Rail needed more than ever: David Brewster misreads the future for rail in this region. All of the reasons Jim Ellis gave for rail in the 1960's are more true today. The Prop. 1 election showed that there is not support for a massive roads program. Indeed, very few new road miles have been built in the last twenty years as our population has doubled. There is not the space or will to build more. Common sense tells us that we cannot build our way out of congestion with roads. With an average length of 15 feet per car, the physical space to accommodate thousands of new single occupancy vehicles simply isn't there.

Rail can carry far more people for far less money in far less space than roads. Rail also allows us to plan for the millions more moving here in the next twenty years by creating dense urban centers around station areas.

What we really learned is that major tax measures can't be passed in off election years with only 40% of the electorate voting. The decisive defeat of Prop. 1 really meant that 21% of the electorate voted no and about 19% voted yes. We owe it to ourselves to vote in 2008 when over 80% of our citizens will be voting for a president, a governor, and the state legislature.

More roads please: Thank God light rail is dead in the Puget Sound. It is not a congestion problem solver. The roads, interchanges, and connecting freeways of the 1960's-1970's should have been built. The worst mistake made is the claptrap convention center over the I-5. Time to think "B.E." as in Beyond Ellis.

Maybe: Maybe the reason subway rail failed is because it doesn't make sense? Or perhaps it is because Ellis's business practices have alienated way too many people?

Methinks the answer is both.

Rail can work, but it has to prove itself, segment by segment. It ought to be like a career in any field - but unfortunately vasselage to Ellis and Co is a higher requirement than performance.

Mr. Ellis certainly has much to be proud of in his career, but perhaps more to be ashamed of.

BTW, I thought it was Brock Adams who got to take credit for cleaning up Lake Washington? FWIW Former Seattle Police Chief Don Maloney, in his book 'Cops, Crooks, and Politicians' seemed to like that former US Attorney and his stance against corruption - while levelling quite a bit of criticism at a number of unnamed.

-Douglas Tooley
Lincoln, Tacoma

It would NOT have been paid off in 2008, David: The ballot title for 1968's Proposition 1 ('Metro Public Transportation Bonds') reads, in relevant part: "Shall Metro perform the function of metropolitan public transportation, adopt & carry out the Comprehensive Transportation Plan and issue, over 17 years, General Obligation bonds maturing within 40 years of issue, payable from annual property tax levies?"

Upwards of $385 million in bonds (approx. $4+ Billion in 2007 $) were anticipated to be sold through 1985 or so, with bond repayment schedules potentially stretching out until 2025. So, Mr. Ellis' /Forward Thrust's line would NOT have "been fully paid off in 2008", as you wrote.

The rest of the story: We tend to ignore how much our lifestyles have changed in the last four decades. Lifestyles reflect relative wealth, and wealth in turn inspires more lifestyle changing invention and innovation. And our lifestyles dictate where we want to go, how we get there, and the number and timing of the trips we take (especially the 4 out of 5 that are not work related).

Just one example. In 1970 the local yellow pages listed only a few restaurants with foreign cusines. Even by 1980 they were so few in number that they could be listed in a few general categories on two pages. Now we are tempted by exotic cuisines so diverse that the phone book no longer attempts a categorization. And they consume 14 closely-spaced pages.

And one only needs to pick up a Sunday newspaper to see how much our hard goods consumption patterns have changed. A dedicated shopper could spend half the day sorting through all of the advertising supplements for bargains. Or scan Friday's entertainment and arts section listings for concerts, dramatic performances, exhibits, readings, etc. that number in the hundreds. The same applies to Thursday for outdoor recreation.

The change has been both incremental and enormous. It dictates our patterns of mobility in both spatial and temporal dimensions. The venues are distributed over the whole regional urban lanndscape and beyond and they keep hours that cater to a 24/7 public.

The challenge for transportation planners is to grapple with this reality knowing that transit systems with fixed alignments like rail will not even begin to serve the multiple destinations that people want to access with any reasonable measure of effectiveness (personal time and convenience).

It's hard to believe that if we had passed a heavy rail transit measure in 1968 or 1970, this region would look much different. People would have still opted for the suburbs and the space and other amenities it offers (including affordable family housing), and they would still rely on their personal vehicles to experience the vast number of choices that enrich our lives (or at least keep us very busy and on the move).

Seattle is not not New York. We may even be farther from it now than in 1968.

And besides, it was (is) *downtown* centric, not 'Seattle' centric...: ST's light rail wouldn't do anything good for Seattle's outlying neighborhoods, with the possible exception of the redevelopment & gentrification of the long-neglected Rainier Valley.

For instance, it would reduce Northgate into serving simply as a 'port', through which ten thousand commuters to distant downtown offices flow daily, like NYC's Port Authority bus terminal. The folks passing through Northgate otherwise would have NO connection to Northgate other than to grab the next bus home -or worse, retrieve the car they stashed all day for free in a five story parking garage near the station and then drive home on I-5.

