Today is a big day for Sound Tran­sit, the Region­al Tran­sit Author­i­ty that the Leg­is­la­ture estab­lished in the 1990s to strength­en mobil­i­ty in Cen­tral Puget Sound — the Seat­tle-Belle­vue-Taco­ma-Everett met­ro­pol­i­tan area. The Sound Tran­sit Board is expect­ed at an after­noon board meet­ing to make some impor­tant deci­sions about the place­ment of sta­tions and guide­way for future light rail exten­sions that vot­ers approved back in 2016 as part of Sound Tran­sit Phase III.

These Phase III exten­sion plans call for build­ing light rail lines out to Bal­lard and West Seat­tle, two pop­u­lous neigh­bor­hoods in the Emer­ald City that our tran­sit agen­cies cur­rent­ly only serve by bus or shuttle.

For those forth­com­ing lines to be able to fea­si­bly con­nect into the exist­ing net­work — which includes a rail spine run­ning from North­gate to Angle Lake in SeaT­ac but will even­tu­al­ly go both fur­ther north and south as well as east — Sound Tran­sit says a new tun­nel under­neath down­town will be required.

Fig­ur­ing out where to put that tun­nel and its asso­ci­at­ed sta­tions has been one of the most dif­fi­cult align­ment exer­cis­es in the agen­cy’s history.

The mat­ter is com­ing before the board at the afore­men­tioned meet­ing, but as our friends at The Urban­ist have writ­ten, Sound Tran­sit seems unpre­pared to make a final deci­sion about guide­way align­ment and sta­tion sit­ing at this time.

Sound Tran­sit staff and board ought to be aware that vot­ers in Seat­tle love the West Seat­tle and Bal­lard light rail exten­sions and are expect­ing Sound Tran­sit to design and con­struct these projects thought­ful­ly. These are poten­tial­ly hun­dred year deci­sions that will affect the rid­er­ship expe­ri­ence for a very long time.

The con­se­quences need to be giv­en care­ful consideration.

In our most recent poll of the City of Seat­tle, which field­ed only a cou­ple of months ago, like­ly spe­cial elec­tion vot­ers in the City of Seat­tle once again said that the West Seat­tle and Bal­lard light rail exten­sions were their favorite cur­rent or pro­posed pub­lic works projects in the city, out of more than half a dozen we asked them about. Sup­port for these projects is real­ly, real­ly high.

Take a look:

QUESTION: Do you sup­port or oppose the fol­low­ing pub­lic works projects in the Seat­tle area?

The map we showed vot­ers in our Jan­u­ary 2023 Seat­tle poll (North­west Pro­gres­sive Institute)

ANSWERS:

Project	Sup­port	Oppose	Not sure
Light rail to West Seat­tle and Bal­lard (in design)	81%	13%	6%
Pacif­ic North­west high speed rail (pro­posed)	77%	14%	9%
Water­front Seat­tle (under construction)	76%	18%	5%
State Route 520 recon­struc­tion (under construction)	67%	20%	13%
Yesler Ter­race rede­vel­op­ment (under construction)	59%	18%	23%
Cen­tral Seat­tle Inter­state 5 Lid (pro­posed)	57%	23%	20%
Uni­ver­si­ty Dis­trict Inter­state 5 Lid (pro­posed)	55%	26%	20%
Wash­ing­ton State Con­ven­tion Cen­ter expan­sion (under construction)	53%	35%	12%

Our sur­vey of 651 like­ly Feb­ru­ary 2023 spe­cial elec­tion vot­ers in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton was in the field from Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 26th, through Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 30th, 2023. All respon­dents par­tic­i­pat­ed online. The poll was con­duct­ed for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute by Change Research and has a mod­eled mar­gin of error of 4.2% at the 95% con­fi­dence interval.

81%… that’s more than eight in ten voters!

We are a long way from the debates of the 1990s and even the ear­ly 2000s, when it was­n’t uncom­mon to read let­ters to the edi­tor or hear pub­lic com­ment argu­ing that light rail was a bad invest­ment. We’ve decid­ed we’re build­ing it, and we’ve built quite a bit in twen­ty years (ground­break­ing on Cen­tral Link began in 2003).

But before the con­struc­tion on the ST3 projects can begin, these all impor­tant align­ment deci­sions have to be made. Where are the sta­tions and tracks going to go, espe­cial­ly in down­town, where we’ll see the most trans­fers between lines and modes? Ear­li­er in the design process, Sound Tran­sit was con­tem­plat­ing putting a tun­nel under­neath Fifth Avenue, but this option has basi­cal­ly been dropped fol­low­ing oppo­si­tion from the Chi­na­town / Inter­na­tion­al Dis­trict community.

Atten­tion has shift­ed to alter­na­tive ideas, most notably a tun­nel under Fourth Avenue, with a new sta­tion adja­cent to the exist­ing CID sta­tion, or a “north and south of CID” align­ment that would entail the elim­i­na­tion of the pro­posed Mid­town Sta­tion in favor of a sta­tion across from the King Coun­ty Cour­t­house in the Pio­neer Square area and yet anoth­er sta­tion in South Down­town (SoDo).

King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Dow Con­stan­tine, the Chair of the Sound Tran­sit Board, and Seat­tle May­or Bruce Har­rell recent­ly offered a pub­lic endorse­ment of the “north and south of CID” con­cept and say they can bring addi­tion­al mon­ey to the table to help build it, but they haven’t pre­sent­ed much in the way of specifics yet.

Urban­ists and tran­sit advo­cates have been offer­ing a very ener­getic crit­i­cal appraisal of the “north and south of CID” con­cept ever since that announcement.

The Urban­ist, The Stranger, and Pub­li­co­la have all writ­ten about the align­ment debate in detail and we rec­om­mend read­ing their cov­er­age. You’ll learn a lot.

What our research demon­strates is that these pub­lic works projects have more sup­port than pret­ty much any­thing else Seat­tle is build­ing or think­ing of build­ing right now. (It’s inter­est­ing that inter­ci­ty high speed rail placed sec­ond — Seat­tle is tru­ly hun­gry for bet­ter rail tran­sit of all kinds, which is heart­en­ing to see!)

There’s a lot of sup­port and good­will for Sound Tran­sit among the peo­ple of the Emer­ald City right now. It would be a mis­take to squan­der it — it took a long time to earn. Years of thought­ful lead­er­ship from Joni Earl has got­ten us to this point.

Self-imposed dead­lines on pub­lic works projects are not a bad thing — a project can’t get built if it stays in the design phase indef­i­nite­ly — but it’s also impor­tant to choose align­ments wise­ly, and make a deci­sion when the time is ripe.

If the prop­er ground­work has­n’t been laid, then today, March 23rd, isn’t the right time to decide where the sta­tions and tracks are going. 

If the Sound Tran­sit Board wants to pur­sue the “north and south of CID” con­cept — which NPI has a lot of ques­tions about — then it needs to prop­er­ly explore the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of that option and ensure that peo­ple have a chance to think about and react to the pro­posed devi­a­tions from the plan that vot­ers saw in 2016.

Vot­ers love these projects. They want Sound Tran­sit to get them right.

If the design phase must go on for longer to ensure that the best pos­si­ble long term deci­sion is made, then let the design phase continue.