Is Sound Transit Ignoring a Plan that Could Save Ballard Light Rail?

[00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics. I'm David Hyde. Unfortunately, Erica C. Barnett of Publicola, or I should say Erica C. Barnett and Publicola are out this week.

[00:00:23] But meanwhile, your friend and mine, Sandeep Kaushik, is here along with a very special guest to talk about Sound Transit and its shortcomings, namely the $35 billion budget shortfall and the fact that Light Rail to Ballard is on the chopping block, which, Sandeep, to me seems like an utter betrayal and a massive screw-up, even worse than that deep bore tunneling machine getting stuck.

[00:00:51] Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a really big deal. I mean, you're obviously a Ballard resident, so you are directly impacted by it. And I live just up the ridge in Finney Ridge. And I was already pissed off at about how long it was going to take them to get to Ballard. And now it seems like they're about to cancel the whole damn thing, which does seem like a significant betrayal of what the voters were promised.

[00:01:16] I mean, look, I did the Sound Transit 3 ballot measure in 2016, where this plan we put in front of the voters and said, here's what you're going to fund if you vote for this. And here we are 10 years later, and they're lopping off a big piece of the plan.

[00:01:34] Well, it's that problem and more, according to our special guest today, Scott Lindsay, who served as the director of Seattle's Department of Transportation from 2014 to 2017. Previously, who is also at senior leadership roles at the Chicago DOT, DC DOT, and Washington DC Metro. Scott Lindsay, thanks so much for joining us. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:57] Yeah, Scott. Thank you for coming on. So we're going to get into all of the Sound Transit stuff in excruciating, painful detail, I'm sure, in a few minutes. But let me start with a kind of broader question, right? Because over the last year plus, you know, since the publication in particular of the Klein and Thompson Abundance book, right, there's been a lot of conversation

[00:02:22] among kind of left of center commentators and thinkers over why it's so slow and so costly for blue jurisdictions to build and deliver infrastructure projects.

[00:02:40] And, you know, the paradigmatic example of this that Klein and Thompson brought up in their book is California high-speed rail where billions of dollars have been spent and years have gone by without a single foot of rail actually being laid. But now it kind of feels like we have our own example here in the Seattle area in kind of how Sound Transit light rail is shaking out.

[00:03:06] And so I want to start here with a broader question about what are the forces, Scott, that you see as someone who's been around a lot of big infrastructure, transportation, transit projects over your career? What is it that's making it so expensive, so hard, so slow and laborious to kind of build out these projects? And why does it seem like these things are happening faster and cheaper in other places? Well, I would first say that this isn't just like a blue city problem.

[00:03:36] It's a U.S. problem. And then even beyond the U.S., it's basically anywhere that was an English colony at one time or another has cost problems, whether it's the U.S., Canada, Britain, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. You know, it's just it's replete around the world. Anywhere that was English speaking has challenges. The U.S. is the worst, right, among them.

[00:03:58] So Sound Transit, just for a benchmark, is probably two to three times higher than any comparable project in the world outside of New York City. So wait a second, just really quickly. So Sound Transit, what you just said to us, two to three times more expensive than any other comparable project in the world outside of New York City. Yeah, possibly Los Angeles, right?

[00:04:23] This is apples to apples, the amount of the project that is tunneled versus elevated, grade separated versus not grade separated. And this is for the Ballard and West Seattle alignment specifically, which is the one that I've dug into the most. And there is not one single cause and they're all interrelated. And so I would say that for folks that are really interested in learning more about this, I would point them to the Transit Cost Project,

[00:04:52] specifically if you're interested in transit out of the Marin Center in New York. They've done a really great job of benchmarking projects around the world and diving very deep into what are the causes of those. And so, you know, I have my own takes, right? But like broadly speaking, you know, so I might use slightly different words, but it's the same substance, right? So I would point to kind of regulatory issues and standards.

[00:05:20] And the reason I call out standards is that there are, as it puts to regulatory, is there's international bodies like the National Fire Protection Association that has a fire protection standard that transit agencies have to follow, or there's engineering standards that, you know, technical experts are going to follow, as well as kind of like hard and fast kind of regulatory rules at a federal, state, or local level. I'd point to risk tolerance.

[00:05:46] So, again, how does this impact with regulatory is a lot of times NEPA, which was originally written to where the purpose was to document environmental impacts. It's now used as a litigation risk management strategy. Utility coordination is another one you can see, you know, here in Seattle, personally, we dealt with this in the Center City Streetcar,

[00:06:08] where essentially you had a mayor that did not want to do the project, and she had, you know, there were a bunch of utility projects got hung on that project budget as a way to like weigh it down. That's not all the time. Sometimes it's because utilities are trying to get in there and do the work that they would do on their own, that they would have to pay fees to do if they were doing it on their own. So that, again, kind of layers in time and money.

