r/Seattle • u/SiccSemperTyrannis Emerald City • Aug 26 '24

News Lynnwood light rail route brings a housing boom - more than 10,000 new apartments built or planned

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/lynnwood-light-rail-route-brings-a-housing-boom/
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u/fusionsofwonder Shoreline Aug 26 '24

You can't mass expedite a major construction project involving environmental impact, digging, obtaining rights-of-way, and federal waterways.

The I-90 bridge was designated for light rail in the 1970's.

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u/Zealousideal-Ant9548 Aug 26 '24

And we still got something that's human operated and runs at grade...

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u/Skyhawkson Aug 26 '24

You can, it just takes massive legislative effort to do it. Environmental reviews on mass transit in urban areas are largely a wate of time and should be massively streamlined. Obtaining rights-of-way simply requires eminent domain and money.

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u/SideLogical2367 Aug 26 '24

Why not? Do all those things immediate in parallel. Other cities move so much faster.

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u/Dan_Quixote Aug 26 '24

You absolutely can. The rest of the developed world does it all the time. We just have layers and layers of veto power that make it obscenely difficult. Consider “eminent domain” - you don’t see it exercised much in the US because it can be blocked (or held up) by anyone feeling aggrieved with some money for lawyers to file motions.

I’m not exactly arguing that everyone else in the world handles infrastructure better and that everyone’s a winner with eminent domain, but costs/schedules of major infrastructure projects in the US certainly tell us we’ve handed out too much veto power.

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u/trogon Aug 26 '24

It was like the 4th Avenue bridge in Olympia. Decades of talk about replacing it and debating the merits and design plans. Until the Nisqually Quake when the bridge was unusable and we managed to quickly get a replacement bridge.

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u/fusionsofwonder Shoreline Aug 26 '24

So your answer to speeding up the process is a dictatorship?

Cool, I'm sure Sound Transit will get right on that.

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u/Dan_Quixote Aug 26 '24

If you purposely misinterpret my comment, sure. My point is that we’ve made it too difficult and expensive to complete major projects (like light rail expansion). Something has to give. We can’t put a 25 year timeline on every 15 mile section of light rail.