This morning, we received great news from the Mayor’s office – not only does his proposed budget close the $20 million hole the city budget has today, it also manages to accelerate street repair funding, and takes the next steps in implementing the high capacity transit corridors in the Transit Master Plan. He has a great guest post up on the Slog that you should read, because he’s right on. The best thing to do to build more transit in Seattle is to start doing alternatives analysis in every corridor.

The funding in the Mayor’s budget is as follows:

· $2 million for Downtown to the U-District via Eastlake. This was actually part of the original Bogue subway plan the city had in 1911 – more than a hundred years ago – and it was one of the highest use streetcar corridors in the city. Almost every inch of the corridor is multifamily zoned, and what isn’t is changing into multifamily fast.

· $1 million to plan real BRT in the Madison corridor. The mayor’s office told me this morning that this means off-board payment, and would be a higher standard than RapidRide.

· $500,000 to develop alternatives for the best pedestrian, bike, and transit crossing of the ship canal, near Fremont. Much like Portland’s new bridge, this would get transit out of traffic and be one of the largest components of a Downtown-Fremont-Ballard streetcar.

· 2.5 million to be spent on whatever corridor is ready for design and engineering soonest – Ballard, U-district, the downtown connector or Madison.

This funding is in addition to the downtown connector and Ballard funding that’s already been secured.

This is exactly what we need to be doing. This funding will identify the possible alternatives so that transit supporters have specifics to fight for and data to back it up. The next move for us will be to ensure the City Council signs off.