Why couldn't many if not most of those commuters have professional/office jobs *at* Northgate? Why must the region's taxpayers be saddled with funding the extraordinary cost of pumping them daily on light rail into & back from downtown when more economical work locations can be developed? There's a whole lot of well-educated folks in Seattle's northend who might appreciate not having to fight their way -twice a day- across the Ship Canal (and even Lake Washington, too) to earn a living.

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I also got a chuckle reading Ellis proclaim "the side that has the negative has a great advantage, since it doesn't have to prove anything." Does he mean to imply the proponents of Prop. 1 -especially its ST light rail component- DID prove something? The 'benefit-cost analysis' ST offered was an absolute joke, riddled with unwarranted & poorly-understood assumptions. They tried their damndest to disguise the inconvenient fact that the benefit of ST light rail is skewed almost exclusively to downtown interests, with its cost ladled onto everyone else.

Hypotheticals: It is very hard to tell what the real cost of ownership would have been, really. How much of the construction would have been done before about 1974, and how much after? That's when inflation and interest rates went way, way up.

Also, would the 1968 train have run across Lake Washington on the I90 bridge that sank? Would the 1968 tunnels and structures be starting to decay, or facing the point of decay in 10 to 15 years when they would be the same vintage as the viaduct and 520 which need replacing?

At this point, what's really important is to learn lessons from the ST1 experience, and the ST2/RTID election. I would like a clear outline of deviations from the original cost projections. What was on target, and what was way off? Some would blame the cost of land acquisition, but it seems a lot of the land is publicly owned already (example: the bus tunnel). Or they would blame increases in the prices of materials. I think I read the citizens review committee said "use a 10% inflation rate, not 5%" for ST2, but ST2 chose 5% for their figures. Well, this points us back to the question: what lessons have we really learned?

Another lesson to learn is by studying Portland. For all its rail and land use planning, the reality is - Clark County has grown tremendously from people who can't afford Portland. So where will people live who are priced out by our growth management policies? Belfair? Chehalis? Bellingham? Or Condos in Seattle? We've seen already how hard it is to get neighbors to sign off on even modest increases in density in Wedgewood, Magnolia, 65th in the Roosevelt neighborhood.

There are some major implications for transportation based on one's answer.

Voters did understand what they were voting for.: The voters rejection of Jim Ellis's rail transportation scheme may reflect more on their good sense than a retrospective view of what his plan might have been. Ellis was indeed a gifted promoter of downtown Seattle and demonstrated amazing skill at selling his pork-barrell ideas to the feds, but his analysis of cost benefit of rail and his other visions of the future for Seattle would not be sufficient to elevate him to Sainthood.

It might be wise to recall that Ellis made a good part of his living selling and processing bonds. Ellis would have made a bundle if it had passed. Ellis was Seattle centric, believing that Seattle was the center of the local universe. He had little interest in encouraging growth in other regional cities. The Ellis plan to put everything in downtown Seattle had more to do with sustaining the real estate values of his downtown clients than reducing suburban sprawl. Serving other regional cities with transportation links wasn't part of the Ellis vision. It was as true then as now, more people pass through Seattle as have the city center as their destination.

It is as likely that the Ellis scheme for rail links and the failure of Prop 1 in Seattle failed for many of the same reasons that Richard Morrill cited in his demographic analysis of regional voting published in a recent Crosscut article.

Voters, then and now, probably asked themselves four simple questions.

1st. How can I get to this rail transportation from where I live. And when I get off at the other end of the ride is it near my work or where I need to go?

2nd. Will it actually save time ?

3rd. If the transportation doesn't save time or get me to where I need to go, is it worth what it will cost?

4 th. Is the ballot measure project the absolute highest priority for the use of public money?

Then and now the answer was no.

Sea-Vue Is Here, Get Used to It: The trouble with David's thinking is that Seattle, as Ellis now says he envisioned it, no longer exists. It is better in ways those guys never dreamed. I have this idea that reality is that Seattle and Bellevue are, in practical fact, the same city with two bridges - and a nice island nieghborhood - in the middle. Call it Sea-Vue.

Does Sea-Vue just want rail on just one side of it? Or does it make sense to better connect the entire city with a seamless rail system and grow around it?

One big thing that happened in the run-up to Prop. 1 is that we all found out that the vast majority of people in the Vue part of Sea-Vue weren't with Kemper Freeman and clan anymore on this subject. He no longer represents them. They rolled him on light rail. But voters rejected big taxes and other things.

Freeman now has to drive out to Issaquah or Maple Valley to find a legislator to do his freeway bidding, despite spending millions on PR and politicans to promote his schemes. His base is now confined to plotting and praying as part of an old time GOP government in exile, advising the Rossi campaign, and hoping to get real lucky. Fat chance.

