News
LIGHT RAIL'S BIG LEAP FORWARD
March 6, 2012
| Like his mentor Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Cairncross & Hempelmann founding partner John Hempelmann has spent years pushing Seattle toward getting a major rapid transport system. Few things are more important to the city's ultimate development (after having a great movie set in your city, but Sleepless in Seattle took care of that), John says: "I see it as the future of our city." |
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| The link light rail under construction is an $18B project for 36 stations by 2023, connecting downtown Seattle with Bellevue, Capitol Hill, the U-District, Northgate, Lynnwood, and Des Moines. More is on the way: a ballot issue to extend the lines under construction to Redmond, Everett, and Tacoma should be coming within the next couple years. Projected result: "By 2030, we should be able to travel throughout the region on light rail," John tells us (above, pictured with William Cumming's Acrobat at Golden Gardens). "A very significant part of the increase in housing and employment is going to be around high capacity transit," John says. On Capitol Hill, in Northgate, and near the Pike/Pine and Bel-Red corridors, density is projected to increase. The U-District is also on the verge of a major transformation— there is an "immense" amount of housing and retail development happening around the future Northeast 45th Street station, and it's a "frenzy" around what will be Roosevelt's station. |
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| You can't go three feet down the halls of Cairncross & Hempelmann's offices in Pioneer Square's Collins Building without coming upon a masterpiece from a renowned local artist. The office contains works by all the masters of the Pacific Northwest School, some of whom once lived and worked in the Collins Building. John says the only comparable collections of the Northwest School in the City are at the Sheraton Hotel and the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences. He said the lawyers and the staff in the firm love working in a law firm in an art gallery. |
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| John's career trajectory was shaped by the late Sen. Jackson, whose 1972 presidential campaign John worked on as a young lawyer. Working in tandem with Sen. Warren Magnuson, Sen. Jackson secured federal matching funds to build a proposed Forward Thrust rapid transit system (given the existing South Lake Union Trolley acronym, the joke just writes itself) during the late '60s. But voters refused to fund it locally, and the federal money went to build Atlanta's system, which capitalized on it to build its own rapid transit. Forty years later, Seattle's light rail system can't arrive fast enough for the traffic weary. John's vision: "I see a world where people are significantly less dependent on cars," he tells us. "If we were able to shift even 20% of our trips from cars to other modes of transportation, it would have a dramatic impact on our quality of life." |
