On the RTID
At my university, you were required to write a “capstone” paper before you could graduate with your Bachelor’s degree that doubled as a handicapped parking permit. My degree was in environmental studies, so I wrote on the attempt in the late 1980s to establish the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma. It was your usual rounds of horsetrading, with oil money sodden politicians and an Indian tribe relying heavily on oil revenue to keep their tribal health system afloat squaring off against local environmentalists out to salvage one of the last tallgrass prairies left in America. And they had a compromise ready for Congress to vote on, one that would allow no new oil wells but allow continued production on the wells already in the ground until they were exhausted, plus guarantees on environmental cleanup and some concessions to the tribe that would be losing their income over time. A workable, reasonable deal.
The Sierra Club quashed it. How dare they allow oil wells in an environmental preserve, they said. Call Congress now! Demand all the wells be capped! It must be pristine! And with that, the compromise unraveled, and eventually the Nature Conservancy bought the land to make it a private preserve… filled with new oil wells.
And this is why I don’t like the Sierra Club. They’re too busy demanding perfection to embrace just a little pragmatism. And that’s why they’re completely wrong on RTID.
It’s the “OH NO NEW ROADS AND LANES” part of it that really gets me. Last I looked, there was nothing coming down the pike to replace the gasoline engine. I hate to say it, but we’re stuck with the petroleum-powered car for another generation, no matter how much ethanol and biodiesel we get from diverting out food supply into the “green fuels” industry. And last I looked, we have tens of thousands of people showing up in the area every year from elsewhere, and that’s just going to keep increasing pressure on housing around here.
And for as much as certain quarters have been talking about “density,” the problem is that those cookie-cutter condos built to last 10 years are vastly overpriced, and at the same time we’ve barely added any park or green space in the last few years. Potential green space and pocket parks are instead going into more condos. Oh, and all this density? It needs a transit system. You know, like a backbone of light rail. Which the RTID is offering to extend just a bit farther north.
But it’s bad, you see, because of the roads. So? There are 686,000 people in Snohomish County, many of whom are lower and middle class families pushed out of Seattle by the same “density” the anti-RTID crowd extols. And every morning, they’re driving an hour each way to work. If we don’t expand the roads, the cars will still come, and 60 minutes will become 90, 90 come 120. And I hate to sound like one of those “values voters,” but every minute a parent spends in a car commuting is a minute they’re not with their kids. And still, families are still being driven out of the city, straight into the Republican suburbs where they come to resent those young, hip, urban Capitol Hill types who keep driving prices up. Maybe tacking on some more lanes and making some infrastructure improvements wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Especially when they’re coupled with park-and-rides. But oh no, if you put in park and rides, they’ll DRIVE to them and PARK and DEFEAT the purpose of STOPPING GLOBAL WARMING. So? If you’re driving 2 miles round-trip and bussing/railing in the other 20 miles, aren’t you still burning less gas than if you drove the 22 miles? Especially if you’re pretty much idling for an hour when you’re commuting?
And yet, the Sierra Club and a certain fishwrap are all gung-ho about torpedoing the RTID because of the roads. And that will just push us back two more years. Two more years of increasing traffic pressures, middle-class families being pushed out towards Lake Stevens and Yelm, and the same old increasing emissions bringing us a little closer to Waterworld. And oh, another two year delay on finally getting light rail in the North End, which said fishwrap has decided must not even be in the city so it doesn’t matter.
We’ve waited 40 years. In two more, we’ll finally have the light rail we’ve needed. And now’s the time to extend it. I don’t care how many lanes it slaps onto 405, because it’s time we finally got a multimodal system.
Now is not the time to be perfectionists like the Sierra Club. Now is the time to be pragmatic. And twenty years from now, when we finally get around to building out the east-west lines to West Seattle and Ballard, we’ll be thankful that we had the foresight to be pragmatic just once in this perfectionist city, as we decide whether we fill the car up with $50/gallon biodiesel or whether the fifth of Jim Beam is enough to get our flex-fuel Vespa to work in the morning. Of course, with the light rail built and gasoline being used as a form of currency, those 20 lanes of 405 will be as wide-open as a Sierra Clubber’s mind is closed.
You have succinctly summarized how I’ve been feeling about this whole thing. Great post!
Well said, Dylan (including the bit about the fishwrap). My only concern, and it’s not going to deter me from voting yes, is the sort of open-ended funding and tax hikes that are included. I’m not happy with the way the proposition was written. Contrary to your post, it’s not succinct and it’s not clear *exactly* what all this money is going to be used for. But, we need it for all the reasons you stated above so I’m voting yes (skeptically).
Btw, the fishwrap’s take on local politics has become entirely irrelevant over the past year.
