You want Tacoma and Everett to pay you all this money for decades and never see a station built here, while you waste time putting stations in tiny parts of South King County like Angle Lake?

Did you get more money from Auburn residents or Federal Way residents or something?

You broke ground on this thing 16 years ago, and you still haven’t laid one inch of track outside King County. Most of the service workers that keep your economy humming- the grocery clerks, nurses, teachers and ambulance drivers- can’t afford to live in your overpriced county. They live in Tacoma and Everett because that’s where they can still hope to buy a house.

Let’s imagine a disaster hits Seattle. A big old 7 pointer earthquake rocks downtown. Bodies everywhere. You need emergency responders. But all your nurses are stuck in traffic on I-5 while your grandma is bleeding to death.

Yeah, okay, you can compare that to a reach around and a triad sexual relationship, but you know who would get fucked in that scenario? It’s not Tacoma or Everett. We have plenty of medical staff who live here because they can’t afford to live in Seattle. Seattle, on the other hand, would have to rely on its tech boys to to stop the bleeding on dear old granny, and to save your husband from his heart attack. Do you trust a fucking Microsoft software engineer to put the EKG leads on him and start the IV for the morphine drip before the doctor shows up?

Here, why don’t you show me how to run a bag of fluids on an Alaris pump. Come on, you’re so smart, I’ll bet you’ll do great. Imagine saving your own kid because I can’t get to Seattle in time to do it. Tell your dying child that s/he will just have to wait 25 years for your plan to connect Tacoma to the Central Link plays out. Then let’s see you start an intubation yourself. Don’t know how? Hmm.

Maybe you should shut the fuck up and build that damn station and quit fucking around.

First, let's stop building parking garages at light rail stations.

I can see there are a lot of strong feelings here. For what it's worth, I tried, but I'm in the magical 40% of Pierce County that thinks paying more taxes for nice things is a good idea. We mostly live in Tacoma and work elsewhere, which sucks for it's own reasons. Go Gen X, am I right? I'm afraid more old people are going to have to die before we can get this tax thing figured out, they've simply got us outnumbered. It practically took an act of god to build that second bridge, and well...duh, we needed that a while ago.

Gig Harbor and Parkland simply do not see why "their" tax money should go to build King County's transit system. It's a selfish argument, but it's simple and compelling. They don't live in King County. They don't even go there, if they can help it. Also, fuck Seattle (see regional history for this). If you can figure out a counter argument that doesn't take 15 paragraphs to explain (and doesn't involve clumsy sexual metaphor) you might get a few more people in Pierce County to shift their hate to Eyman and his money men, where it belongs.

Angle Lake was built with the last few drops of "squeezed out" available funds for the rail, when the Federal money was going dry - largely thanks to the efforts of Senator Murray. That's as far south as the rail could go.
I can't blame voters in Federal Way, Tacoma, or Everett for being pissed, but this is the price for piecemeal funding of a regional system that is 30 years overdue.

3,

The effect is much stronger in Puyallup than in Parkland or Gig Harbor. That’s where all the Republicans in Tacoma fled to after the 1990’s when the city decided to raise property taxes to dig itself out of an economic slump.

Puyallup hasn’t got any homeless services. They have the local PD drive homeless folks to Tacoma and drop them off here, even if they’d lived in Puyallup their whole lives before winding up on the streets.

I can't really blame people for being frustrated. Link Light Rail will eventually reach Lynwood, then finally Everett in 2036? Not sure how that's much of a help when we can currently pay a single fare and take a single ST bus, and be in Seattle in about an hour. I have been happily voting for transit what seems like my entire adult life, and as it is now I probably still won't live long enough to really benefit from the final product. Thankfully wages outside of King County seem to be rising, so people will be less reliant on commuting there for work.

7,

The problem, as I see it, is the infamous Seattle Process, or “ consensus through exhaustion”.

Seattle based public sector enterprises all fall victim to this. We insist on getting buy in from literally everyone, for fear that somewhere, someone might be offended if we don’t ask what they think about the idea before we do anything. When Atlanta laid out its transit system, it went up overnight. They just made a command decision as to where the stations would go, where to lay the tracks, and started digging. There wasn’t the decades long agonizing deliberation that we have up here.

