Ballard light rail might not make it to Ballard. 🤦‍♂️

Terrible news - Sound Transit faces drastic cuts, and it is starting to consider some ugly choices. In a recent meeting that highlighted a set of options that were meant as representations of the kinds of choices we face (not an actual menu of what we have to pick right now), none of the options reached Ballard.

This is bad news for Seattle in general, and transit riders in particular. “Ballard Link is . . . the highest ridership line planned as part of ST3, by far, with 90,000 to 147,000 daily riders expected to jump on trains between Chinatown International District and Market Street by 2046.”

Why the shortfall? Some of it, like inflation, was unavoidable. But the responsibility rests primarily in the hands of our legislature for four reasons:

1. They set up Sound Transit projects to all turn out insanely overpriced by giving local jurisdictions the power to extract huge concessions from the agency in exchange for a permit, and by empowering city politicians to run the board and meddle with projects to please their constituencies. This has caused a lot of dumb building decisions and huge, huge delays, raising costs by billions or even tens of billions.

2. Then, a few years ago, they cut back the most progressive (as in, tax the rich) source of revenue for the agency, costing it billions.

3. Then this year, they wouldn’t extend Sound Transit’s bonding capacity to meet its needs.

4. And finally, they walloped it with another multi-billion dollar funding cut when they cut future sales taxes on services. While sales tax cuts are generally a good thing, services are consumed more by wealthy people. And in any case, they didn’t replace the revenue.

For those of us who rely on/love these trains, it feels a little like the legislature has left us like this.

Perhaps you can understand why I don’t have faith in the folks that created these problems to be the ones to fix them.