Seattle - home to Puget Sound, the Space Needle and Mount Rainier.
It’s also the headquarters for some of the biggest names in tech, with their shiny, futuristic campuses.
The tech boom has made the city one of the most attractive places in the United States,
bringing in a pretty astonishing influx of people, some 1,000 new residents every week.
Of course, all those Seattleites need a way to get around and things are getting, well, crowded.
In response, the city has been expanding its rail system, and fast. The latest project,
Sound Transit 3, will invest $54 billion over the next 25 years to expand the network five-fold.
This is a transformational thing that's going to define how the
city grows and looks over the next 50 to 100 years.
With the passage of the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, American cities are getting
a chance to rethink their public transit systems with fresh infrastructure funding.
And Seattle’s expansion might be the country’s most ambitious project yet.
Seattle is home to some of the biggest companies in the US,
from Amazon to Microsoft and Starbucks. And its population is growing fast.
Between 2010 and 2020, it went up by 21%, making it one of the fastest growing cities in the country.
By 2040, another 800,000 people are expected to join the city.
That’s been good for Seattle’s economy, but progress like this also comes with growing pains.
Before the pandemic, the city's traffic congestion had become some of the worst in the country.
And as the population has grown, housing prices have been rising too.
That’s made it hard to find construction workers that aren’t already building new housing.
And the workers that private firms are able to
find face the challenge of getting their own affordable place to live in the city.
Seattle is growing really, really rapidly. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the country.
Tremendous population gains and pressure on
existing housing supply. And so that is both an opportunity for transit, but also a challenge.
Enter Sound Transit. Established in 1993,
the regional transit authority has been building out Seattle’s public transport system for decades.
The first phase of the long-term vision, called Sound Move, was approved by voters in 1996.
Then in 2008, voters approved a new 15-year, 36 mile expansion called Sound Transit 2.
Most recently in 2016, a 25-year expansion and upgrade plan cleverly called Sound Transit 3 got the
go-ahead - and some of that campaign's largest donors were Microsoft, Expedia and Amazon.
We decided that our future in our region belongs to fast, efficient transit.
Stretching across the greater Seattle region, ST3 will add 62 miles of new
tracks and 37 new stations, with new services opening every few years.
When it’s fully complete, the current rail network will be five times its current size,
making it comparable to those over in Chicago and Washington DC.
Now, it’s going to take a huge team of construction and engineering professionals to make
this a reality. Sound Transit estimates ST3 will require 43 million hours of labour through 2041.
Seattle is full of lakes, mountains, sea and forests. All great things if you want
to spend time outdoors, but not so great if you’re trying to build a train line.
While some tracks are on ground level, the expansion will have engineers tunneling
through complex soils and constructing elevated tracks and water crossings.
Like over this giant lake. Sound Transit is installing a light rail line on top of a floating,
moving bridge. Engineers are adapting the tracks to the bridge’s movement,
and ensuring that its steel anchors will be protected from corrosion by the water.
In areas with a higher risk of earthquakes,
the elevated tracks will have to be built to a higher standard to meet rigorous safety codes.
Now, all those new tracks are going to require a lot of new trains, and Sound Transit is
working with German manufacturer Siemens to triple its light rail fleet by 2024.
All of which comes at a cost. Typically in America, public transit is paid for
by a mix of federal, state and local funding and revenue from local taxes.
Seattle is somewhat unique in that some of its past transit projects have come in
under budget and ahead of schedule.
But Sound Transit 3 is happening at this wonderful moment in history where it’ll
face rising construction costs, a labour shortage
and of course the pandemic.
The original plan called for a nearly $54 billion budget,
roughly half of which would come from new local taxes.
Sound Transit said it would cost the typical adult about $14 a month.
There’s always going to be a risk on the revenue side, but there's, I think,
risk with pretty much any tax that you put on. There's a lot of different approaches. And so
you kind of have to pick the one that has the most political appeal and move forward with that.
Since the project’s approval, the pandemic has caused local tax revenue to fall,
denting the overall budget.
On top of that, rising land values have made it more expensive to acquire
space for new tracks and stations, eating into the money even further.
By the summer of 2021, Sound Transit was facing a $6.5 billion budget deficit.
So it came up with a new realignment plan that delayed some projects by 2-5 years.
With taxpayers and major corporations counting on the success of this project,
staying organised across multiple generations of stakeholders is going to be key.
And that’s where tools like Autodesk Build come in.
It’s an end-to-end construction management tool that's intuitive and easy to use.
For long-term projects like ST3, something like this isn’t just nice to have, it’s pretty essential.
Autodesk Build is accessible from anywhere. You can download project
plans to your device to access information while away from Wi-Fi and cell coverage.
So teams in the office can be working off the same plans as those teams
tunnelling deep underground or building that floating bridge,
As more and more cities start undertaking projects funded by the US infrastructure
bill, and try to minimise the disruption to the lives of their citizens as they
do it, cloud-based platforms like this are only going to become more important.
The new bill sets aside $39 billion for public transit.
It’s an historic investment, but it’s not enough to fix all of the country’s issues.
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates there’s currently a $176 billion transit backlog.
And building public transit, especially rail, in the US is expensive.
Eno found that the US pays more and takes longer
to complete rail transit projects than its international counterparts.
I feel like we have to take some big changes, right? The costs of transit in this country have
frankly become a little unsustainable. And when we're faced with this huge
economic and environmental and social equity crisis
on three fronts. Transit is a huge element at addressing all three of those things.
Of course, federal funding alone isn’t enough. And there’s no
simple fix to making transit more efficient and affordable in the US.
It's going to take a mix of changes to planning, governance,
standards and focusing on the long-term public benefit to really get the most out of transit projects.
Sound Transit gives Seattle a chance to rethink the way we build transport
and set an example for other cities across America at this critical moment.
This video was made possible by Autodesk Construction Cloud, you can learn more
about Autodesk Build at the link below - and as always if you enjoyed this video and
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