22 Sep “City’s Streetcar Promise Was a Promise”

Our issues with the streetcar were recently featured on PubliCola and the Seattle Transit Blog. Originally, PubliCola stated the following:

The only thing is, the city never “promised” Pioneer Square it would build the streetcar to their neighborhood. In fact, according to city staff, the city only told the neighborhood it would try to extend the streetcar to the neighborhood—if, and only if, it could meet its contractual obligation to Sound Transit to keep the streetcar on ten-minute headways (the period riders must wait between trains) and to keep costs below the $123 million Sound Transit agreed to provide under an interlocal agreement with the city (which will actually build the streetcar).

In a follow up post today, however, Leslie Smith from the Alliance for Pioneer Square was able to provide multiple places where our neighborhood was, in fact, made promises by the city that we would soon get the streetcar:

The evidence: At a public forum on the future of the Pioneer Square neighborhood in June, Mayor Mike McGinn said, “We have the streetcar coming” to Pioneer Square. “That’s good.”

Additionally, the city’s Pioneer Square 2015 Committee adopted a list of economic development strategies for the city last year that included “implement[ing] the streetcar line extension through Pioneer Square.”