Seattle Bike Lanes Costing Taxpayers $12 Million Per Mile

revgen · Jul 23, 2018

$12 million per mile for a bike lane? That should trigger a civic heart attack
Originally published April 27, 2018 at 5:54 pm Updated May 1, 2018 at 11:00 am

The revelation that the biggest tax levy in Seattle history is already short of funds after less than three years ought to prompt a reckoning at City Hall about how they do business. It probably won’t.

By
Danny Westneat
Seattle Times staff columnist
The news that voter-approved bike lanes in downtown Seattle are costing more than 10 times the estimates is said to have nearly sent our new mayor to the ER.

“I thought the mayor was going to have a heart attack when I showed her,” said the interim director of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Bike lanes that voters were told would cost about $860,000 per mile were actually clocking in at an eye-watering $12 million per mile.

This was part of the news that the $930 million Move Seattle package — passed in 2015 and by far the largest tax levy ever in this city — is nevertheless already short of funds to accomplish anywhere near what the voters were promised.

Why? Costs are said to be up. Federal help is said to be down (though Congress just boosted federal transportation spending by 10 percent, so I don’t see how that part can be true).

Most revealing was when an SDOT head allowed this:

“Some of those dollar amounts estimated for what projects would cost were clearly insufficient, even at the time.”

I added the italics to focus you on all you really need to know about this same old story. Which is: They bamboozled us. They exaggerated the benefits while lowballing the costs — knowingly so. To the point that the problem now with the biggest levy in city history is that it’s too small.

As a result, due to be cut back will be everything from miles of bike lanes to bus rapid-transit projects to repaving of arterials.

If the mayor is having a metaphorical heart attack over this, the people who are actually most heartbroken are the bike advocates and safe-streets activists who campaigned most enthusiastically for the levy.

They hailed it at the time as ushering Seattle into an era of green urbanism — of transit-only lanes, road diets and bike corridors. That voters endorsed this vision was seen as a tipping point toward mass transit and away from the car-centric policies of the past.

Now some see the city’s malpractice as blunting all that momentum.

“The past few years of SDOT management have been a disaster,” says Andres Salomon, an activist who has worked with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. “I would describe people in my movement as burned out and frustrated. You work really hard to get your neighbors to support something, to take a leap with you, and then SDOT blows it up. The worry now is that we’ll lose all support for these causes.”

That is a worry, though it should be pointed out that SDOT didn’t fulfill a bunch of its major promises on the previous “Bridging the Gap” roads levy, either. Example: They pledged to voters they would repave 360 miles of arterials, then lowered that to 300 miles after the vote, then cut it to 200 miles before finally actually paving 225 miles. They then awarded themselves an ‘A’ for besting the drastically reduced goal.

“Résumé inflation is usually covering for something,” I wrote about this at the time.

This pattern of overpromising or outright deception — hello, Seattle streetcar — never seems to get the city in too much hot water with voters. Maybe because we’re so desperate for transit and infrastructure improvements.

“I do think this performance will be terrible for future transportation levies — if we don’t fix this,” Salomon said.

Maybe. Something is in the air out there. This past week in Kent, for instance, voters handily defeated two tax levies, one for fire service and the other for police. When voters start saying no to firefighters and cops, it might be a sign they need a bit of a break.

But mostly, Seattle desperately needs to get its act together. Twelve million bucks per mile for a bike lane is insane, even by our normal expectation that all projects will be bloated. At that rate, there would only be enough money in the levy for 5 miles of bike lanes, when voters were promised 50 miles.

This ought to trigger some heart attacks down at City Hall. If it did it would be the healthiest thing that’s happened in city politics in some time.
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Maybe Seattle needs to call Dominos.

While this isn't nearly as bad as the California Bullet Train, it's still a boondoggle. On the surface it appears to be incompetence, but I wouldn't be surprised if graft and corruption is involved too.

LTLakerFan · Jul 25, 2018

"Road Diets" Yeah that's what the vast majority who drive cars out of necessity need .... f****** road diets. And then insult to injury they totally f*** that up with the massive cost overruns.

revgen · Jul 27, 2018

Seattle’s new $52 Million streetcars may be too big to fit tracks, maintenance barn, mayor’s office says

The Seattle Department of Transportation ordered 10 new streetcars in the fall, at a cost of $52 million, as it planned to link the two existing streetcar lines with a new line along First Avenue through downtown.

