Proposition 1: the arguments against, deconstructed
It's fairly easy to propound better solutions than the roads-and-transit measure about to be voted on. But it's not easy to see how they would be enacted.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, or so they say. The $17.8 billion roads-and-transit package that will go to King, Pierce, and Snohomish county voters in a matter of days is clearly far from perfect. As King County Executive Ron Sims has noted, it won't replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct or the 520 floating bridge. It will cost a lot of money. It won't reduce congestion. It won't reduce our regional carbon footprint. Sims, who emerged belatedly as an opponent of Proposition 1, says that the costs exceed the benefits.
Still, many local politicians defend the proposal. The late Walt Crowley, in an essay published after his death, argued that it represented a significant and irreversible step away from the age of the internal combustion engine.
Could we do better, assuming the measure is defeated? Sims figures that regional officials can fix the eye-glazing but critical issue of regional transportation "governance" and come back to the people with something better. And what if they can't? One close observer suggests "we've got this package not because it's good, but it's the best they could put together politically. That's the basic pro vote: It's better than nothing."
But is it really better than nothing? No, says the Sierra Club Cascade Chapter's Tim Gould. "The current proposal, with respect to greenhouse gasses, makes things worse," Gould says. "It essentially blows out of the water any chance we have of meeting" the county's ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target, announced last July by the Sierra Club and a group of large American counties. Gould says "we've reached the point where we can no longer accept bad highway projects just to get good transit projects." If we're serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he says, "we just don't get very far unless we can also reduce vehicle miles traveled."
The Cascade Chapter came out early as the only vocal opponent of Proposition 1. Sims and other skeptics kept their reservations to themselves, evidently hoping that the voters would reject the proposal on purely financial grounds. (Americans have always been reluctant to pay for transportation infrastructure. The historian Garry Wills, paraphrasing Henry Adams, writes that in 1800, "Americans' reluctance to submit to any requisitions on their own money made them put up with the terrible costs of bad roads or no roads rather than submit to paying turnpikes.")
Some of the arguments over Proposition 1 may be arcane, but most can be reduced to easy sound bites:
Build it and they will come. This is essentially the Sierra Club's argument. More lanes mean more driving, which in turn means more emissions of greenhouse gas. Instead, we need "lifestyle changes where people make it a point to live not so far from work."
Ending congestion is an illusion and perhaps a scam. Sims complains that Proposition 1 won't get rid of congestion soon enough and that other measures are less costly and likely to work sooner, such as congestion pricing and bus rapid transit.
The Regional Transportation Investment District (RTID) Web site talks about reducing congestion. A recent performance audit commissioned by the state says that reducing congestion should be the main transportation priority for the Puget Sound region. It assumes congestion can be reduced. It recommends adding lanes, transit trips, car pooling, and telecommuting. Some of these recommendations are beyond the reach of conventional transportation policy. Some would clearly work. If you eliminate bottlenecks, traffic will move more freely.
But more lanes seldom mean less congestion - at least not for long. Neither do rails. Manhattan has great public transportation, but rush-hour Manhattan still has gridlocked streets. BART doesn't keep Bay Area freeways from being nightmares; it just enables hundreds of thousands of additional people to commute into downtown San Francisco every day. People know this, but they don't say it when they're trying to sell bonds.
Demand for highways tends to be elastic. If new lanes make driving more attractive, they will attract more drivers. And congestion is not the only issue – greenhouse gases being another important consideration not mentioned by the state audit.
On the other hand, there's no denying the bottlenecks on Highway 167 and the Highway 520 bridge, in particular. There's no use pretending that if nothing changes, drivers who have gone to the hinterland for relatively cheap housing will do anything but sit in traffic, motors idling, until they get to work or to the mall. And there's no use pretending that if the Viaduct collapses or the 520 bridge sinks, the region will get along just fine
Charge them and they will stay home. What Gould and a lot of other people would like to see is "congestion pricing," making drivers pay for the privilege of driving downtown during peak daytime hours. They've done it in London. They may do it in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to charge every car $8 and every truck $21 for driving below 86th Street during the day. The state Assembly balked, and the plan faces an uncertain future, while a commission is studying the idea. If the feds kick in several hundred million dollars and both the Assembly and City Council approve, it may happen. Just in time. The hard-pressed subway system could use the money that congestion fees would generate. It will almost certainly raise fares before any congestion pricing system can go into effect.