That represents a huge change. The modal debate is effectively over. Majorities on both sides of Sea-Vue want light rail, along with their elected leadership.

They're going to get it, even though about half the government reform faction (those aligned with former Transport Secretary MacDonald) are promoting reform for one pet reason: to kill light rail between Sea and Vue. They will lose.

It is only a question of how long will it take to serve the city of Sea-Vue with light rail. The longer it takes, the higher the price in terms of taxes and less compact development and less access to opportunity for all the people of the city on both sides of the lake.

Beware of David's history on Seattle's population. While it is true that Seattle has far less relative population than in the early 1960's, Seattle's population took a big nose dive and has now recovered and zoomed up. It is a major success. It'll never the the electoral force it was in the old days. But other things have changed too. One of them is the obvious merger of complementary urban forms on both sides of the lake into one big city that functions as such in most every way (media/utilities (nat gas now at least)/water/transportation/employment/business relationships).

Sea-Vue is a terrible name. But it is here. Kirkland and Redmond are practical annexations. It is real. Get used to it. It is a powerhouse. Government reform that adapts to this fact is the only one that are likely to get anything big done, anytime soon.

Times Have Changed: Having a heavy rail (like BART, not light rail like Portland's Max) system mostly paid for by the federal government, was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and even though at this point we would be faced with rebuilding it at nearly the cost of the original system just as Atlanta is today. In any event this opportunity ain't come'n back. Nor should it. In the intervening 40 years times have changed. Back then the equivalent computing power as that sitting in my lap took up a large living room and probably consumed a house's worth of electricity. In the realm of mobility things have changed just as radically. We now have the ability to make one or more freeway lanes flow at 60 mph 24/7 even at the height of rush hours, providing buses the virtual equivalent of a dedicated right of way, and costing the general taxpayer nothing. The key, of course, is pricing. In 1970 the know-how and technology to do this just wasn't available.

Jim Ellis did great work in his time. But like rail as a mobility solution, that time is gone.

Jim Ellis success has mitigated the need....: "Ellis' skill at assembling a wide coalition (environmentalists, sports-stadium advocates, parks and neighborhood groups, and business leaders) is almost unimaginable today."

Actually, it is imaginable---the opposition to Prop 1 assembled all of these groups except substituting anti-stadium folks for stadium advocates. And one of the reasons the coalition came together was Jim Ellis success over the long term with Metro and other regional transit systems --- in assembling a transit system that works, and carries perhaps as many people daily as Jim Ellis ever envisioned being carried by rail. So give him credit as it is due -- for getting things done anyway. But it also means that the voters (who ride those buses, including the express buses in the HOV lanes) recognize a smart solution, and that the proposal of the bureaucrats for capital intensive solutions that would not improve on what was already here in any meaningful way for at least 15 to 20 years --- that would not solve our problems, not the least of which is global warming in the next ten years. We need a solution that is now---and more buses now is a viable and economically feasible way to do it. Just look at the Transit Now vote last year----a resounding "Yes" to meaningful rapid transit.

And incidentally, the comments regarding Jim Ellis profession as a bond attorney are little more than cheap shots. With the expectation of that kind of crap being thrown at oneself, why would anyone want to stick his or her neck out to help engineer any kind of a solution to any public problem? To quote Edward R. Murrow, "have you no decency?"

a few more thoughts: timing and taxes: First, I wonder, how realistic were the cost and engineering projections for the 1968 rail? We've learned the hard way: tunneling under capital hill and beacon hill is really tough because of the type of rock / fill in them.

Second, I wonder when the majority of the construction would have been completed. It if had mostly been done by 1973, when inflation started to really kick in, then we might have ended up with a bargain: we would have repaid dollars borrowed at very low interest rates.

however, if the bonds had been issued 1974 or later, we would have had a very different picture. I doubt the US Govt would have covered cost overruns from inflation, or been in a position to cover huge surprises because of the soil conditions.

Another item to consider: in the 1970s, the inflation had a huge impact on many people. School district bonds and levies were in several cases rejected, leading to very big problems in some districts. If the property tax had been in place to pay for rail, I think the odds are good even more districts would have had levies rejected.

It is really simple to set up straw men, looking wistfully at what could have been. however, there are a lot of unknowns, besides the ones here I mentioned previously some unknowns included whether the rail would have gone over a I90 and sunk, whether the tunnels would be obsolete because of new findings about earthquakes in our region, or the tunnels would be worn out, etc. I think the odds are very high the "rosy scenario" would not have actually happened, and that we could have wound up with a wpps on rails, with a huge impact on our region's finances, and also, we might not have as many riders on transit as we do today because we would not have invested in the bus system the way we have.