According to Bellevue City Council member Kevin Wallace, Bellevue is too good for at-grade light rail:
It should not surprise Seattle that Bellevue finds this unacceptable. The Surrey Downs and Enatai neighborhoods are similar to Seattle’s Maple Leaf and Montlake neighborhoods. Imagine the reaction in Seattle if Sound Transit proposed to run light rail at-grade up Roosevelt Way through Maple Leaf, or to condemn 47 homes in Montlake because running at-grade next to Montlake Boulevard would be less expensive than tunneling. Sound Transit protected these neighborhoods in Seattle and should do no less for Bellevue.
Of course, Wallace doesn’t bother to mention the at-grade alignment down in here in South Seattle, because those neighborhoods are filled with black people and immigrants, so, I guess, in his mind, that’s not an apples to apples comparison.
Uh-huh.
Wallace’s classless classism aside, the thing that really needs realignment here is the anti-rail crowd’s perspective on who light rail really serves. They see it as a blight and an inconvenience… a means of conveying people past their neighborhoods, hopefully unseen. But I’m pretty darn sure that the vast majority of folks near rail stations down here in South Seattle see light rail as a tremendous neighborhood amenity… an inexpensive and convenient means of getting to and from the downtown, the airport and all stops in between, without worrying about the vagaries of traffic and the expense of driving.
I don’t have much hope of changing Wallace’s perspective, as his patrons are so heavily invested, emotionally and otherwise, in their anti-rail jihad. But if he’d like to come down to South Seattle and look for himself, I’d be happy to give him a tour.
Some people in South Seattle have a different perspective: they wonder why they didn’t get full grade separation as well.
MLK pre light rail seemed a lot wider than Roosevelt, or than the streets in 112th into which light rail tracks would be placed. This is an impression and please feel free to post the real widths.
How many homes were removed in South Seattle? At least the businesses that were impacted got a significant amount of mitigation.
Frankly I think every neighborhood is too good for at-grade light-rail – I wish light-rail ran to/through every neighborhood in Seattle, and that we could afford to build it grade-separated everywhere it went.
Commentator @1,
MLK did not lose any lanes. In fact, as a pedestrian crossing it, I’d say MLK is too wide in places. The end result is that N/S traffic on MLK runs much faster, with less traffic than before construction, while there are some delays crossing MLK.
As for light rail itself, I think I’ve only been on the train once when it needed to stop between stations. For the most part, it operates at full speed.
SuperSteve @2,
In the best of all possible worlds, we could afford a massive subway system. Or, we could just do what Portland did, and build what we can afford.
First of all, I’m not fooled by the timing and purpose of this post. Goldy is trying to take my attention away from “Hiringfreezegate.” Goldy told us to vote for Gregoire, who says there is a hiring freeze and a budget crisis, but is hiring new people like never before.
Secondly, so let me see if I understand something. Goldy believes that because the Rainier Valley has at-grade rail, every other community must have it, too, otherwise it would be racism? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s absurd of Goldy to say that rail that goes through tunnels in white neighborhoods is racist.
news flash: there are some brown people in the mega suvs of bellevue, though kevin wallace is as white as they come. i say shut all roads to bellevue down and make it a bike/walk only city called kempertown.
@5 Whatever Gregoire’s doing, Rossi would have done far, far worse. Either that, or he would have pulled a Sarah Palin and gone running home to his mommy.
Well look at this, you little lying piece of shit.
“Bellevue … has a larger percentage of nonwhite residents than Seattle.”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ty19e.html
“Bellevue … has a larger percentage of nonwhite residents than Seattle.”
they’re taking all whitey’s jobs with their superior overseas educational systems and shit.
Maybe ST should build light rail someplace the wants it. In the long run Bellevue will be the loser.
troll-
You are correct.
Goldy made a big deal about “hiring freezes”.
Turned out to be another Gregoire smoke-and-mirrors campaign just as I predicted.
Lots of loopholes.
Ineffective.
Useless.
So instead, even though the State & local government is broke…let’s dream about light rail.
Money is no object.
Just have Obama print more and throw it around.
Troll @ 8
Bellevue also has nearly twice as many foreign born immigrants (31%) as does Seattle (19%). These figures were from 2006, and the percentage of both non-whites and immigrants in Bellevue has increased further since then — and at a greater rate than for Seattle.
An even bigger issue is that Sound Transit wants the City of Bellevue to pay $150 million for the cost of building a tunnel through downtown Bellevue. This would require Bellevue to raise the city portion of the property tax by 37% for 20 years to fund the tunnel.
By contrast, none of the tunnels already built or proposed to be built in Seattle — both downtown and through numerous neighborhoods — have required a dime out of the Seattle city budget.
