From the piece:

[O]nly one metropolitan area has a regionally elected governing body: the Metro Council of Portland, Oregon, created in the 1980s. No other region has followed suit.

Nice. Of course these authors reference how transit is governed around Portland. They do regional transit right. Moreover, it's no mystery why the authors pointedly disregard the regional transit authority in our neck of the woods.

Sound Transit has by far the largest spending and taxing program for rail of any regional entity in the country. Why does this piece ignore it? The authors hint at it: "A sense of shared identity, whether occurring formally or organically, does not guarantee good planning results . . .."

Sound Transit is our Grand Experiment in governance. It is an appointive-board controlled local government with unlimited powers in the areas of taxing, long-term bond selling, capital project spending, and rail line siting. It is an abysmal failure in every respect. Nobody around here even tries to compare it favorably to any peer in terms that matter (e.g., tax impacts on the local people, capital spending plans, ridership, taking cars off the road, fostering TOD, adding wealth to the region, etc.).

The far better model is TriMet in and around Portland. It was up and running for a decade before Sound Transit, and doing a great job of providing bus and train service. It never has imposed direct regressive taxes targeting people. The very modest levels of additional taxing it does engage in are imposed on businesses (the primary beneficiaries of transit), in a progressive manner.

Nobody has copied the Sound Transit governance and financing model. The political heads around here went with it though because "the smartest guys in the room" in the early 1990's pushed for it. They were the local "muni bond" industry (lawyers and financiers) who wanted Sound Transit structured in a particular way so they and Goldman Sachs could get rich for decades by sucking vast sums of regressive tax revenue out of the bank accounts of families and individuals around here. It's an abusive financing model.

The abysmally poor performance by Sound Transit on all the relevant metrics relating to tax costs, capital spending plans, ridership, etc. is the result of how it was structured. It was meant to exist as a tax-collecting, bond-selling unaccountable government, not as an efficient, accountable, transit services provider.

I have to agree with Robert and Christina's last sentence, along with Crossrips analysis of our own efforts in the region.
Sound Transit and WSDOT have been shackled by big money interests to the detriment of fast, frequent and EFFICIENT rail travel for the last 20 years.
As long as BNSF holds all the cards for rail ROW, they can charge whatever the market will bear. In the case of WSDOT, that's about a half billion in ARRA stimulus money for new tracks between SEA-PDX to support several more trains per day.
Sound Transit got an even worse deal, paying 1/4 bil to BNSF for track rights from EVT-SEA for 4 round trips. Counting interest and it makes a $10 bus trip cost the taxpayers over $100 for daily RT on Sounder.
Big money has a strangle hold on local light rail projects too. This region is fast sliding down an abyss of debt to build light rail out to the suburbs - mostly because tunneling cost are many times more expensive than surface or even elevated lines. Out of sight, out of mind, no nimbies in between, and everyone is happy. Ask Sound Transit how much our region will have paid for this 'starter system' by 2053, when all the bonds have been retired? It'll make you, your kids, and their unborn kids cry!
I'm really an avid rail supporter at heart. Being forever tied to big business is a recipe for modest improvements in service, and extremely high operating costs forever.
WSDOT should be looking at ROW opportunities of their own between PDX-SEA to replace ever increasing airline traffic between the two city pairs. (they exist if you look) That's where High Speed Rail can shine, if allowed to grow.
Sound Transit should be providing economical transit solutions, allowing their tax revenue to support more trips, not just a few more at double the current cost. Just look at the cost of light rail to the airport. The trip takes 20% longer on average, has a worse on-time record than the 194 bus it replaced, and is twice as expensive per rider. You be the judge.

All this talk of "high speed" rail strikes me as trying to not just run, but fly before we have even learned to walk. (or re-learned...) We need just regular old "rail" transportation, not this dream of super fast trains that would consume vastly more energy than "regular" rail.

Regular rail, if it has a decent right of way, just keeps on moving, and it gets there. "Really?" is right on about rights of way. Unless we carve out new ones, we will be forever captive to the private RR's. Maybe we will just have to wait until moving people starts looking attractive to the private companies again. With a declining dollar guaranteed to eventually push fuel prices in the U.S. into the stratosphere, there will again be profits in moving people once air travel gets really costly.

@Snoqualman makes a good point—if a passenger train could run reliably, consistently, 90 mph nonstop between Seattle and Portland the trip would take a little over an hour and a half, i.e., commuting distance. About an hour, Seattle to Bellingham, and I'm going to guess about the same, Eugene to Portland. In each case, this could be accomplished with rolling stock already in possession of Amtrak, or whomever.

