Nix the new tunnel? Sound Transit looks for big moves to save billions

Sound Transit’s light rail expansion plans could cost up to 25% more than expected. This week, board members began brainstorming on how to bring down costs.

They hope to come up with a more realistic plan by summer of 2026.

In 2016, voters passed Sound Transit 3, a package that would expand light rail to Federal Way, Tacoma, Everett, Issaquah, Ballard, and West Seattle, along with many other transit improvements.

But with the price of concrete these days (along with many, many other rising costs on everything from land to labor), the remaining work could cost billions more than expected.

In Seattle, local elected leaders are getting squeamish.

At a Seattle City Council meeting Wednesday, Councilmember Rob Saka sent a message to the Sound Transit Board: Spare the West Seattle stations at Avalon, Delridge, and Alaska Junction.

“Don’t pare those back," he pleaded. "Don't cut corners to pare those back. We need all three of those stops. Every last one.”

But it's not at the city council that these decisions will be made — it's at Sound Transit.

During an executive committee meeting Thursday, Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine made it clear he's open to big ideas.

"We have a lot of options," he said. "Inaction is not one of them."

Board members put forward their ideas.

As usual, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci came with the most highly-detailed suggestions, such as letting Sound Transit purchase land earlier (before costs escalate further), and breaking larger projects into smaller bid packages to encourage more competition between contractors, since few of them can handle massive projects.

But the most significant of her suggestions was to nix much of the planned second tunnel through downtown Seattle. Instead, she says they could run all three current and planned light rail lines through the old one.

“If London can run multiple lines and high frequency service in a tunnel that first opened when Abraham Lincoln was president, I’m sure we can figure out how to make our tunnel, which was built when Ronald Reagan was president, one that could work,” Balducci said Thursday.

A portion of the new tunnel would still be built between downtown and lower Queen Anne, through the South Lake Union neighborhood.

If the idea proves feasible, Balducci said the move could save billions of dollars. That money could go toward planned lines to Ballard, West Seattle, and elsewhere.

Other suggestions from Tacoma City Councilmember Kristina Walker and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell focused on making project administration more efficient and cost estimates more accurate.

Harrell sought to tamp down the perception that disagreements over which parts of the rollout to prioritize could lead to turf wars between elected leaders in different cities — with Everett fighting to extend the spine and Seattle fighting for West Seattle and Ballard. Harrell said Seattle remains committed to the spine.

At the end of the Sound Transit Board's executive committee meeting on Thursday, Constantine thanked participants for all their suggestions.

"This is the exact kind of board involvement we need to succeed," he said.

Sound Transit’s revised expansion plans are expected by June 2026.

Value Engineering

One of the next steps for Sound Transit's projects will be to go through something called "Value Engineering," also known simply as VE.

It means a team of specialists goes through a design with a fine-toothed comb and looks for expensive line items that the project could live without.

It's a part of the design process that many architects hate, because it can mean the elimination of building details that looked great in drawings, such as ornamentation. It can mean that finishes are replaced with cheaper, sometimes uglier materials. It's one of the reasons many federal government buildings look bland.

It can also be a place where experts point to efficiencies that designers simply hadn't thought of, or had ignored — including consideration of long-term maintenance costs that are easy to ignore because they aren't part of the construction cost estimates.

Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss has cited reports indicating that many of the concrete footings that hold up Sound Transit lines are significantly overbuilt. That means they're built to withstand loads far beyond what engineers expect or the law requires.

Strauss said Wednesday that with concrete being one of the fastest rising costs in Sound Transit's construction budget, reducing concrete use to more reasonable levels could lead to significant savings.