Tacoma has had a streetcar that runs less than one mile through downtown for 16 years. It’s useless, because it doesn’t stop at any of the places a local resident would need to go to, like a hospital or a grocery store or a high school. It stops at the tourist attractions and that’s it.

Well, when it became apparent that ST was about to lose funding, they suddenly just this year expedited an effort to expand the thing to a few hospitals, a grocery store and a high school. They’re building all the stations all at once. This should have happened a decade ago, but at least they’re finally doing something other than dithering.

That’s all too typical of Seattle based bullshit. Operation Forward Thrust was passed by the voters in 1960. They didn’t break ground on the project until 2003, by which point everyone of voting age in 1960 was dead of old age.

It also accounts for the poor urban planning throughout the region. When I moved here in 1993, everyone knew the area was undergoing a population boom. So why didn’t we do something to mitigate traffic on 1-5? Whether you’re commuting to Seattle or Olympia, it’s always horrible. Puyallup is 20 miles from my house, and it takes me an hour to commute there in the mornings. Olympia is only 30 miles away, and sometimes that takes 2 hours. And fucking forget going to Seattle during rush hour. We knew this was coming, but we did nothing about it. We are paralyzed by indecision.

@6 when you have an environmental disaster with climate change you want to make sure it takes a generation or two to actually provide a solution to get people out of cars. Seriously, this is why I don't take the climate panic freaks seriously. All of their plans are half baked or line the pockets of government agencies

@1 - It says a lot that so many non-Seattlites have wet dreams that consists of a mega-quake wiping Seattle out, or Seattle somehow suffering if not for the generosity of 'The Real WA.'

We hear it all the time: If E WA broke away and became its own state, Seattle would starve without food from rural farms... as though they'd refuse to sell it to us out of spite.

We'd all bleed to death if nurses from Pierce County weren't around to put tourniquets on us after 'the big one.'

We'd all have dipaer rash if nannies from Snohomish couldn't come down here to wipe our asses for us.

It's amazing how much bitterness the rest of WA has from being the recipient of welfare paid for by the economic engine of Seattle and King County.

We beg for the chance to pay higher taxes that benefit everyone, you deny us that ability, and then have wet dreams about some cataclysmic event in which we suffer.

I dream of a world in which Seattle can go it alone, but I don't wish the rest of WA any ill will.

Go ahead. I sincerely wish you and your bootstraps all the best.

Here's to Tim Eyesore's disastrous I-976 being scrapped by Washington State Supreme Court (big shout out to WA AG, SuperBob), Tim Eyesore getting his sorry, corrupt ass shipped out of Washington State permanently one way via a rusty old BNSF rail car, and Washington voters duped by Timmy's tagline, "$30 car tabs! Whee!" will forever vote NO or never again to another Tim Eyesore scam.

9,

If you had bothered to read the post you are ostensibly responding to, you’d see your reply is a total non-sequitir.

I realize that reading anything longer than a PowerPoint slide is difficult for you tech boys, but you should try to gradually work your way up to a full sentence. Maybe someday, you’ll even be able to comprehend a full paragraph.

@3 TacomaRoma : Will all the road construction and freeway overpasses being built on I-5 / SR16, etc. around Tacoma, Steilacoom, Lakewood, Dupont, and JBLM be completed soon? The last time I visited Tacoma there was no Yellow cab service (at least not offered at Amtrak any longer). Every time I check traffic updates through WA-DOT and there is an accident on I-5 in Pierce County, there's no word about an incident response team, State Patrol, firefighters, medical aid, or tow trucks (like there is reported throughout King County, Everett, and elsewhere). Where do your tax dollars go in Pierce county?

12,

That depends on where in Pierce you are talking about. In Tacoma, the tax dollars largely go to social programs and public parks. In DuPont, they mainly go toward surveillance. In Puyallup, to the cops. In Steilacoom, they don’t go anywhere because they don’t like collecting taxes. In Lakewood, god only knows.