Wallace’s perspective may be driven by his own fortune as much as his patrons. His family owns and runs one of the biggest real estate development/property management firms in the area and they have been involved in all kinds of conservative politics to pad their fortunes for some times.
According to Ben Bernanke, no new money has been printed.
no way, kevin wallace is conflicted?
Yep, there are a lot of immigrants over here in Bellevue, where I work. Quite a few who appear to be Indian and apparantly make good money, presumably at Microsoft or other Hi-Tech companies. They tend to bring their extended families with them, all in the country quite legally. And there are the Japanese/Korean/Chinese immigrants from the previous influx.
And Bellevue has certainly seen an influx of hispanics, mostly in the labor occupations (construction, landscaping, nanny, etc.).
But a couple of notes about how this settles out. The wealthist reside at the eastern shore of Lake Washington (western Bellevue, Medina, etc.), and after you cross I-405, the democraphis become increasingly less wealthy. By the time you get to the Crossroads area, you begin to see blocks of apartment complexes which are populated by those “serving” the wealthier clientale or their businesses. There were articles in the paper a few years back about how parking is such a problem there due to Bellevue’s policy against providing on-street parking, and limited parking spaces in the apartment complexes themselves.
But the Light Rail plan isn’t going that far. It’s stopping along Bellevue Way, for now. Which is right in the heart of traditional Bellevue, which is the entertainment/shopping haven for Bellevue money, either new or old.
So in Bellevue it may not be a racial debate, but it is a class debate. Bellevue will tolerate members of other races as long as they bring sufficient money with them. But I noticed that almost all of the homes potentially affected by the planned light-rail route are the residences of white people.
Coming to a neighborhood in Bellevue soon. This isn’t blight??
http://www.flickr.com/photos/b.....199956963/
(Picture of a tagged Link train pulling into the Othello Station).
OMG! The brown horde has reached Bellevue! heh- Let’s all pray that the Cascade mountains slows their advance to Montana.
heh- Some of the east side’s oldest suburban developments are practically ghettos. So sad.
I think Bellevue might adopt a different attitude to Light Rail once they understand that it makes it easier for the “help” to arrive for work each day, and also makes it easier to make sure they get out of town at the end of the day, as well.
After working in Bellevue for some 17 years now, I still recall one of my early frustrations here. It came when I was trying to find a parking space to attend some errand or another. The parking lot for the businesses at the small strip mall were full, and there was NO street parking available anywhere near.
That’s when I looked around, and realized, that with only a few exceptions, Bellevue has an official policy, enforced through it’s zoning and street-plans: you can park to shop, or you can park at your residence, or you can park in the space provided for you by your employer. But you can’t park on on the street, and just walk around. If you don’t live here, work here, or shop here, you simply aren’t welcome here. Move along, now.
@22
No, Bellevue is simply encouraging people to use mass transit by putting its streets on a roadside parking stall diet. Seattle has its road diet. Bellevue has its parking diet. Less parking spaces is better for the environment.
And if it will help ease the angst of the honorable councilman, I have observed that on light rail, as on the Metro buses, black people still board and head straight to the back of the bus/train thus isolating themselves from the white folk.
@8 (troll) well observed.
@9 india puts out more tech developers but i believe MSFT still has a preference for american born computer science peeps. independent thinking and problem solving continue to be american virtues. for now…
@23 i don’t think i’d give the city any credit for a public transit conspiracy… but it does baffle me how hard it is to park and walk on the east side. also, how many cars there are, considering the width of the roads and how small the population is.
@4 (GOLDY) in a perfect world, someone like paul allen would build the public transportation system and make millions off it.
@24 someone should create a law, requiring all white people to make at least one black friend! =D
goldy my man with a very small dick who couldnt please his wife,
all those brown people who used to live in rainier vista and farther south have now been displaced because of light rail and other rising costs and replaced with self serving liberal progressive gentrifying whites.
so in reality it serves progressives to get rid of the brown people who would actually throw a wrench in racist progressive plans and call for more cost effective interim fixes (like more reliable bus service)
but goldy doesnt care about the poor or the brown people he just wants the light rail built even though he doesnt live in that neighborhood
btw im from Beacon hill and the light rail is pretty nice and a good ride to get downtown (even more so now that parking rates will rise) but the gentrifying whites are annoying POS.
http://www.newgeography.com/co.....white-city
Someone should start a state fund to get this moron a new brain.
Three of the most miserable years of my life were spent working in Bellevue. I found it soooo delicious when the good burghers of the eastside started to be victimized by the Russian gangsters who had moved into those big apartment complexes that the developers foist on King County.
Schaedenfreude.
