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1

I agree. But I don't get why the same argument isn't being made about surface transit anti-viaduct folks who spend almost no time opposing the SR520 expansion. The notion that rebuild money would go to 520 doesn't have very many people up in arms. I'm an outsider in all this, so maybe I'm missing something...

Posted by wf | April 14, 2007 12:37 PM
2

Well, a 520 expansion could benefit transit by allowing for HOV lanes. Whether that would actually happen is still in question -- I doubt drivers would put up with two lanes being HOV only.

Posted by keshmeshi | April 14, 2007 12:52 PM
3

The poll does ask about the components of the package separately, and the transit components uniformly poll higher than the road components. I'll post more.

Posted by Goldy | April 14, 2007 1:24 PM
4

There really isn't a surface option for 520. I mean its a fucking bridge. As keshmeshi say the expansion allows for HOV and the possibility of light rail or bus rapid transit at some point.

Posted by Giffy | April 14, 2007 2:33 PM
5

There's a direct appeal in court that will go forward over this. The Supreme Court will get the opportunity to undo the tie binding the measures. The election would still take place in November, but with the measures standing or falling independently.

Posted by albert e. | April 14, 2007 2:42 PM
6

Posted by Conservative Don

Over at HorsesAss, Goldy’s got a post laying out polling numbers on a combined RTID/light rail package.

The numbers, about 61% in favor after a dose of messaging, are pretty positive, and so Goldy seems to be saying, everybody should stop complaining and fretting about a joint measure.

While I’ve certainly posted and bitched that a joint measure will fail (road advocates and the concrete companies will abandon the measure), my real gripe isn’t so much that it will flop at the polls. My real gripe is this: I don’t want to vote for transit expansion in order to get my roads. It seems a bit like putting a dash of soy milk in my chocolate, almond syrup shake to keep the weight off.

Moreover, in order to ensure victory at the polls, planners might lower the price tag (currently it’s about $9.5 billion for light rail and about $7.4 billion for roads). Since they’re joined at the hip, planners would probably cut from both projects. Well, it sure seems dunderheaded to scale back road expansion in order to lower a $16/$17 billion plan, when already, 60 plus percent of the package isn’t for roads.

Goldy’s contention that polling looks good doesn’t address my biggest fear—in fact, it confirms it: It’s going to pass, and we’re going to undo the benefits of voting for roads by simultaneously voting to expand silly light rail.

Indeed, here’s the polling I’d like to see: light rail on its own and RTID on its own. I’d bet RTID would pass and light rail wouldn’t.

Posted by Stevo | April 14, 2007 2:47 PM
7

I say pass them both and STFU.

Posted by ivan | April 14, 2007 2:54 PM
8

this poll shows very strong support as well.

this thing is going to pass. 40 plus miles of new light rail and more buses.


http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/accountability/PublicOpinion/Documents/SurveyAugust2006.pdf

Posted by by67 | April 14, 2007 2:56 PM
9

ivan is a cow anus

Posted by boo | April 14, 2007 3:07 PM
10

Moderator: I'll try this one again without multiple url's

Josh, I think Goldy's post was more about the naysayers trying to use a self-fulfilling prophesy to use doomsaying for their own purposes.

On that front, it's no surprise anti-rail pundits like Joel Connelly and Ted Van Dyk are predicting a train wreck - they WANT the transit & roads measure to fail this November.

And given the strong support for regional rail and roads projects, about the only thing they have left in their holsters is the hysterical spreading of doubt.

Just read Ted Van Dyk's ranting every two weeks in the P-I:

-On top of the existing backlog, elected officials soon will ask private interests to underwrite a ballot campaign this fall for a crushingly cost-ineffective Sound Transit regional light rail system as well as new local roads. They'll be kidding, right? -

Van Dyk may not know it, but according to the poll Goldy posted, he's condemning the PUBLIC, not those (popular) "corrupt" politicians he always harps on. Do these cranks ever wonder to themselves why those politicians keep getting re-elected by wide margins????

