I may be the least knowledgeable person on transit issues or transit economics among today's list of contributors, but I'll offer a few thoughts with that disclaimer.

First, great cities have great urban mass transit serving their urban core, conveniently and quickly connecting neighborhoods to neighborhoods and neighborhoods to downtown. ... Seattle, by any measure, does not. The question isn't whether regional transit planning and capacity is good - it's whether Sound Transit is truly positioned, financially and politically, to manage all of the transit needs of a (hopefully increasingly) dense Seattle urban environment on anything less than a generational timeline. If so, we certainly don't need to recreate the wheel. But if not, urban leaders have every right - and responsibility - to step up and propose alternatives that create great urban mass transit on a faster timeline.

Secondly, I agree that while the technology itself may not be the most important consideration, buses in particular (and to a lesser extent other at-grade options) are slow, get stuck in traffic, and pose a hidden tax in lost hours of time for those without faster options. What a driver might pay in downtown parking a busrider loses in lost hours of productivity or lost hours of time with family & community. For those seeking speed and convenience, rail and neighborhood streetcars connecting neighborhoods have a justifiably high appeal.

Third, all of our public policies should discourage suburbanization and sprawl and should encourage urban height, density, affordable housing, successful inner-city schools, and living wage jobs all within the city of Seattle. We should aim to make it cheaper and more convenient to live in the city and more expensive and inconvenient to live in the suburbs.

The fact that only 18% of our region’s population lives in Seattle (compared to, say, New York, where nearly 40% of the entire State's population lives in the 5 Boroughs) is a testament not to some mythical free market, but rather to the fact that our public policies have encouraged sprawl, discouraged height & density, under prioritized the need for affordable urban housing in order to preserve anachronistic "single family neighborhoods," short-changed inner-city public education, and allowed private sector wage-earners to go for a generation without a pay raise, making Seattle housing out of reach for many. Public policy should absolutely recognize the needs and existence of suburbs, while it tries to shrink them.

I can sympathize with Mayor McGinn’s desire to speed up the delivery of high-quality transit services in his city. We share this desire in Bellevue where we’ve supported the voter-approved ST2 initiative to extend light rail to Bellevue and Redmond, pursued a Transit Now partnership with Metro to create a circulator in our downtown and supported legislation to allow cities to provide their own bus service (thanks again, Deb [Eddy]!)

That said, it is critical that the regional transit system we build works as a whole. It has to be easy to use and connect people to centers across the region. We are challenged as it is to provide an integrated system with the patchwork of funding and planning in place. Transit expansions should be carefully planned so that they support the most seamless system possible.

I do think there is a way for the Mayor to try to accelerate transit delivery in Seattle without “going it alone.” We have a few examples right now of cities and ST working cooperatively on light rail projects that go beyond the scope of the voter-approved plans. The City of Tacoma is working with Sound Transit to add an infill station on the Tacoma light rail line. In Bellevue, we negotiated and signed a term sheet with Sound Transit to essentially split the excess costs of a downtown transit tunnel, which wasn’t in the scope of the ST2 proposition.

In both of these cases, the plans have been (or will be) worked out between the governing body of the city and the Sound Transit Board. This ensures that the needs of both agencies are met, that plans are coordinated, and that work on the expanded projects doesn't detract from the existing expansion plans. It would seem a similar approach could help move Seattle's plans forward - one way to start might be a partnership where the city supports funding of resources necessary to accelerate the already-planned corridor study.