Written by I hope our regional law-makers look at some of these options before removing the entire eastside rail line.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Snohomish County opinion
Preserve Eastside rail line for Snohomish transit link
By Bruce Agnew
Special to The Times
J. CRAIG THORPE / CASCADIA CENTER FOR REGIONAL DEV
A conceptual rendering of Snohomish Station on the proposed Eastside commuter rail line.
Bruce Agnew
There’s no finer experience than taking your family on a crisp, sunny, fall adventure along the Centennial Trail. Stretching from Snohomish to Arlington and framed by the resplendent Cascades and quiet Machias, the red and yellow trees and clean air remind us why we endure the gray skies and light rain of Puget Sound’s winter.
Now we have an opportunity to continue that trail into the heart of suburban King County and simultaneously provide an Eastside rail-transit line that scores of Snohomish County commuters could utilize for years to come, helping limit highway congestion as growth continues.
But if Snohomish County leaders don’t act quickly, King County and the Port of Seattle may consummate a pending deal with Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, resulting in King County control of a crucial rail-and-trail corridor, and the possible ripping out of the corridor’s 41-mile rail line from Woodinville to Renton. This would leave Snohomish County commuters with a dead end.
Instead, let’s keep the tracks and initiate a demonstration project using a new self-propelled rail car called a “diesel multiple unit” (DMU). It’s far cheaper to purchase and operate than typical commuter rail (like the Sounder train that connects Everett and Seattle). The DMU also burns biofuels, carries bikes and can be maintained by community-college diesel mechanics.
In the United States, DMUs are made by Colorado Rail Car and Siemens. They’ve been generating revenue for six years in the West Palm Beach area, and are planned for suburban Portland, Oceanside-Escondido in California, Alaska and Amtrak’s Vermonter service.
A single double-deck car can carry 188 passengers and costs around $4 million. Its lower weight requires less investment in track and the bi-level feature allows shorter platforms. The DMU can operate on separate tracks with freight trains or on tracks embedded in concrete like a streetcar, allowing them to divert from the corridor to downtown areas.
The Cascadia Center is working with a group of community leaders in the North Sound region to bring a DMU train to the Bellingham-Everett corridor in the next few years, to supplement Seattle-Vancouver, B.C., Amtrak service and connect with Sounder in Everett.
Why not piggyback on these efforts and share equipment and maintenance between the Eastside and North Sound? We could even run a DMU connector service between Snohomish and Everett.
Snohomish City Councilman Larry Countryman, Snohomish airfield owner Kandace Harvey and business leaders support the rail-and-trail idea, as does Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon.
How do we pay for it?
Private developers and cities can enter partnerships to develop train stations, fix the tracks and build mixed-use development with private capital, as with the South Lake Union streetcar in Seattle.
Currently, there is no direct bus service between the fast-growing east Snohomish County communities of Snohomish and Monroe to jobs-rich Bellevue in East King County — only one early morning bus with a connection from the Highway 520 corridor. Surely, Community Transit, Sound Transit and Metro can team up to share the relatively inexpensive operating costs for the train.
Proponents of the trail-only approach had early on argued that the tracks were in poor shape and conversion to high-capacity transit would cost billions. Cascadia has independently hired a team of respected, retired rail executives led by Read Fay to walk the tracks and provide an estimate of what it would cost to have the DMU units travel at a top speed of 40 mph. The likely estimate is in the range of $20 million to $40 million. The rail/trail corridor could serve as an important emergency transportation lifeline for first responders and citizens in case a major earthquake destroys our critical bridge infrastructure.
So don’t let your King County neighbors prematurely cut a vital transit link along the congested Interstate 405/Highway 9 corridor. A commuter rail line connecting eastern Snohomish County to Redmond, Kirkland, Bellevue and Renton needs to be on the map of our region’s transportation future.