By
David Gutman

Seattle Times staff reporter

The new streetcars that Seattle ordered to expand the downtown streetcar system are heavier and longer than the ones the city now operates, and it’s unclear if they’ll work on the current track and fit in the maintenance barn, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office said Tuesday.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) ordered 10 new streetcars in the fall, at a cost of $52 million, as it planned to link the two existing streetcar lines with a new line along First Avenue through downtown.

But Durkan halted that work in March and ordered an independent review of the project’s finances, after a Seattle Times report said costs to operate the new system could be 50 percent higher than SDOT had publicly stated.

That independent review, by consultant KPMG, was supposed to be completed within 90 days, a deadline that came and went this past month.

The projected cost to build the project already has risen to $200 million from what had initially been about $150 million.

The KPMG report, the mayor’s office said, found a possible “additional capital shortfall” to build the new line.

Durkan’s office has declined to share draft reports from KPMG. It now says the report should be finished in August.

“The KPMG analysis was much more complex than initially expected — including the review of thousands of estimates, design materials and correspondence,” Durkan’s office wrote Tuesday.

The mayor’s office said a more detailed “engineering review is critical to understanding the cost and feasibility of the project.”

It is unclear if the new streetcars, ordered from manufacturer CAF USA, are compatible with the streetcar system. The city’s contract with CAF USA does allow it to cancel the order, for any reason, provided the city pays for work that’s already done.

“It appears the error will require either a change order for design of the streetcars or incur new costs for construction of new or retrofitted maintenance barns,” City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, a longtime skeptic of the streetcar project, wrote in a blog post last week.

The streetcars the city now owns and operates are made by a different company, Inekon. The city opted for a new manufacturer after Inekon fell behind schedule on cars for the First Hill streetcar line, which opened two years late.

The city asked for a fairly broad list of specifications in the new streetcars, but almost all of the options are longer and heavier than the Inekon cars currently in use.

The city’s contract with CAF USA asks for streetcars between 65 and 75.5 feet long.

The Inekon streetcars are about 66 feet, according to the company.

The CAF USA streetcars are supposed to have a maximum weight of 82,000 pounds to about 95,000 pounds, according to the contract requirements.

But the Inekon streetcars are only about 60,000 pounds, according to the company.

Both the length and weight requirements for the new streetcars were also changed at some point during the contract process to allow for longer and heavier vehicles.

But the new streetcars do not seem to be wider than the current ones. The contract requests streetcars that are 2.45 meters wide (about 8 feet), while Inekon says the current streetcars are 2.46 meters wide. And both sets of streetcars have a track gauge specified at an identical 1.435 meters.

“How does the width and length of the new cars impact the maintenance barn?” Durkan’s office wrote. “Are the new vehicles compatible with the current track gauge? If not, what options, costs and disruptions to service would there be to retrofitting the tracks?”

Ridership on the city’s two existing streetcar lines has lagged expectations, but SDOT predicted that connecting the two lines with a First Avenue line would cause ridership to soar exponentially.

Last month, a coalition of about a hundred business owners and individuals wrote to Durkan, urging her to go ahead with the streetcar project, which they called essential for downtown mobility as the city continues to grow.

That coalition met with Deputy Mayor Shefali Ranganathan on Tuesday.

The project, they noted, has secured $50 million in federal funding with $25 million more likely to follow. That money would almost certainly have to be returned if the project is scrapped.

“This project will finally connect Chinatown-International District and Pioneer Square to the rest of our center city and South Lake Union,” the coalition wrote. “These neighborhoods endured years of streetcar and utility construction, for which they were promised a connected, center city streetcar network.”

There is no timeline for a final decision on the project.
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Wow. You can't make this stuff up.

I'm glad I'm not a Seattle taxpayer.

sirronstuff · Jul 28, 2018

Most of our elected officials can’t balance their own checkbook and have never successfully run a business, so it’s no wonder financial decisions like this get made.

Absolutely shameful. And there are no consequences.

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Seattle Bike Lanes Costing Taxpayers $12 Million Per Mile

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