But as @Snoqualman also observes, such service ain't gonna happen until someone figures out how to make money carrying passengers. In the meantime, a personal vehicle will still be the most convenient, fastest and least expensive way to get anywhere on the I-5 corridor...

I find no end to the frustration that results from the short-sightedness that prevents counties and municipalities from engaging in any reasonable collaboration. The Nashville-Davidson County Metro Council, for instance, considers it a big victory to poach business from counties next door. They were willing to offer a major tax incentive to induce LifePoint, a health care provider, to move offices from Williamson County to Davidson County; the press was not polite enough to refrain from pointing out that the move was a mere four miles--practically walking distance.

Counties may be efficient administrative subunits of a state for purposes of jails and courthouses, but they are no longer logical as economic units. Local governments continue to expand their role in economic development. One of the more obvious, yet still evidently too difficult, ways forward for regional thinking would be for the local governments that comprise a metropolitan / megapolitan area to coordinate incentive policies. Nations are evidently able to do this, albeit imperfectly, through mechanisms such as the WTO, and so cities ought to be able to as well.

crossrip. You're contradicting yourself. You quote this passage from the article:

[O]nly one metropolitan area has a regionally elected governing body: the Metro Council of Portland, Oregon, created in the 1980s. No other region has followed suit.

Then you go on to say, "Sound Transit is our Grand Experiment in governance."

Well, if Portland has the only elected board, then it would be defined as the exception. The fact is, Sound Transit's method of governance is not really that exceptional when it comes to transit boards.

Comparing Portland to Seattle is really not meaningful either. The Portland Metro area is much smaller, both in terms of population and area. Their Metro district is also within 1 county not 3 as with Sound Transit. They also don't have the bodies of water to contend with either.

You seem to think that a directly elected model would solve all of the problems. Yet the Seattle School Board is directly elected and it's viewed as ineffective. It's been suggested that the way to fix it is by having the Mayor appoint school board members.

There is no magic bullet for transportation governance. One of the biggest problems that Seattle has is that everyone seems to be an expert, which explains the amateur suggestions of replacing light rail with buses, monorails or PRT systems.

It is clearly more cost effective to move freight over rail than passengers or else you'd see BNSF back in the passenger game. But the fact is that passenger rail requires tax subsidies to work. There are no subsidies for freight trains these days, and the few remaining freight rail carriers are actually doing pretty well.

Hence the issue with passenger rail (and also with regional commuter buses). Who pays for it? The federal government already subsidizes it heavily. Local taxing districts subsidize it heavily. Passengers pay a small percentage of the actual cost of operating the systems. What kind of regional taxation district would need to be created for a Seattle - Portland high speed rail network? Is it worth it to the residents of Seattle and Portland to subsidize such a network that would truly only benefit a few people? How much would you have to subsidize it to bring the costs to a point that people could ride it frequently? Does everyone along the line pay for it? Just those areas where there are stops?

I think that you can see Seattle and Portland as encompassing a regional identity, but that is a big leap from saying that identity means that they should have a shared regional governance and taxation system.

Richard Borkowski misrepresents what I’ve written, makes unsupportable assertions of fact, misstates facts, and fails to address the main point of my posting above.

-- He first tries to twist what I wrote into a “contradiction”. The Portland Council of Governments IS a unique regional governance model (as the authors assert). Moreover, Sound Transit IS a unique regional government – it IS our Grand Experiment in local government. We’ve had nothing like it in our state, and contrary to what Borkowski suggests no other metro population is subject to a local government structured pursuant to state and local legislation of the kind that authorizes Sound Transit (e.g., RCW 81.104 and RCW 81.112, and the ST2 ordinance). But hey, maybe Borkowski wants to prove me wrong. Richard – try supporting this statement you made:

The fact is, Sound Transit's method of governance is not really that exceptional when it comes to transit boards.

-- Here Borkowski is just wrong:

The Portland Metro area is much smaller, both in terms of population and area. Their Metro district is also within 1 county not 3 as with Sound Transit. They also don't have the bodies of water to contend with either.

TriMet serves a three county region. The population of those three counties is less than the RTA area, but TriMet’s coverage is greater (Sound Transit has many fewer bus stops and rail stations) and it serves many more people on a daily basis than does Sound Transit. Those three counties in northern Oregon have big rivers all around and through them. Here’s my source for those facts:

http://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/factsheet.pdf

-- Here Borkowski misrepresents what I’ve written:

You seem to think that a directly elected model would solve all of the problems.