[00:06:37] And then I think there's just agency, you know, capacity, incentives, and culture. And when I say agency, capacity, incentives, and culture, that is board, CEO, staff, and the consultants that support them. And they all kind of intermix together to produce really expensive projects. I was actually looking at or listening to this Planet Money episode from a couple years ago that was citing one of the reports by that Marin Institute, Scott, that you just mentioned,

[00:07:06] talking about the 96th Street station. I think it's the Q line in New York City on 2nd Avenue. And just how insanely expensive it was due to, in that case, station costs. Like they were building this elaborate station and much bigger station. We'll get into some of this stuff because you've talked about that too. For Sound Transit, gigantic white-collar labor costs and the outsourcing of white-collar work and some other issues.

[00:07:34] But the thing that really struck me in that story is that no one's talking about it. That like, it's like people, especially maybe in blue jurisdictions, I'm not sure, are kind of like, well, I guess we just have to raise more revenue. No one's really talking about what you're talking about, how it's just so much more expensive here than it has to be. And that's the part that I found particularly kind of shocking because it's like, how can we be progressive and say we want to deliver things like on transit,

[00:08:02] whether it's transit or homelessness or addiction policy or whatever, and not care about saving money, not care about costs? Isn't that part of what this is all about? Hey, Seattle Nice listeners. Seattle politics got you low. Well, get high with Uncle Ike's. Pissed at the mayor? Relax with a dollar joint.

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[00:09:00] Yeah, I mean, that's a really great question, I think, or observation. And this is just one guy's opinion of what I see. And Sandeep has worked with me close enough when he and I both were on the Murray team that he knows I'm not going to probably pull any punches or be a shrinking violet here. But kind of my observation of transit in particular is that you have, and government just generally,

[00:09:27] you have these two camps that one believes government can do big things and one believes that it should not exist. Obviously, that's hypermolic to a degree, right? But I think what happens is if you're in one of those camps, right? Say you're in the we believe government can do good things. There's this real reticence to criticize it for fear of giving your opponents ammunition.

[00:09:54] And what I would argue is that bad execution gives your opponents more ammunition than you being critical and holding them to account ever could. Let's get a little deeper into Sound Transit, right? And the current situation there. So we've been building out our regional light rail system now for what, close to 30 years, right? Since the whole kind of sound transit project started. And there's been progress, but it's been agonizingly slow.

[00:10:24] And I mentioned I did the communications for the ST3 ballot measure in 2016, right? And here we are now, 10 years later, and sound transit says they're facing a $35 billion budgetary shortfall. And therefore, they've got to reduce the number of stations that had previously been promised and planned.

[00:10:49] And as we mentioned up front, most of all, they're on the verge of basically canceling, though they're not quite saying it that way. You know, the line that was supposed to extend to Ballard, which is one of the densest parts of the city and is, you know, an officially designated regional center in the city, one is seven. And the only one now that apparently is not going to have light rail to it. And obviously, people in Ballard are not happy about that.

[00:11:18] And so, Scott, how would you characterize the current state of sound transit and its expansion plan? Well, I mean, I think deeply troubled is the way I would describe it. And I think the dates that are slipping out are optimistic dates. So I think like stepping back and saying like, where did we start and where are we today and where are we going? So like when you look at where we started, sound transit, you know, the Ballard and West

[00:11:46] Seattle projects were, you know, I think in the neighborhood of $2 billion and $8 billion each when you take the, you know, they're separated. And I think now the Ballard or the West Seattle project is $7 billion or so. And they've identified what some savings potentially. And Ballard is now at $20 plus billion. So it's two and a half times what they were anticipating spending. And they're talking about Ballard or West Seattle rather as a shovel ready project.

[00:12:16] And when you dive into like what a shovel ready actually mean, you know, I think one board member said, oh, it's got to be ready to start in 90 days. That is not at all where they're at. They're projecting being able to be done by 2020, 2032 rather. And they're assuming that they are going to be getting, you know, the latest that I've heard of the Lindblom article is to be taking at face value as a 60% match on federal funds.

[00:12:43] Their plan assumes 2025 that they have a full funded grant agreement in place. And that's like a two plus year process to get in place. And so even now, the date they're advertising, 2032, is not an accurate date based on their current plan. And then they're assuming that they will get, say it were, and they're going to start constructing their less than 30% design today. But say they get there by 27, I think is when they say they're going to start.

