About as well as could be expected:

Delays add to transit price tag Sound Transit panel to study cost overruns in Auburn, Kent before signing off on millions of dollars

David Quigg; The News Tribune

Sound Transit's Auburn train station will exceed its budget by an estimated $3.2 million, the agency's finance committee learned Thursday.

Faced with that news, committee members balked at giving more money to the construction project, which is now expected to cost more than $17 million. Located in downtown Auburn, the station will feature covered platforms, a parking garage, a clock tower, retail space and a public plaza.

Members put off a vote on extra funding until their next meeting, during which they want a full briefing on the fiscal health of the project to build stations in Kent, Auburn, Puyallup and Sumner. All four cities will be stops on the planned Tacoma-to-Seattle commuter rail line known as Sounder.

"This is clearly not ready for action today," the committee's chairman, King County Councilman Greg Nickels (D-West Seattle) said of the request for a bigger budget. "The level of information is not nearly adequate for us to make a decision."

What information the committee members got did not reassure them. They learned, for example, that the Kent station is also headed over budget.

They also heard about further casualties of Sound Transit's protracted negotiations with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, which owns the tracks Sounder will ride. It was already well known that those talks - over how much Sound Transit should pay to share the tracks and how much the tracks should be improved to make the sharing safe - pushed back Sounder's start date.

-- Mark Stilson (mark842@hotmail.com), July 07, 2000

Answers

Gee, even tax-and-spend Democrats can do simple math.
Some of them, anyway.

Light rail sounds good, but is it worth the expense? 



 
A group called Citizens for Mobility is planning a lawsuit to block 
Seattle's light rail project. It is an "environmental" lawsuit, which 
is to say, it's about paperwork. It's a delaying tactic; the group's 
real hope is that citizens rise up and stop light rail before the 
tunneling machines start burrowing under Capitol Hill. 

That's unlikely. Trains appeal to something in the human psyche. To a 
non-rider, a bus is a ticket to an uncertain destination; a train is 
safely bound by steel rails. Seattle people love the train, and in 
1996 they voted for it. "It still polls well," says Kate Joncas, 
executive director of Downtown Seattle Association. "There appears to 
be no community will to reexamine it." 

Opponents raise several arguments. One is over the capacity of the 
downtown bus tunnel. Emory Bundy, the bicycle-and-bus riding 
spokesman of Citizens for Mobility, calculates that light rail will 
reduce the number of passenger seats in the tunnel by 25 percent. At 
five minutes between trains, which is what they plan, he is right. 

Paul Bay, Sound Transit's director of light rail, replies that trains 
have more room for people to stand. That's also true. Trains load 
faster than buses. Trains could conceivably run through the tunnel 
every two minutes, vastly beating the capacity of buses. But that is 
not in this plan, because one-third of the line is at grade, cutting 
across streets. Two-minute headways in the tunnel could be possible, 
if trains were mixed from Seattle and Bellevue. 

Still, Bay says trains will use the downtown tunnel much more 
efficiently than the buses they replace: "We will immediately double 
the (daily) usage of the tunnel, on day one." 

Opponents warn that rail boosters overstate their case. As an 
example, Sound Transit vice-chairman Greg Nickels wrote (Seattle 
Times, Feb. 11) that light rail is worth 12 freeway lanes. That's not 
even close. Sound Transit forecasts 105,000 boardings per day along 
its entire length. Interstate 5 carried about 365,000 people (281,500 
vehicles) per day last year, including buses, at one point: the Ship 
Canal Bridge. 

By that comparison, light rail works out to fewer than three freeway 
lanes. If one had the "boardings" all along I-5, light rail would 
look even smaller. Will light rail get those 105,000 riders--or the 
projected 125,000 if there is an extension to Northgate? Portland's 
MAX gets 61,500 riders. Portland's system is 57 percent longer than 
the planned 21-mile system here. But it is a smaller, slower train in 
a smaller city. 

The critics' strongest case is the money. Seattle's light rail will 
cost $100 million per mile. Daniel Malarkey of Amazon.com recalls the 
economic study he did half a decade ago on Seattle light rail for 
ECONorthwest, a consulting firm. "I'm a good tax-and-spend Democrat," 
he says. "I came to this issue thinking public transit is the right 
thing. Then you get into the numbers, and light rail isn't a very 
good deal." 

Take Sound Transit's forecast: 105,000 boardings, one-third of them 
lured from cars. If you just focus on the one-third, that's 35,000 
daily boardings, or 17,500 two-way riders. By that estimate, light 
rail costs $125,000 per new transit rider. 

That's a lot. But if you evaluated I-5 at today's dollars, replies 
Sound Transit's Bay, it would also be a lot. "This an investment to 
last a century," he says. 

Chuck Collins, former director of Metro Transit, warns to watch out 
for interested parties. "Steel wheels mean big capital dollars: lots 
of bond sales, lots of engineering work, lots of contractors," he 
says. But if you want people to ride transit, he says, it's far 
cheaper to reduce bus fares to zero. If you want to build stuff, 
build bus lanes. 

Collins opposes light rail. It sucks up too much money. It also gives 
people, and particularly politicians, the excuse that they're all 
done. 

That is the real problem of light rail. Will it work? Sure. Will it 
help solve the mobility problem? Some. Will it help enough? No. Not 
even close. It is for one corridor, 21 miles long. It will be the 
equivalent of two freeway lanes, maybe three. 

-- Mark Stilson (mark842@hotmail.com), August 03, 2000.

Oh, that was a Seattle Times editorial, by the way.

Seattle Times

Not looking goood, Patrick, when even your liberal friends are starting to have second thoughts.

Wonder where Patty boy is. Probably out looking for that "second pot of money" with the ADDITIONAL $500 million.

Wonder if he's checking both ends of every rainbow in the area, or beating the bushes trying to find a leprechaun from whom to steal to steal the "pot of money." Probably more likely than getting it from the feds at that.

-- (mark842@hotmail.com), August 03, 2000.