What To Build, When

This post about ST3 (the third installment of the Sound Transit Link expansion) interested me in its own right, but I want to use it as a jumping off point to discuss general principles for how to build (or perhaps based on experience more avoiding how not to build) transit under constraints like budget and timeline.

1. Build The Good Stuff

Let's start with the article's own argument: build the good stuff first. This means prioritizing the parts of the project with the most impact and the most significance to the overall transit program. 

This sounds obvious, but it competes with other ideas, like finishing one subsection of a project before continuing on to others, or doing the hardest, longest part first (or the easiest, quickest!). 

Say, the 1 Line in Seattle, which was a success for earlier phases of Sound Transit--but you do have to follow it up with the promised expansions on time!

What it contributes, though, is the sense that the tax dollars being spent are actually having impact: that they were worth supporting, paying, and spending. And it avoids a problem like I'd suggest Sound Transit is seeing where as time goes by you end up dropping really key elements because of spiraling costs.

2. Break Ground ASAP

Now, I'm not suggesting Sound Transit specifically has dragged its feet. And in some ways this is a systemic not an individual agency issue. But we have got to stop having projects priced and approved in 20XX dollars and then having to wait to be paid in 20XX+5 or +10 or +15 dollars. We need streamlined environmental impact work (not ignored! Just work that allows things to actually go forward). We need more standardized planning processes so that station design, route choice, etc. don't end up delaying project starts.

Because frankly it sucks when projects get a vote, get approved, and then don't get built (or discontinued) because they take too long and the money isn't there anymore. 

The Montreal REM and its relatively quick builds with fairly standardized built forms is a good example of what to do here: break ground, don't get too fancy with it, and make it work.

3. Repurposing Is King

Many major, successful transit projects exist because they didn't try to produce the optimal system: they built a functional system on top of repurposing what was already there. Link itself did this with the Downtown Transit Tunnel, and the piece recommends doing it to produce a maintenance facility for a Ballard stub in the system. 

Not everything can be repurposed rather than fresh built of course. But it helps a lot to accelerate growth if you emphasize the areas where you have less new stuff to do.

These are all common sense, but they also end up by the wayside in some planning because they lead to systems that are not optimized, but rather effective; that is, they don't produce the best theoretical system, but a more practical, buildable system that may still have flaws.

But while there are white elephant systems, by and large the biggest problem in US transit is un- and underbuilt systems, not overbuilt or suboptimally expanded ones.

We should build better, faster--not by magically uncorking a new money tree, but by making sound (pun intended) decisions and acting on them, rather than dragging our feet and making the perfect or the fancy the enemy of the good and effective.