The roads are in disarray because nobody planned for urban growth until it was already here. That’s not just a Pierce problem, it’s a statewide problem. Nobody in this state plans for growth. I-5 has choke points at JBLM, the Tacoma Dome, Wild Waves, SeaTac, Tukwila, Renton, The Seneca Street exit, Centralia’s outlet mall, and the Columbia River. It has been like this since the early 1990’s.

@13 Wandering Stars: Actually, it has been a fifty-plus year growing problem since the 60s (mainly during the World's Fair, 1962) when we had been offered federal money for road and infrastructural improvements but voters said no (I wasn't around until '64 and couldn't vote until 1982). You're right about I-5 being a north-south parking lot. My beloved and I have since retired ourselves from driving it.

Where do our tax dollars go? Cops and firefighters, just like always. It’s like 80%+ of every city budget. That highway construction is all ST2 echo — state money as far as I know. Ft Lewis needs its highway, am I right?

It will be done, someday. Still won’t make a damn bit of difference. Road construction is sunk-cost fallacy as far as I’m concerned.

@1 "You want Tacoma and Everett to pay you all this money for decades and never see a station built here, while you waste time putting stations in tiny parts of South King County like Angle Lake?...Tell your dying child that s/he will just have to wait 25 years for your plan to connect Tacoma to the Central Link plays out"

How are you suggesting the extension of light rail from the airport should have progressed? Should an express line have been built to Tacoma, with intermediate stations added later? Or are you saying no station would have been necessary at any point around 200th Street?

Building infill stations is more expensive than doing it at the same time a line is constructed, hard to build enough community and political support for, dangerous, and disruptive to operations. The Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco happened largely because of the deep pockets of The Rockefeller Organization. NoMa-Gallaudet Metro in DC, because the neighborhood was perfectly situated for dense residential redevelopment and because the Feds built a new headquarters there for the ATF. They're exceptional cases. Less-charmed but otherwise worthy projects such as the long-proposed Albany BART station in California's East Bay, which will probably never materialize, are more typical.

I hope Angle Lake doesn't end up being Central Link's southern terminus for the foreseeable future. But whether it does or not, it was worth building.

16,

The line should have been built all at once, with stations from Anacortes (ferry terminal to BC) to Vancouver (future stop on the Columbia River Crossing). This would have bypassed I-5’s chokepoints, and any future chokepoints that could develop. Doing it by fiat would have gotten things finished before a Eyman had the chance to kill it, and provided counties other than King with a reason to fund it.

Asking the state to pick up the tab for a project that will never benefit anyone other than King county residents is guaranteed to get a no vote eventually. Border counties may say yes in te short term, but eventually, they’re going to ask themselves why they can’t enjoy economic development too and pull the plug.

While money is important, the,political capital necessary to see a project through to completion is as well.Historically, we have seen multiple projects fail to win statewide support because the benefits to counties other than King have been either poorly stated, or nonexistent. By building those stations immediately, the benefit is also immediately seen. A voter in Skagit or Whatcom only has to drive to station by the ferry dock, a voter in Clark to the station by the bridge, a voter in Thurston or Pierce to the stations present in Olympia, Lakewood or the Tacoma Dome. since three of the most populous cities in the state are all clustered along I-5 at the Sound, it makes sense to appeal to them quickly and get all of them to buy in and stay in.

The approach now being used has the opposite effect- you’re telling people to pay for something they won’t see until after many of them have died of old age. Only an idiot would fall for that. Much to the contrary of the opinions expressed by this article’s author and some commenters here, the voters aren’t stupid, they’re voting in line with their personal interests. If you’re 65 now and you’re being told, pay for this and we will build you a station in 30 years, by which point you’ll either be dead or in a nursing home so demented you don’t even know what a train is anymore, nobody is going to do that.

First, I voted against this but not in the spirit of "yes light rail" (as you will see below) but more in the spirit of "Fuck you idiot for buying a new expensive car"(I've always gone the used/frugal route). Buying cheap cars my tabs are not that much - I don't care and love the wails of "OMG so much for mah tabs!!!".

