I lot of buses use the spokane street viaduct, so adding HOV lanes is $162.5 million well spent in my opinion.

It’s a little ridiculous how expensive roads are eh? Unfortunately a lot of it gets wasted. I have a friend who works for a company that contracts to DOT and DOT gets scared when they don’t come at them with a big number in a proposal. Kind of backwards if you ask me

1. Highway 99 is a state route, not an interstate.

2. It’s only 0.5 mile from SR-99 to I-5 along Mercer St.

A key question here is what economists call “opportunity cost”, which is a fancy way of saying what else could you buy with that same amount of money?

For example, the pro-parks levy was able to purchase a 1 acre site for a new park in Ballard for $3 million. Assume that’s an average cost, the combined cost of these projects ($360 million) could purchase 120 acres of park land in the city of Seattle for that much money. For comparison, Seattle Center is 74 acres, Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill is 40 acres.

How about streetcars: SDOT estimates the cost of extending the SLUT to UW would be $180 M, and the cost of extending it via Westlake to Ballard to be $130 M. For the cost of these two road projects, we could instead build two streetcar projects and still have $50 M left over.

One last idea: free transit passes. $360 M, is about $600 per person in seattle. The cost of an annual Puget Pass, which gives its owner full access to all transit services in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties including sound transit is about that much. So we could give EVERY SINGLE PERSON in Seattle fair-free transit for one year for the cost of these projects. Think that won’t affect ridership that much? Just look at the evidence of every university bus pass program ever implemented, including the UW’s U-Pass. These programs generally create a 30 to 50 percent increase in transit ridership.

Here’s the point: to say that there’s no money for streetcars or no money for parks, no money for Pike Place or Seattle Center is simply not true. It’s about choices. We could have all of these things without raising taxes one penny. All we need is the courage to say “no” to what we don’t want anyway.

I also generally think that every proposal should be framed in this way, with a direct cost comparison of what else could be done with that money. Fixing Mercer and Spokane street may sound like good ideas compared to say throwing the money into the ocean, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is: is this the BEST use of this money, or are there other things that we want much more.

Thanks anonymous, I’ve corrected the post.

I completely agree with Tony. They always frame the transit debate as “this is so expensive” but never compare it to anything, and never bat an eye about roads projects, but never compare them to anything either.

Tony — you’re not going to find 120 acres of park space for the City to purchase, so that’s a moot point.

And free bus passes are a terrible idea. The last thing this city needs is more hobos on its buses. Besides, Metro hardly has the funding to keep up with current ridership demands, let alone a massive slew of new riders.

Your point about opportunity cost is well taken, though. Like, for the cost of building the SLUT, how many bus routes could we have expanded? How many more customers could have been served?

The $25 million of city money for the SLUT would have been about 500,000 service hours total, ever. That’s about a month’s worth of bus service, which sounds like a lot, but that’s a one-time shot.

The City of Seattle already has hundreds of acres on a list, to be purchased, or, if already owned, cleaned up and made into parks, when money is available.

As for the idea that the city should not encourage transit use, as a way of improving mobility, fighting global warming, and improving the city’s financial condition, because an anonymous commenter thinks some of his neighbors dress like bums- Ha ha, I bet if we could see Mr. Anonymous, we would think he dresses like a bum.

God knows I’d rather share a bus with a typical Seattleite than a psychopath like Dick Cheney.

You can’t always talk about what the money would buy, though. A homeowner who joins an LID to get a new sidewalk or sewer drain might vote against a stadium subsidy, and the property-owners who voted to finance a streetcar LID are at perfect liberty to oppose paying for more buses in the outer reaches of the county.

Seattle would go a long way to atone for previous sins if they used $200 million to build a streetcar out Rainier Avenue S instead of making a half mile of Mercer the Cadillac of streets.

//The last thing this city needs is more hobos on its buses.//

I keep hearing this as the reason for not removing fares, but it seems terribly classist. The implied sentiment seems to be not just to keep homeless people off the bus, but anyone who thinks a $4 round trip is expensive. Also, don’t we give free bus passes to the homeless now?

Seperating class from the issues, I think the real intent is to remove smelly, drunk, and obnoxious people from the bus. But just as often these are people with money coming home from Belltown bars – and I’d rather have them on the bus than driving.

If instead you’re afraid homeless people will sleep on the bus, the simple solution is to kick everyone off when you stop to refuel.

Um, cat owner? I live in Seattle, I pay taxes in Seattle, and I ride the bus every day.

You live in Mason County and you’re not paying for any transit improvements out here. So I’m not inclined to listen to you dictate what sorts of transportation improvements we should fund, when I know full well you’ll never have to pay for any of them.

What a gross exaggeration! If you would only study the wisdom of the “BRT is better than Light Rail” folks, you would know that added lanes can be built for a song on urban arterials, if they are reserved for buses and HOVs.

Why it’s the reason the BRT is so much cheaper than Light Rail. If we followed your flawed reasoning, people might conclude that BRT would be as expensive as Light Rail to build in a crowded urban environment.

Make the buses free, the homeless and riff-raff don’t pay anyways…

They spend millions on collecting the fares and the greatly slow down the system.

I live in DT Bellevue and DRIVE everywhere because for my short trips the bus costs more, make the bus free and I use that instead.

Why, of course, Mr. Anonymous, that makes perfect sense- reject the opinion of anyone who doesn’t live in your precinct.

Even if that person actually read the fine print and noticed that all the state taxpayers will be chipping in to help build the Mercer Street of tomorrow.

