At some point, a train has to close the doors and move out of the station. Even if more people want on board.
Sound Transit has reached that point as it prepares to lay commuter-rail tracks from Freighthouse Square through Tacoma’s Dome District and over Pacific Avenue.
Many of the district’s advocates are bitterly opposed to the transit agency’s plan to build a berm to carry the tracks through the neighborhood. They favor a “post-and-beam” design. Unlike the berm, the post-and-beam structure would be open underneath, not an impenetrable earthen wall.
This controversy quickly becomes very arcane.
For example, Sound Transit planners say the path of the sloping berm could be beautified like a parkway – and the post-and-beam alternative could wind up as a gathering place for transients and derelicts. Opponents counter that the berm would likely become a neglected, weed-ridden eyesore, and a post-and-beam design would lend itself to vibrant commercial development.
The conflicting claims – some based on hypotheticals – are hard to sort out.
But this isn’t merely a local dispute over the future of a few blocks in downtown Tacoma.
The route through the Dome District is the only unfinished segment of the corridor that will extend Sounder service to South Tacoma and Lakewood. Lakewood has been waiting for what seems eons for the long-promised commuter trains to arrive.
Residents of the Lakewood area have been taxed since 1996 to pay for a line that was originally supposed to reach them in 2001. Without further complications or design changes, they’ll finally get Sounder in early 2012.
The hard truth is that any major transportation project – whether it be rail, highway or airport – leaves people unhappy.
The berm’s opponents talk as if it will ruin the district’s future. We don’t think the stakes are so apocalyptic: There have to be ways to mitigate the harm and make that berm more than a blight.
But even a post-and-beam structure would preclude some development that otherwise might happen in the district. The existence of the tracks is the fundamental issue. Heavy rail is the Godzilla of urban planning. It doesn’t win beauty or popularity contests when it stomps across an existing city neighborhood.
Sound Transit has to lay those tracks, though. It hasn’t run roughshod over Tacoma; part of the long delay on this segment has come from the agency’s efforts to accommodate the city’s concerns. It abandoned, for example, an early plan to run the tracks across Pacific Avenue in favor of a much more costly bridge over the thoroughfare.
The agency must do its utmost to make its design work for the Dome District – without taking the whole thing back to the drawing board. Mass transit is a regional investment. Lakewood’s as much a part of the region as Tacoma, and it’s been waiting far too long to collect its returns.
