Terrace in transit

MOUNTLAKE TERRACE

About 50 people, including Mayor Jerry Smith and other city officials, turned out on a cold and rainy Friday, Dec. 14, for the groundbreaking of this city’s first parking garage, to be built by Community Transit, the agency that got its start here 31 years ago.

The four-story, five-level garage will occupy the lower portion of the transit agency’s Park &Ride lot when it opens in early 2009. Once open, the garage and Park &Ride will be known by a new name: the Mountlake Terrace Transit Center.

The Park &Ride site off 236th Street Southwest at I-5 will remain closed until the garage is finished. In the interim, bus riders can use spaces set aside off of 56th Avenue West downtown.

“We know it will be a challenge to use the interim lot,” Community Transit CEO Joyce Eleanor told a crowd gathered under a tent. “Your patience will be rewarded with a new garage in about a year.”

The new facility will more than double the existing capacity of 390, with the garage adding 685 parking spaces and a new, adjacent surface lot adding another 205 for a total of 890.

“The need for parking spaces is going to more than double over the next decade,” Eleanor said, adding that with a decreasing pool of available vacant land, “we have been forced to build up rather than building out.”

First District Congressman Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, called the planned garage a “great gift from Community Transit to the people of my district,” and said there’s something in it for everyone, including non-bus riders.

“If you drive a car and don’t ride the bus, it’s helping you because it just removed 200,000 cars a year from the freeway,” Inslee said. “The people in my district are as far-sighted as any community in the United States.”

Mountlake Terrace Mayor Jerry Smith urged the audience to “keep an eye on Mountlake Terrace” in the coming years. “We’re going to be better than Edmonds or Lynnwood,” he said.

Outgoing Edmonds Councilman Richard Marin, a Sound Transit Board member, said the coming transit center is a “huge thing” for Mountlake Terrace.

“The way we’ve spread out, we don’t have the option of having a bus that goes through your neighborhood,” he said. So “hubs” like the transit center are crucial, he added.

“I will be one of the first people who will come out and use it,” he said.

Sound Transit’s Board recently approved $959,000 toward creation of a “flyover” stop that will serve that agency’s regional express buses along I-5.

Marin said the flyover stop, which will take about a year to build once the garage is finished, is in the design phase and over budget. Currently, none of Sound Transit’s regional express – or ST – buses stop in Mountlake Terrace.

Shane Hope, Mountlake Terrace’s planning director, said the coming transit center and its added parking will “free up the neighborhoods and other areas and makes a really cool entry into the city.”