The simple fact is that there are no simple facts. Sure, today you’re all full of yourself because you ride the bus, as unpleasant an experience as it may be because of those other riders, and then tomorrow you look in the mirror and it’s like “OMG, I am one of those other riders.”

If you’re lucky, by then you’ll have more tolerance for those who no longer live in Seattle, but still live in the Puget Sound region. Who knows, someday you might be among ‘em.

Sure, whatever.

YOU don’t depend on transit to get to places everyday, so it makes no difference if streetcars are painfully slow.

YOU don’t have to watch the industrial base of your hometown die because of property-tax valuation schemes masking as mass transit.

YOU don’t have to pay the higher prices passed on by LIDs.

YOU don’t have to pay King County, Sound Transit, or Seattle taxes — the taxes funding our limited transit resources.

I have nothing against those outside the city, county, or region. But I do have a problem when they get all evangelical and tell me how I should tax myself for things I don’t want.

Take a pill. The industrial base of Seattle died when they built the assembly plant in Everett. Or maybe when the Boeing Company built the worst streetcars in the history of ever. Offshore steel mills and the decline in demand for “Frogs and Switches” (a sign that used to be prominently visible from the Spokane St viaduct) didn’t help much either. Oldtimers used to say the industrial base died when the Boeing Company managed to keep Ford and GM out of Seattle after WW II.

But actually, you’re being kind of funny because the new industrial base, biotech and software, seems to be booming, and they chipped in to build a new streetcar.

The future- it’s never what it used to be.

[sc] Just letting you know that some of us Seattlites value your input. Actually, I value the input of anyone that adds to the debate.

There seems to be a great deal of anger that infuses much of the public debate here in Seattle. I’m pretty new to the city, having only lived here since last September, so I am still trying to understand where it comes from and what we can do about it. We really need to find a way to transcend the anger and focus on win-win solutions.

There are things we can come together on. Take the subject of taxes, which anonymous was discussing earlier. I think there really can be a lot of agreement, liberals and conservatives, that no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. Regardless of whether you generally support a larger or public sector or a smaller one, we can all agree that whatever we spend, we should always get the most bang for our buck.

This brings me back to to the discussion of opportunity costs I brought up near the beginning of the post. We need to look at what we spend our tax money on and really ask ourselves: is this the best thing we could spend it on. I’m not here to say that fixing Mercer and Spokane streets isn’t the best use of this money. It may be, but we can’t answer that question if we don’t ask it.

Our city values process, so here’s an idea for a process. Go to the people with a survey, or with a vote for that matter, and ask them this question:

The city of Seattle has $360 million to spend on some capital projects. This is money that already exists and requires no increase in taxes. The city could spend this money on either of the following:

1. “Fix” both Mercer and Spokane streets
2. Extend the streetcar to both UW via Eastlake and Ballard via Westlake
3. Put the money toward parks and open space
4. Increase bus frequency / lower transit fares by X amount. (calculate out exactly how much could be purchased)

Ask the people via ballot or survey which they prefer. This sort of thing can be done in a more sophisticated scientific manner, of course, this is a rough sketch.

Then, see what comes back. Who knows, maybe it will be an even split, maybe the people in West Seattle will vote overwhelmingly for Spokane Street while the people in Ballard vote overwhelmingly for the streetcar, but maybe not. Maybe one of these two ideas really has much, much more support than the others, but we’ll never know because the city never frames the question this way. They simply frame the questions as, “Do you think x is a good idea?” The question they should ask is, “Do you think x is the best idea?”

Of course, the “best” idea might be to spread the money out across a number of projects, maybe build one streetcar and spend the rest on parks. These questions can be asked via a pennywise survey, in which the respondents are asked given $1 in imaginary pennies and asked how many cents they think each of the projects is worth. Aggregate up the responses and you have at least a vague idea of how much the public values the various alternatives in comparison to each other.

Once we start asking and answering these questions, we can start focusing our tax dollars on what the people value most, and when we do that, perhaps some of the anger will dissipate. Of course, I could be wrong.

I think much of this goes back to figuring out the externalities of activities and then taxing those activities accordingly. Petroleum is too damn cheap if you ask me. If we fully understood the costs involved we’d have a completely different mindset toward driving and our cheap $3.50 per gallon gasoline..

Tony, I vote for #5: send us $300 checks and let everything spiral out of control! Wheeee!

In all seriousness, though, I love your idea. Why isn’t it done that way?

Uh, well, the reason it isn’t “done that way” is because we already have a representative form of government.

I think it’s important to remember that people have good reasons to be angry, sometimes reasons they can’t bring themselves to admit.

In real dollars income is falling. Job security hardly exists. In most respects the quality of life in this region is dramatically worse than it was 40 years ago.

People also have bad reasons to be angry, but they’re usually not very grateful if you helpfully point out to them how what they’re doing is making them angry.

To be quite honest, from what I’ve seen of our civil court system, I’m just surprised that people aren’t a lot angrier than they are.

I imagine that as long as the standard of living keeps going down, people will be angry. There are other societies that have dealt with the type of problems we have more successfully, so when we want to change, it will be possible to do so.

“I live in Seattle, I pay taxes in Seattle, and I ride the bus every day.” Or at least I would pay taxes if I had a job rather than sitting in my parent’s basement at the age of 25 and being an internet toughguy posting personal attacks anonymously on message boards.

Its too bad that you went the personal attack route, because not EVERYTHING you said was total BS, some of which could have been discussed here.