Like what you just read? Support high quality local journalism by becoming a member of Crosscut.com today!
Comments:
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 8:11 a.m. inappropriate
Who is the enemy?: There's a fatal flaw in your argument - easily discernible enough to not make your waffling worth reading - Prop 1 does not provide a business model to move people that works. The business model that is at work in this plan is nothing but a global hedge of international energy/engineering companies along the lines of Haliburton and Blackwater - sure, they'll give you your environmentally friendly transit system - if you bankrupt yourself and put yourself in a bind to 'them' financially, as well as to their single source 'technology'.
Yes, we need to do something now - and that is why it is justified to 'complain' - your word - about our elected officials - and compliment folks like Sims, Licata, and Rossi.
Sure, Hitler's policies likely would've led to a quicker environmental catastrophe than those of the US and their allies - but that isn't the reason FDR and Churchill 'complained'. They were leaders who knew what was up and could make a good, even if very, very costly, decision.
Poor decision making is not just a local problem - but we can start to do something by holding our local leaders accountable - as well as insisting that they represent us in holding at higher levels to those same standards by which they matured as responsible adult american citizens.
The core of the solution is congestion pricing, implemented gradually, like in HOT lanes and Bridges, not spending 100% of our money solving 1% of the problem. Congestion pricing will work and it will work immediately. It needs effective leadership that convey that to the people. Sims, Licata, and Rossi are those sorts of leaders.
Norm Satterberg talks much about the his 'non-partisan' approach to the law. This is all well and good, in theory. In practice though that office's procedures are the source of what can result as a cancer of well meaning primadonnas.
Sure, folks are well intentioned. But if you don't hold them to the same laws as everyone else - if you don't protect the public's money like you protect a legal client's - what, just what to you end up with.
It is time to 'deconstruct' our leadership and to throw these losers that call a constructive critic a complaining harrasser and throw them in jail. You don't believe that would happen here? Well, time to grow up buddy, it has.
Methinks the losers are starting to get desperate - are you going to start losing your temper, like your type does? Or are you and adult, responsible, proud, american, citizen?
I think you can guess where I'd place my bets...
Call it tough love, if you must - and stop giving me this every critic is a negative defective BS.
Now I'm not saying our current leaders are Hitlers. But do they have the potential - if we continue to let them - to become Stalins? The answer to that is yes, and that is a sad thing.
-Douglas Tooley
Lincoln Hill, Tacoma
P.S. - Treasurer Mike Murphy needs to be held accountable. He claims that the 157 Billion dollar number is bogus. That is fraud. The 157 Billion is the highest number that can be stated and there are certainly other ways of presenting the costs that come across lower, but they are all valid, and legitimate items of a rational debate. Simply put the 157 billion is the amount AUTHORIZED (not budgeted) calculated in actual, not adjusted for inflation, dollars.
However one must also consider that this is as budgeted. The current plan went through the same sort of 'Expert' review as ST2 and it has completed not much more than 50% of what was originally promised with a delay of near a decade, as I recall. Go figure.
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 11:30 a.m. inappropriate
Prop 1 is awful: I know you want to sound balanced but this region simply cannot afford prop. 1. Consider talking more about costs and less about the future.
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 11:59 a.m. inappropriate
An Alternative to Congestion Pricing: The argument in favor of Prop 1 is -- more of the same, actually alot more. Proponents never talk about cost benefit -- it's going to be a big bite on middle income households.
Congestion pricing is often posed as the best alternative, but it too falls much more heavily on those with lower income. Do we really want to favor the wealthy in our transportation policy?
What's the alternative? A really good bus system is more cost effective than trains or bigger roads. And here's one possible alternative to congestion pricing:
What about a reward model, rather than fees and taxes, to induce people to carpool or take public transportation? For example, consider the state lottery, which gets people to voluntarily contribute to government revenues, even though many of these same people detest mandatory taxes and vote anti-tax at the ballot box. The lottery pays out much less than the cost of tickets. People are indeed happy to pay hard cash for a very slim chance at winning. What about using the same technique to reward car pools and bus riders, and thereby reduce traffic?
How would a traffic reduction lottery work? For cars, we might select stoplight locations (possibly freeway exits or busy streets) and designated times, keeping the information secret of course until prizes are awarded. The first car that stopped at the payoff point would be chosen. If the car had multiple occupants, each would get a lottery prize check. Drivers of single-occupant cars would get voided checks to show they were chosen but didn't qualify. It's simpler for buses - lottery prizes would simply be randomly given to a few riders a day.
