Sound Tran­sit revealed high­er-than-expect­ed pro­ject­ed cost over­runs for the West Seat­tle Link Exten­sion project, reports Ryan Pack­er in The Urban­ist, but the Sound Tran­sit board indi­cat­ed it would con­tin­ue to sup­port the project with­out con­sid­er­ing alter­na­tive options. The project is now esti­mat­ed to cost as much as $7.1 bil­lion, close to $3 bil­lion more than ini­tial pro­jec­tions.

Accord­ing to Pack­er, “Even as the agency touts inter­nal reforms that it says could bring some of these cost increas­es down to more man­age­able lev­els and help Sound Tran­sit regain some ground, there are storm clouds brew­ing when it comes to the afford­abil­i­ty of the entire Sound Tran­sit 3 pro­gram.”

Pack­er out­lines oth­er poten­tial options that could save the agency mon­ey, such as the Ele­vat­ed Fauntleroy Way alter­na­tive, which could reduce costs by as much as $850 mil­lion. But accord­ing to Sound Tran­sit CEO Goran Spar­rman, “The real­i­ty is that the kind of cost esca­la­tion we’re see­ing on the pre­ferred align­ment, that is a large­ly [sic] dri­ven by broad­er mar­ket forces, so I don’t know that we would expect to see sig­nif­i­cant low­er cost in any oth­er alter­na­tives.”

For Pack­er, the cost increas­es pose a broad­er ques­tion about the future of the ST3 pro­gram and the Bal­lard Link project, a ‘sis­ter project’ to the West Seat­tle exten­sion that could cost $11.2 bil­lion.