As I said in today’s Open Thread, McGinn announced the next step on the Missing Link. So it’s that Seattle will conduct an Environmental Impact Statement.
“We are eager to complete the Missing Link, and conducting a full EIS is the best way to break the legal log jam on this project,” said McGinn. “We are also moving ahead on safety improvements on the street that can be implemented quickly to help everyone share the road.”
“For over a decade the City has been working to complete the Burke-Gilman Trail. I am confident that with careful planning both bicyclists and freight and industrial traffic will be able to co-exist successfully in Ballard,” said Rasmussen, chair of the City Council’s Transportation Committee.
“The Burke-Gilman Trail is a busy, multi-use trail that provides an important connection to residents and businesses in Ballard. I’m glad to see that the City is moving ahead with its plans to close the Missing Link and with these other safety improvements,” said Davidya Kasperzyk, Founding Board Member of Friends of the Burke-Gilman Trail.
For the past decade and a half or so, I’ve been skeptical and excited about the next step on the missing link pretty much whatever the next step is. So hopefully the EIS will get done and we can finally go ahead on completing it. But who knows?
This was about light rail? I thought the link had something to do with archeology!
It’s a freight line. When the Ballard Terminal took over the north bank spur from Burlington Northern(not sure, I think the merger with the Santa Fe might have been in the negotiation phase when this happened) had three customers, but now only one is left, Salmon Bay Gravel, and it is only served at night, and about once or twice a week/month. The crew drives in from the railroads other operations near Woodinville and Puyallup. If the line east of it’s current location had not been taken up, perhaps at least kept in place as far as Fremont, perhaps the trash from the North Transfer Station could be moved out by rail instead of truck, but the neighborhoods would not go for it, anyway.
I thought Carl might get a kick out of this:
http://yehudamoon.com/12282012/
Because a zillon trucks hauling garbage is so much preferable than one train…
Probably because they would notice the train, although it would have been just a few cars at a time. At the time most of the rail line was taken up, locomotives were pretty smoky, even for diesels. It was before environmental regulations became the norm, and before the GenSet switcher. The city already moves the trash by train to a landfill in Oregon, and those trucks pass through the neighborhood. That is one of the drawbacks to that city policy. It started after the rail lines to the transfer stations disappeared, or in the case of the one in South Park, never been there.