Van Dyk and other rail opponents try to pretend buses stuck in traffic (BRT) can replace rail in a growing metropolitan region. They claim we should use developing countries (like Colombia - where car ownership rates are at 5%) as the transportation model for Pugetopolis to follow. Van Dyk has got to be kidding, right?

If Ted Van Dyk, or the other naysaying pols, ever decided to take the bus one day, he might come to the realization how dishonest his arguments really are.

And then there's Joel Connelly, "hero of the middle class," taking his lead from a billionaire:

-The "Big One" will very likely come this fall, when voters in four central Puget Sound counties are asked to fork up $15 billion or so for highways and Sound Transit light rail projects.
"We are headed for a train wreck in November," said John Stanton, co-founder of Western Wireless -

Look, I can see why the public should remain skeptical about multi-billion dollar projects. It's our money they are spending, after all. But it is also we who benefit from those projects, in terms of jobs, mobility, the local economy, and more free time spent outside a traffic jam on I-5, I-90 or I-405.

Someday, Josh and the Capitol Caucus may want to venture outside their urban island, and see what people who "drive for affordability" have to deal with every day. A condo on Capitol Hill, Belltown or SLU is going to cost them half a million dollars, and will include an extra bedroom if they're lucky. Try pulling that off with a family of four.

And finally, Connelly, Van Dyk, John Carlson and Kemper Freeman wouldn't have a problem if the $16 billion were only to be spent on freeways, along with a few crappy buses. It's rapid transit - and light rail specifically - which has remained as the bane of their existence for over a decade.

But now we know just how small a segment of the population their views are representative of - same goes for those who believe road improvements are never necessary.

More on the affordability gap

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/260560_downtown23.html


(good luck finding that $250k house or condo in Seattle with two or three bedrooms - and just wait for what happens in the next ten years)

Posted by NickTheSlick | April 14, 2007 3:07 PM
11

Conscientious folks who care about the environment need to stop saying, 'Please, sir, may I have another?' Vote it down until they are separated. A measure like this needs every vote it can get to pass.

Posted by Grant Cogswell | April 14, 2007 3:21 PM
12

No shit, Sherlock. Josh, this is precisely why transit and roads got married in the first place. Transit is more popular than roads programs.

But, before you vote down the package as non-Seattle resident Grant suggests, realize this--if this package loses you won't see another transit vote until 2009. By then Sound Transit will have laid off half its staff and lost valuable momentum.

Perhaps the gamble is worth it for you if the world is merely an ideological exercise. But realize that the chance to vote on major transit packages doesn't come along that often. If you don't pass the RTID package, the state and business community will find a way to build the same roads. All you will have done is fucked up the chance for transit.

Posted by tiptoe tommy | April 14, 2007 5:12 PM
13

Given that 520 is floating on the water, it is the surface option. You could suspend a submerged tunnel below the surface, but nobody is seriously talking about that.

And in all the 6 lane proposals I've seen the added two lanes are diamond lanes (bus/carpool). Plus they're talking about tolls on both 520 and I-90, and that will piss off drivers.

Not everyone thinks transit is honey and cars are poison. For a lot of people transit = buses, which are those things that make you walk in the rain at both ends of your commute, don't have a sound system, and, at non-peak hours, are often occuplied by substance-abusers and the mentally ill.

When gridlock gets bad enough all the people who commute from wherever they can afford to live to wherever they have to work will switch to transit, but we haven't reached that point yet and these are the people who will vote to build roads to put that moment off as long as possible.

So for those people you could view the roads part of the deal as the chocolate that makes the tasteless-but-good-for-you non-fat soy protein of transit go down.

Posted by Joe | April 14, 2007 5:20 PM
14

Greg Nickels doesn't think there's enough in it in the way of benefits coming soon enough for Seattle. Ed Murray is against it. Ron Sims is unintelligible. So it won't get a huge push from the electeds.

The public knows ST can't bring train systems on line on time or on budget.

The press is against it because passing RTID/ST2 in its current form won't come close to paying for the SR 520 work.

ST has already said it has Plan B ready to go if the thing goes down in the fall (this is what it did the first time - give a smaller version to the voters after the first one fails).