[00:13:13] So 28, 29, 33, 132. So five years of construction. Comparable project Northgate was 4.3 miles. Took them nine years. And that did not have an elaborate cable stay bridge as a part of the project. So they have a tunnel, cable stay bridge, and some elevated versus, whoa, or Northgate was tunneling and elevated.

[00:13:39] So they've never finished a project this complex in this amount of time. So that's like optimistic number one. Number two for Ballard. You know, I backed into a date kind of using like rough estimates saying, okay, if it's not in their 20 year plan to start, that means the soonest it could start is 2027. And then if you look at where they would be in design at that point, and then when, what

[00:14:06] they would have to restart, you're looking at 2059 as the earliest. So we put that out there, right? Urbanist pushes on them for that day. And they say, well, like Hubli is saying, and Trevor Reed, who's my co-author of this paper are saying 2059. What do you have to say about that? Do you have a different date? And they're silent on the date, which tells you it's even worse. And the reality is, so I did a, when I was early in my career, I did capital financial

[00:14:34] strategy and planning for the Washington Metro. And at the time we were facing a six year $3.3 billion shortfall. You, so you put that out there and that's now today, you know, probably six years and seven or 8 billion when you adjust for inflation. And to say that you cannot, when you have, they have a dedicated revenue stream, which Metro never had. Sound Transit does. It has a dedicated evergreen revenue stream.

[00:15:04] They have an idea of what their project costs. They do enough projects that they should be able to produce what's called an S-curve, which is basically how much money you're spending over the life of a project. They should be able to forecast when they are going to spend the money and when they're going to launch the project. And the fact that they are not putting that out there suggests that they don't want the news getting out there. And why wouldn't they want to get the news out there is the question. So what ballot initiatives are coming up?

[00:15:32] There's a ballot initiative in Pierce County. Maybe they don't want dates showing how bad things are so they don't undercut that ballot initiative. Maybe there's a Rhodes Initiative in King County. So I think that there is, yeah, I don't know. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I don't know. It's not going well. So Sound Transit board chair and Snohomish County executive Dave Summers has issued this report basically saying we're not going to do light rail to Ballard.

[00:16:02] And it's clearly not a priority for him. But what I kind of wonder is, how does he get away with making that proposal with a straight face? What is going on behind the scenes? Because obviously you have city council person and Sound Transit board member Dan Strauss, seemingly the only one or one of the only ones, according to Erica's reporting, who's kind of objecting to it. And everyone else is kind of like shrug, like, well, what are we going to do? And isn't this what we voted for?

[00:16:30] It's just so freaking outrageous. So can you give us any insight into what's happening behind the scenes? Because I'm pissed off. Yeah. I mean, maybe. Sandeep probably has his ear closer to the ground on the politics than I do. So I can just give you kind of like an outside observer, what I see and what I suspect based on kind of the conversations that I'm having. So when I kind of like break it down, and I'm like putting on my lens of having worked for a few mayors, right, as well.

[00:17:00] So what I see is like you go back to kind of the hiring of the CEO, right? And when you look at kind of what did the hiring committee want and what were they communicating out to the publicly and what were they communicating privately? I think what they were looking for, they said, was somebody with mega project or running big transportation agency, somebody that really understood the local political environment and somebody that was committed to completing the regional spine.

[00:17:29] That was like the three things that we want from our CEO. And then we get a CEO and I think a strong CEO in many ways. You're talking about Dow Constantine. Dow, correct. Yeah. Yeah. The nearly half a million dollar an hour, sorry, half a million dollar a year salaried Dow Constantine. Yeah. But I mean, I don't actually think that salary is necessarily out of whack with the industry.

[00:17:59] As long as he gives us a light rail to Ballard, it's not. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. No worries. So, I mean, I think like you have a region that is, you know, you have a parochial board just by nature, right? And you have a parochial board that has been paying into this, you know, kitty for sound transit for several decades. They've been getting their bus service, but it's all been about getting rail, right?

[00:18:25] And so I think you have a board chair who's got tremendous power there. And that board chair is going to lead, like get to a point who's on the committee for the hiring and is going to lead, get to a candidate that he thinks is going to deliver to his highest priority, which is building the spine. I think now, then you go into like what's happening today at the board. And I think the same dynamics are in place. You have a CEO whose contract is up for renewal in late December.