Does it sound farfetched? But, essentially it's the same theory as congestion pricing, but with incentives for carpooling and bus riding rather than penalties for driving.
The cost? Here's one example at about $5 million a year - a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to transit and road spending. Each day, 10 lucky carpoolers, and 10 lucky bus riders each receive prizes of $500. This means, each year, over 7000 people would win $500 each for carpooling or taking the bus. Once every three months, a lucky carpooler or bus rider would receive an additional prize of $100,000, and we could have one grand prize per year of $1,000,000. This is just an example -- the amount and number of these prizes could be adjusted to fit a budget and to be most effective.
Is this experiment worth trying for a few million bucks a year? Experience during recent I-5 repairs suggests that it's indeed possible to reduce traffic flows. At worst, a traffic reduction lottery would reward some carpoolers and bus riders. If it didn't help reduce traffic after a reasonable trial, we could stop spending and try something else. Maybe a big public education campaign, such as was done around the recent I-5 repairs would be even more effective. (We don't know, because the jawboning about cutting traffic flows ended when the repairs were completed.) Or, is it more sensible to irrevocably commit tens of billions to massive road and train projects, with no hope of reducing traffic, but instead providing for even more cars and increasing our contribution to global warming?
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 12:11 p.m. inappropriate
The more supporters of Prop 1 seek to debunk opponents and their arguments, the more Prop 1 is made to look like the loser it is.
Remember the first rule of holes: when in one...quit digging!
The Piper
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 3:30 p.m. inappropriate
Kemper says No!: Yes - I agree with the Sierra Club, don't vote for Prop 1. Afterall, I need you to keep fueling up your cars, sitting in traffic and coming to my mall with its easy and convenient parking. And god forbid they fund this with a sales tax increase - what is that going to do my bottom line. That is why I am funding the majority of costs for the No to Prop 1 campaign. Just stay in your cars, stay dumb and happy and keep shopping at Bellevue Square Mall - don't worry - I am sure these gas prices won't stay up this high forever!
Kemper Freeman, Jr.
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 5:20 p.m. inappropriate
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE: At least here at Crosscut, there is a distinct and noticeable lack of enthusiasm for Prop. 1. The defenders, Mr. Chasan and (earlier) Mr. Brewster make eloquent apologies but I interpret what they are saying is "hold your nose.."
The best argument for Prop. 1 is that the next "proposition" (a useful term) we get will be all roads. And then, true horror, it passes. I am willing to take that chance and vote against Prop 1. But it may be something I regret.
Posted Tue, Oct 30, 7:12 p.m. inappropriate
Prop 1 - a transportation fiasco: There is very good science published that deflates the CO2 hype we
see the 'cali club' - sims - our fraudulently elected gov and the rest of
the ecco-facists hanging their berets on.
Anyone who has studied the 11 year sun spot cycle and the solid body
of work explaining the consequences of, knows this. Obviously, there are
many al gores in this world who have reached a silly conclusion when in
fact, the science is NOT over.
So, one big myth is the need to elect prop 1 to reduce CO2 ! Think again
Seattle, if your minds are not closed too tight.
Another myth is that by devoting a rediculous amount of money on light
rail, 'we' are building a 'solution'. Well, it's a solution that 90 % of the
regions people will NEVER use.
If light rail is a solution, why not make the current and future riders pay
the TRUE cost of each trip ?
It makes more sense to 'isolate' seattle and all the bike riders by creating
a new zone of essentially the city, with north and south limits and GIVING
the city I-5 and the two floating bridges. In exchange, the region builds a
new freeway ( 605 ) designed for minimum access, with LONG entrance and
exit ramps and segregation for truck traffic. Emphasis should be on removal
of HOV and creation of as many general purpose lanes as possible on 405.
If the HOV stupids must have their way, put all HOV as the RIGHT most lane
on any freeway.
Any regional transportation district should EXCLUDE Seattle, so as to
accomplish the more immediate goal of beginning to relieve traffic congestion
that has been caused by the decades of planning and construction neglect
with regards to the means the vast majority of us use and will continue to
use : ROADS / FREEWAYS.
Why is it NO Prop 1 zealots are saying word one about what will happen to
the existing gas tax money ? This is a state where the gas tax is the among the highest in our country. How will this money then be used ? Or, will our
governor, in a rare stroke of intelligence, work to reduce this tax.
