Unless you just move forward with the already-designed West Seattle stations and convert it to automated later?

Presumably the need to delay West Seattle would be the holdup. That's a pretty significant redesign on a project that is about to start construction.

My question is why is this just coming up now? They already knew 5 years ago that Ballard was unaffordable and could have pivoted then.

Loved hearing you yesterday. Now just waiting for your interpretation of the Foul Ball Dance Party for next time :)

In warm weather it’s probably fine IMO

For reference Nucor is upper right and Genesee didn‘t exist yet east of Avalon.

Here is the old grid (I think 1940s) from when Fauntleroy extended farther to the NE as a residential street and Andover went through up the hill. Parts of the old home foundations are still present in the green space below the Andover pedestrian bridge.

This thunderstorm produced a waterspout over Puget Sound! Photo via Reddit.

It's embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the Monorail has >99% fare compliance, even after sporting events with hundreds of people in line. Once it's clear that they are enforcing, everyone pays without complaining.

I agree with you, I think a ST4 ballot measure would likely fail.

In the short term, Sound Transit has plenty of money to fully design and engineer all of these projects, they should proceed with the full scope. Then once the funding is available they can start construction immediately.

Ultimately this comes down to which ST board members feel they will suffer political consequences for putting projects from their subarea on the chopping block.

Assuming every subarea member feels they have to save "their" projects, then raising funding in ST4 becomes the most logical path forward

As of two years ago the options were pretty limited. I went to the upper Dungeness trail and planned it so I had enough battery to get all the way back across the ferry to I-5. I think there is a Tesla supercharger in Sequim now if that's an option.

"Ok, then let's replace parking lanes with bike lanes"

~~~~ car brain recalculates ~~~~

The bars show the chance of El Niño (red bars), ENSO-Neutral (grey bars), and La Niña (blue bars) provided for 9 upcoming, overlapping 3-month seasons (each letter represents a month, for example, F = February). The color shading within the bars indicates the chances of different categories of El Niño or La Niña strength (weak, moderate, strong, and very strong). Looking pretty super

Probability of super El Nino vs probability of super duper turbocharged El Nino? Check out the strength forecast cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/ana...

F0615

I support this

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

Well, this is simply infuriating. Someone's got to fight this in court. BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service open.substack.com/pub/morethan...

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

Colorado snowpack is melting out three weeks ahead of the previous record.

This is happening at 1.5C of warming. What will the record year look like at 2 or 2.5C?

Is climate change making cold extremes more frequent/severe?

No

This plot shows the difference in temperature of the 0.2% coldest hourly temps (from ERA5) from two periods: 2000-2019 and 1980-1999.

Red colors indicate that the later period had warmer extreme cold temperatures.

Many PNW cities did the 3 peat in June 2021. Portland got the crown for breaking their all-time record three days in a row. I wonder which heatwave is more statistically anomalous. It’s probably close.

Screenshot of a Rolling Stone headline that reads "Top Disaster Response Official Claims He Teleported to a Waffle House: FEMA's Gregg Phillips says he has experienced multiple "scary" episodes of sudden teleportation."

Earlier today, I was asked to comment on the current state of American disaster preparedness.

That was already a fraught question, even prior to present chaos, but then I saw today's headlines. 🫠

"Top Disaster Response Official Claims He Teleported to a Waffle House"

I've interviewed more than a dozen hydrologists and climatologists across the West the past 10 days.

A sense of panic is starting to set in. Wildfires and water shortages will start mounting this summer. Adverse impacts are expected from not only this heat wave, but the historically warm winter.

Drop Avalon has been in back pocket for a long time, I think the earlier board circa 2021 expected it would happen eventually but held onto it as a negotiating point for future cost cuts, which everyone knew would come because ST3 was already unaffordable 5 years ago.

I was in meetings with ST where we asked for this and those were the reasons given. So we had to pivot to asking for longer tunnel. And we were eventually successful. Hated to ask to drop Avalon but it was our only choice to avoid the bulldozer, nobody wants their house bulldozed.

You need a wide curve to climb the grade which bulldozes 100s of housing units. So you have to stay on the WS bridge route the entire time. That was considered and rejected early on because a freeway Delridge station failed racial equality toolkit. Also traffic impacts were cited (ugh).

Perhaps…and a wetland that can easily be weaponized

They won't be able to pass a ballot measure unless more new ST3 construction is already happening. And the only option for new construction prior to the mid-2030s is West Seattle. Exactly as intended by the decisions of the previous ST board.

Wasn't that an intentional decision from the pro-West Seattle board at the time? They knew the fiscal cliff was coming and wanted to make sure West Seattle was best positioned to move forward when things inevitably got to where they are now.

The NIMBYism just hasn’t had time to built yet since they haven’t scoped routes.

Oh looks like Issaquah would also be a victim…