I’ve never taken that position. TriMet’s board is all-appointive, and it does a great job of providing bus and train service at no direct tax cost to the people of that region. Sound Transit’s problems stem from its abusive financing plan. That core problem is exacerbated by its unaccountable governance structure.

I stand by what I posted yesterday in this thread. Note how Borkowski failed to address those key points. Sound Transit has unlimited powers in the areas of taxing, long-term bond selling, capital project spending, and rail line siting. It is an abysmal failure in every respect. Nobody, including Borkowski, can compare it favorably to any peer in terms that matter (e.g., tax impacts on the local people, capital spending plans, ridership, taking cars off the road, adding wealth to the region, etc.).

Once again, Crosscut awards an Editor's Pick for nonsense. As a Portlander nearing my 20th year as advocate for light rail & transit oriented development (TOD), I'm satisfied with the progress nationally, but extremely disappointed with Seattle and Washington State. Link, SLUT & Sounder are the nation's WORST new rail projects in ridership predictions and accidents. Link & SLUT expansion plans are highly questionable.

As for regional planning, the authors must not understand New Urbanism's basic principles regarding the means by which effective transit and TOD can reduce the need for long-distance travel and transport. Evidently, their solution to travel woes is to travel further faster. I suspect these authors answer ONLY to travel-dependent business interests who profit by keeping the public racing across the county, state and nation like chickens with their heads cut off.

Oregonians predict the DBT and Mercer West projects will fail catastrophically with a predictable death toll in the many hundreds to many thousands. Washington State's transportation planners are malevolent crooks employing clueless sychophants.

Wells. None of what I say is nonsense. For whatever reason, some people have developed a hatred of Sound Transit like some people hate President Obama. All I can say I used to work with Sound Transit staff and board members when I was President of a transit coalition back in the 90s. It's an unwieldy, bureaucratic organization which is hardly a surprise. But the reason it's hard to make decisions there is that they have members on the board with divergent points a view about almost everything. For instance the Mayors of Seattle obviously favor TOD. Not so for the Snohomish County Executive, who also has a seat on the Sound Transit board. To the casual observer, it seems like something sinister is going on. For those of us who bothered to attend Board meetings, I saw board members who struggled to make good decisions. Keep in mind that all of these board members are elected officials that serve in other capacities, whether it be mayor, councilmember or county executive.

Another problem with critics including yourself is that you think you have all the facts and everyone else is wrong. Link is a project of Sound Transit. Sounder is a project of ST and BNSF and Amtrak. SLUT, however was a project of Seattle, championed by the Mayor's office. So if you're going to be critical, at least criticize the proper agencies.

Nonsense, Mr Borkowski. Portland and Seattle are comparable despite your lazy excuses why Seattle transportation systems are a dismal failure while nary 150 miles away Portland exceeds national standards. Crossrip is correct: Portland's regional governance agency Metro jurisdiction covers 3 counties - Multnomah, Clackamas & Washington - whose population is roughly 1.5 million; fewer than the Seattle region of roughly 2.5 million, but still comparable.

I hate Seattle transportation planners because their incompetence is outrageous and because sychophant chair warmers like you sit back and casually watch the sh*t hit the fan. Mr Borokowski, you are a prime example of how education is overrated. Your diploma, if you have one, is a piece of paper signifying nothing more than an ability to blame others for your own miserable failure.

Wells. For whatever reason, critics of transportation seem to be eternally angry. Your comment is a perfect example. Rather than engage in conversation, you personally attack me and my education despite having no idea who I am and having never met me. I don't really care personally. I'm used to it. So many angry people in the Northwest.

Seattle is not Portland in many ways. Back in the 60s when Seattle had the chance to have a 1st class subway system, the opponents of the day stepped forward and said the same thing they do today, "Let's do buses instead." So while Portland built a light rail system, Seattle built a bus tunnel.

There are lots of other differences as well. It's more than just the numerical comparison of how many people there are or how many counties they cover. If memory serves me correctly, the Metro Board in Portland is also an MPO, Metropolitan Planning Organization. In Puget Sound there is the Puget Sound Regional Council, which is another level of bureaucracy that transportation planning goes through.

I'm not defending the stupidity of the Seattle transportation planning Wells. Hardly. The viaduct and 520 plans are going to be financial black holes. But WS-DOT is and always will be a highway agency. They want highways, highways and more highways.

