Must Sound Transit 2 Include Street Cars?

There is a lively conversation going on over at the Tacoma Urabanist. The topic is the next Sound Transit package and some Tacoma neighborhood groups’ insistence that it include a street car network for Tacoma. We will put aside for a moment the fact that the plan has to be finalized by Sound Transit in a week and that this kind of lobbying needed to occur before the first ST2 package was announce or at least shortly after it failed.

Sound Transit has protection for each of the participating areas called subarea equity. This divides the area from Snohomish County to Pierce County into 5 regions. These regions include:

• Pierce County
• South King County
• North King County
• East King County
• Snohomish County 

Sound Transit may only spend in each region what it is able to raise in that region. This would prevent the dollars being spent on starting the southward migration of the lightrail from Seatac to Tacoma that is in initial ST2.1 proposal details from being used instead to extend light rail from Seattle all the way to the Redmond Microsoft campus (Sound Transit will fall just a few miles short). The Microsoft campus light rail expansion is much more popular than the southward light rail expansion but would not be good for South King County where the tax dollars are. (BTW the light rail extension in South King County will be good for Pierce County).

If we want a citywide streetcar network anytime soon we need to do what Seattle did. We will need to get the City of Tacoma to raise money and to get money from both the state and the federal government to build it. Maybe we need to look at some of our other priorities (i.e. sacred cows). Who wants a refurbished Murray Morgan bridge more than a street car from downtown Tacoma to TCC via "the best route" ™?

(I don’t have time to write about the pros/cons of express bus service and Sounder commuter rail that are being challenged in the comments section but you can check it out for yourself.)