities. That always creates disorder.

The search for government efficiency is an excuse by people who want to complain to stifle action.

@3: “The search for government efficiency is an excuse by people who want to complain to stifle action.”

Wholeheartedly agree.

Thinking about being all inclusive to the three county area would help. Right now it seems that all of the transportation benefits will be in Seattle and the system might begin to think about serving the Tacoma/Everette areas in about 15-20 years.

The Washington D.C metro doesn't have open gangways. People aren't cattle, David Cole.

Comfortable and civilized seating is preferred. No need cram us in like sardines, because the whole idea of mass transit is to be able to wait for a better seat on the next one in just a few minutes - right?

@5: You kind of have to build the system from the densest part out to the less dense parts. It takes a long time get this stuff going. They started planning BART in 1946. Construction began in 1964. The first trains didn't run until 1972. BART didn't go to San Francisco airport until 2003, and the spur line to Oakland airport didn't open until 2014.

They started building Central Link in August of 2003. The first leg opened on July of 2009 and by December it was serving Seatac Airport. Since 2016, it's been going from Angel Lake south of Seatac to Husky Stadium. 2021 it gets to Northgate. By 2024 it'll go from Federal Way to Lynnwood and also out to Bellevue/Redmond. So basically, it'll take 21 years to build out this mainline.

By 2030, Tacoma will be connected to the airport and downtown Seattle. I think I read that a federal grant just came in that's going to fund the Hilltop extension of Tacoma Link, with service starting in 2022.

So when compared to the history of BART, I don't think our progress is particularly out of whack or slow. This stuff just takes a long time and we messed up by not starting things 50 years ago.

Dude, you are worried about the wrong fucking things. Seriously, you don't seem to get it. Link will never, ever, have capacity problems. You are like a small town mayor worried about whether your buses are big enough instead of whether they go to the right places.

Let me just take one of your paragraphs. It starts out just fine (excellent even):

Light rail works best for distances of less than about 15 miles.

Same with heavy rail, but whatever. But then you segue into nonsense:

Link light rail from Everett to West Seattle will cover the same distance, and the line from Tacoma to Ballard will be ten miles longer. Does Sound Transit really think those trains won’t be at crush capacity before they even arrive at Federal Way?

Anyone who has ever looked at transit systems in North American knows those trains won't be close to crush loaded. Holy shit, how many people do you think will ride this thing from Tacoma to Seattle, when the trip takes an hour and 15 minutes? Have you actually looked at how many people ride buses (which will be faster most of the time) from the suburbs to Seattle? Like every fucking city, it is nothing compared to the number of people that ride inside it.

A very high movable bridge (that will never open during rush hour, and rarely open outside of it) is not a big deal. Nor is the fact that we have given riders in Rainier Valley an easy way to get on the train. Sure, we could spend billions making the situation better (for some) but wouldn't it make sense to actually correct the obvious flaws in our system? How about service to Belltown, the most densely populated spot in the state. How about serving First Hill, or the Central Area, so that the large, densely populated section of Seattle can actually get somewhere? How about making it easy to get from Capitol Hill to South Lake Union? What about getting from Ballard to the UW? Why can't ST build a line that is faster than driving -- even at noon -- while simultaneously connecting to all the buses in the region?

Because while ST does some things cheaply (the things you are obsessed about) that is nowhere near their biggest flaw. They simply design things on a whim. A spine; rail from Issaquah to a park in ride in South Kirkland; a subway line to West Seattle that will require 90% of the riders to transfer five minutes before their destination. All ideas that they never really studied, history would tell us are all really stupid, but went ahead and approved just because they thought they were cool.

Easy Dave. Ross makes a few decent points worrh considering. Your response shows lack of maturity for a wannabe journalist and someone who purports to be an “expert.” You really have no clue what it is like to plan and deliver the systems described.

Apologies. My comment above was written in haste and doesn't reflect the level of professionalism that I normally aspire to. I've asked for it to be removed.

I still stand by the points I made in the article.

Transit geeks commonly label BART "heavy rail" or "commuter-rail" to designate capacity needed during rush hours. However, any AIA worth their salt incorporates transit-oriented development (TOD) into their calculations on transit design. Mass transit "commute" systems 'backfire' by creating more demand for commuting than they can handle - crush loads during rush hours, miserably underutilized off-rush hours and in the reverse-commute direction. Plus the excess demand can only be met with personal car use.