Bruce Agnew is a former Snohomish County Council member and now serves as director of Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center for Regional Development, www.cascadiaproject.org
Eastside rail
Allowing the eastside rail cooridor to disappear and become a bike trail is an incredible waste. What in the hell are our elected representatives thinking? We’ve spent billions acquiring real estate for the light rail that serves mostly Seattle, and the one available rail that we have on the eastside is being given away. Am I missing something? We booted Eric and his wonderful Dinner Train out of Renton. He had one of the most viable businesses in town and now he’s backrupt. I would like to see our regional politicians step up and create an eastside plan for that rail line. I think that the future is going to be light rail there. If not now, it will be in a few years. Maybe the new Mayor of Renton (please let there be a new Mayor), will create a task force to look into this? Mayor Kathy, as she likes to call herself, has no vision on this. Maybe Mayor Law will have one and will be willing to work with BNSF, King County, Sound Transit, the Renton City Council (now there’s a novel idea), the local communities and put something together. And when he’s done with this, can we bulldoze the transient (transit) center in downtown?
Re: Eastside rail
RIGHT ON bobndina !!!
Mark in Kennydale
So now the Port says they will buy the rail right-of-way, and then lease it to the County who will tear out the rails from Woodinville to Renton for only a stupid trail:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003989165_railtotrail02m.html
Goodbye to commuter rail on the eastside…have fun in the 405 mess for years to come…
Meanwhile, a private group says they would buy the right-of-way, put in a trail and light rail for commuters, and it will not cost taxpayers a dime:
http://www.allaboardwashington.org
and
http://www.rethinkrail.com/rtr-intro.html
Sims and the Port should go away, as they have never been serious about solving the 167/405 commuter nightmare, and they are not now. They are just playing politics, at our expense as usual.
Mark Hancock
Kennydale
WAY TO MUCH MONEY!!!
Good point ! The Port wants to pay $103 million for the land, and then the County will spend something like $60 million to build the trail. They will also take out the rail lines from Woodinville to Renton – imagine the cost to put in new rail lines someday in the future. This waste of your taxpayer dollars brought to you by our selfish short-sighted County politicians. This isn’t the game Sim City, it is Sims County and it’s very real.
Now that RTID transit failed in the election, it’s time for our State and County officials and staff to start thinking and looking for more creative solutions to our traffic problems. “We don’t have enough money” is not an acceptable excuse.
This eastside rail proposal is a good place to start. Tearing out tracks just to build a trail, when you could have tracks and a trail, is just plain stupid. And here is a proposal to help solve traffic problems without spending large amounts of our tax dollars. How can you trust County/State politians with more money when they make stupid decisions like this?
They want more money to solve traffic problems (or worse, tolls), but there are inexpensive solutions/improvements that the social engineers who run this state don’t want to offer to us. I’d like to see some more lanes on 405, but in the meantime why isn’t there a good transit option from Auburn to Bellevue to help reduce the traffic mess there every day? You almost never see a bus on 167/405, yet it’s the worst traffic in the region. If our politicians and planners can’t even offer a badly needed viable bus service along this corridor, from homes to jobs, why should we trust them with more money? They’ll just spend it on more Seattle-centric services, and ignore the poor people who have to get to work each morning on the 167/405 corridor.
I held my nose and voted for RTID/Transit (you’ve got to start somewhere), but now I’d sure like to see some brainstorming and creative thinking by our officials, and some road design experiments that don’t just add tolls to see how they might work.
Here’s a start:
1) Through the 405/167 interchange, open up the HOV lane at the interchange as a passing lane, so those going through aren’t so stuck in the weaving that happens there and can’t get by.
2) Or just barricade off the HOV lane through the 167/405 interchange, so people can’t merge at the last minute and hold everybody up. This worked well up near Bothell during a construction project a few years ago.
3) Aggressively ticket the people who merge at the last minute and stop and hold up traffic (I’ve seen them come to a full stop in the middle of 405 at the interchange).
4) Try opening up all the HOV lanes for a couple weeks and see how much better the traffic will run (it ran great when they opened them all up during the s-curves construction several years ago). Other states have gotten rid of their HOV lanes entirely, but we stick to ours and tie up badly needed lanes for a few while the majority suffers (talk about global warming and wasting oil, think of all those cars just sitting there). If we aren’t going to build new lanes, open them all up until we do.
5) Better bus service times and routes (esp. 167/405). Why should all the money be spent servicing downtown Seattle, when so many people now work on the eastside. Spend the money up and down the 167/405 corridor, and not just in downtown Bellevue.