1. The Sound Transit Board announced its revised ST3 proposal yesterday; it’s a new version of the light rail expansion measure to Everett, Tacoma, Issaquah and within Seattle that the agency originally announced in March. Responding to community criticism that the ST3 plan, which is on this November’s ballot, took too long to get built, the new proposal gets light rail to Ballard and West Seattle along with Everett, Redmond, and Tacoma a little sooner. The Ballard extension from Downtown, for example, will come on line in 2035 instead of 2038 and the West Seattle line from Downtown will come on line in 2030 instead of 2033.

But three other (and bigger) wins for Seattle: The Ballard line will be grade separated (it will be elevated along 15th), North Seattle is getting the new station it wanted (the 130^th Street station in Pinehurst in 2031), and costs of the second downtown tunnel will be paid for regionally, rather than just by taxes generated in Seattle.

Speaking of taxes, the slightly faster timeline—14 and 18 percent decreases in years for Ballard and West Seattle construction respectively—is possible because the agency retooled its financing plan to get more bonding capacity, getting more money in the door sooner. The change increases ST3 from a $50 billion plan to a $54 billion plan, though tax payers would still be paying the same amount annually, about $400 per household.

Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff said it may be possible to speed up the timeline even more with a series of process changes such as: going with a design/build contract instead of a design/bid/build contract, and reversing “the backward” process of having staff design stations and alignments and then presenting them to stakeholders by instead having senior staff meet with stakeholders first to deal with concerns upfront. And finally, Rogoff stressed that local municipalities could speed up delivery by making zoning changes to permit light rail sooner.

Tweeting about this last point from the meeting yesterday, I went with the hashtag  “SuburbsSchoolingSeattle” because Rogoff pointed to suburbs like Redmond and Snohomish, as examples, where local governments had made light rail a “permitted use” in advance. Making light rail a permitted use from the the get-go cuts out much of the finicky building permitting process along the way. Seattle has not done this; we love our process. Issaquah, Kent, and Redmond have also done upzones too, by the way, which could be another sticking point in Seattle.

I asked mayor Ed Murray, a Sound Transit board member, if Seattle was ready to change permitting rules as a way to get light rail on the ground faster. He told me: “Whether we would make [light rail] a permitted use is something we need to explore. There are things we would give up as a city that we might be willing to give up to expedite the process, but we need further discussion to understand exactly what that would mean.”

(And as Seattle Times reporter Mike Linblom points out in his report on yesterday’s announcement, another Seattle level change to accommodate the revised plan—specifically, including the 130^th Street station now—would mean the neighborhood would have to go along with a density upzone around the station.)

The suburbs haven’t totally become model urbanists, though. File this one under suburban mysticism. Giving into demands from the Issaquah city council and the Lake Forest Park city council that, as Lake Forest Park deputy mayor Catherine Stanford put it yesterday (as if she was reading a Zen Buddhist koan): "If you want to get people out of their cars, you need to provide more parking”—the ST board responded with more surface parking in Renton, more parking for Issaquah a new North Sammamish park and ride.

2. Here’s a follow up to this week’s rejoinder (featuring Beyonce) to the Seattle Times’ reactionary column against new city policy that would measure transportation infrastructure by multimodal use rather than by traditional metrics that prioritize single occupancy vehicles. The Times column—totally misunderstanding how cities work— tried to make the case that without prioritizing cars, the city’s arts scene would flounder. As traffic has gotten worse in the last few years, patronage at arts events was declining, the Times said; I pointed to actual data that showed the very opposite.

Well get this, at last night’s annual Capitol Hill Housing community forum, during her presentation on the Capitol Hill Arts District, Velocity Dance executive director Tonya Lockyer happened to note that Velocity had a 348 percent increase in ticket sales over the last three years.

3. The Washington State Democratic Party has named 67 of its 101 pledged delegates to this summer’s Democratic National Convention; 26,000 Philadelphia hopefuls who’d come up through the precinct caucus, and then winnowed down to 1,400 at the Legislative District level, vied for the 67 spots with one-minute speeches at last weekend’s Congressional District caucuses across the state. One name on the list? Relentless Tim Eyman antagonist Andrew Villeneuve, a Sanders delegate from the 1^st Congressional District.

(Full list here.)

There will be 52 Sanders delegates and 15 Clinton delegates. The remaining 34 pledged delegates, 25 for Sanders/nine for Clinton, will be chosen at the Democrats’ state convention in June. There are also 17 superdelegates (including governor Jay Inslee, U.S. senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, and the Democratic house delegation in the U.S. congress.)

The pressure from the Sanders camp to get the superdelegates to switch from Clinton to Sanders votes (based on Sanders’ big March 26^th caucus win) lost some of its populist currency this week when the primary vote, where 500,000 more people voted than voted during the caucus, went for Clinton, 52.5 to 47.4.