No Light Rail for 520 Bridge Replacement: Victory for common sense

Light rail cut from the plan for 520 Bridge
Focus is on 6-lane design over lake and bus rapid transit

By DEBERA CARLTON HARRELL AND LARRY LANGE
P-I REPORTERS

When Seattle Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis told a group grappling with the Evergreen Point Bridge design not to count on light rail, jaws dropped.

"Don't get your hopes up on light rail across 520, folks," Ceis told the 34-member mediation group recently. "It's probably not going to happen."

You could hear the transit balloon pop. No light rail? In a hyper-congested yet critical corridor that links growing population and job centers? But Sound Transit told the group that for mostly technical reasons, the bridge section of state Route 520 is not a light rail candidate for the foreseeable future.

The revelation, while busting previous assumptions, has freed the mediation team to focus on neighborhood impacts and feasible six-lane designs, rather than on more controversial eight-lane versions for light rail.

The designs, which are being refined this week, call for pontoons strong enough for future light rail. But designs now focus on separate lanes or tunnels to allow hybrid buses to move more rapidly between Interstate 5 and Interstate 405.

"We won't see 520 light rail in our lifetime, but I don't think that's a bad thing," said Virginia Gunby, a mediation team member and former state transportation commissioner.

"You don't need light rail across 520 if you have dedicated lanes for bus rapid transit, in combination with light rail across I-90," Gunby said. "The ideal is to have both."

Rob Johnson, regional policy director for the nonprofit Transportation Choices and a mediation team member, said that while "the environmental community feels really strongly about high capacity across the 520 Bridge ... it doesn't necessarily have to be light rail. ... 520 works pretty well with a bus configuration."

The decision to focus on bus rapid transit on 520 has led to a new buzz for bus rapid transit in the Interstate 90 corridor, particularly as a short-term substitute for more-expensive light rail.

Sound Transit, the agency that has worked for years developing light rail in a north-south corridor, last week delayed until April 10 a board vote on a revised transportation package to possibly be sent to voters this fall. The board is mulling its response to the November defeat of a comprehensive roads and transit package. The measure included funding for light rail across I-90 and an "Eastlink" at least to growing Bellevue, one of the region's biggest employers.

"The decision has been made on 520: four general-purpose lanes and two high-occupancy vehicle lanes (each way), and it's going to have bus rapid transit, not light rail," said King County Executive Ron Sims.

"So now the decision is, how are you going to relieve congestion and get across the lake in the I-90 corridor?" Sims said. "That is a question that the region will have to decide."

Rep. Fred Jarrett, D-Mercer Island, who like Gunby has been involved with regional transportation planning for more than 30 years, said bus rapid transit is the way to go until transit markets, and voters' willingness to tax themselves, are more clear.

"If you build light rail across I-90, it will be 2012, optimistically, before the first part of the line is open from downtown Seattle to downtown Bellevue," Jarrett said. "In the long run, trains would be better, but how long do you want to wait?"

Some transportation experts say I-90's middle lanes could be converted to "hot lanes" or "zip lanes" for single-occupancy drivers willing to pay tolls, as well as toll-exempt buses. This could provide an interim approach to light rail and provide a better picture of transit demand, plus help pay for transit improvements on both trans-lake corridors, said Bruce Agnew, director of the Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center for Regional Development, a Seattle think tank.

Ultimately, light rail would be built on I-90's outside lanes, planners say.

King County, helped by federal transportation policies and funding, is bullish on buses. While Sims supports light rail as a needed "spine," he considers buses the "rib cage" of a transportation system. With gas and parking costs climbing, bus ridership already exceeds demand, Sims said.

As part of the expansion plan for its hybrid-bus fleet (part diesel, part electric), the county has ordered 45 buses that are expected to be delivered by the end of 2009. The buses, built by General Motors, are funded by a federal Urban Partnership Grant awarded last year.

Long before planners knew 520 needed to be replaced, I-90 was identified as the priority corridor; compatible infrastructure already exists. An eight-lane 520 corridor for light rail is unacceptable to Seattleites on the west side of the bridge -- even for those who would ride it. Connections to the University of Washington, to much of Seattle, and to Bellevue pose hurdles, as do some technical and engineering problems.

Ric Ilgenfritz, Sound Transit's chief communications officer, said light rail across 520 would overload the rail system as it is currently designed south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

"It's feasible conceptually, but we would not propose it as the first crossing," Ilgenfritz said.

The university link of the system, for which the agency hopes to break ground this year, was not designed to handle cross-lake traffic to downtown Seattle, but the system could handle the needed number of trains approaching downtown from I-90 from the south, he said. The agency hopes to connect the university to its light rail system by 2016.

The initial segment, between downtown and Sea-Tac Airport, is scheduled to open in late 2009.

A 2006 Sound Transit study estimated the cost of Seattle-Redmond light rail service at up to $3.9 billion, compared with up to $3.4 billion for buses that would run in exclusive lanes with doors on both sides of the vehicles, basing figures on 2005 dollars. The study estimated that the rail system would carry an average of 35,000 passengers each weekday, while the bus system would carry 24,500, with light rail travel times three minutes shorter between the two cities.

With growing population and jobs in Bellevue, Mayor Grant Degginger said the city has long hoped to be served by light rail via I-90. A citizens committee has visited cities already using light rail and will provide input to the Bellevue City Council.

Ilgenfritz said his agency has heeded the recommendations of a trans-lake study concluding that the I-90 bridge was the first place light rail should extend from Seattle to the Eastside.

If light rail is ever put on a new bridge, it would likely come after Sound Transit had built out the rest of its light rail system, said Larry Phillips, a King County councilman and a Sound Transit board member.

"It would be awhile given the limitations we have with our taxing authority," Phillips said.

Reader Comment
Posted by FURYOFPORK at 3/17/08 10:48 p.m.

A loss for the greens. It's about time the green super-lobby lost SOMETHING in this city.

And I feel sympathy for the people posting here who didn't get the light rail they wanted. I know that light rail on 520 would have helped save the planet, but some people in this city (believe it or not) still care about the cost of a project, not just so-called greenifying everything everywhere to so-called save the planet.

Poor greens.........waaaaaaaaaaaaaa