I was gonna vote Yes: But the more I think of it, the more it boils my blood that there isn't a central planning department for our transportation needs in the Puget sound. Second, it takes bloody forever to build a hundred foot piece of road. What the Romans would build in a day, takes us four or five months.

And as for railroads, the Transcontinental Railroad laid down 50 miles of track a year, or at least tried to. These days we're lucky to lay 1 mile in 5 years. Why? Safety. We are overly worried about it.

Safety is important, but because of our current fear of injury and even more of lawsuits resulting from those injuries, construction is hamstrung by a myriad of safety rules and regulations that stymie any form of progress.

Now you'll say, "Uh-uh, it's getting the right of way that's hard."

No, that's just finding the right price and using right of ways that are already own by the government. Like the Express Lanes on I-5. That's where the Light Rail should have run, not under a hill. I even brought this up at one of the RTA meetings years ago and was told, "It would reduce capacity of I-5."

'Scuse me? Reduce capacity? It would carry more passengers than any of the cars it would have displaced... Oh, wait... back then roads were measured in car capacity, not passenger capacity. Turning the Express Lanes into light rail tracks would have reduced car capacity... Duh.

We need to streamline the process that gets things built, like light rail, and have it finished in our lifetimes, not our kids.

Proposition 1 Needs Less Planning and More Performance: Why I ABSOLUTELY HATE Prop 1 (which I will continue to call RAT), is that the whole notion of performance is swept under the rug. Casey mentions logrolling. The RAT logrolling could power the City of Seattle for 50 years and still never create a transportation system. Anyone who's ever watched a Sound Transit board meeting on TV understands why politburo central planning failed in the Soviet Union. The call for better planning is useful, but better yet would be a set of entrepreneurial public-private construction arms, combined with enactment of new methods for financing individual corridors that don't require general taxes on everyone and that allow entities to design, build, operate, and maintain infrastructure for long periods of time. Sound Transit would do better if it were considered an entrepreneurial pay-as-you-go entity and less a subsidized free utility.

The Times recently ran an article about whether we could "trust Sound Transit?" The article reached no conclusion. It mainly said that in 1996 we were promised something but are being delivered half as much at twice the price in twice the time. The Sound Transit response is mainly we cleaned house and everything's better now and we're always on time and on budget. Of course, like any big project, from Windows to the Dreamliner, small milestones are important, but you measure promises against promises. So when someone can actually ride on Sound Transit, then we'll know when it's really available. But the problem here is not the people at Sound Transit. The problem is the incentives in RAT and for Sound Transit and all those feeding off our tax dollars.

The incentives are set up to make the gravy train last as long as possible. The way RAT is set up, on-time and on-budget performance are nice, but compared to life-long employment they don't compare. Thus we get 50 years of taxation for a way-too-long 20-year project. Solving transportation problems is nice for Sound Transit, but compared to high-wage salaries that support the families of all involved (from management to unions to contractors) transportation problems pale in significance. MAYBE Sound Transit will finally open light rail on time from the airport to downtown, but don't bet on the inertia of any government agency to meet deadlines. Unfortunately, the motto of many unions and government agencies is We don't care, We don't have to. Without the right incentives, the people who build and run the system won't have to care about performance and they won't.

I'm not pointing fingers at Sound Transit (or even unions), because they are constrained by all the usual government reasons for being ineffective: regulations, law suits, multiple-jurisdictions, complexity, weird public mandates, multiple union contracts, bureaucracy, politics, politicians -- the list goes on. To cut through the usual government constraints what's needed is a REAL performance focus in RAT to counteract business as usual, where the three parts of performance are:
- Construction Performance (including labor, materials, and real estate),
- Financial Performance (with an emphasis on user pays, minimal debt service, and minimal taxation), and ultimately
- Transportation Performance (in number of trips, tons of carbon, and congestion relief during peak periods).

These are what are mainly lacking in RAT Prop 1. I'll make my recommendations in the next post for what ought to be in Prop 2 to make it performance based and to also make it passable.