Borkowski was a blind cheerleader to get ST trains near his house on MLK, would cite the rubbish numbers being fed him as gospel and is still in denial.
Look at your dismal ridership numbers compared to all the 'extremely conservative estimates' you touted in the 90's.
It came in way over budget, overtime, and cost twice per rider for the service it replaced to the airport - a simple bus that beat it timewise and cost effectiveness.
The only thing you can claim is a big fat subsidized ride to Seattle or the Airport from your house in your own personal train.
Now fess up, I know you want to.

Really really? I've never lived on MLK. I've been accused of lots of things, including the media accusing me of being paid by Sound Transit. I guess it's impossible to support transit in Seattle unless you're being paid by the agencies. I guess it's so obvious, at least to the Seattle press. But I've never been accused of having a house on MLK. Where is this mythical house?

The nutty thing about this accusation is that the original plan was to have light rail run along International Boulevard, NOT MLK. But the highway oriented people down in Tukwilla said "OMG, we need more room for cars." Cars, cars, cars!! So Sound Transit was forced to choose another route. That's the dual travesty of your comment. MLK was never a preferred route of the agency. They were forced into it. You could have at least accused me of buying a house along International Boulevard.

crossrip. You say, "That core problem is exacerbated by its unaccountable governance structure."

Typically that means people are unhappy with the Federated board structure of Sound Transit and they want direct elections.

You seem to think this is somehow unique. It's not. The MPO for Puget Sound, the Puget Sound Regional Council is of a similar structure.

http://psrc.org/about/

In fact some of the same board members on the PSRC sit on the Sound Transit Board, in addition to being elected as either a mayor or council member of their respective jurisdictions.

Here's a note about the ST board...
http://www.soundtransit.org/About-Sound-Transit.xml

Sound Transit is governed by an 18-member Board of Directors who are mostly local mayors and city and county council members. Board meetings are open to the public. Joni Earl is our CEO.

Here's a note about the NYC MTA board...

http://mta.info/mta/leadership/

The MTA is governed by a 17-member Board. Members are nominated by the Governor, with four recommended by New York City's mayor and one each by the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam counties (the members representing the latter four cast one collective vote).

If you want to compare apples to apples, you should be comparing the Puget Sound Regional Council to the Metro Council of Portland. They are both MPOs. Sound Transit is not. The MPOs serve as the exchange agency for federal dollars, among lots of other things. Only projects approved by the MPOs are eligible to even be considered for federal money.

I didn't mean to imply you live on MLK, only the routing was on it. As I recall you live a block or two from it towards Rainier, so that's splitting hairs.
As for Tukwila, they objected to Intn'l Blvd from south of Boeing Field to the top of the hill along Hwy99, which has zero to do with surface running down MLK. That was the Ron Sims/et al, ST, TOD route with you trying to counter every media article that raised doubts over it.
You won. Enjoy the victory. The rest of us won't see any benefits from ST for decades, if ever, yet every family will shell out $15,000 for something that benefits a tiny (5% of all trips in the region) fraction of the population.
Please justify $100/day subsidies per rider on N-Sounder Trains. Why is light rail to the airport twice as expensive as the 194 bus it replaced?
Answer those and I'll shut up.

Really. It's not my job to justify the subsidies for transit, highways, airports or anything else. I don't believe in parking meter politics like you do. The subsidy for transit is far less than what it is for gasoline. Why no complaints about that?

Richard:

Why do you refer to Sound Transit’s governing board as a “federated” board? Nobody refers to it that way -- that's not what it is.

Sound Transit has an appointive board.

There are two types of boards local governments can have: representative (such as King County’s council, or Seattle’s city council), and appointive. Pursuant to a state statute 15 of the 18 seats on Sound Transit’s board are controlled by political appointees, so it has an appointive board. “Appointive vs. representative” is the way the US Supreme Court differentiates local governments, and that is the distinction relevant to the issues I’m addressing.

The structure of the PSRC is irrelevant. It is just an MPO; it is not a local government like Sound Transit. It has no powers to tax, to sell bonds, to site rail lines, etc. It’s primary function is just to apply for and allocate federal grant money.

Similarly, the MTA is not an autonomous local government like Sound Transit. For example, it depends on subsidies from transit taxes that the state levies (primarily a payroll tax). The state legislators in Albany control the amounts of those transit taxes, how much tax revenue goes to the MTA, etc. In contrast to the governance structure in New York State (where Albany decides the tax rates and amounts), here the appointees controlling Sound Transit select the rates and the amounts of the taxing.