[00:18:53] And by the way, I'm not like trying to throw shade at anybody. This is just, I'm like laying out what I see as the facts and let others interpret it. But the CEO's contract is up in December. Incoming chair, outgoing chair is going to be Dave Summers. And incoming chair is going to be Ryan Mello, the two ends of the spine. Then you have two chief executives in Seattle and King County that are new. One is Katie Wilson, new mayor. The other is King County exec, Germai Zahali.

[00:19:25] So what I see there is Germai controls 10 of the 18 votes or will control 10 of the 18 votes. Right. And so he should have the power. And Katie is going to have the biggest megaphone of any elected in the region because she is the mayor. So why aren't they fighting harder? And, you know, I kind of bring it down. I mean, this is like my, like, I just game theory this out. Like, what are people, what do people want?

[00:19:50] And how to, like, what, what are people's actions signaling what they want? Right. And so I look at, you know, Germai who controls the board. Well, it's like pulling back. It's, you know, there's like three simple scenarios. Like, obviously it's not this simple. There are way more going on, but it's like, I don't know the power that I have. I know the power that I have, but I don't know how to use it. Or I know the power that I have and I want to use it for something else.

[00:20:21] Right. Those are kind of your three macro scenarios. And I don't, they both seem like smart people that understand the power that they have. Germai is a little more experienced as an elected. So probably better equipped to understand how to, how to use that power. And if I'm him, where I've got, I am in the cabaret seat and I've got the power. I'm just going to look at the mayor and say, well, if you're not telling me this is unacceptable for Seattle. Right.

[00:20:50] Then why would I go out on a limb and fight for it? And if I can defer to the existing, you know, if I can say, well, this, this problem predates me. And I want to go in and try to fix it. That creates downside risk for me. That is higher than accepting the conditions as they are. That's kind of my read on the situation. I could be a little bit too cynical. Yeah.

[00:21:17] Well, well, let me, let me play, you know, I mean, a bit devil's advocate here, or at least take the sound transit side on this. Look, there, you know, a lot of stuff has happened since the plan was originally put forward as a ballot measure in 2016. Costs have gone way up, right? The costs of construction of materials and all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, there are competing priorities, right? It is intended to be a regional system.

[00:21:46] So that main spine between Tacoma and Everett, like, you know, if you want to sort of stay true to the, to the kind of, kind of regional core of this, right? That, that, you know, maybe that takes priority over a kind of internal Seattle line, right? Which is what West Seattle to Ballard, what West Seattle to Ballard is. So I can see, you know, what choice do they have, given that they've got this big $35 billion shortfall.

[00:22:16] They've got these, this regional commitment and priority, you know, you got to cut somewhere. Well, it sucks, but, you know, Ballard's got to go, right? Because that's, that, that, that is the most expensive, even though it's the highest ridership part of it, it's also, you know, the most expensive demand. Yeah. No, I think it's, I mean, I look at all this and like, just by the way, like, it's like, I feel like what's going on there is like peeling an onion, right?

[00:22:46] And as soon as you get to the center of your onion, you looked over to your left and there's like a full bag of onions that you got to get to, right? And so there's so many things that you, depending on the, the angle that you look at this in, there's different ways to, to peel it. So I don't think like when I saw the $35 billion shortfall, it's like my first instinct is like, well, how do you solve it? Right. How do you solve?

[00:23:09] Like, so generally when you're doing projects, it's like scope, schedule, budget, pick two is the cliche, but like the reality of pick one and you hope for two. Right. Right. And so when I look at a $35 billion shortfall, before we even wrote kind of our white paper on doing an automated Metro, we, like I wrote an editorial that was like, you need a framework for solving this problem.

[00:23:31] And in the formulation of their enterprise initiative, they never have put forward a scenario that says in order to deliver all of ST3 within the 20 year time horizon, this is, these are the things that would need to be true. So that's known as like backcasting and infrastructure planning. You'll hear people talk about build, do your work backwards plan where you have to, you know, figure out where you want to be and then work backwards to get there.

[00:24:00] And so my frame of mind on that is first define the end state that you want to achieve and then go through and say, okay, well, what are the things that we need to do to get there? And so what's the operating plan that we need to have to deliver the capacity? And so when I define and when Trevor and I define the end state, it's, we got to carry as many people as sound transit three proposed to, you know, or plans to carry through downtown. That's like our number one thing.

[00:24:28] And the reason we say downtown isn't because we're like downtown centric. It's in transit planning and anything that's dealing with infrastructure. It's your max load point is your capacity constraint. And so like you've got to, if you can solve for that, you can solve for the whole system. So got to be able to carry the same amount of people through that max load point. And then you start looking at, well, what are the design constraints that we're putting on ourselves, right? These are laws of men and guidelines of people, not laws of physics, right?

