It’s been a sea change at Sound Transit in just the past 10 years since Sound Transit 2 (ST2) was approved. In 2008 the voters approved ST2, a 15-year program that authorized substantial additions to the express bus service, commuter rail service and 36 miles of light rail service.
At that time, Ric Ilgenfritz, executive director of planning, environmental and project development, said the dominant political narrative was, should Seattle have a mass transit system or not?
That has shifted dramatically as the agency has rapidly grown and is about to open a huge expansion of the light rail system which will come close to doubling the ridership.
This coming fall Sound Transit will be going back to voters for ST3, which will enable the agency to keep growing to the north, south, east and west.
At the end of 2015, the Sound Transit Board of Directors appointed Peter Rogoff, former head of the Federal Transit Administration, to become its chief executive officer, replacing Joni Earl, who is retiring.
Sixteen years ago Sound Transit was having a very difficult time getting its first rail project off the ground and Rogoff said he was spending a lot of time with the then-new CEO Joni Earl in getting the agency off the ground and back in the good graces of the Federal Transit Administration, Secretary Mineta and the inspector general.
Having worked closely with the agency, Rogoff said he kept a very good working relationship with Earl through all those years since. “I feel a certain kinship to the agency in terms of having been part of its growth and now I’m really excited to be central to its growth.”
At the time of ST2, the burden of proof was on Sound Transit to make the case for having a transit system. Now, he said, “It’s shifted to we can’t do enough, fast enough to satisfy the public’s desire.”
He continued, “We have people following what we do extremely closely, not because they’re skeptical or opposed, but because they want us to do more and they want it to be outstanding and they want it to happen quickly.
“It’s a very, very high-performing agency with a very good and well-deserved reputation.
“It’s also in a region of the country that not only believes in transit but needs more of it quite desperately.”
Last year the region took in more than 1,000 additional residents every week and those 52,000 residents brought an estimated 40,000 additional cars.
“Traffic here, especially at peak times, is truly punishing,” he stressed.
In addition, they are expecting a million more residents by 2040 in the taxing district, which will compound the needs.
Past Experience
Ilgenfritz said Sound Transit has a culture of learning and adapting to continuously improve. Some of the lessons brought from the early capital project delivery experience brought in to ST2 planning, was how they develop the scope of a project, estimate costs and establish schedules.
“We’ve carried those methodologies forward from the agency’s early experience into our system planning and it’s paid off,” he said.
The primary consultant team for system planning is Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), who they also used in ST2. Sound Transit develops project concepts working with its board and partner jurisdictions and Ilgenfritz said they task PB with developing the details, project descriptions and then doing conceptual engineering review and based on that, developing cost estimates and preliminary schedules.
Last year the board went through a public process to develop and vet a candidate project list. In August 2015 the board adopted a candidate project list and the team went ahead and performed the technical analysis on those candidate projects.
“That’s where Parsons [Brinckerhoff] and our team completed their first wave of technical work,” Ilgenfritz said. “We fed all of that information back to our board in December as a technical matter.
“All of the candidate projects are now pending before the board and it’s the board discretion to pick from that list of candidate projects to form a proposed system plan.”
At the end of March the board will release the proposed system plan for the final round of public comment.
Ilgenfritz said, “That’s when the board will sort of put a stake in the ground and formally propose a financially balanced plan with tax revenues and a time horizon and the capital component.”
“With ST3 coming up, the most important discussions that are happening right now are among our 18 board members in coming up with the package that we want to bring to the voters,” said Rogoff.
The board is wrestling with which projects to put before the voters and how to get them all done, however, Rogoff said, “We don’t have, I think, an extraordinarily hard sell job to with the voters because they experience that traffic every day.
“According to our recent surveys of the public, there’s extraordinarily strong support for expanding rail and bus service — like 85 percent support for it.”
The most important challenge they face, Rogoff said, it in making the ST3 package real to every individual voter.
“You win these elections one vote at a time.
“You need to be sure that you’re talking to the voters in language that is relevant to their daily commute and their mobility for their family patterns and not in a kind of planner-engineer-speak, as sometimes transit agencies fall into.”
As they move forward in the planning stage, Rogoff said, “I think the thing that needs to be the organizing principle always, is to improve mobility. And, how we make that happen as quickly as possible.
“Sometimes when you tell a community how long it will take to reach them with light rail, they groan at the number of years it will take, but I want to infuse the notion that it can happen more quickly if everyone partners together and really works hand-in-glove to make it happen more quickly.
