Seattle delivered rail infrastructure on time and under budget, and now it has a ridership in the millions. People want trains. People use trains. Build more goddamn trains.
https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance...
Trains board and deboard WAY faster than busses.
And the link has grade separated track most of the way. So it cannot be slowed by traffic.
There's no reason to think it would be slower than it is today, which is to say, often faster than a single occupancy vehicle.
We need like 8x the amount of rail here, at least.
>The Central Link project was originally planned to open in 2006 and projected to cost $1.9 billion (equivalent to $2.95 billion in 2020 dollars), but the estimates were found to be unrealistic by auditors in November 2000. New executives, hired by Sound Transit to replace previous program directors, presented a revised plan with an opening date pushed back three years to 2009, costing $3.8 billion (equivalent to $5.53 billion in 2020 dollars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_1_(Sound_Transit)#Budget_...
Yes, the initial planners made bad estimates before anyone started working, they were fired and new planners were brought in.
Those second planners then properly scooped the initial project and the Ulink extension, both of which were under budget.
So no, definitely not wrong.
The initial light rail was given an estimate of 1.8B of that 3.9B that voters approved, and year of expenditure costs were roughly 20% higher then that, but federal studies by the dept of transportation have evaluated the costs and believe that there was a period of unpredictable and unusual inflation. If you control for that, the project would have completed under it's original budget. Additionally, they did come under their revised budget and the Ulink extension has come in under budget too.
I guess I don't fault a transit authority for making a 10+ plan that makes reasonable assumptions about inflation given the information they have, and then deliver only slightly above budget after being impacted by said inflation.
The Ulink extension was part of the original proposal, so it should be counted against the original budget and timeline as well. The U-district station didn’t open until 2016, 20 years after being voted on and 10 years behind schedule. The extension also cost $1.8 billion on its own.
From the same wiki page I cited earlier:
> The ballot measure failed to pass on March 14, 1995, and the light rail line was shortened to 25 miles (40 km), between the University District and Sea-Tac Airport. Voters approved the $3.9 billion package on November 5, 1996
> The initial segment identified and approved by Sound Transit later that year shortened the line to 14 miles (23 km), between Downtown Seattle and a southern Tukwila station near Sea-Tac Airport. The remaining routes to the airport and University District were sent back to the planning stage, and re-organized into separate light rail projects.
> Planning of the Portage Bay tunnel between Capitol Hill and the University District was suspended due to higher than expected contractor bids, attributed to difficult soil conditions.
> The line was extended north to University of Washington station, via Capitol Hill station, on March 19, 2016, via a $1.8 billion, 3.15-mile (5.07 km) tunnel.
Pretty soon we'll have three large lines, and there's discussions about what to build next. The rail is fairly popular out here.
Seattle has monthly ridership in the millions.
That's actually still pretty terrible for a city of its size.
We went from 0 trips a year to tens of millions over the past couple years.