[00:24:56] So how do we design a system that can deliver our objectives, but have a lower cost? And then once you get to there, it's like, okay, well, what is our financial strategy? And where do we need more money? And then to the extent that you need more money, what is your federal strategy? So that was kind of like where we started this. And then another concept that you do, and this is our white paper is we went into, it did something called basically building a reference case, right?

[00:25:21] We said, okay, well, what is a city and what is a project that presents a comparable desire to end state as to what sound transit is doing? And we view that as from a customer perspective of like in a traveler perspective of moving from A to B, not falling in love with a specific type of car or a specific type of train technology. And from there, we kind of like backed into, well, like how would you build something?

[00:25:49] And like before, you know, I'll cut off here after this point, but like our first kind of premise was, you know, a lot of what you'll see kind of baked throughout the sound transit issue is solving political challenges with technical solutions, which is incredibly expensive to do. So the original sin, the original political problem was this need to regionalize the funding of the second tunnel.

[00:26:16] And to do that, the decision was made to run, we've got to run the trains, some of the trains through the second tunnel from somewhere else outside of North King. So we're going to have trains run from Tacoma to Ballard and West Seattle to Everett. And that original sin to solve a political problem locks them into a technology and infrastructure solution that is ill suited for the project of connecting Ballard to West Seattle.

[00:26:43] So I personally, I think they have like the right project team today. Everything we've interviewed dozens of people around the country, around the world on this paper. And I think they have the right team. I think they have the wrong project. Right. When I say the wrong project, I don't even mean the wrong line or the wrong station locations. I just mean like they're designing, they pick the wrong train. They pick a different train, a bunch of other stuff like falls into place.

[00:27:08] And Scott, the answer for you, like everything really in Seattle since I moved here falls to Denmark. Well, something isn't rotten there. Yeah. No, absolutely. So 20, I'm trying to think. So in 2005, I had the opportunity to go on a federal transit administration funded project.

[00:27:30] So the Eno Foundation, which is big transportation, it's kind of like Brookings for transportation, funds a dozen people a year from different transit agencies to go abroad and do different study missions. So I had a chance to go to Denmark. It's 2005, so about a year after they opened the Metro. I had a chance to meet with and spend a couple days along with a bunch of other people.

[00:27:52] The original VP of operations and development for the Copenhagen Metro, who then went on to be the CEO of Copenhagen Transportation and then European Investment Bank. Just really, really bright guy. So, you know, 20 plus years later, so 2026, I just kind of reached out to him on LinkedIn. I was like, hey, you may not remember this, but we met 20 years ago. It never left my mind how amazing this system is and what you build.

[00:28:21] Tell us how you did it and how can we apply it here in Seattle? And so that was kind of the genesis of it. So let me so because you've alluded to the fact that you and a transportation planner, yeah, Trevor Reed, have written this paper, right, where you're arguing an alternative proposal that you say could save 10 to 15 billion dollars in costs for the for the Ballard line.

[00:28:48] And so so explain a bit about what you all are proposing in this alternative proposal. And then I want to get into like it's obviously not been brooded around that much publicly, though. This your your white paper is circulated among Sound Transit board members and officials and, you know, other folks. So I want to ask about how and why the reaction to it has been so much of a kind of cold shoulder.

[00:29:17] But but but but let's start, first of all, with what is it that you all are saying? What is this magic alternative scheme you guys have come up with potentially could save a bunch of money? Well, I mean, yeah, we'll put a pin in the last point about why is it falling on deaf ears? Like, I don't know anybody who's been around City Hall can hazard a guess. I have some thoughts on that, too, which I will lay in on. Yeah, deeply personal. They're probably going to hurt my feelings a bit to a degree.

[00:29:45] So the entire premise is if you step back and say we want to get. Ten thousand plus people per hour to be able to move between Ballard and West Seattle through downtown and you put it in a second tunnel, but that second tunnel can be different and or separate from the current downtown Seattle transit tunnel, the spine, if you will.

[00:30:11] If you do that, if you separate them, you create the opportunity to revisit a bunch of different core assumptions. So first thing it allows you to do is think about the kind of trains that you're buying and the train control. So Copenhagen as an example, and we use Copenhagen not as the solution. We were not trying to say this is the only way to do it. We were trying to demonstrate this is a way to do it. And if there are better ways to do it, by all means. But all we were trying to do is demonstrate you can't. There's a different way to do it.