Proposition 2 RIGHT NOW!: Let's develop a simple plan that focuses the energy of everyone on fixing problems right now, thus I suggest we call Proposition 2, RIGHT NOW! This will stand for Real Incentives Generate High-performance Transportation Now! Let's vote on it in January, and start building in June. In five years by 2013 we'll have ST2 everywhere and all the Prop 1 roads built. That's the goal. Here are three performance recommendations for Prop 2 that build on the current RAT:

1. Expedite!
EVERYTHING should be doable in five years. Let's plan to DO and not plan simply to PLAN. And let's pass laws that make it easy to do: Streamline the environmental regulations for projects this gargantuan; Streamline settling of lawsuits; Streamline hiring; Streamline contract negotiation. Do the same work, but don't stretch it out over 20 years or allow it to be delayed for decades by bureaucracy and legal challenges. Give government the ability to expedite construction and real estate purchase through eminent domain, closure of roadways to speed up construction, and payment of expediting fees to address project bottlenecks. Expediting transportation projects should be the Legislature's JOB #1. The measures they pass should be in Prop 2. If we do this, then we can get rid of the 50-yr taxation window that gives rise to $157-billion dollar cost estimates and get rid of the 30-yr bonds and replace them with 20-yr bonds. Let's ground ourselves in reality. And urgency!

2. Give Incentives for On Time and Under Budget.
We must be willing to pay EXTRA for on-time, under-budget performance. REWARD people for doing what's hard. It's relatively easy to take twice as long and spend twice as much money as promised to finish ST1. By passing RAT we'd be rewarding failure with more of the same. So what should we expect from ST2? More of the same.

Similarly, unions win when big projects start and lose when they end. Let's change that. Often there's no risk to unions in construction or financing failure. So if a union causes a deadline to slip or a project to go over budget, there's only cause for the union to rejoice, because now there will be more work and money for the union. The perverse incentive is in place, guaranteeing lousy performance. Let's ask union's to invest in the projects they work on, and to retain a stream of future income from the project, so that there is the equivalent of a a profit incentive to a union and its employees to complete a project and start the money coming in. Kind of like profit sharing. Then people won't prod unions to be more productive, they'll prod themselves.

3. Fund with User Fees.
Financing of infrastructure, particularly bridges and trains, and freeways, should be significantly funded with user fees including tolls, peak-hour charges, HOV-toll lanes, and light rail rider fees. Currently light rail cares not a whit about fare-box revenue. According to their PLAN only 1.3% of their 20-yr financing comes from farebox revenue. Apparently Sound Transit believes riders shouldn't pay their fair share. In fact, the plan is mainly to tax everyone in the region instead. People who are going to be living in dense downtown condos and ride light rail have money. Charge'em so that users are co-paying significant cost. And then lower the taxes. Same with 520. Financing for 520 isn't done, even with RAT. The simple solution is to raise the toll to cover it. Make it $6 a trip instead of $3. Or $12 instead of $6. If the bridge costs so much, let the actual users pay for usage, rather than unequally spreading the cost over taxpayers. Put the minimum tolls in the plan up-front. Higher tolls also mean that light rail fares can go up and still remain below the comparable road price. No more free commons being abused by drivers and riders.

RE: right now ?: I have no problem with making REAL accountability the first priority for
any agency that has it's finger in the transportation field for this region. If that
is to be then I say you all better back up one step and look at the disaster
that light rail is and will ALWAYS be.

Over 90 % of the regions population will STILL choose to never use light
rail. Go ahead, make the riders pay the REAL share of cost to take a trip and
the numbers will go from dismal to almost non-existent !

Your trip on light rail ? Imagine a ride where you share the 'car' with drug
pushers, gang bangers and those who 'sound transit' supported agencies comp
with free tickets ! Except for the morning and evening commute times, look for
light rail to simply provide a conduit for the social misfits to spread their grief
to new areas of the burbs.

The next gen of personal vehicles will be essentially pollution free. Build freeways
designed to segregate truck traffic, with approaches to allow speed up/slow down
BEFORE entry and let them serve the areas OUTSIDE of central Seattle. Let the
socialists ride their bikes or whatever - just drop Seattle out of the issue !

I'm voting NO on this tax fiasco ! I could care less what ron sims thinks !

Another capacity-booster: It has been conventional wisdom for decades that HOV lanes are a beneficial and efficient away of getting people around on freeways. The sentiment is nice: motivate folks to pool together, avoid solo freeway driving at crowded times, and so forth. But in fact this plan has never worked!! Look around you at the number of single drivers on I-5, I-405, and SR 520: once we get past the judgmental mindset which is at work here, it is clear that improved mass transit may alleviate the situation somewhat, but probably no more that that; there are people who NEED to drive alone, and others who simply won't change. In the meantime, giving preferential treatment to multiple drivers simply makes traffic worse, because those partially empty lanes could handle a whole lot more cars, and thus lessen travel times (consider how many cars can pass through a 10-mile corridor with two lanes, as opposed to one with three lanes: the math is not quite so simple as this, but the outcome is the same).

