Let’s change the narrative and talk about improving things with ST4
As a Kirkland resident I don’t directly benefit from current 1 or 2 lines, but I do enjoy using them to get to Seattle. The stations are lovely and the trains are fun to ride and make Seattle act like a real, proper, city.
The doom and gloom about the ST3 deficit and deferred projects is deserved, but we can be solution-oriented and reframe the dialogue. ST4 will need to bailout ST3; but this has always happened! ST2 bailed out SoundMove (ST1) and ST3 bailed out ST2. Ballard deserves to be built out and more of Seattle, and Eastside deserve more LR too.
Our collective anger needs to be harnessed into demanding more - letting our voices be heard that YES we want these trains, and are willing to pay for it. I believe the latent demand for good transit in Puget Sound region is massive.
Here is a link to Seattle Subway describing what we potentially could vote for. To me ST4 would fund and restore timelines of ST3 and hopefully build a line from UW to Ballard and extend 4 line into downtown Kirkland, Juanita, and Totem Lake.
As others have mentioned, structural changes can be made to help this - allow 75 year bonds; change the arbitrary 1.5% RTA cap to a higher number; have the STATE directly fund this (so stupid that it doesn’t).
Structural changes like this compress timelines and allow the lines to be built easier. We can continue to build trains and expand the Link network instead of doomering about delayed projects and bickering over what gets built.