Link: https://www.theurbanist.org/were-not-going-to-stop-sound-transit-assuages-concerns-about-reaching-ballard/

At a town hall this week at Ballard's National Nordic Museum, Sound Transit walked through its path to be able to get to Market Street by 2042. That work involves needing to find $8 to $10 billion via cost savings, new revenue, or creative borrowing over the coming years.

I am getting tired of the gaslighting. It is not a “cool thing” that the RFI process didn’t find any new ideas Sound Transit wasn’t already exploring, it’s a huge drag because they keep telling us we need to find savings, and we didn’t

"One of the cool things is we're already doing a lot of the things that they identified in the RFI," Owen said. It's difficult for us to communicate what we do every single day on a daily basis, but, some of the things they talked about, like – getting to talk technical for a moment – 'don't build temporary things, only build permanent things.'"

I found their counterpoint to the "save 10 billion by doing elevated rail instead of tunnels" RFI to be the most telling. They basically say "most downtowns dont have elevated rail" and thats that. Completing ignoring downtowns with very succesful rail like Chicago, but also "well, we isn't like the aesthetics" being the brunt of their argument. So instead Ballard gets to wait 35 years for a train in a town THAT ALREADY HAS AN ELEVATED RAILWAY IN ITS A DOWNTOWN CALLED THE MONORAIL YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING WANKERS!