While living a life of eternal self-sacrifice for the sake of our great-great-great grandchildren may give you the piece of mind to endure our current transportation system while you dream of the utopia that you will never live to see, many of us consider this to be untenable.

Those BRT lines will of course be converted to light rail in the future, but ignore short term solutions necessitates ignoring short term problems. Transit in most forms is better than driving an SOV.

Now, if we had to choose between BRT and light rail — well of course light rail would win. But RapidRide and Prop. 1 aren’t asking us to make that choice. And the opposition campaign, as cjh notes, doesn’t use BRT in nearly any of their arguments to the public at large.

I can see the point about investing in BRT and that not creating the political conditions that necessitate light rail, but I don’t think that’s the best way to plan a transit system with the resources we do have at our disposal.

People adapt their lifestyles based on current realities. Someone who refuses to adapt in a manner well within their control — and then complains about it — gets no sympathy from me. If your commute sucks, see what you can easily do to fix it first. Don’t come looking for a huge subsidy from me.

Within our current regulatory structure we can either have low taxes and weak services/terrible infrastructure or higher taxes and better services/infrastructure. Privately run bridges and transit services have a barrier to entry that is too high for everyone outside of, well, Microsoft.

There was a post on this very blog on this subject, basically, why do most other high income countries have better roads, rails, mass transit (rail and bus!), airports, sewers, etc than us? Because they either a) levy sufficient taxes to pay for them, b) have a regulatory structure that supports non-governmental investment in infrastructure (the classic example is France’s privatized water supply), or c) some combination of the above.

I know there are legal constraints to many state and county taxes but they are not insurmountable, just difficult. This really isn’t even an R vs. D issue (see how much our D supermajority did last session) but rather an issue of finding a new taxing consensus in the legislature as a whole. Rural districts certainly have their share of infrastructure issues as well (and the burden is far worse per resident). All easier said than done but, as I said above, it’s not like saying “If E=mc^3.”

Here’s the alternative (although we’re not really choosing between the two, it’s just an equivalency thing):

1) Choose buses. This eats your money to build rail, which means you’re stuck with ONLY buses. That’s what Metro is doing. Ever heard of COMET? We tried to avoid this situation.

2) Choose rail. You build it, you operate it, and there’s never a situation like this – and then, when you’ve paid off the construction, you free up money to build more.

It will ALWAYS be better in the short term to choose 1, and it will ALWAYS be a bad choice in hindsight.

You know why I blast BRT? Because BRT keeps us from ever getting rail, and then BRT is gone with the financial winds.

Prop 1 is Sound Transit. They’re not having these problems because buses aren’t their bread and butter – building capital projects is.

The things that are putting Metro into such bad shape are leading to lower land prices and lower construction costs – exactly what we need to make Prop 1 happen.

And none of this has anything to do with the city. Please be careful not to confuse city government, county government, and sound transit. They’re totally different – often, in fact, they don’t even get along.

Oh, and it’s “Humungus” Lake, not “HUMONGOUS” Lake.