Look kids, this thing is toast, and deservedly so.

Posted by 43rd Voter | April 14, 2007 5:45 PM
15

I completely disagree 43rd @ 14. I'm a realist. I live in Seattle, work in Bellevue, and don't have a car. I walk downtown and take the 550 to work. As I, and the rest of the eastside commuters on the bus, sit in traffic I keep thinking about how nice it'll be in a few long years to be able to zip along past the traffic in the train. In fact, I want that train right now.

Sound Transit fucked up in the beginning, no lie. But they're actually building stuff now, they're actually making it happen. They cleaned house and they're making visible changes throughout the region. I don't want to have to start "the process" over again and lose even more time because people have a stupid vendetta against sound transit.

I also recognize the benefits of expanding SR 520. My roomie usually drives to work in Redmond (another eastside commuter) and frequently we'll carpool home together. The expansion would do two things, boost the capacity for transit and put tolls in place. To me, that's an acceptable tradeoff.

Posted by Desidono | April 14, 2007 6:46 PM
16

@15 -

Don't worry about your commute to Bellevue. You are going to lose that job in Bellevue in less than two years, and the trains wouldn't be running over I-90 before 2022 anyway. Also, Transit Now will start kicking in, and there's going to be better bus service to and from the Eastside by METRO.

Have a great day!

Posted by rufus wainright | April 14, 2007 7:19 PM
17

Please.

61% approval means nothing until someone spells out exactly what they will have to pay.

I seem to remember some tunnel project somewhere that had high numbers until the people saw the price tag.

As far as light rail, I think we should go slow about expansion until we see if:

A - It works as promised.

B - Anyone rides


I like the idea in general, but most cities take years until jobs/housing start to consolidate around rapid transit. This may yet turn out to be a white elephant.

Posted by me | April 14, 2007 9:13 PM
18

As Josh notes, the poll includes messaging in favor of the joint ballot, but no serious messaging against the measure. It's a flawed poll that does not well indicate the real messages that would come from an opposition campaign.

ST2 expansion by itself would pass easily. And the benefits aren't just for central Seattle dwellers. Most of the light rail miles in the ST2 package are in the suburbs, plus there are a bunch of suburban park and rides and some improvements in the Sounder commuter train service. And by preserving some tax capacity for a ST3 package later on, light rail could be extended further out into the burbs, and Seattle could extend either light rail or street car on the 45th St corridor and along the West Seattle to Crown Hill green line.

Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 14, 2007 9:27 PM
19

RTID is a shameful disaster for 3 reasons:

1) Tax equity: It sucks up tax capacity that should be preserved for transit (because the state contributes virtually nothing to transit). At the same time, the state is let off the hook for the road projects it has always owned, financed and constructed. Yes, the recent statewide gas tax increases pay some of the costs of these projects, but if they're that valuable, if they're truly "highways of statewide signficance," the state should pay the whole bill. WSDOT: take care of and pay for your own fucking roads unless you're going to start pumping a bunch of state money into transit. Roads are of statewide significance, but transit is not? Fuck you, WSDOT!

2) The financing is all screwed up: The taxes won't provide adequate funding to complete most of the road projects on the RTID list. The prime example of all this is the 520 bridge (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/310810_tolls09.html). Nor does it complete SR 509, the SR 167 extension, nor even the Cross-Base Highway. This is because the majority of county councilmembers on the RTID executive board have no desire to come up with a comprehensive proposal that actually works, they just want to fund, as much as possible, their pet porkbarrel projects.

3) RTID will do great environmental harm: Building your way out of congestion has never worked. As soon as new highways open, they induce sprawl and suck up latent demand, so they fill up with new traffic and are as congested as the old highways within just a few years. Not only is the sprawl environmentally harmful, but so are the auto emissions, especially the CO2 emissions that cause global warming. Building these new highways - like Cross-Base, SR 509 extension and new lane miles in Snohomish - will bring enough new cars on the road to make it impossible to ever reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the levels scientists tell us is necessary to stabilize the climate by mid-century (reduction levels also reflected in Gregoire's recent Executive Order and just passed by the legislature in SB 6001). In fact, if RTID passes, look for a lawsuit from the environmental community to stop these highways from being built in order to prevent the increase in emissions (the State Environmental Protection Act and Federal Clean Air Act both regulate new sources of GHG).