“We’ve seen that in the permitting process nationally, we’ve seen some success with the President’s Permitting Dashboard.
“I’ve been talking with some partners around the region here just in my first month about how we can take that model and make it applicable for the local permitting and planning process so we can try to get these project in the ground more quickly.”
Modern Engagement
The methods of outreach have dramatically changed since the last time Sound Transit went out to the voters. In 2008 Ilgenfritz said they were just beginning to see the dominant role of social media in reaching out to the public.
“It was just at the beginning of that wave of social media taking over as a primary communication tool and now it’s the centerpiece of how we interact with the public.
“In 2008 we had something like 8,000 public comments during the last public review of our proposed system plan,” he said. “The first wave of public outreach on this plan last summer, we got over 25,000 comments in a much shorter period of time.”
“And that was all online,” added Sound Transit Public Information Officer Bruce Gray. They use microsites to elicit feedback from the public and using Facebook and Twitter, push people to those sites to submit comments and pass that on to the board.
“From a communications point of view, it’s night and day,” explained Gray. “In 2008 we were sending out postcards and glossy mailers to a million residents and now there’s still some of that you have to do by statute, but largely we’re using online resources to get the word out and get information disseminated.”
There’s a formal portal at st3.org that gets recorded and they take comments at public meetings.
“It’s a menu of tools that we use to record comments,” said Gray.
Ilgenfritz said, “It’s a very savvy audience and they’re holding us to a pretty high standard. It rquires a lot of continuous engagement to work with folks.
“We’re a very wired city both in terms of digital culture and caffeine,” said Ilgenfritz. “The good news is, all those digital outlets that are following politics and transit so closely are always hungry for content.
“If a post erupts and a debate erupts about a particular topic, we have a good enough relationship with folks that manage those outlets that we can work with them to get our content into the mix.”
University Link Extension
In March Sound Transit will have opened a new segment that connects the two largest employment centers in the state of Washington: downtown Seattle and the University of Washington.
Ilgenfritz said, “There’s 45,000 students at the University of Washington and probably close to that many faculty and employees and the two areas are separated by water crossings and a series of very steep hills.”
With only one highway connecting the areas, it exists in a state of perpetual congestion because the traffic all comes down to a bridge over a water crossing. “When this segment opens, it’s going to create an 8-minute trip where today, 20 to 25 is the norm.”
Rider projections are that the University Link will add 71,000 riders to the system by 2030.
Rogoff said, “It’s going to open up light rail to literally the densest communities in the state of Washington and connect to our flagship university here.
“My experience at the FTA has taught me that when you connect major employers, universities, hospitals, airports, central business districts, it’s always a win.”
He added, “If I had a worry about that extension right now, I worry we may have underestimated ridership.”
The project is $115 million under budget and 6 months ahead of schedule. The project includes twin tunnels, each 3.15 miles long and two subway stations, one at the University of Washington and one at Capitol Hill.
It was a complex project that required extensive planning to ensure they would stay on track. Ahmad Fazel, director of Link light rail, said between 2007 and 2009, Sound Transit worked closely with the FTA when it came to planning for the extension. They wanted to ensure they were best prepared for the underground construction.
Gray explained they talked a lot about the geotechnical work and the advanced drilling that went in to the project before things really got going.
One thing they did up front, explained Joe Gildner, ULink project director, was to make sure they had a solid understanding of the hydrogeological conditions. There are a lot of glacial soils that vary widely. “We wanted to make sure we had a good baseline understanding of these conditions, not only for the running tunnels, but also for the subway stations that we were going to be building.
“One of the things we did do in terms of making sure we did baseline these conditions along the entire line, and most prudent orders do that, in order to make sure that the bidders know that we’re taking stock of the nature of the conditions that are likely to be encountered as you go into construction,” he said.
Another consideration was the concurrent construction that would be going on at some locations. At the University of Washington, the football stadium was under renovation at the time Sound Transit was building the subway station and there were some conditions about the manner in which they could support excavation before the station was built.
At Capitol Hill, there are a lot of apartments, buildings and businesses in and around the station, which prescribed different ways in which they would engage with the community. Gildner explained that respectful ground rules for different environments all had to be identified up front and inserted into the contract documents so the contractors knew what the rules were as they did their work.