TOD considerations alter calculations infinitely beyond what this article offers. For example: If the Bay Area BART system managed to direct TOD development at all stations along its lines instead of primarily San Francisco, travel demand would decrease during rush hours and increase during off rush hours. TOD also influences inter-connected bus service. IMO, the Seattle Metro system is terrible downtown and will worsen when removed from the DSTT. It's a typical transit system conundrum: More buses than necessary and at the same time too few. Large crowds of patrons wait while many buses pass with few passengers boarding and exiting. Denver's 16th Shuttle is an example of a basic transit system component lacking everywhere.

This is a great article. It's really difficult to imagine that the full ST3 will ever be completed, let alone anything beyond it. Cost overruns and federal budget cutbacks. Also, Seattle is starting to change its attitude about higher taxes. They've tolerated them for several years, but how much longer? I'd like to go back to the drawing board and stick to light rail for the city and immediate suburbs, and change to express buses and commuter trains with improved rights of way for towns further away. The city of Seattle is where there are too many cars, and too little parking. People who won't leave their cars don't want to go places on the bus that require a transfer, but better light rail routes would get many of them to ride transit.

Too bad I never got to see the comment. Whatever. If I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry. But I'm not questioning your bonafides. I really don't give a shit about your qualifications any more than you should care about mine. No one is asking experts here about specifics (e. g. cost estimates) we are simply discussing the arguments you have made with your proposals.

The point is what you are suggesting would be a huge waste of money and you have done nothing to support your point, other than to spend paragraphs explaining basic concepts that can be understood easily by reading Wikipedia (bigger trains can carry more people -- wow -- whodathunkit) . You stand by your points, but most of them are ridiculous. You haven't even bothered to state the strongest argument for one of your suggestions (but I will, just to be thorough). Nor have you bothered to actually analyze what we plan on building, estimate the cost of your "improvements", and compare it to other improvements. At the risk of spending way too much time explaining why your focus is all wrong, here is a more thorough rebuttal, point by point:

Open Gangways -- You aren't the first to suggest it. But as I stated quite clearly (and you failed to rebut) we are nowhere near capacity right now (1), nor is it likely we ever will be(2). Do you honestly think that we will see crush loads when we add stations like Fife and Ash Way? Maybe you do, so I'll explain why that is unlikely. First, no other city has ever experienced that sort of mismatch (higher ridership outside the urban core). Similar systems (in Denver, Dallas Fort-Worth, etc.) perform poorly overall because the ridership from distant destinations are too low. Second, the suburbs have a lot less density than the our cities (we aren't Phoenix)(3). Third, the city proper is growing faster than the suburbs and surrounding cities(4). Fourth, even Sound Transit, which has greatly overestimated suburban ridership, doesn't believe it is a problem. Fifth, ridership actually went down at SeaTac with the addition of Angle Lake (and Capitol Hill/UW). That is significant. It means that even though more people from the UW and Capitol Hill were going to the airport, it wasn't enough to make up for the loss in ridership caused by SeaTac no longer being the terminus. People who used to park (or drop off their sweety) at the airport now use Angle Lake. In other words, riders have just switched around (which is common as a suburban line gets extended). Lastly, many riders will have faster alternatives. Tacoma riders for example, can get downtown much faster via an express bus or commuter rail. There is a reason why most cities avoid building subways as long as we have -- it is a terrible value.

Make Rainier Valley Grade Separated -- You have suggested several reasons for doing this (while ignoring the most important) so I'll start with the most important.

Frequency -- Yes, this part of Link is held to six minute headways. It would be nice if the train could run more often. But six minutes is common for many lines throughout the world, including lines a lot more popular than this one. It is quite likely that even if they made it possible to run trains every three minutes, they simply wouldn't. Running trains is expensive.

Speed -- You never said how much faster it would be. Perhaps because (like me) you are too lazy to do the math. But if you are going to write an article in the newspaper, you should be able to back up your case. By my calculations (which are very rough) you would save less than two minutes. That takes into account the distance between each stop and how much of that is spent speeding up or slowing down. Go ahead and check my math (but don't forget Graham Station).

So you want to spend hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars, shut down the south end of Link (and likely much of Rainier Valley transportation in general) all to save some of the riders a couple minutes? Seriously?

Also, what about the riders in Rainier Valley, that now have to enter a tunnel to get to their stop. Isn't their time worth something? All of those riders will spend extra time just trying to get to the platform. It is quite possible that after all that work, it actually is an overall time loss.

Reliability -- Again, you fail to offer facts to back up your case. How many times has the system been down because of an accident on Rainier Valley, as opposed to some other reason? All systems have reliability problems. The older they get and the bigger they are, the more unreliable they are. If were focused on reliability, we wouldn't have built this thing so long.

