Prop 1 Post-Mortem

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

I’m not going to pretend that Prop. 1’s failure was merely a tactical one. Clearly, in the current environment a significant number of people are unwilling to vote for anything that includes new taxes, roads, and/or rail. However, in hindsight I think there are two narratives where the YES campaign, for all its resources, was unable to frame the debate:

(1) Sound Transit’s record: In many voters’ minds, ST is still the agency that got off to a disastrous start at the end of the last decade. There is extensive evidence that ST is no longer that agency, but the perception remains. A key question: is there a way to reverse it before light rail starts running in 2009? Will that even be enough?

(2) The cost: $18 billion vs. $47 billion vs. $150 billion. They all sound like a lot of money, but few of us really know what any of these mean in terms of actual economic impact and opportunity costs. I’m a big fan of the “average household” figure, which was $125/year for the ST2 side. If our newspapers were a bit better on providing the public useful services, they might have published a table indexing household income to likely annual expenditure. I suspect that these concrete costs would have been both more relevant and would have prevented R & T from sounding like the cost of a moon shot.

Any other communications problems?

Comment Etiquette

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

A minor request:

If you don’t have a blogger account, I would certainly appreciate if you chose “Other” when commenting instead of “Anonymous”. By using a name (whatever it is), it makes a lot easier to track threads.

Thanks!

Prop. 1 Aftermath: What’s Next for ST?

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Mike Lindblom writes today in the Times that Sound Transit does not need to get permission from the legislature to get back on the ballot next year. This was the reason that many hypothesized the rapid re-emergence of a transit-only ballot initiative as early as next Spring.

Permission is one thing, protocol is another. I was going over this with a friend last night, and he reminded me that Sound Transit doesn’t need any more enemies in Olympia right now. The knee-jerk reaction is going to be to blame the agency for the failure of Prop. 1.

Plus, there’s more talk about creating the regional transit “super agency” that the Stanton-Rice report recommended earlier this year. Sound Transit has fought the creation of such an agency in the past, fearing that it would dilute ST’s influence and create a huge new bureaucracy. If Sound Transit wants to keep lobbying against such an agency, it needs to stay in the legislature’s (and the Governor’s) good graces.

All of this is by way of saying that Sound Transit won’t rush back to the ballot unless the legislature gives them the green light, or at least a wink and a nod.

Stepping Back from the Ledge

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

Well, that stunk.

I sincerely hope that left-wing Roads & Transit opponents are correct, and that transit will come back soon and pass. I’m skeptical, but we’ll see.

Regardless, we will at least have light rail from Downtown to the Airport in 2009, and that can only help to build support for transit, although it means delivery of less rail, later, for more money.

In the meantime, as Seattle transit supporters, what should be our priorities over the next few years? Here’s my layman’s stab at a list:

1) Scrutinize (and probably oppose) “governance reform.” This is usually code for scrapping Sound Transit and replacing it with some other agency to oversee transit. Although in principle there are almost certainly governance structures superior to the current one, in reality it’s virtually certain that any replacement will spend its first years mired in mismanagement and incompetence (see: Sound Transit, 1996-2001; Seattle Monorail Project). That’s not what we need as the University LINK project comes close to getting seriously started.

2) Protect University LINK. The light rail line from downtown to Husky Stadium is supposedly all set to open in 2016. However, not one spade of Earth has yet been turned, nasty financial and engineering surprises are no doubt ahead, and God knows what legal and other challenges are lurking in the wake of the Prop. 1 failure.

This segment has the highest ridership projection of all, and the clearest time advantage for rail. An 8-minute travel time easily outclasses any conceivable alternative, including a streetcar. We must remain vigilant about this project. Like the airport, the University provides all-day traffic demand that justifies non-peak operation.

3) Get to Northgate. We must find the $1.2 billion (2006 dollars) to get to Northgate. This is the obvious terminus for southbound commuters to get on the line, and will increase the exposure of light rail that is critical to future expansion. Ideally, this would be part of a reduced regional package, but even if Seattle alone must fund it, it’s “only” $4,300 per household spread over many years — a lot, but not backbreaking.