While some road projects, like a new SR 520 bridge, are vaild because they replace crumbling, unsafe infrastructure, most of the RTID money would be much better spent on more quickly expanding our regional transit system to allow more people to get out of their cars, thereby actually increasing mobility while limiting sprawl and new sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 14, 2007 9:37 PM
20

Bill
Why did you support the 2003 and 2005 gas tax packages?

I have seen others ask you that question on these posts and you have never answered.

You are so quick to rip apart the entire road piece of this plan even though a majority of the projects epsecially in King County support Metro and ST service.

Yet you supported 1.2 billion for 405, money for cross base, money for 509, 167 - well for every project in this current plan. You supported funding in each of those corridors.

You are a hypocrit. Explain yourself.

You and the Sierra Club will have zero credibility as opponents. I can't wait til the business community kicks the shit out of you guys using your old newsletters, quotes, testimony in in support of the TPA.

Greeny flip floppers.

No idea what they believe in or why.

Posted by refin | April 14, 2007 10:24 PM
21

Josh is correct (as usual), but is even worse than he says.

I fear that two bad measures will pass, as the voters are desparate and trust ST and RTID too much.

First, an aside on SR-520. The description as four general-purpose lanes and two HOV lanes are misleading and from previous decades. This is practiced by the Governor on down. Whether four or six lanes, all will be HOT lanes. SR-520 will be tolled. I hope dynamic tolling is used; it would vary by time of day and be sufficient to maintain flow at 45 mph.

SR-520 is indicative of the flaws in both the RTID and ST2 measures as they stand today.

The RTID was written by three state senators who wanted to expand I-405 (e.g., McDonald, Finkbiner, and Horn). All three are out of office (replace by Tom, Oemig, and Weinstein), yet we continue to follow their lead. The RTID legislation mandates that 90 percent of its funds go toward highways of statewide significance. Would not sidewalks and arterials be more supportive of growth management, transit use, and less likely to induce sprawl?

The RTID relies on one tenth sales tax. That is inefficient, as it does not send a price signal to roadway users. It is unfair, as it taxes households and firms at a rate completely unrelated to their use of roadways and it is a regressive tax. It is politically risky, as its rate is already quite high.

Even the RTID MVET is not related to use, but to value. At least it is progressive.

The Legislature should have set up better governance and better taxes.

Back to SR-520. The RTID includes funding for the fifth and sixth lanes, but the funding for the replacement four lanes is still insufficient. Treasurer Murphy pointed that out last week. The RTID plan allocates $1.2 Billion to adding four general-purpose lanes to I-405 between Renton and I-90. Should that expansion be reduced in scale, tolled, and the capital funds shifted to SR-520? Fix it first.

Maybe something will come out of the last week of the Legislature.

ST2 ignores SR-520. ST2 invests almost all its East King County subarea funding into East Link LRT. Yet Route 545 (Redmond to Seattle via Overlake) is growing fast and could be branded as BRT and helped with additional capital.

ST2 has studied East Link LRT enough to learn the following:
1. that they cannot afford to reach downtown Redmond;
2. that it forecasted ridership in 2030 is rather modest;
3. that it will take a long time to build it; if all goes well (and what capital project goes well?), East Link LRT will open in about 2022.
4. ST3 will be many years away without even more revenue, as they will sell 30 year bonds to pay for the 20 year program.
Bill LaBorde: ST2 would exhaust ST tax capacity.

Desidono: please do not compare the current Route 550 trip in the reverse peak direction only with East Link LRT. Instead, ST2 could implement both R8A and R2B and establish a two-way busway in the center roadway. The third phase of R8A requires a modest $65 million, but the three governments (e.g., ST, RTID, and WSDOT) cannot agree who will pay for it. ST has the money sitting in the bank. Your commute would be helped by R8A.