I have been using public transportation (Sound Transit/Sounder) from Pierce County for 10 years - so I think I know a little bit about the experience. It is no puzzle to me why Pierce County doesn't want this: we already HAVE two decent options via bus and train. I work in Seattle and talk to people all time about their cross-Seattle commutes - which are not that much shorter than mine in many cases. And, pay close attention here: many people work locally, have short local commutes, and are not all that impacted with traffic/transit issues. Do you think you appear intelligent having difficulty grasping this and playing it off with silly comparisons to sex?

The writer here seems to have drawn the short straw in The Stranger writer pool and flails around looking for a clever way to frame this. But at the end of the day the people going from Pierce to King seem pretty happy with the current service. I would much rather see dedicated bus lanes, but that solution isn't 'sexy' enough and doesn't serve this paper (and egotistical politicians) well in terms of juicy subjects for the next snide article or campaign. WOW I just checked the time it would take to go from Angle Lake (southern most point) to University Street Station (where I would get off) - 40 minutes! FOURTY! Now imagine light rail has to travel twice that distance from Tacoma; what will that travel time be - 80 minutes? HOW is that an improvement over the bus? How? Even at 60 minutes how is that an improvement? Had I looked up this info before my vote, it may have gone the other way.

I have no doubt that if voters in Seattle/King County were asked to approve a noticable tax hike that voters in Pierce/Snohomish were keen on, but not King, this paper would top the juvenile screed we see here - maybe using defecation to frame it instead of sex. I don't believe for a second that if the situation were reversed the citizens of Seattle would simply open up their wallets in a heartbeat, or this paper would be advocating a 'yes more taxes' vote. More likely would be some kind of "Screw you asshole that doesn't live in King County...." articles run every week.

@16: It looks like Link will get at least to Federal Way Transit Center

"Sound Transit has already awarded construction contracts to build three lines by 2024 — to downtown Lynnwood, to downtown Redmond and to the Federal Way Transit Center. Marchione signaled those remain full speed ahead. The eight-mile Northgate-to-Lynnwood line, for around $3 billion, is actually a Sound Transit 2 project passed in 2008, while the other two lines were approved in Sound Transit 3 in 2016.

“Any project that we have construction projects for, needs to go ahead and be completed, otherwise they’ll be very expensive,” he said. It’s the next wave of projects that are at risk, he said."

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/king-county-plans-to-sue-over-car-tab-initiative-while-bus-and-light-rail-cuts-remain-to-be-seen/

@17 / Wandering Stars, the whole state is not paying for Sound Transit, only Snohomish/Pierce/King Counties. Other counties also saw their car tabs reduced, but whatever more they were paying above $30 was not funding Sound Transit, it was for local transportation projects (potholes in Spokane or whatever).

2033? Seriously, and Contant-lying expects them to pay taxes?

@22 is correct. My car is registered outside of the three Sound Transit counties. My savings on car tabs with the passage of 1-976 won't be enough money to buy a dinner for two at the local cheap eats Asian buffet. It will be a pittance.

If you can't afford your car tabs, quit being a whiny snowflake and take some personal responsibility for your situation. Get a cheaper car, stop driving, move away, learn some new skills, get a better job, learn to code, clean your room, something about bootstraps, etc etc

I can afford all of my taxes, so what's your problem? Must be a moral failing.

We couldn't afford to buy even the lowliest shack in Seattle and we'd been living there since 2001. We wanted to stay in King, but home prices forced us to become Everett residents last year. While I'm learning to accept, and dare I say, sort of like the grittiness of my new city, elections seriously piss me off. The number of gas-sucking brand new trucks (that I guarantee aren't going to a construction job or the farm) that drive around Snohomish county is insane. And more proof that most of the residents and in particular those drivers were probably more than happy to screw the rest of us over with the $30 tab. Everett residents bitch about car tabs constantly. I'm trying to give these people the benefit since most are my neighbors, but really? Just because you made a bad decision to buy a penis extension doesn't mean the rest of us who still need to drive to Seattle have to suffer. Please liberals, if you can find work up here PLEASE move to Everett and fill up this city with more personality and better decision making.

Someone sounds bitter they lost.

Probably the same poor lady we witnessed on video crying hysterically the day after Trump was elected.

Need a shoulder to cry on?

@18 Doofus in Shoreline: Seriously. Stop before your MAGA mush brain leaves a puddle in the hall.