I’m not completely happy about the open-endedness, either, and the 40-year length on these bonds is a little scary. But with the price of metals rising from Chinese demand and the “density” crowd pushing wages up as well, it will be another 10% more to get any of the transit improvements built. We can’t wait any longer.
We’ve had numerous times where we could have voted for these packages, and we keep turning them back because they’re not “perfect.” And then everyone bitches about traffic.
I think the moment the fishwrap lost me was when they started splitting hairs on the Tri-Met votes. See, people inside the Portland city limits voted for it, and THEY MATTER MORE than everyone else in Tri-Met! Great. Well, you know, the metro area is a lot bigger than Seattle. And Seattle doesn’t end at the Ship Canal, and those of us in the North End want some DAMN LIGHT RAIL RTFN.
Amen and three cheers – I’m not about to wait another year, hedging my bets that anyone can put together a more-perfected-sierra-club-worthy transit package next time around. This one isn’t perfect, but it’s more than good enough. And by the way, can we have more of this on metblogs and less about what I should be drinking for Halloween? Because it feels neat when you make me think… and there’s an open niche (read: gaping void) just waiting to be filled by relevant, non-fishwrapped commentary.
I’d be curious to see who reaps the profits when those oil wells are uncapped. Seems to me these environmental groups, with a little help from the government and certain corporations, are creating shortages…not just oil, but water (as they systematically dismantle dams)and eventually food as agricultural land is removed from the private sector.
Nothing is perfect! But by waiting 10, 20, 30yrs like we have been we have blown through money & opportunity to make it perfect. I honestly feel like this is the last hope, as developers, strip malls, etc have eaten up so much of the land. I drive North on 1-5 each morning the lines to get onto the highway, not to mention the 15 mile backup are insane. The crazy thing is that most of those SUV’s have but 1 person in them. The gas costs for those families must be enormous. And to think that extra $100 per month could be going towards their kids education.
I use to live in a metro area with fantastic public transit. It was actually really refreshing to get on the bus, subway, train, hydrofoil, Millennium Falcon and unwind from a long day. take a nap, read a book, etc. It made me feel so much better by the time I got home, rather than sitting in traffic for 1+ hrs hating the guy in front of me for letting that shitbag sneak up the right side and get in front of him. :-)
Sound Transit is issuing 30 year bonds. Jeez.
And this won’t be back in 2 years. I can’t believe people still think that. Pay attention to the legislature – they WILL merge ST with RTID, and you will not see rails on the ballot again with anything like this kind of split. You’ll see mostly roads, and two more light rail stops.
I share your concern about creating affordable solutions for people, but wasting billions on new highways is not it. Our reliance on highways means we have created a transportation system that saddles users with very high household transportation costs, congestion and the health effects of pollution.
The King County study on congestion pricing points to a truly fair solution. Toll the roads to get traffic moving, and use the funds for maintenance and for transit expansion. Road expansion just won’t work in reducing congestion. And if you are right that fuel costs will drive people off the roads, then why waste billions on road expansion?
As for regressivity, tolls are much more fair than a sales tax. Working class folks would probably appreciate knowing that they can get to work on time, make soccer practice, or pick up the kids from childcare on time. Time is valuable to poor and working class folks too. And they will benefit from transit that can run on time, as well the funding for new transit.
The problem with RTID, beyond its global warming impacts, is that it won’t even succeed at its goal of reducing congestion, giving people choices, or fixing critical safety and maintenance needs. It ties something good, light rail, to the same failed strategy that has gotten us to this point. Vote no, and demand a better plan.
The problem with congestion pricing points is that you need to provide alternatives that cost users less than the cost of the tolls. The reason congestion pricing has been successful in London is because they have Tube, rail, and a surprisingly good bus system. The reason it could be successful in NYC is because of the subway, trains, buses, and cabs. And in both cases, they have very dense and singular center cities that have a large number of people living and working there.
Where would you put the “congestion charge” zone in Seattle? On downtown? Well, people are going to clog Aurora, then. Or 405. The bridges? That makes sense, but you’re still not dealing with the north-south mess. And if you put them on the bridges, how you going to get them in and out of the city? What about people who live in Kirkland and work in Northgate? Or the U? Or Ballard?
Price points sound nice on paper, but Seattle is way too spread out for it to be effective, and there’s no mass transit system in place to take the cars off the road effectively. One of the ideas in the RTID is to build more suburban park-and-rides, which the Sierra Club and others are railing against. But suburban park-and-rides + light rail + congestion charges… that would work wonders.
There’s no one solution. And the idea that there’s a singular, wonderful solution is as goofy as the idea that there’s a singular, wonderful solution to us running out of oil. Just going to congestion charges will help us as much as making all cars run on biodiesel.