4) Get to Bellevue. The two bridges are the most obvious chokepoint in the region. Getting to downtown Bellevue at least allows connection to the “RapidRide” BRT service that will continue to Overlake. Not optimal, but something we can accomplish. The high-end cost estimate is $2.2 billion, something that will probably require at least King County to fund. Paging Senator Murray…

5) “A Thousand Little Things.” There are lots of little things we can do that cost little compared to these mega-projects: streetcar extensions, bus lanes, arterial fixes, etc. These generally occur at the municipal level. A lot of these are being discussed on earlier threads. Expanding Sounder park-and-rides is another inexpensive capacity increase.

UPDATE: A point I should have made more clear is that there is zero chance a package involving these points would pass the three county district: there is literally nothing in it for Pierce and Snohomish Counties. To move forward, we probably need to restrict the taxing authority to the city of Seattle or King County.

In the case of King County, perhaps that involves a few hundred million for Sounder park-and-rides to win over the Southern part of the County. Whatever it takes.

Prop. 1 Aftermath: What’s next for 520?

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Erica Barnett sums up, somewhat inadvertently, the problems with crafting another transportation package:

It was too big and too divisive, and hopefully the people who craft a replacement will have learned their lesson by the next time. (I would prefer, of course, that that lesson be: No more roads expansion; money for neighborhood streets, safety and maintenance; and more money for rail NOW, rather than in 20 years–but that’s just me.) In any case, I think one lesson is definitely that an $18 billion, 50-year package is simply too big to pass–especially when, as with this package, it doesn’t fully fund all the projects it includes, meaning that voters will have to pay tolls or additional taxes to finish major projects like SR-520.

In other words, this package was too big, but it wasn’t big enough! Reminds me of that classic Woody Allen line, “the food was terrible, but the portions were so small!”

Any package that “fully funds” SR-520 would, by definition, have to include even more money for roads, something that Barnett and others seem dead-set against. So where does that leave us?

It should be said, though, that “fully funding” a new 520 bridge was never, and should never have been the point of a regional transportation initiative. 520 is a state road, and it’s ultimately the state’s responsibility. The point of the RTID was simply to have the 3-county region kick in a some extra money to fill in the gap between what the state was willing to pay, what tolling could provide, and what the new bridge will actually cost.

Now the state will have to kick in the rest. But with the current gas tax money on the decline, and I-960 looming overhead, it’s unclear how they’re going to do that.

Prop. 1 Aftermath: What about I-960?

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The passage of I-960, which will requires a 2/3 vote of the people or the legislature to raise taxes, will certainly complicate future transportation proposals. Already the state is worried that the gas tax money is drying up, and it will be next to impossible to get the 2/3 majority required to raise revenue for any other projects.

So what does that mean for transportation? Do RTID or Sound Transit count as state taxes, since they were chartered by the state and the state is responsible for tallying the votes, or are they local taxes that can circumvent the 2/3 marjority? That will certainly be up for debate, and probably get tied up in court along with I-960 itself.

Prop. 1 Aftermath: The Vote Goes Down

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Well, last night was certainly disappointing. I have to hand it to the “no” campaign. They were outspent and outgunned and still they won. I was naive to underestimate their ability to corral everyone into a circular firing squad. It was surprisingly effective.

The “yes” folks, meanwhile, were clearly caught flat-footed, as the TNT’s Joe Turner notes:

“The No campaign created enough confusion over the cost, and that’s how you win,” said Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg, chairman of Sound Transit. “They put us on the defensive and we didn’t recover.”

He said it’s unlikely anything will happen on the regional transportation front before 2009.

“We’ve basically delayed the solution two to four years and driven up the cost by about $25 billion,” Ladenburg said.

The next fight will be the fight for public opinion. As the P-I writes, that’s still largely up for debate:

Before doing anything, some want to examine the election results more closely, possibly using surveys to figure out what voters didn’t like about the plan: Was it the taxes? The road versus transit squabbling? The specific projects proposed?

As state House Transportation Committee Chairwoman Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, put it, “I don’t know what a no-vote tells me.”

That fight is now underway. Already Danny Westneat, a light rail proponent, is saying we should give up on big projects like light rail for a while, since the voters don’t seem to want to foot the bill. The state may be forced to kick in more money for a new 520 floating bridge, everything else is up in the air.

In the meantime, this is now our official regional transportation policy. Sweet!