“The other thing we did,” he said, “we packaged this project such that we had our tunnel contractors primarily focus on constructing the tunnels.
“They did excavate the station holes for us ahead of building the stations so they could launch their tunnel boring machines effectively and then we separated out the finish work of the two stations to other contractors so that they could come in strategically and start building those stations while we were still building our tunnels.”
The tunnels go under an interstate and there were a number of man-made features that were going to be in the way of the tunnels and the tunnel boring machines aren’t geared up to cut through reinforced concrete. “They’re geared up to deal with glacial soil, so we had to see that as a risk,” said Gildner.
They did an advance contract and removed those man-made elements from the tunnel horizon before the boring machines arrived and went under I-5.
“We had to do everything to protect I-5 so we didn’t damage it, given its importance here in the region,” he said.
Ahmad said some credit goes to their funding partner, the FTA, because it was incessant on doing comprehensive risk assessment on the project. He said they came off thinking ahead and being prepared to accommodate the risks.
“We did our homework and made sure that we could mitigate some of this risk and by doing so,” explained Fazel, “using contingencies to mitigate that risk caused us to save money and also time.”
The contract packaging arrangements for this project were done differently than Sound Transit’s Beacon Hill tunnel and station on the initial segment.
“We utilized our general contractor construction manager type procurement,” said Gildner. “We did so in order to maximize what we wanted to achieve with our station finish contractors and our systems contractor as it related to that follow-on work that was being done concurrently and as a follow-on to our tunnel work.”
After Fazel and Gildner had explained the construction process, Gray added, “That’s kind of our engineer’s way of saying anything that could go wrong, did not really go wrong on this project.”
Fazel agreed, saying, “It was really good work from engineers and construction staff and a little bit of good luck.”
The Northgate Lake Extension is already under construction and has four miles of tunnels and includes all the challenges that the University Link had. There are two underground stations and one elevated station next to Northgate Mall.
The budget is about $2.1 million but that doesn’t include financing costs because it’s not federally funded.
Construction began in 2012 and it will be open for service in 2021.
Speaking of so many projects happening in a short amount of time, Fazel stressed, “We are implementing a plan that we promised to the voters.
“Almost 8 years into it, we have done a good job. We are remaining on schedule to deliver on a promise made in 2008.”
When asked what the biggest challenge facing Sound Transit Ilgenfritz stated, “Figuring out how to do enough to satisfy the people.”
An Insider’s Perspective
Having been the FTA administrator, Rogoff provided some insight on working with the FTA. “I think part of the challenge between transit agencies and the FTA is, transit agencies don’t always understand why FTA makes all of these information requests and requires so much data and material.
“When you’re on the other side and you’re selling projects to Congress and you’re selling them to the secretary’s office, to OMG and other elements of the White House and you’re competing for federal funds against other investments, there’s a reason why that data’s collected and why agencies are put through a variety of hoops.
“It’s not always made clear to the agencies themselves, so people get kind of cynical to why all of these processes are necessary.”
He added, “I don’t doubt there are some that may be overkill, I think I’ll discover that over time.”
When speaking of his time at the FTA, there were a number of things that he was really proud of having accomplished.
“At the FTA, I really felt like I had a good imprint, with partners like Brian Farber, of getting the agency to tell its story better.
“I think prior to the Obama Administration, the FTA sometimes tried to hide under a rock a little bit and not promote all the good work it was doing.
“I think that was an important change.”
He said he felt he was also able to resuscitate the FTA’s important civil rights function and make clear that the administration took civil rights responsibilities seriously.
“I think that has shown itself in how agencies are getting clear guidance on how to comply with Title 6 and environmental justice, ADA, which sometimes would function in the gray before.”
He said he believes they made the Triennial Review process more user-friendly and more value-added to the transit agencies, rather than doing just a backward-looking “gotcha” game to doing a forward-looking, value-added discussion of how the federal government and the agency can work in partnerships for the challenges that the transit agency faces in the future.
“I’ll discover soon whether that’s true because our Triennial Review here at Sound Transit is coming up.”
He continued, “… being the transit administrator during the Obama Administration was a very privileged thing to be because there’s not one initiative, whether it was reducing greenhouse gases, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, promoting the lives of hardworking people and making their lives more affordable and more enjoyable, I mean every one of these initiatives that the administration has launched, transit has been at the table.
“That, I don’t think, has been historically true for the agency in terms of White House initiatives.
