I really couldn't have said it better myself then The Northwest Urbanist did in his blog post about ST3.
"Subarea equity should not mean the suburbs build dubious projects out into the hinterlands while Seattle languishes for decades. The whole network will produce better ridership and results when more of Seattle’s core neighborhoods are well integrated in the system." - The Northwest Urbanist
While I'm excited that we are building out our transit system, I question why this has to come at the cost of urban neighborhoods. Where is the Ballard to UW connection? Where is the Central District (Route 8) Subway? What about Belltown and Queen Anne? For many urban residents of Seattle, ST3 does little to improve transportation connections between close neighborhoods with poor transit connections.
Seattle's population is increasing at a rate approaching the gold-rush era. High-Capacity transit is the only realistic solution to accommodate this growth.
In today's era of fiscally restrained limited government, it is important for our infrastructure investments to perform at a maximum output. Light-Rail is expensive to build per-mile and is really suited for dense neighborhoods that have high ridership levels. I have a difficult time believing that a Bellevue-Issaquah link (a particularly expensive alignment with 3-4 stations) would perform at a capacity anywhere near where it should. Sure, I think Eastgate and Bellevue College deserve high-capacity transit investment, but a far-flung low-density suburb such as Issaquah is difficult to justify in my opinion.
Additionally, as a region that is about 10-15 years behind on infrastructure projects, this timeline seems entirely too slow. Yes, transportation infrastructure is notoriously slow in planning and development, but accepting this status-quo will cost our region greatly. We need projects to play catchup. It's surreal to see a timeline laid out that effectively will only be built as I get close to retirement that doesn't have the things we as a region already need. Other countries build subway lines in fractions of the time. We need to try and achieve this nimble approach, otherwise we will suffer the consequences of transit in our city getting far worse and quickly.