Would not a LRT train every nine minutes in each direction in the I-90 center roadway be a rather modest use of that much capacity? It could carry many more buses to Eastgate, Issaquah, Sammamish, Issaquah Highlands, and north Renton, instead of just improving Route 550.

If a local government (e.g., King County, POS, ST) acquires it, ST2 should use the Woodinville subdivision for diesel LRT service between Woodinville and Renton via the wineries, Totem Lake, Kirkland, South Kirkland, Overlake Hospital, downtown Bellevue (via an elevated wye), Newport, Port Quendall, Kennydale, and north Renton. Modest stations could be placed at each arterial with a bus route. It should have enough passing track for frequent service.

The ST2 packages in South King and Pierce counties are very weak. The Board seems fixated on regional rail connecting the urban centers. But the south line is slow as it correctly deviated to MLK Jr. Way South for ridership in phase one. Seattle and Tacoma are about 35 miles apart. LRT is not a cost-effective mode, as its capacity is not required. ST2 should instead improve south Sounder and intercity bus. The South 317th Street center access ramp sets that up nicely. Tacoma could extend their existing LRT to both TCC via 6th Avenue and to PLU via SR-7. They could run two-way all-day DMU service on the Nally Valley rail line they own. Why is Sounder a good mode for Lakewood; it is 10 minutes slower than bus between the Tacoma Dome and Seattle. ST2 completely ingores the possibility and potential of regional HOT lanes improving bus reliability.

Grant's message is sound. The RTID and ST2 are antithetical.

The RTID and ST2 measures have the political institutions and momentum. They are both ambitious and have large appetites for taxes. If they are approved, what tax capacity will remain for highway maintenance (example: $2B will be needed soon for I-5 in north Seattle)? Or what of the large sidewalk deficit? In north Seattle, long segments of Greenwood, Aurora, and Meridian avenues North do not have sidewalks, yet have schools, multifamily housing, pedestrians, and transit service. Many of our suburbs developed since WWII lack sidwalks. Should we widen I-405 or build a empty slow costly trains first?

Posted by eddiew | April 14, 2007 10:29 PM
22

eddiew apparently is one of those in the 39% category.

That is about the same amount of people who support the President now.

The rest of us want to get out of Iraq and want light rail that doesn't get stuck in traffic like eddiew's buses do.

Posted by gimby | April 15, 2007 7:17 AM
23

These polls are terrible. The financial details have not even been released yet. No one knows how much tax would have to be taken in, and what the "promises" from Sound Transit and RTID (WTF???) really will look like.

This is just like the monorail project. It got great poll numbers - for a while. It passed four times with the voters UNTIL THOSE ASSHATS DISCLOSED HOW MUCH TAX THEY ACTUALLY INTENDED TO TAKE IN.

Once the real financial picture became clear, the voters killed it by a 2:1 margin.

Gee, I wonder why none of the tax collection guesstimates for this thing have been released yet . . . .

Posted by remember monorail? | April 15, 2007 9:40 AM
24

Refin @ 20:

"Why did you support the 2003 and 2005 gas tax packages?

I have seen others ask you that question on these posts and you have never answered."

I think I have answered this in previous posts. In any case, there are a few reasons why many of us enviros held our noses then but can no longer do so now:

1) The tax equity arguments I mentioned in my earlier post at 19 don't apply the same way at the state level. Gas taxes are user fees and at least there is some price signal sent by higher gas prices that encourages people to drive less. With the previous gas tax increases, it was the state taking on their own projects. RTID is about the state shirking its responsibility and pawning off "highways of statewide significance" onto Puget Sound taxpayers. As mentioned earlier, this might be a reasonable trade-off if the state invested in regional transit, but it doesn't.

2) With the '03 and '05 state packages, it looked like the legislature was starting to turn a new leaf, prioritizing safety and infrastructure replacement, along with HOV. That was worth rewarding with some political support. Regarding the projects further financed by RTID, like 405 and 167, it's actually perfectly legitimate to spend hundreds of millions in improving the efficiency of these routes without expanding SOV capacity (eg., new interchanges, ramp metering and new collector/distributor lanes). And Cross-Base did not get much in these previous packages, compared to what it could get in RTID. On the plus side, much of Puget Sound money from '03 and '05 was put into completing the HOV system and fixing the Alaska Way Viaduct (even the surface/transit option will cost most of that allocation). There were definitely bad projects on those '03 and '05 lists, but much better than what we had seen from the legislature in previous years.