You understand that distinction, right Richard? In contrast to how it’s done in New York (e.g., the nature and amounts of taxing are established at the state level), the unaccountable appointees controlling Sound Transit’s board have the unfettered discretion to decide how much taxing to do, which of several types of taxes to impose, how long those taxes are to be imposed (via the terms of their bond sales contracts), how large the capital projects are to be, etc.

Do you have any idea about how much tax Sound Transit would need to confiscate just to secure the mountain of bonds it wants to sell? My estimate is $85 billion. What’s yours?

crossrip. We're going to just have to disagree. Sound Transit is not a 'local government'. That's ridiculous. It's a tri-county agency. Thus the name, Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority.

You're being totally deceptive when you say the board has 'unfettered discretion to decide how much taxing to do'.

The thing is, it's entirely fettered by the voters, in the tri-county district, who have over and over, approved these taxes. I'd hardly call that autonomous or unaccountable. If you want to call the voters stupid, that's your choice. But it's the voters who have approved all of these transit taxes. Again, and again and again.

Contrast this to the NY MTA, which raises fares, tolls and taxes with no votes from the public at all.

Hi Richard,
An entity which can tax, and plan, and spend is a "local government" Just because they can't write laws and jail people doesn't exempt them from the term.

Crossrip's complaint when you get to the core of what he says is that ST, borrowed all the money they needed up front via municipal bonds. That the sellers of those bonds made a heap of money from us. That the interest rate on the bonds makes the project more expensive.

Crossrip's solution is to do "pay as you" and borrow less. In the long run you can build more because you aren't paying as much for the money you are spending. And he's cited numerous other agencies that in fact did just that. Minneapolis, Portland, Denver etc.

I have yet to see anyone claim that the only way to pay for our current system was to go into so much debt.

Here are a couple of thoughts on Borkowski's posts in this thread.

1) Note how he refused to address the question I put to him about the amount of taxing the political appointees controlling Sound Transit's board would impose if they decide to sell all the additional $7 billion in long-term bonds the (growing) ST2 financing plan would entail.

2) Borkowski's protestations notwithstanding, Sound Transit is in every respect a local government. The _Cunningham_ opinion from Judge Dwyer in 1990 which held old-Metro unconstitutional provides the applicable analytic structure.

3) Borkowski's ridiculous attempt to equate the very limited responsibilities of the PSRC, and the essentially-administrative role the MTA board plays, to the unchecked governmental powers wielded by the appointees controlling Sound Transit is in one of his posts above. Here is a partial list of the governmental powers the appointees controlling Sound Transit's board were delegated by the state legislature:

- the power to decide how many tens of billions of dollars of regressive tax to impose,

- the power to decide which types of taxes to impose,

- the power to decide how many decades to impose new local taxes (done via bond sale contracts resolutions),

- the power to incur unlimited billions of dollars of debt, secured by scores of billions of dollars of intergenerational tax confiscations,

- the power to use eminent domain powers to take thousands of private properties (including partial interests in private properties),

- the power to disregard all county and municipal land use regulations when the board sets train line locations and station sites,

- the power to establish and maintain an autonomous police force of statutory law enforcement officers (to the same extent as the governing bodies of cities of the first class in this state),

- the power to set fares to impose on the public,

- the powers to set and impose fines on people that courts will enforce,

- the power to set unlimited spending budgets on dozens of capital projects (including projects with multi-billion dollar budgets),

- the power to create and fund massive reserve accounts of unlimited size that to fill with public money, including tax revenues (currently Sound Transit holds over $1 billion in investments), and

- the power to unilaterally decide the locations for new train rights-of-way, tunnels, and stations.

That is FAR too much authority for an appointive board to possess. Anyone want to argue Borkowski's side of this debate, that, say, the PSRC possesses policy-setting powers comparable to those? Hey Richard . . . provide a citation to any NY state statutes authorizing the MTA to set policies such as the above relating to taxing, bond-selling, and pledging taxes at maximum rates during periods any bonds remain outstanding. You knew the MTA wasn't any kind of comparable, didn't you Richard?

4) Sound Transit is an abysmal failure in every respect. Nobody, including Borkowski, can compare it favorably to any peer in terms that matter (e.g., tax impacts on the local people, capital spending plans, ridership, taking cars off the road, adding wealth to the region, etc.). Because of the abusive financing plan Sound Transit employs -- alone among its peers -- it will become an increasingly oppressive force on the people around here and the local economy.

Mr Borkowski. Reducing my extensive and varied comments to name calling is how the lazy or guilty person avoids addressing charges of incompetence and other concerns. The public is entitled to be angry when predictions and expectations are suspiciously not met.