That's it for burying the line in Rainier Valley. It just doesn't add up, in my opinion -- I am quite confident we could do something much better for the money.

Drawbridge -- A drawbridge in Ballard would never open during rush hour. Outside of rush hour, the trains run less often. The bridge operator decides when to open the bridge. They can make boats wait until it is the ideal time to open the bridge. Finally, the bridge will be higher, which means that it won't open as often. It is quite likely, therefore, that delays caused by the bridge being open will be rare, if not non-existent. At worst you will have a train move slowly towards the bridge, and lose a few seconds. Way more seconds are lost during rush hour as they wait to close the doors.

Train Automation -- This would save us some money. That's it. It wouldn't allow the trains to run more often. Running trains is expensive. You have to have, well, lots of trains. That is why Vancouver (which has automated trains) hasn't increased capacity on the Canada Line (train cars aren't cheap). That is for a 12 mile line. Adding more trains would really add up for a system as long as ours.

Headways aren't limited by the fact that we have drivers. The basic reason that trains don't come more often is because they have to have room to stop. You can spend money improving the system, and it is something ST has discussed (2) but at a certain point, you just run out of room, and things become unreliable. Whether the added throughput is better than the loss of reliability is a reasonable question, but automating the driving won't help in the least. All it will do is save some money when it comes to operations. You are basically arguing that we should spend some money to save some money, without any evidence to support that case.

Converting the diesel trains to electric -- Sure, why not. But it won't make them any more frequent or faster. We don't own the tracks, which means adding more service means not only buying more trains, but negotiating for more service.

Well, that's it for your grand ideas. Basically you want to spend a bunch of money, while ignoring the transit needs of most of the city. Most of the train riders wouldn't notice the change, while the overwhelming majority of transit riders wouldn't care. That is because the vast majority of transit riders in this city take a bus. Even in Vancouver, where the rail system covers the city in a much better fashion, more people take the bus.

You seem to think we have an unlimited amount of money, and it really doesn't matter where the trains go, as long as the trains can go fast and frequently. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Lines like the ones we are building will never carry that many people. Fife isn't going to become the next Queens.

Even if it did, don't you think we would have bigger problems? Again, the city is growing faster than the suburbs. Density and proximity lead to higher transit demand. The relationship with density is not linear, it is exponential. In other words, if population density in Fremont doubles than it will lead to more than twice as many transit riders.

And what about the people in Fremont? What about the people in First Hill or the Central Area? Are they just supposed to sit back and suffer with shitty bus service while we spend billions tearing up Rainier Valley?

As I said before, you are worrying about the wrong fucking thing. You have not even come close to pointing out the weakest part of our subway system. It isn't the trains, or the drivers, or the fact that it runs on the surface for a relatively short section. It is that it skips over vital areas while spending way too much time in suburban ones. Just look at a census map, or a map of employment in the area, or a map of new growth. Just compare our system with any system in North America (both good and bad). You just don't build the kind of thing we have built and then get lots of riders. Heavy rail, light rail, automated or with drivers -- it makes no fucking difference.

Where the trains go, and where the buses go is a lot more important than what technology they use to get there. We are already spending more money than any city our size (and likely more per capita than anywhere else on the continent). We only have so much money. We can't even afford the type of bus improvements that could make a real difference in the lives of so many people, while you are worried about frivolous bullshit.

OK, now to the footnotes (because SLOG doesn't allow hyperlinks anymore):

1 -- See page 59 (Figure 16) of this document: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/2018-service-implementation-plan.pdf. The little dots represent peak load. None of the dots come close to "crush loaded", and only a handful even reach "target max load". This is with 2 and 3 car trains (we will soon have 4 car trains).

2 -- https://seattletransitblog.com/2015/03/21/capacity-limitations-of-link/

3 -- There are a lot of census maps out there, but I like this one: https://arcg.is/1v5Tfb. Doesn't exactly match what we built now, does it.

4 -- https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-added-more-people-last-year-than-all-king-countys-suburbs-combined/

Re: RER (Regional Express Rail)
It'd be nice if someday waaaaay down the road we could have something like Philadelphia had decades ago.
http://www.septa.org/maps/system/index.html

Hey Ross, density 'without diversity' backfires, making traffic worse. Downtown is already sufficiently dense and 'economically' diverse enough to support a functional transit system, should Seattle ever decide to build one. If the lack of economic diversity in the suburbs remains as it is, traffic will get worse. Light rail has to reach across the region and spur diverse 'mixed-use' infill development to even begin to change the situation.