Cannon is claiming that roads are funded purely from use taxes and he is obviously wrong.

No, I have not claimed that roads are funded PURELY from use taxes. Roads are funded MAINLY from use taxes. This is about the fourth time I have had to correct this misrepresentation of what I wrote.

Here you go. Tabulated from historic data provided by the Federal Highway Administration.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Give us a link.

I agree that the stadiums are downtown and so probably is Queen Anne (at least “greater downtown” if you want to be really picky), but all I’m trying to say is it’s definitely not the same meaning of the word “downtown” as used in the following sentence: “downtown is easily available with single-seat service from any where in the county”. That definition is only for the Ride Free Zone, aka the CBD.

“A gas tax used to fund roads is NOT a subsidy for roads. It is a user fee. ”

You need to clear up one thing. How do you allocate what portion of the gas tax goes to the roads I drive on?

Are you allocating the (approx) 2 cents per mile I am contributing in gas tax to the roads I drive on?

How are you using that money? Are the roads in my local neighborhoods getting repaved in accordance with the money spent?
Or are they being spent on projects such as the widening of I-405. I rarely drive on I-405, and certainly not during the heavily congested commute hours that this construction is adressing. If I am being taxed and money is going to benefit someone else, then I am Subsidizing them. Why not allocate only the gas tax paid by the users of I-405 for that project?

Actually, maybe the argument needs to be defined more precisely, such as “What exactly are we building and why?”

Do we build new roads to ‘relieve congestion’? What about rural highways? Is there enough ‘ridership’ to justify their existence?

The gas tax is NOT a user fee. A toll is a user fee, just as a fare is a user fee.

Jim

$36 billion is a large figure, and factoring that as a percentage of our budget is just meaningless — transit is also less than 1% of the budget, so I guess your concern don’t matter? 36,000,000,000 is a lot more than zero. Would you dispute that?

Trying to argue that transit deserves more money because roads are massively subsidized by general tax revenues unrelated to road use just doesn’t fly.

Funding for Highways

User-revenue Other revenue Percent subsidy
1920 3,484 10,406 74.92%
1930 8,686 13,551 60.94%
1940 14,087 9,938 41.37%
1950 42,700 16,974 28.44%
1960 104,648 24,965 19.26%
1970 190,750 64,307 25.21%
1980 329,152 151,828 31.57%

The goal stated in the paper was to try and push transit use vs autos for new employees over this entire broad definition of city center up to the 50/50 mix for the CBD. Even if you blanket the area with coverage equal to the part with the really really tall buildings that’s going to be an up hill battle and of course isn’t even possible by 2015.

FWIW, when us hicks out in Bellevue make a trip into the big city to go to a ball game or the Seattle Center we call it downtown Seattle. And downtown Bellevue is Main & Bellevue Way up to around Safeway or Welch’s Drugs; we don’t got none of them really tall buildings ;-)

Walking I noticed is already pretty high downtown (4% is equal to the ferry, do the cost comparison there!) and work from home is also pretty darned good at 14%. Instead of trying to lure people out of cars onto transit doubling these numbers would be far less expensive and I think a lot more likely. Number one reason people said they drove, to save time. They hate driving already but door to door transit is going to be hard pressed to compete. For some percentage that live next to train stations it will but the area covered by rail is so limited it can’t make the type of difference they’re looking for. Sure you can encourage residential development near the train stations but why not just encourage it near the job center in the first place.

You said, “suburbs are a natural part of the metropolitan framework”. It’s true, all of Seattle’s neighborhoods were suburbs when they were formed. Somewhere along the way cities seem to have forgotten to keep up with that demand. Of course they can’t mirror outlying suburbs or even neighborhoods like Capitol Hill but I think they can offer an alternative different to either of those that people will choose to live in. They already hold the number one advantage, less time commuting.

Lower Queen Anne has about the same level of transit service as Capitol Hill, and no where near the level of service of the CBD. You can’t include LQA in “downtown seattle” and then say “downtown Seattle has great transit service” because LQA doesn’t really have great transit service.

Don’t combine the two in once sense and separate them in another.

A commute is one trip, but there are other types of trips obviously. You asserted that the dominant means of transportation in cities isn’t walking nor transit — I assumed you meant transportation of city residents given the original blog entry.

What I mean is that Capitol Hill being walkable doesn’t mean that people who live in Redmond are going to be able to get to their Hill job by walking. I don’t think it’s meaningful to talk about that Redmond resident. I want to know if that Capitol Hill guy walks to the grocery store instead of driving, or even buses to his job in Redmond, because he has closer access to a bus line.

Additionally, do we really have the option to expect Seattle to be the model? We don’t have a rail network and won’t have a real one for a very long. ST2 will significantly grow that transit percentage according to the PSRC.

I asked for evidence and data to substantiate your claim of a “history of public subsidies to the highway system that got us to where we are today.”

Expressing surprise and asking a bunch of questions is not evidence.

Can you substantiate your assertion or can’t you? If you can’t, I can only assume your assertion is simply guessing or wishful thinking on your part.

148th between NE20th and NE85th is about as transit perfect as you could imagine. At the south end you’ve got retail. The entire west side of the street is multi unit housing and the entire east side is relatively dense employment. It’s a straight shot four lane road that off peak is uncongested. It’s just that hardly anyone needs to go anywhere mid-day.

The 253 runs along this corridor and is one of the busier routes on the Eastside. I used to ride it daily.

But why it’s no Seattle route is also why that area isn’t Queen Anne. There’s no density aside from the apartment buildings so everything is spread out with massive parking lots in-between. North of 51st it’s single-family. The “retail” is Sears and Fred Meyer (set back with a football field of parking) without a decent walk. Every apartment comes with its own parking spot for “free”. Every retail location has a hundred parking spots for “free”. Clearly the area is designed around automobile use. It isn’t walkable, so why would it be the perfect corridor for transit? It isn’t.

I think you make the mistake and finding attributes that could give it success, but success in the real world should be learned than predicted.

Comment by John Jensen
2009-04-14 20:19:56

> But the dominant means of transit in cities isn’t walking. It’s not even transit;
> it’s cars.

That is untrue in many cities across the world, and in this country you don’t have to look further than NYC. Do you have evidence that this is the case in Seattle or specifically urban Seattle? I’d be surprised if most trips in Capitol Hill were served by cars.

Don’t know about Capitol Hill but it’s not even close for Downtown. According to the Urban Mobility Group (Downtown Seattle Association, King County Metro and the City of Seattle) it’s 70% private automobile (58% SOV) and only 28% transit. Given that downtown has far and away the best transit connections, driving is a pain in the bucket seat and parking is more than what some people pay in rent I’d expect this to be one of the highest rates of transit use over personal vehicles.