My concern with Seattle transit plans has more to do with basic engineering than financing. Tukwila City Council strongly supported the inclusion of Southcenter along the Link route, but were overruled. Sound Transit boasted that bypassing Southcenter would save a whopping 3 minutes travel time from Seatac to downtown. More likely the bypass was a political maneuver to deliver air travellers to downtown Seattle accommodations 'exclusively' despite predictions of a ridership shortfall around 10,000 rides daily. I support a spur line through Southcenter and ultimately Renton to the Lake Washington RR line connection. Sound Transit is mute on this spur proposal, just as they are mutely indifferent to the useless S.200th parking garage terminus.

It seems to me that Sound Transit, Metro and other agencies conspire with local business interests to undermine transit so that it will never be competitive with the automobile. Infernally corrupt Washington state highway department conservatives have decided to punish liberal Seattle with a bored tunnel that will destroy downtown while over-educuated idiots ignore the danger and make excuses. Related surface street reconfigurations are as horrendous but your allegiance is to the wrong side of this mortal battle.

crossrip. I've given up on participating in politics other than just observing. The entire country seems focused on all the wrong things. It's always struck as somewhat bizarre that people like you are so concerned with the money that ST and other transit agencies spend while there is no outrage whatsoever with the tens of billions of dollars spent on war profiteering in the Middle East.

http://costofwar.com/en/state/WA/
$27 BILLION since 2001. With that money they could have paid for EVERY conceivable transportation project on everyone's wish list. What do we get for it instead? We get thousands of soldiers with PTSD. So forgive me for not getting too hyped up about Sound Transit's governance structure. I've heard the elected vs. appointed argument many times over.

In the end, all the powers you list that Sound Transit shouldn't have seem like an indictment of the state legislature, who created the enabling legislation.

Wells. I can't remember exactly the arguments about Southcenter. I know the shopping center had concerns about light rail commuters filling up the parking lots and crowding out shoppers. With Southcenter being such a car-centered hub, surrounded by I-5 and I-405, it's a really pedestrian unfriendly environment.

With that being said, our transit group, people for modern transit, lobbied for ST to include a stub switch in the tracks so they could extend the line through Southcenter and up the East side at some future point in time. So we share some of the engineering shortcomings of Sound Transit.

Sound Transit's hopes revived; Tukwila's approval 'not required'
Saturday, June 29, 2002
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20020629&slug;=tukwila29m

To go back to the article itself ... there were a few things that struck me.

First, the challenges with building rail between cities varies widely. For example, going to Vancouver BC with high speed rail would either mean some very challenging work along Puget Sound, or would mean some very challenging tunnel work to get out of downtown Seattle at some point to a different route headed north (maybe next to I5). If these writers want to be taken seriously, they should set up some comparisons along the lines of "it is a myth to think building high speed rail in Europe is easy because the terrain they have to deal with is simple. In reality ... (then fill in the places where high speed rail has been built that is equivalent to what we face in building alongside sliding bluffs, or in building a bridge that can go over rivers at height of whatever is needed to preserve a navigable waterway, as is the challenge going over the Columbia River to Portland. Please don't cite the Alps: drilling through them has got to be a piece of cake compared to tunneling through glacial till).

Second, they should not completely ignore the fiscal realities states are facing. What would the writers say to Florida with the proposed project going between Orlando and Miami? Or how about the California project that is now presenting very different numbers to the public then the numbers that were presented at the time of the election?

From Borokowski's article "Tukwila approval not required" June 2002:

"Tukwila city officials opposed the first proposed route down Highway 99, (not Interurban Ave) pushing instead for a route serving (Southcenter), the city's commercial hub. Sound Transit said it was too expensive. Last year ST adopted a compromise "Tukwila Freeway Route" west of I-5 and north of Highway 518. Tukwila Mayor Steve Mullet, city staffers and Sound Transit officials negotiated a "memorandum of agreement" on that route which called for expedited city processing of light-rail permit applications. When the council rejected the deal by a 5-2 vote, both Mullet and Sound Transit said they had been blindsided. Council members said they still wanted light rail to go Southcenter."

Richard, Southcenter is prime redevelopment property, especially with light rail. You may say it is currently unfriendly to pedestrians, but you may not honestly ignore its redevelopment potential nor its existing transit demand. Sound Transit purposefully misled the public about the cost of the Southcenter route. The higher cost was justified to serve the existing demand and potential growth of ridership. Sound Transit lied.

"Richard Borkowski, president of the pro-rail group People for Modern Transit, urged the agency to build a stub off the Tukwila Freeway Route as a first step toward extending light rail to Southcenter later."