Asswipe Wallace ignores the fact that Bellevue voters approved ST2. The right never lets pesky little things like facts get in the way.
@28 maybe i’ll just come to your house and eat yours? nom nom nom! its quite juicy and full of smarts
“but the gentrifying whites are annoying POS.”
I grew up in the valley. There were still farms there at the time. It was pretty much white to start. That is, heh- if you consider the Irish, Jews and Italians to be white. There was also some Asians, mostly Japanese I’d say, and some Chinese and Filipinos. The International District, or Chinatown as we called it, stopped at the north end of Beacon Hill and the Chinese population kind of phased out as you went south. There was some tension between the Chinese and Japanese, mostly at the adult level, but it would drift down to the kids. I wondered if that wasn’t why the Japanese seemed to be more on the east side of the Beacon Hill slope, somewhat separate from the Chinese. Much later came the Vietnamese, Cambodians and other SE Asians. Following WWII, the housing projects were pockets of blacks and other poor of varying stripes, including many whites, but no Asians. The demographics were always evolving. Even in my day, when the SE Asians were showing up, it was like, “WTF?”
But yeah, this gentrification shit is squeezing out the old demographic, the kind of people who were historically “dumped” in the south end because they really weren’t much welcome anywhere else and probably couldn’t afford it even if they were.
too be fair the various brown tribes had decades to improve their communities even with limited resources and they chose not too.
also to be fair as i did a research project on rainier vista it is a very successful gov’t redevelopmental program (a public-private venture) in regards to density and mixed income communties that will pay out far more in tax revunes then the 240 Mil spent to develope it, but the pretentious yuppie PC democrat whites need to go.
“too be fair the various brown tribes had decades to improve their communities even with limited resources and they chose not too.”
I agree wholeheartedly. The Irish should have cleaned up their act a long time ago.
“also to be fair as i did a research project on rainier vista it is a very successful gov’t redevelopmental program”
Did they do to Rainier Vista as they did to High Point and Holly Park? Damn. I always hoped they would turn them into golf courses. I really ought to get down to the valley more often. I still have some friends down there who didn’t escape like the others. That was one of the things that happened. Families would stay there one generation after another. Then almost all of my generation left. There go the old demographics. In came more blacks and the SE Asians to take their place.
they did but Rainier vista is by far the flagship program. Housing density increased 65% and even though greenspaces area droped the quality of those that remain are substation-ally higher. There is also mixed income and mixed used facilities and relevant communtity service support facilities.
How in the world can you folks even dream about light-rail projects. The business climate in Washington State is horrific. Unemployment insurance tax statements arrived in most mailboxes last week and even with fair warning from the Employment Security Department, the tax increases are startling. The department reported that the average increase would be 41 percent, but just like last year, employers are seeing increases that exceed 200-300 percent. I just talked to one business where his rate went up much more than 300%. He was told that because he hadn’t laid folks off, he needs to pay more!! He told the UI staffer that with these increases in UI and Workers Comp. (12%), he was going to now have to lay people off.
The UI Staffer could give a sh*t!!
So dream on…but for a change, dream about where the $$ is going to come from.
Probably hurts your “visioning glands” to think practically about how to pay for your dreams and the consequences of your scheme to grab more tax money.
I figure locating the LRT line and stations next to the RR tracks would work if a frequently convenient transit shuttle were arranged to transfer patrons from the station to downtown Bellevue. However, smart-ass know-it-all liberals couldn’t wrap their pointy little heads around that idea probably because they, like full-fledged anti-transit conservatives, are accustomed to the notion of the proverbial 1-seat ride, nevermind that transit systems cannot work without transfers.
@30…
..dream on sparky.
This is EXACTLY the time to initiate large scale, long term public works projects.
There are thousands of building trades professionals out of work. Big construction companies with whole divisions that are idle.
Investment in infrastrucre is an investment in the future and it pays didvidends NOW.
But the MISTER-Cynical-ASS-Klowns of the world are too wrapped up in their “me first and fuck everybody else” mentality to care.
@36
Worry about your problems in Portland Art Lewellen.
Before the light rail along MLK was built, many of us in the neighborhood WANTED a surface alignment, because it felt safer for our neighborhood (we didn’t want to be in a tunnel at 11:00 at night). Then a lot of folks changed their minds.
Before the second I-90 tunnel was built, many of us in the neighborhood wanted to make sure that the housing was restored. Then when some of the open space after construction was proposed to be dedicated to housing, a lot of folks changed their minds.
My brother-in-law grew up in the Surrey Downs neighborhood, inherited his parents’ house, wishes Bellevue were still “Olde Bellevue” and will surely have an aneurism if light rail ever runs down 112th. He is also a bigot and a moron. Some folks never change their minds.