Why is it NO Prop 1 zealots are talking about how so very much tax money
for transportation has been 'mis-used' by local juristictions ? Used to fund
'solutions' that are NOT meaningful !
Posted Wed, Oct 31, 1:13 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Prop 1 - a transportation fiasco: Don't worry about the money for this proposition. If you vote it down, you will have no option other than to take a car (since the buses will also be stuck in the traffic nightmare) and some guy in the Middle East (and in Houston) will have your balls on the anvil - with a captive market that has inelastic demand thanks to no alternatives. What will be especially great is he can funnel all of the "savings" you thought your were poing to get from voting no on Prop 1 into one of the subway projects or highrise building they are putting up in Dubai.
Thank you for being totally car dependent King County - you guys are definitely smarter than all of the the other places in the world that have rail mass transit!
Posted Wed, Oct 31, 4:04 p.m. inappropriate
RE: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE: Yeah, that is a risk, but I think just making it tougher will be a good thing, regardless of specifics.
Congestion pricing is a highway strategy, but it does maximize existing resources if you price roads so they stay at a speed level that maximizes capacity. That minimizes gas burned. I am trustful that buses will have access to congestion priced lanes and that makes it fair for all, regardless of income.
If revenues from congestion pricing are dedicated to the roads where they are generated I think you will see right wing support as well.
It's called win-win, as opposed to the we win, everybody else loses strategy of Prop 1. proponents.
My biggest fear is that the Sierra Club won't be smart about what they ask for after the defeat of Prop. 1. Attacking the roads package won't work, but they will be able to get some concessions - perhaps free access to HOT lanes for hybrids and electrics?
-Douglas Tooley
Lincoln Hill, Tacoma
Posted Mon, Nov 5, 10:27 a.m. inappropriate
Time to step up to the plate: One poster here says we should stop thinking so much about the future and concentrate on the short term costs of Prop 1. That attitude is what has gotten the region into such a mess in the first place.
Every single time we've had an opportunity to do something about transit, we've cheaped out, and now we're in a deep hole for sure. Far from digging us deeper, Prop 1 provides hope for a way out.
But we've got to get started.
I agree that the idea of reducing congestion is misleading. I lived in Japan for six years, where they have a very dense rail network. They also have highways everywhere, and tolls are astronomical ($9.00 to drive five miles!) Auto taxes are expensive, and like most places in the world, they pay about three times what we do for gas. The roads, and the trains, are packed to capacity.
And that is the key: capacity. Not miles of open road for you to tool along in your Lexus SUV, but capacity to get vast numbers of people into and through the city.
Congestion pricing is an interesting idea, but I just don't think it's workable. A regional toll system would be better. I also don't buy the argument that the recent I-5 construction demonstrated that congestion can be managed by denying drivers capacity. The reason demand dropped was because everybody knew it was temporary, and they could make alternate arrangements for a short period of time. I wouldn't count on that over the long haul.
Posted Mon, Nov 5, 11:10 a.m. inappropriate
Flawed Argument: Mr Chasan makes a familiar, albeit flawed argument. "If you want to make congestion pricing work ... First, you give people alternative means of transportation." People have alternative means of transportation, namely buses, along with carpools, vanpools, bikes and feet. What's wrong with buses (well, other than they're not being fashionable)? They get stuck in traffic. What's the point of congestion pricing? To get vehicles NOT stuck in traffic!
If you price even one freeway lane each way (ie turn the HOV lanes into HOT lanes), buses will move at 50-60 mph 24/7, even at the height of rush hours. Combine that with some arterial bus-only lanes and the transit mobility problem is solved. Not addressed. Solved. Cost to the general public? Nada. Those who pay to use these (HOT) lanes pay for them.
This can be extended to congestion pricing of all freeway lanes. I won't go through the nuances here, but will just mention that, because semi-gridlocked highways carry far fewer vehicles than their design capacity, applying pricing to the freeways would give us abourt 50% more effective rush-hours capacity than we have now. As former Transportaion Secretary Doug MacDonald repeatedly said, pricing increases the size of the "traffic pipes". The net revenues from pricing can then be used to increase roads and/or transit capacity further. Cost to the general public? Again, nada.
So we have a total surface transportation solution with no general tax increase.
Vote NO on Prop1.