Rantz: Sound Transit escalators mistake will cost you over $20 million

If you’re Sound Transit, escalatoring is hard. So hard, they can’t figure it out and now it’ll cost taxpayers at least $20 million to address.

The UW light rail station has been plagued with frequent escalators issues: they don’t work. They break down easily because, due to a mistake, Sound Transit bought and installed the wrong escalators.

“What we’ve discovered since then is that we need heavy duty escalators because our system is a 20-hour-a-day system,” Sound Transit spokesperson Kimberly Reason told KIRO 7’s John Knicely. “So, we really apologize to our riders. We realize this was a terrible inconvenience for them.”

Sound Transit is either wholly incompetent or they lie to us when they confidently claim ridership will be high when they build. They constantly tell us the investments are worth it, because users will flock to light rail. But if they believe that, why in the world would they use escalators that can’t handle crowds?

When you harangue people into ditching cars for light rail, you better to be able to deliver a quality project. But you can’t even get something as basic as escalators right? They’re undercutting their very goal of convincing people to use a service they claim is high quality — when you can get to it via a broken down escalator, but they won’t let you use them as stairs when broken.

And speaking of incompetence, they don’t really even know how much this mistake will cost us.

“We don’t know the exact cost, but we know it’s going to cost more than $20 million to accomplish this piece of the program,” Reason told KIRO 7. “Well, it will be the taxpayers [paying]. But the taxpayers invested in this system. And they expect to be able to access the station in and out without any trouble.”

We invested in a system that works, so no, we didn’t invest in this particular system.

When you’re playing with other people’s money, it’s really easy to get away with an answer like this. No one will be fired for this mistake. They’ll likely make the same one again on future projects because there’s no accountability. But it’s Sound Transit. They embrace over-promising and under-delivering.

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