3) Climate change: we know much more now than even just a few years ago about climate change, sources of state GHG emissions, and what it will take to get to a point of climate stabilization by mid-century. It's now clear that clean car technology and bio-fuels will, at best, flatten out the increase in emissions from transportation. But, that's not good enough. We need to cut our emissions 80% by 2050 according to IPCC. There's no way we're going to cut our state's biggest source of emissions- transportation - without cutting vehicle miles traveled (not just per capita, but overall). We can't cut VMT by inducing a million new cars onto the road with a shitload of new, unpriced SOV capacity.


Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 15, 2007 10:03 AM
25

Gee, I wonder why none of the tax collection guesstimates for this thing have been released yet . . . .

“This package will cost the typical household $150 in additional sales tax each year, plus $80 in license tab tax for every $10,000 of your car’s value.”

Gotta love all these insightful commenters who have the absolute certainty of ignorance...

Posted by Some Jerk | April 15, 2007 10:29 AM
26

Refin @ 20:

"You and the Sierra Club will have zero credibility as opponents. I can't wait til the business community kicks the shit out of you guys using your old newsletters, quotes, testimony in in support of the TPA."

With a strategy like that, I hope they put you in charge of the campaign for RTID.

Refin: I really hope you don't have any children. Because it would be sad if you were unwilling to sacrifice whatever short-term pecuniary gain you get from RTID in favor of your children's future. As I've said before, dumping billions of dollars into new SOV capacity when we know what we now know about the need to reduce GHG emissions is not just a bad idea, its immoral.

Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 15, 2007 10:33 AM
27

Refin @ 20:

"You and the Sierra Club will have zero credibility as opponents. I can't wait til the business community kicks the shit out of you guys using your old newsletters, quotes, testimony in in support of the TPA."

With a strategy like that, I hope they put you in charge of the campaign for RTID.

Refin: I really hope you don't have any children. Because it would be sad if you were unwilling to sacrifice whatever short-term pecuniary gain you get from RTID in favor of your children's future. As I've said before, dumping billions of dollars into new SOV capacity when we know what we now know about the need to reduce GHG emissions is not just a bad idea, its immoral.

Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 15, 2007 10:56 AM
28

Bill,
Then why did you support $1.1 billion for more SOV capacity on 405 in the Ed Murray lead 2005 gas tax plan?

Bill do you want me to actually post the scope and budget of that project you supported?

Or can you just answer the question.

You aren't claiming that building more SOV lanes is ok as long as we do it with a user fee?

You aren't saying that you just learned in 2007 that the car contributes to global warming?

Posted by redfin | April 15, 2007 12:09 PM
29

Redfin:

We looked at the package as a whole and decided we could accept it (accept it, not like it), even though there were pieces we didn't like. And, that was then, this is now. Enough already.

User fee does not equal acceptable SOV lanes, but this issue is one factor that makes RTID exceptionally awful.

What is different now re: climate change is that we better understand the level of emission reductions needed and that clean car and bio-fuel technologies by themselves are not going to come close to cutting it. Again, enough already. Time to stop digging the carbon hole and time to start filling it back in.


Posted by Bill LaBorde | April 15, 2007 12:45 PM
30

ok there "some jerk" - got what you say (it is what RTID and ST have said for several months):

"“This package will cost the typical household $150 in additional sales tax each year, plus $80 in license tab tax for every $10,000 of your car’s value.”

Gotta love all these insightful commenters who have the absolute certainty of ignorance...""

Everybody knows those numbers. What we don't know includes:

- how much ST expects it would haul in during the first year of taxation,

- how much RTID expects it would haul in during the first year of taxation,

- what number of dollars in total (year of collection) would approving these measures mean these two governments would take out of the pockets of taxpayers of this region,

- what annual growth rate RTID and ST are expecting over the next five decades for their respective tax streams, and

- when the taxes would stop (2078? 2085?).

