Let's get real.

Most ST board members depend on campaign kickbacks from concrete and asphalt providers. They don't actually care about the fact that a minimal station with two basic elevators capable of handling wheelchairs and bikes and basic rain/shade covering are all they need.

It's the garages that they get the kickbacks from.

Keep pushing.

A transit system that prioritizes rider experience is better for everyone because it gives people alternatives to cars that they will actually use. I wish the board had a better understanding of this.

Self-inflicted delays are the name of the game!
Or as another local mag put it; 'consensus through exhaustion '.
I hope to live long enough to see a Ballard line, but no telling which decade that will happen in.

There were a great many of us who expressed concern about setting up an agency with zero accountability and giving them billions of dollars in tax money and we were told to shut up and stand aside by the urbanists. This is a program that openly admits they are overcharging taxpayers to fill their coffers, has had issues with toxic leadership and has repeatedly delayed projects and/or had to redo them further wasting taxpayer dollars. The irony of urbanists now complaining about this set up would be funny if it didn't have such large ramifications for the community.

“…reducing transit ridership and decimating system effectiveness by deleting some of the highest ridership stations: Chinatown International District, Midtown, and South Lake Union.”

Those stations have zero ridership now.

Seriously, both the redundant station at C/ID and the redundant station at Midtown won’t be missed anyway. The damage the redundant C/ID station would do to that jewel of a neighborhood is not worth the cost. The West Seattle station should go through a tunnel, like the Beacon Hill station. The downtown portion should go under Second Avenue, with each station connected via underground tunnels to the existing tunnel’s stations under Third Avenue.

Other than that, ST3 looks good. ;-)

Why are they so bad? Julie Timm, Russ Arnold, Brooke Belman, Mary Cummings - get your shit together and stop fcking over this city!

The title had me excited. We really should start over with ST3, because ST3 is crap. This is not just my opinion. There is a growing consensus on the issue over at the Seattle Transit Blog. Keep in mind, the blog articles are written by transit proponents; the people who comment are transit proponents; yet folks have come to the general consensus that ST3 is crap. We should start over.

I could cite many example, but consider just one: The second downtown tunnel. Why do we need a second tunnel? No reason, really. Someone just thought it made sense at the time. When questioned about it recently, Dow Constantine said the issue was settled. So we will have a second tunnel, with stations that (at best) will be just a little bit worse than the existing stations. They won't add coverage -- no one will bother to transfer to them. But if you are stuck on the existing line (from say, Rainier Valley) your downtown stations will be worse. Unlike today, you will be forced to transfer if you want to get to Capitol Hill or the UW. This is bad enough, but the connection between the old tunnel and new tunnel will be bad. So riders going from Rainier Valley to the UW will be asked to make a tedious, time consuming transfer. The same goes for those headed from Northgate, Roosevelt, UW or Capitol Hill to SeaTac.

In contrast, if they reused the tunnel, same-direction transfers would be trivial. You get off the train, then get back on a couple minutes later (at the exact same spot). Another alternative would be to merge the lines from the south and send them all to Capitol Hill and the UW, while making the Ballard Line independent, with smaller stations, and more frequent (automated) trains. That would enable a future expansion to First Hill (and Yesler Terrace, etc.).

These sorts of changes would be cheaper and much better than what they came up with. The original plans were not designed by transit experts. They were designed by politicians who know very little about transit (which is why they came up with the ridiculous idea of building a rapid transit line from Everett to Tacoma). Keep in mind, I'm not anti-politician; my mom was a politician. But the folks in charge simply don't know what they are doing, and haven't deferred to those that do. Hire an independent transit consulting firm and ask them what is the most cost effective way to improve transit in the region. I guarantee you we don't end up with the crap that is ST3.

I tend to agree with the three Seattle Subway guys about these station choices, although I don't have strong feelings about them. What I do have strong feelings about is any significant further delay or anything that smacks of having to go back to the drawing board. We're already six and a half years out from that 2016 vote, and the opening dates for the Ballard and West Seattle lines don't appear any closer.

My one great fear is that, the longer we dawdle, the greater the risk of ST3 being kneecapped or even killed off entirely. Already transit foes (and faux transit supporters) like Ross @10 are sounding the clarion cry to defy the will of the voters and abandon the generational opportunity to build a second downtown transit tunnel.

Of course, for folks like Ross (who bitterly opposed ST3), there's only one thing better than an ST3 with a capacity that's nowhere near the original planned capacity. What's that? No ST3 at all.

P.S. Unfortunately, my time is limited. I'll have to let that be my last word on this.

@11: “…abandon the generational opportunity to build a second downtown transit tunnel.”

You actually validate on of the major points made @10. What, exactly, is so great about the mere existence of a second downtown transit tunnel? As I wrote @6, a second downtown tunnel should be organically connected to the existing one, else what’s the point? As @10 implied, making someone from Ballard, headed for Sea-Tac, change stations by hauling luggage across downtown’s steep surface streets makes no sense at all; that traveler will choose car service from Ballard. A brief underground transfer can make all the difference toward keeping that traveler using transit.

@5: "There were a great many of us who expressed concern about setting up an agency with zero accountability and giving them billions of dollars in tax money and we were told to shut up and stand aside by the urbanists."

We could have been well on our way to a self contained, self supporting regional transit system if we would have stuck with the monorail. Instead, we got concensus through exhaustion, as @4 said. This state of affairs will continue until we restructure our regional political systems to make them more accountable to the public's wishes. Instead of re-voting on an issue until it comes out the way city hall wants.. The wisdom of the masses is a real thing, in spite of what the intellectual elites would like us to belive.

@10: "Why do we need a second tunnel?"

Anticipated traffic volume. The first tunnel won't be able to handle it all. The question is: Why does everything have to be done in the middle of downtown Seattle? If there's a need to transfer between systems, why not an (above ground) station somewhere in SoDo?

Answer: Because Downtown Seattle is The Center of the Universe. Anything that detracts from moving everyone through there will marginalize it as the True Destination of all travelers. And businesses might start focusing on the new station as a good place to be. And that, in the eyes of our city planners, would be apostasy.

@15: “If there's a need to transfer between systems,”

Tell everyone you know absolutely nothing about transit planning*, without explicitly stating you know absolutely nothing about transit planning*.

*And, therefore, urban planning as well.

@15: "Tell everyone you know absolutely nothing about transit planning"

And you do?

@14 @10

Also redundancy. Even if the single tunnel can handle all the current traffic by itself (it can't unless you believe Sound Transit can suddenly run a Japanese tier transit system) you are creating a giant single point of failure that can take down the whole system by itself. Why would you ever do that?

In an ideal world there would be a transfer station in the south (SODO) where you can switch between tunnels. Another in the north either a Ballard to UW line or just snake up 15th till you reach Northgate for the reverse.

The thing is if we don't build the 2nd tunnel now I can guarantee you Seattle 2100 will be complaining about those short sighted idiots who saddled them with a single failing tunnel. Just like how Seattle 2023 complains about how Seattle 1970 passed on Federal funding for a transit system. It took New York 100 years to finally add a 2nd Hudson river tunnel, a tunnel that has been desperately needed for decades. It just took the near total failure of the original tunnel for them to get right on it. Ten years after it flooded.

@17: "In an ideal world there would be a transfer station in the south (SODO) where you can switch between tunnels."

True. But the advantage of the SODO site is that the tracks are on the surface there. A simple covered platform with track on either side can be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of excavating a station site.