A spur would be good, but the direct route would have more ridership and redevelopment potential. The Seattle REGION lost a valuable opportunity to guide growth with transit-oriented development of Southcenter all because Seattle hoteliers and retailers pulled Sound Transit strings for the bypass. Meanwhile, Sound Transit builds pedestrian unfriendly parking garages at most suburban Link LRT stations; a major failing that indicates Sound Transit does NOT intend to build an optimal light rail system nor apply TOD guidelines that will improve the entire transit system and help guide growth.

Wells. I don't disagree with your thoughts. I think a Southcenter stop would have been a good one. However, the cowboy Tukwila City Council decided to use their role to try to stop the entire light rail project. I know. I was at the very emotional and contentious meeting where the Discovery Institute people and the CETA light rail opponents were there, cheering on the city council to block light rail to Southcenter where they took the 5-2 vote.

So don't blame Sound Transit for the poor routing of light rail. It was the light rail opponents who foisted 'bus rapid transit' as their preferred alternative, who influenced this Tukwila vote. And despite what crossrip thinks, ST isn't some all powerful, invincible agency. They have to work with every jurisdiction and city council along the routes where they run trains. The Discovery Institute put forward 'bus rapid transit' as a public trick to fool a gullible public. It almost worked.

The current highway tunnel being built under Seattle is 100% from the Discovery Institute that was eventually adopted by Governor Gregoire. They held free wine and cheese seminars for years to market this idea under the radar of the public and the media. Obviously, they were effective.

The fact of the matter is, Seattle voters are not like Portland voters. Seattle is much more car-centric and less supportive than Portland when it comes to high capacity transit.

The deep bore tunnel, Richard, is an atrocity. It will immediately and forever destabilize the foundations of many historic and valuable buildings which will require their demolishment. In an earthquake, sudden collapse with horrendous death toll is entirely possible. Its related surface street reconfigurations are likewise atrocious and will make downtown traffic much worse all along Mercer, Denny Way, Alaskan Way, 1st Ave, etc. Please don't spout BS excuses for Seattle and the state of Washington's notoriously inferior, malevolently corrupt transportation planning agencies. Obviously, Seattle needs better downtown transit arrangements much more than Portland. Metro & Sound Transit have done their worst while you sit back and make excuses for those ingratiating sons of bitches you sat beside on some goddamn committee.

I have to question this sentence above which seems to be a justification for many other assertions:

"The fact of the matter is, Seattle voters are not like Portland voters. Seattle is much more car-centric and less supportive than Portland when it comes to high capacity transit. "

The first question is whether "Seattle" and "Portland" means only inside the city limits, the city plus nearby residents (so Bellevue, Burien, Shoreline, Kirkland and nearby areas), or refers to the Sound Transit taxing district of King, Snohomish and Pierce. Definitely in the latter counties there have been some big drops in bus service and taxes to restore the cuts have not been reinstated.

The second question though is how "high capacity transit" is defined. If it is rail only, then it is worth asking whether that's the only metric that counts, or should the metric used to praise one region and critique another be overall support for all modes of transit?

Then a third question is how "support" is measured. Is it through ridership, through taxes paid or some other means?

I don't see Portlanders paying for bus service every time they buy something. There have been failed votes in Portland for transit increases. And ridership figures as a percentage of commuters to work are much lower in Portland, just 12%, compared to 21%, according to this Sightline blog post from Feb.

http://daily.sightline.org/2012/02/28/commuting-in-seattle-and-portland/

The blog post notes the importance of land use and planning. What is striking in Portland is how the high cost of housing has led to a lot more people moving to Clark County, where they have lower costs of housing. One wonders whether "Portland" includes Clark County.

When the closing support line has so many holes in it, it is a lot harder to take the rest of the comment at face value.

sjenner. Seattle is less supportive of transit in many ways. While some core neighborhoods in Seattle are very walker friendly and have lower car ownership rates, most of the region is not that way. The Seattle-Everett-Tacoma area is very sprawly. But even in the closer in neighborhoods like Ballard or West Seattle, not having a car is a challenge and people who live there know it. The residents of West Seattle were strongly against the surface option for the viaduct plan. They mostly drive to downtown Seattle.

Add to that the Seattle Times which has always been against transit and they editorialize against light rail whenever they can. So the voters of the region are given a constant diet of anti-transit reading.