[00:30:40] So if you go to automated trains, you can get down to Copenhagen goes as frequently as 90 seconds, right? Between trains. They're capable of going down to 75 seconds with their latest train set. So what is so let's say 90 seconds. That is a train every minute and a half. That's 40 trains per hour. That's at the same crowding standard.

[00:31:05] Seattle is using 15,800 people per hour going through this second tunnel. Compare that to what Sound Transit is planning in the second tunnel of five trains or 12 trains per hour, five minute headways, 800 people per train. That's 9,600 people per hour. So right off the gates, we know that we can carry more people with this proposal. But so why is it so much cheaper? And why are we confident that it can be that much cheaper?

[00:31:30] So Copenhagen, so first thing that we did was we basically took Copenhagen's most recent project that is a pier to Seattle. It's about 10 miles long, a station every kilometer. So about 1.75 stations per mile or 1.6 versus 1.1 or 1.25 for Sound Transit. Stations are the most expensive part. So we found this pier system, 100% tunnel. So how much does that cost?

[00:31:58] And it works out when you inflate it from the Copenhagen dollar or convert it from Copenhagen dollars or euros to the U.S. dollar and then inflate it with U.S. inflation. It works out to about $600, $620 million per mile. The next thing we did was we said, okay, well, let's talk to payer. Let's understand how they do budgeting. Make sure it's fully loaded. Are they counting the hard costs, soft costs, which David alluded to, kind of the white collar stuff?

[00:32:27] And then are they counting rolling stocks of trained cars? Are they counting operations and maintenance facility? And they are in all of those. They're counting that. Still at $600 to $620 million a mile. For reference, Sound Transit is counting only the track and structures. They are not counting rail cars. Those are in a different budget. They're not counting the operations and maintenance facility needed to support the Ballard extension and the West Seattle extension.

[00:32:56] Those are in a different budget, right? So we're very conservative. And Copenhagen is coming in at about 25% cost of Sound Transit, apples to apples. 100% tunnel versus, you know, 25% to 30% tunnel. So we felt pretty confident that, like, half off is, you know, we're only trying to get halfway to where Copenhagen is, right? So how do they do it is they have, because you're running trains every 90 seconds, their trains are much shorter.

[00:33:25] So their platforms, when we were interviewing Pair, you know, we asked, Trevor asked, what's your average station size? And Pair said, well, that's easy. It's 210 feet because every station is the exact same size. Every station is modular, same design, 100 or 210 feet long. The platforms are, you know, so versus a 680 foot average for the station box for Sound Transit.

[00:33:54] And what does that mean and why is that important, right? Because it's like, oh, I don't know. It's like one is the geometric, right? So you're excavating volume, which is, you know, area times depth, right? So smaller station is much less earth, which is time and money. The other interesting thing, and again, I talked about, like, political solutions or engineering solutions to political problems. Talk to John Scholes and DSA or anybody that's, like, associated with that.

[00:34:24] Now, they do not want decades of disruption constructing these projects. Well, when you have a 700 foot long station box, you are almost guaranteed to be crossing two intersections and one full block. So you're disrupting best case or not guarantee. So two blocks and one intersection or two intersections and three blocks, but it's highly disruptive. So then what has Sound Transit done?

[00:34:48] Well, they've decided, well, we're going to go very, very deep and mine those stations out because we don't want to disrupt the public right of way. Right. And so how do we do that? Well, we're going to have to buy property adjacent to where our station is. We're going to use that to excavate down and then we're going to mine the station out. Right. Versus Copenhagen's coming in and they're saying, OK, well, we're very tiny stations. It all fits within the right of way.

[00:35:13] We're going to dig a tunnel or dig a trench, excavate and, you know, and move less dirt. So we assume, you know, so that's how they're able to get so much cheaper. Is there like it's just like smaller stations, cheaper built. They have shorter tunnels, shorter trains, shorter trains, shorter stations. Right. And then they run the trains more frequently. Yeah. It's like not it's not rocket science. Right. It's like really it's like arithmetic.

[00:35:40] So and that's how that's how they're able to deliver it so inexpensively. And so then we started red teaming it, if you will. So like beating it up, like how would you beat up this proposal? It's like, well, does the ballot language allow it? We think it does. Does would it cause delay to environmental? No, we don't think it would. Why? Because, you know, our proposal is keep the existing station locations that you've already planned and done analysis for.