Rather than just leaving smart ass comments, how about trying to post something we don't know?

Posted by West Seattle Pete | April 15, 2007 1:41 PM
31

West Seattle Pete,

One way to look at the costs is that if the package is $16 billion that would be about $5000 per person in the RTA and RTID (about 3 million people).

Are the numbers we're being shown with or without finance costs?


One reason that people may not be splitting out ST based on the poll is that it was done by the most inaccurate pollster in the area. The August poll was badly skewed towards North King County (Seattle) - the guy is a tool. Has anybody posted the latest poll? Was it publicly paid for?

Posted by Kush | April 15, 2007 2:40 PM
32

Some of you might be interested in what CETA documented for hand over at a late March meeting with the State Auditor. It's posted at

www.bettertransport.info/pitf/stateauditor.htm

We were not sure of the Auditor's work scope, so we provided everything we thought might be of interest.

A State performance audit of Central Link light rail is already announced as being in the works, to be released this summer.

Picking up on a topic mentioned here, annual per household taxation in Sound Transit Phase 2, we wrote for the Auditor: "In 2008, Sound Transit projects it will collect $358 million in local taxes, from a population of 2,763,500. That's $128 per-capita. But it reduces that figure to only $125 per household--$50 per individual. (A local household averages 2.47 persons.)"

I noticed that the early April poll fielded by Sound Transit uses $125 per household per year to get 49% approval. I wonder if the results would have been different had the per household been quoted as $317, based on 2.47 people per household times $128 per person. That would be just for the first year. And that doesn't include the taxes already being paid for Sound Move Phase One, the ten-year plan approved in 1996 and now in its eleventh year.

Posted by John Niles | April 15, 2007 6:36 PM
33

John, none of us are interested at all in anything CETA has to say. You are all a bunch of road builders who only support buses because they can justify more pavement.

Posted by tiptoe tommy | April 17, 2007 2:05 PM
34

Tiptoe Tommy and others not interested in what CETA has to say, ignore this, please!

CETA supports transit that runs on roads, and we support road configurations that give buses more priority on the roads ... things like transit priority signals (more green lights for buses) and diamond lanes for HOVs only, including buses. We think bus-only streets should be given more consideration, like the bus-only pedestrian street with electric buses running through downtown Denver.

On city streets with parking, we support bus bulbs where the sidewalk is expanded to meet the lane where the bus moves, so the bus does not have to pull out of traffic. This is a technique successfully used in downtown Ottawa Canada.

We like buses better than trains because buses can be routed to cover the entire metro area, and can be deployed and re-routed quickly to meet new service demands. Measured by commuter market share, Seattle area has one of the more successful bus systems in North America.

We know that there will always be a road network, because that is how police, fire fighters, emergency medical services, grocery store and hospital deliveries, mail and package delivery, construction equipment and supplies, dirt and garbage hauling, and taxicabs can travel to any address in the city. Fortunately, power systems to reduce pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions are coming on strong. Google "plug in hybrid electric vehicles" and find thousands of pages. Seattle already has many all-electric bus routes, a clean, quiet technology for transit propulsion.

We are therefore in favor of building a transit system that exploits the ubiquitous road network and garners its fair share of road space.

To say CETA supports buses in order to build roads is inaccurate. We support buses because we want to exploit the road network. We support changes to roads that would give more priority to buses.

A graphic showing the official best case government forecast for road and rail use in 2040 (see http://www.bettertransport.info/pitf/gridlock.htm#split) shows that bus and car trips will vastly outnumber rail trips even with Sound Transit's 200 plus miles of light and commuter rail completely built and in operation. Rail trips will be fewer than 2% of 20 million trips in 2040. Rail is an alternative, but it is an alternative that is too much money for too few riders ... the next 20 years of Sound Transit phase 2 is now forecast by Sound Transit to cost $23 billion.

Posted by John Niles | April 28, 2007 5:33 PM

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