Bottom line: I am not against Prop. 1 because, despite its flaws, it seems a big step in the right direction. But I have trouble taking seriously any traffic plan which doesn't question the continued use of HOV lanes.

RE: Proposition 2 RIGHT NOW!: You make some good points but you present no methods for expediting the revolution you propose.

I'd say that if everything went your way, some of what you are dreaming about might be in place in five years.

But 10 years is a more realisitic implementation timeframe for your RAT 2.

The 10 Year Plan: You make some good points but you present no methods for undertaking your revolution.

Accomplishing most of the changes you advocate would probably take 5 years easy, depending on who is in charge, it could take much longer.

You are more realtistically looking at 10 years for implementation of the process and policy changes you advocate.

So that means we're 10 years away from voting on your alternative. That's not extactly expediting.

What If? Summit: Prop. 1 may well pass this fall. Something that might help would be to have a "summit" prior to the election featuring all the people who oppose the ballot measure offering their alternatives. This should be on television.

That way Ron Sims would be forced to assess his futuristic ideas with Kemper Freeman. The Sierra Club would sit eye-to-eye with the editorial board of the Seattle Times, who announced this weekend that they prefer more roads and sprawl, to rail. For fun you could even invite Norm Rice and John Stanton to come with their instructions on transportation utopia. All of these people would have a public opportunity to work with each other and produce a common ground result under deadline.

And then all of the leadership of of the yes side could weigh in on the result.

The result of this excercize would be a public recognition of what should now be obvious to everyone: the people throwing darts at Prop. 1 have no real answers because real answers require common ground.

The most likely outcome of a defeat is delay, rising costs, extended debate among leadership and an extended period of environmental damage because we're actually doing nothing but increasing emissions and runoff in the same old ways into the Sound.

It was interesting that Ed Murray said he'd introduce a new bill for John Stanton and Norm Rice. I guess he didn't say he'd pass a new bill, which has proven to be impossible. Which means that the Rice/Stanton plan is DOA, which means it is really a "do-nothing" distraction that'll take years to sort out.

The sun 'ill come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar there'll be sun!: What will happen if Prop 1 fails on Election Tuesday? We will wake up Wednesday, the sun will come up behind the clouds, babies will continue to be born, the rest of the world will be unmoved and care less, and life will go on.

Despite the hystrionics of Prop 1 proponents, the sky will not fall nor will our first born be consigned to the fire. Instead, we might take stock and, as is increasingly being suggested, re-think how we think and decide about transporation.

Right now, the various agencies and authorities resemble Italy before Garibaldi and Germany before Bismarck. A bunch of smaller, competing, overlapping, and ineffective in a big picture sense gaggle of agencies, councils, authorities, districts, and more. Too many fingers in a pie designed to appease too many mutually exclusive constituincies.

Prop 1 exemplifies the old joke about making what a horse designed by a committee would look like.

That it's a plan now doesn't render it virtuous or effective, yet much of the proponent's campaign rhetoric is grounded on this thinking; vote yes or you'll never have another chance in your or your children's lifetime! Humbug!

The process by whicn Prop 1 was conceived is a mess, and the product it produced is fatally flawd. Two wrongs don't make a right.

That people from all over the political spectrum are moving in the direction of a regional authority says that the future lies in that direction. To those who complain that we should have gone this route decades ago and that it's too late now...Say's who?

Better late and right then never and better late than right than now and fatally flawed.

The Piper

Question Authority: There is no big relevation here in this vote - everything that is now being revealed was clear not long after the first two votes on Sound Transit.

Although they tried to scapegoat Director Bob White for the problems seen then, it is clear now, as it was then, that the problem lies with those controlling the business model of Sound Transit, their legal team and those that they pander to, the appointed ST Board, as well as former board member, PSRC Executive Director Bob Drewell.

These folks are no better than a sex predator violating a restraining order. The first step is to FIRE them all.

And don't be overly swayed by Norm Rice - just because he can see which way the wind is blowing doesn't mean he, or his supporters, would do anything any different. Witness the hiring of Anne Fennesy(his former counsel and the Monorail's legal director) at the RTID.

Sure, we need to improve the way we do the public's business in Washington State, but Rice and his crew already had their shot - and they've failed - witness their participation in ST, even if in a number two position.