[00:36:07] All you're doing is building less of them so that would be less disruptive. And, you know, you can do that. You don't need to redo an EIS. That can be a checklist exercise. Or you can just say it's less and be reliant on somebody suing you to prove that you've done it wrong. That gets to the kind of risk tolerance. So it's fundamentally the proposal. Shorter trains, shorter stations, less construction, disruption, carries more people, delivered at a fraction of the cost.

[00:36:34] And then we said, and I think this is the thing that's like super nerdy, like city and transit procurement talk. We basically said, don't stop. Keep going. Keep doing your engineering. Right? At the same time you're doing that issue or request for information. I could write one of those in four to five hours. Right? This is not, it is not a heavy lift procurement document. Send it out to the industry. You're continuing to engineer.

[00:37:03] And then three, four months later, you start hearing back from the industry. And they tell you the idea is crazy or it's not. And if it's not, do it. And if it is crazy, you haven't lost any time. So it was like truly like a no-lose approach. And it's really consistent. So again, we interviewed dozens of people. Right? So we interviewed a bunch of people in Los Angeles. I'm not naming names because many people have asked to be anonymous because Sound Transit is spending tens of billions of dollars.

[00:37:30] So if you're an expert, you don't want to put your name to a report that might be unorthodox or against agency orthodoxy. But they, LA Metro did this exact same thing with the Sepulveda project that they're currently doing. So they had an RFI issued through their Office of Extraordinary Innovation. Then to an RFQ, they shortlisted two consortiums. One led by BYD, which is a Chinese company, does battery buses and among other things.

[00:38:00] And the other was Bechtel. And then at the same time, they were advancing those two proposals. And they were paying them to develop those proposals. Right? Tens of millions of dollars to develop proposals that they might never use. They were at the same time simultaneously advancing a public agency-led option. Right? So they're advancing three projects through the early stages of engineering.

[00:38:25] And when you do that, you essentially are, like when you write a contract, we did something like this in DC. So that's my familiarity with it. But you're essentially paying for the intellectual property that those respondents are producing. And you can use it for other proposals. Right? And there's proprietary stuff like around tech that they would probably hold on to. I haven't seen the contracts. Right? But that's not unusual to do something like that.

[00:38:54] And what you're doing is you're paying to learn more. And then you're eliminating a ton of different risk items. You're seeing how different entities are viewing that risk. Right? So one person may see it. One person may not. So you're kind of de-risking it. But ultimately, they chose a project that they had not studied in NEPA. They're in the CEQA process, which is California's version of NEPA, same as our SEPA. It's more rigorous than NEPA, federal NEPA. So it goes first.

[00:39:24] But they chose an alignment that was an amalgamation of things they had studied in part, but never in whole. And that's the project they're advancing. So that's essentially, I mean, that's super weedy. But that's what we proposed was like zero risk. Just go talk to people and see if there's a better way to do this. Right. Run a, throw out a request to allow people to put forward an alternative as you're working on the current main proposal. A hundred percent. Exactly.

[00:39:55] But bureaucratic momentum or something got in the way. Like we're already spending so much time and money and effort on our current plans that we just can't possibly imagine shifting gears. Even if it could save us tons of money and solve all of our problems, we just can't do that. Yeah. I mean, this is where, I mean, are you guys familiar with the technical advisory committee or group that? Why don't you explain it just quickly? Okay. Yeah.

[00:40:21] So a couple of years ago, Claudia Valducci, I think, put forward a board actually. Claudia Valducci, King County Council. Yeah. On the South Transit Board. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry. I'm like, I'm just talking to you like having beers. Yeah. So put together this technical advisory group to sort of say, hey, how are we doing? Is there a better way to do this? What do we need to do? And I think there was kind of some dissatisfaction with how the agency was progressing at the time.

[00:40:47] And one of the recommendations coming out of that was, you know, you need a mega project manager. Right. And it laid out all the traits of a mega project manager. And this is where I say they have the right team in the wrong project. Right. A good mega project manager is like a heat seeking missile. And what they need to do, you point them at a target and they are really good at ignoring distractions and blocking out things that get in the way of project completion, which

[00:41:14] is absolutely what you want in a mega project manager. But right now they have the wrong project. Right. And so I think that is one component of it. I think another component of it is that you have a board who none of them are. This is all their second job. Right. And they are elected because they are great at another thing. And so this represents risk and uncertainty. And I think at a staff level, it's like you've got momentum.