Add to that the elected officials, WS-DOT, SDOT and think tanks and columnists piling on the anti-transit bandwagon. That's just my opinion but I've got 1st hand experience with all of it. It makes it very difficult to get anything done with so much misinformation being produced. So when I say support, I mean people and organizations who speak positively about transit, which naturally affects the population of voters in the region.

As far as high capacity transit, yes, I'm referring to rail. This isn't my definition. It's hard to describe buses as high capacity transit if that's what your implying.

As the authors of this article note, it's to the advantage of regions to cooperate in building transit ridership. I think in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor, there appears to be pretty good cooperation. The Amtrak Cascades service is evidence of this.

Wells. I don't disagree that the deep bore tunnel is going to be a huge mistake for all of the reasons you state. Earthquakes, building destabilization and cost. But if you talk to people from Ballard, who use the viaduct to get to the airport and I-5 they want highway space. People from West Seattle use it to get into downtown rather than getting stuck on I-5. So there is definitely political support for a highway replacement.

I always thought a surface option had potential BUT the railroad crossing on the lower west side by the sculpture park presents a huge problem. You can't have a high capacity surface route with a railroad crossing. You'd have to raise or lower either the road or the railway and the geometry makes either one nearly impossible. I don't think I've ever seen that problem solved.

"Why not Southcenter"

About two years ago it dawned on me why LINK skipped Southcenter. "Northgate & Downtown Seattle" and It's because Northgate mall is within the Seattle city limits, and Southcenter is in Tukwilla. Why does this matter? If you make it easy to get to a place to spend money, then the sales tax spent at that location goes to the municipality where the store is, not where the people come from. The beginning segment of LINK is 90% in Seattle, but they'd be riding it to the next town over and spending their money there.

Instead LINK goes easily to Westlake, the retail core of Seattle. Next it will go to Northgate. Once these shopping patterns are well established, then maybe, just maybe the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the Seattle merchants would think about running light rail to one of the other regional malls. But I doubt it.

The route to Southcenter was doomed because it's in the wrong city, that's all. All those other arguments are a smoke screen on the core argument about the money, who spends it and who gets it. There was no way that Seattle which basically controls the ST board was going to let that happen.

I can lend some credence to that reasoning, being a fly on the wall for some of the routing deliberations, and meeting with Mayor Rantz of Tukwila on several occasions during the ST's "Lets Trade" days.
Your observation why Link mysteriously misses all the other malls is spot on.

While the tunnel is an egregious, expensive wound to the city's mobility, it's the loss of the viaduct that represents the biggest step backwards for Seattle. No other proposed configuration for the AWV matches the existing viaduct in any transportation related category. The rights of ways already exist. The configuration already can handle 110,000 vehicles a day. It already provides a bypass for downtown and off ramps for the core, Ballard and West Seattle. It already meets the demands for commercial vehicles. It can incorporate modern seismic protections and other enhancements for noise abatement, bikes, pedestrians and aesthetics. It provides the only effective way to modulate traffic in the core. And it’s billions of dollars cheaper than this present tunnel/surface street mistake in the making. The tunnel/surface option is a terrible substitute for one of the most successful north/south arterials in the city. It will add to the tax bill of the over-taxed, and it will add to the congestion faced by regional commuters.

It acknowledges the fact that rubber-tired, multi-passenger vehicles are still the choice of over 90% of us. Unlike speculative videos and drawings of solutions with unfinished engineering details and unknown capacities, you can see a real working elevated model down on the waterfront right now doing its job every day. If an honest vote were ever held it would be a winner walking away.

Now if some responsible hedge fund citizen would just step up and pull some strings on behalf of the viaduct, we might all avoid this grinding, self inflicted gridlock and the laughter from cities around the world.

GaryP. Interesting perspective. That could certainly be part of the equation. There's never just 1 reason why these decisions are made. I think realistically, the number of people trekking down to SouthCenter to shop on a train would have been pretty small. A 30 minute ride and a $5.00 trip to get there is a pretty steep price to pay.

Having been involved back then, I know there were other factors as well. ST was under extreme cost scrutiny and the Southcenter leg would have cost more. The parking at Southcenter would have been used by the commuters, something the mall owners didn't want. The extra time of a few minutes was also a consideration since opponents continue to complain how slow the train is compared to the 194 bus to the airport, even though that bus was not immune from traffic backups in I-5, making it less reliable than a train ride.

More nonsense from Borkowski. Southcenter is not just a shopping mall. It is Tukwila's commercial core and major employment center with high potential for growth and TOD. The extra cost was justified by predictable Link ridership and development potential that the route offered.
Richard Borkowski: sellout. Whose side are you on? DINO Gregoire's?