BTW, Sim's biggest mistakes may well have been in trying to support the Rice legacy.

PS: Check out Drew Carey getting political. The Price is Right!

RE: Question Authority: BTW-

Joni Earl, the replacement for the Scapegoat Bob White, should not be considered, de-facto, part of the group that needs to be fired. There were some adminstrative improvements that needed to be made and getting rid of her might well be a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

-D

Sims is right: Ron Sims is right--The RTID has been a loser from inception, has only gotten worse, and it's time to admit it. I agree we need some entity to make sensible, cost-effective decisions that are INTEGRATED and COORDINATED. The WSDOT is a fiefdom with its own budget, as is Sound Transit; self-promotion and indefinite job security are the priorities. The last WSDOT director with any integrity and sense was Sid Morrison, who espoused a tunnel & bullet train to a new super- regional airport/(spaceport?) in Moses Lake. This was poo-poo'd venomously by the Port of Seattle, another self-perpetuating transportation agency.
The RTID is nothing but an agglomeration of pet projects put on the list by member localities with no thought to making them work together for the region. Hwy 18's completion has been seemingly been abandoned. No project would be completed in full, and no new ideas or technology is offered. Politicians let local a handful of power brokers and a joyriding management team kill the monorail. We need a radically new approach to transportation around here that makes some sense--lots of small to mid-sized projects that tie together down to the local level. We in central King County have experienced record growth for years (approved by DDES and the Council) AND STILL DON'T EVEN HAVE BUS SERVICE. How about borrowing some technology from high-tech roller coasters to run small pod-cars along our huge trail network that used to be railbeds? How about helping the Issaquah Historical society extend a trolley line from Issaquah to Redmond and Maple Valley? Why aren't we re-habbing the rails on the East Lake Washington line NOW to get folks from Tukwila and Sea-Tac all the way to Snohomish County? And by the way, figure out some way to finance it more equitably than by raising the sales tax to record levels.
Time for some LEADERSHIP with BRAINS and COURAGE.

RE: Question Authority: Tooley,

The Drew Carey video was an absolute eye-opener. Should be mandatory viewing - tie them to their seats, if need be - for every transportation planner and politico in the Puget Sound region. Make them watch it over and over and over and over again until they get the point.

Thanks for the great link!

The Piper

Seattle Times Monday, Oct 15, 2007: Peyton Whitely has a huge article today--toward the end appears this sentence; "While millions of cars have been added to state and county registration--from 2.4 million in 1970 in the state to 6.7 million in 2006--virtually no new roads have been built in decades." Kind of says it all; the treehuggers, autophobes, and global warming zealots have caused the congestion by opposing roads. Vote No on Prop 1 because it is skewered toward the evil empire of Sound Transit.

RE: Seattle Times Monday, Oct 15, 2007: I'm not even sure why I'm responding to this post because you appear to be trolling, but you've got your facts all mixed up.

Adding new roads does not necessarily ease congestion. In many cases, it enables sprawl and development farther from city centers, which then add even more cars to the roads. Los Angeles tried to build roads as a solution to traffic congestion and it's a sprawling metropolis with the worst traffic in the world.

RE: Seattle Times Monday, Oct 15, 2007: It's the old "Build it and they will drive" problem. You add more roads, you get more traffic. By cutting back on roads, should increase mass transit use, if the mass transit system adapts and adds the necessary capacity. However, we're not doing that in the Puget Sound area. We're not adding road capacity and we're not adding enough mass transit capacity.

Why Prop 1 must be defeated: Prop 1 must fail. It typifies everything that is wrong with DOT as
enabled by a Democrat controlled government.

The next transportation measures need to authorize light rail expansion
separately from highways and bridges so that each can receive an up or
down vote.

Every project needs to be evaluated through the prism of traffic
congestion relief. This should end light rail beyond its current scope
and result in blended road expansion and transit bus solutions.
Retrofitting or replacing the viaduct and the 520 bridge with at least
six vehicle lanes are not debatable, but the 520 bridge could be a
suspension design for a fraction of the cost of another floating bridge.

All projects of this type should be design/build contracts that will
reduce costs by 30 to 45%. Moreover most of the 1100 + "design
engineers" now employed by DOT can look for new jobs. Design/build
authorization is now quite limited and a major bill is needed to
establish the mandate. Design /build also prevents local governments
from tampering with the contract via change orders. These projects
should be exempt from the little Davis Bacon act, for additional savings.