[00:41:44] We're, you know, we're, we have momentum. We need to keep going. We can't let distraction get in our way. And I think that's like a big part. Change is like, I mean, I don't know, institutional change in large bureaucracies is not for the fact of it. So you're telegraphing already, but let me ask the question explicitly. You've taken this to sound transit. You've taken this presumably to Dow to Dave Summers to, you know, Claudia to whoever else

[00:42:09] on the, you know, Dan Strauss on the, you know, it's a board made up of regional elected officials, their staff, there's all these folks, there's the various entities, the King County exec, the mayor, you've talked about all these folks. He's kind of been shopping it around. So what have you heard? What have they said to me? You know, it's, I mean, that's a fair, that's a fair point. I mean, we were operating up against a clock, right? Because the agency is like very much kind of like trying to get this enterprise initiative and get to alignment on a plan going forward.

[00:42:39] So we didn't have a ton of time to shop it around. So we spent months kind of talking to board member or talking to a few board members, not a ton, talking to staff, talking to consultants that support them, talking to stakeholders. But then when it came time to execute, kind of like put it out there, you know, I had somebody that was a very, very experienced, well-regarded former elected official kind of share the proposal with Dow.

[00:43:10] And they said that, you know, they recommended that Dow talk to me and I reached out to Dow and I didn't really hear anything. I wanted to, you know, I offered a brief like their staff, right? And say, hey, like, I'd love to share with you this product before, you know, it goes public. Because, you know, I think like if you want a bureaucracy to move the best thing, it's got to be their idea. You want it to be their idea, right? And so we didn't want this to be like kind of a public document, candidly.

[00:43:39] But when we didn't hear back, you know, I pinged and said, okay, like, hey, we'd love to get together and kind of explain the idea. Didn't hear back. Like that's when we kind of sent it out and just kind of said, okay, well, like here's an idea. We've talked to a bunch of people. It may be a good approach. It may not. But we both got day jobs that we've got to do and we don't have the time to like do all of the traditional

[00:44:06] kind of grassroots advocacy and organizing and kind of like lobbying of different people. It's just like if it's a good idea, let the good idea win or not. But that was we probably didn't shop it as intelligently as we could and give people a chance and time to react to it. And that's part of my charm is I lack that. Part of the things that have held me back professionally is that I lack that. Well, that's, you know, so take that. Whatever you mean, Scott.

[00:44:35] I have no idea. I have no idea. So basically what you got, though, is what you're saying is you basically got no reaction. Right. I think there was an attempt to ignore it for a long time. I think the further away you get from the halls of power and the halls of sound transit, the more seriously people take the proposal. And the more optimistic people are about it.

[00:45:00] I think every time I hear an objection raised by sound transit, I'm like, you clearly didn't read it. Right. Like I talked to the deputy secretary of DOT under Biden. And she was also then former secretary, undersecretary under Obama. Right. To like talk NEPA. I talked to an acting or not acting assistant secretary. We talked to, you know, CEOs of transit agencies that have run automated metro. Talk to like multiple mega project managers.

[00:45:27] Like you can't, you can discount the idea because I came up with it and you don't like me and you think I'm like a hard person to deal with, which, you know, you would not be the first or sound transit wouldn't be the first to do that. But you can't discount the idea. Right. You can't discount the concept. You can't discount the work that went into it. And, you know, if they want to, if they want to go down the current path that they're on, like, by all means, like, I think it's a, I think they're, I think it's fraud.

[00:45:54] I think they underestimate the amount of anger there is out there from people, you know, as it relates to delivering. So Scott, obviously we got a kind of, you know, a wonky audience of politicos and policy wonks and stuff that listen to this podcast, Seattle Night. So if they, and regular people, there's a few normies, probably there's sprinkled in among the, the freaks and the weirdos who listen to us.

[00:46:22] But, um, but, but for all of those, the normies, the freaks and the weirdos, if they want to take a look at like, what the fuck is this coobley guy talking about that this plan? And I want to look at it myself. Where do they go? And, and, and how do they, how do they kind of dig in there and, and rip it to shreds? Please rip away. Uh, transportation reform.org.

[00:46:43] And truly like at me on blue sky, if you want, like we wanted to, I like, we wanted people to poke at it, to make it a better idea. So like, you know, compliments aren't compliments don't make things better. So tear it up. Blue Sky only people. That's the only place Scott Lindsay will, uh, we'll talk to you. Scott Coobly. My email is available on LinkedIn as well. I'm just not going to broadcast it on a podcast. Yeah. We'll have a link to that document in our show notes as well.

[00:47:13] Scott Coobly. Thanks so much for joining us. Yep. Thank you. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And, uh, Eric will be back next week. Our editor is Quinn Waller. And thanks everybody so much for listening. Thank you.