Please refer to a map of Seattle/Bellevue in your handy Rand McNally. Upon leaving the downtown Bellevue tunnel the track will meander across I-405 somehow and follow a fun path through the Bell-Red area eventually to Redmond. Microsoft awaits. In about 2100 people will be able to ride a light rail all the way from Sea Tac International Airport to Redmond. How wonderful. We’ll have flying cars by then so the trains will be empty.
Here’s where we are today. Some important folks in Mercer Island and Bellevue have filed a suit to prevent the use of I-90 for light rail. The point they make is that we paid for the I-90 corridor with gas tax money and Washington State Law says you can’t use gas tax money for anything but roads.
The other side is interpreting the law to mean general transportation not specifically limited to rubber tire vehicles. This is being decided by the Washington State Supreme Court. Those guys. Anything that annoys the most people is pretty much what guides their decisions. The biggest trouble is figuring out what would annoy the most people in this case.
Lake Washington is a big gouge in the earth made during the last Ice Age. It’s very wide and very deep. We only have two bridge routes over the lake. Both are floating bridges because of the challenges. One is SR 520 and the other is I-90. The alternatives are going north or south around the lake. What a choice: you either face Bothell or Renton. Might as well stay home and telecommute.
It’s fairly certain we’ll have mandatory tolling on the SR 520 (Evergreen Point) Bridge very soon. We don’t know how many drivers will switch to I-90. Maybe lots. That means I-90 will get even more crowded. WashDOT says they expect drivers to sort out which route they can stand in a few weeks. If I-90 gets too bad they’ll try to figure out what to do next. Probably make people pay tolls on I-90 too. Again, might as well stay home.
Construction of a light rail will naturally take away at least one general purpose lane in addition to the express lanes on I-90. Construction crews need lots of room and they can’t share. So instead of five lanes into Seattle in the morning and five lanes out in the evening we’ll have two during construction. They promised us they would add a lane each way on the existing bridges. Budget cuts will prevent that as well.
Mercer Island is in the way. Once the glacier melted the original Americans found it hard to get across the lake so they began a project to dump lots of dirt and rocks so they could get over the lake without going via Renton or Bothell. It’s a landfill. Now people actually live there for reasons I have not yet determined. But I-90 uses it. Thus the light rail corridor would also use it.
The result of all this is nobody knows if we’ll get the tracks will get across the lake.
The other problem is Bellevue. There’s a heated debate over the route from I-90 into downtown. One plan has it run along, or possibly on, Bellevue Way. Currently that’s one of the main road connections from I-90 to downtown. Not during construction.
The other proposed route is to use the former railroad bed along I-405. In order to accommodate that route a brand new parking facility is proposed on the edge of I-90. There would be a station there. This route has been roundly criticized as going too far from where potential riders live. And that’s the point – the “potential riders” don’t want light rail anywhere near their homes. Thus they insist that the Bellevue Way proposal is bad.
Bellevue has a city council that makes decisions in the “best interests of its residents.” I have no idea if those decisions are based on logic or facts but at least they make decisions. So they decided to launch a three phase study on the route proposals to determine which one is. The first phase is costing $670,000 which is coming from the light rail budget. One has to assume that if the other two phases cost this much it will remove over $2 million from the budget. Light rail is already underfunded.
Oh yeah, that’s another issue: there’s not enough money to do this anyway. So what are we talking about here? There’s an underfunded plan to that’s in a political dispute, still being “studied,” and is challenged in the Supreme Court. Boy I’m looking forward to riding that sucker.
Meanwhile the Newcastle Library Branch is finally under construction. They’ve broken ground and are now actively digging a big hole in the ground. Trucks are running to Maple Valley and back with old dirt and new dirt. It’s a sight to see. I just hope the hole they are digging doesn’t run into the Brightwater Treatment Plant outfall tunnel. Nobody really knows where that thing runs.
Al
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