Every transportation project should be fully authorized and funded so
that DOT cannot play the foot in the door and stop and go games that
make performance more costly and allow projects to be expanded beyond
their original scope.

Stop collecting sales tax on all materials and labor that goes into
public works contracts. This sneaky double taxation is unconscionable.

No more of these "expert", but unaccountable boards and commissions to
manage state agencies. They become tools of the bureaucracy because no
one is responsible or knows how to control them.

RE: Why Prop 1 must be defeated: Willi,
Good points. A simple action plan inspired by your list:

1. Do Least Cost Planning (as required by law), so that we consider major cost savings, e.g., your example of a 520 suspension bridge.

2. Increase Competition with design/build contracts and other forms of public-private partnerships.

3. Get Rid of Double Taxatation by eliminating sales tax on materials and labor of public projects. (Note that with bonded public projects, we end up paying interest on the tax on our own taxes!)

4. Blow away the leadership hydrocephaly at the top. (Hyrdocephaly is a disorder characterized by the enlargement of the skull and atrophy of the brain.) By analogy, the skull is DOT, Sound Transit, "Expert" Review Panels, the Legislature, the RTID, et al., and the brain is our transportation decision making.

5. Measure the Right Metrics because what gets measured gets done. Miles of roads and rails are the wrong measures for transportation effectiveness. Right now we're optimizing dollars spent and dollars taxed. And from the numbers I've seen, Prop 1 PROMISES to INCREASE CONGESTION over the next two decades. Talk about measuring the wrong thing. Yet the latest Pro-RAT flyer says that Prop 1 is "Finally, a smart way out of this mess!" The quality of a transportatoin system is not increased simply by adding more miles. That's like judging the quality of a jumbo jet by how much it weighs or the quality of software by how many lines of code were written (NB: neither comparison is original). Let's measure congestion relief, average trip duration, average trip cost, traffic flow, commuter satisfaction, or whatever dimensions the pros use. Once we know what to measure, then we can use Andy Grove style high-output management to become efficient and effective.

Prop 1 should be rejected. Just as any blackjack player would be foolish to double down before looking at their cards, voters for more light rail would be equally foolish to double their transit taxes before the first trains ever start running next year. Sound Move has built one of the most expensive systems to date (nearly triple the original cost estimate) and is taking twice as long to build it. Should we have reason to think the ridership estimates were equally bogus? You bet!

Here’s what Sound Move trains will actually accomplish next year, looking at the trip from Seattle to Seatac Airport. The 194 makes the trip to the luggage ramp from downtown in 27 minutes while the light rail will take 35, plus require a 5 minute walk from Hwy 99 to get to the terminal – with bags in tow. Metro charges either $1.50 or $2.25, while Sounder rail charges $3.25 from Tukwila to downtown. Will Sound Transit match Metros fares? I really doubt it. Will Sound Transit honor the ‘ride free area’ in the tunnel. No! So your Metro bus will still do all the heavy lifting through downtown.

How can any informed voter decide the cost/benefit to them personally, when Sound Transit only tells you how much it’s going to cost in higher sales tax per year, but withholds any mention of how much they plan to charge YOU to ride it? Surely they’ve thought that one through to generate all these ridership projections.

So what did our billions buy? A slower trip on a more expensive vehicle? Metro buses run on time, nearly all the time to the airport, and could have been made ‘traffic proof’ for much less of an investment with the extension of the E3 busway and a transit only flyover at SouthCenter for millions, not billions. Rails across I-90 eliminate the reversible lanes forever. Buses could be using that space, with the same capacity as light rail, and still accommodate 2,000 car and vanpools with a 3+ limit, carrying another 6,000 riders per hour each way.

Prop 1 will nearly double the taxes we pay to Sound Transit. Twenty years ago all transit in the region received about 30% of all transportation dollars. Today, transit gets about 50%. If Prop 1 passes, transportation spending will be turned on its head in the next 20 years. Roads will only get about 30%, while transits share climbs to 70%. That’s a complete reversal of spending priorities, but roads will still be required to handle 90% of the 15 million daily trips made in the region, while Prop 1 will only relieve roads of 62,000 new trips

Do we really want to starve our road and HOV system into 3rd world status of potholes and crumbling bridges, just to claim ownership of a bright and shinny railroad, that moves fewer than 5% of the trips?

Your right about one thing David, this region sure knows how to screw up a good thing. Light rail is being built elsewhere, at fractions of the cost Sound Transit has poured down the rat hole. Change is coming!