Last night, Publicola wrote a piece about Sound Transit’s policy of not running controversial advertising (a policy shared by Metro), and their decision not to run a recent pro-unionization ad.

There’s another side here. In the court of public opinion, advertising money buys support. Eyeballs on an issue raise awareness, and getting more eyeballs on your issue costs money.

Throughout history, the small forces for progressive policies, labor rights, and human rights in general, have less money than those who profit from employee exploitation and oppression.

The policy that caused Sound Transit to reject this ad would also cause Sound Transit to reject much better funded anti-unionization ads. The ability of a company to buy public opinion is something we have very few tools to limit, and this is one of them. Sound Transit’s position helps reduce the influence of money in politics.

There will shortly be a press conference by labor decrying Sound Transit’s choice. While this outrage helps them get publicity on their issue more than the rejected ad ever would,  in the long run, Sound Transit’s policy helps progressive policies far more than it hinders them.

In remarks to the Eastside Transportation Association, a group of people who seem to exist essentially to keep Link off the eastside, the anti-transit Republican yesterday stepped up his commentary.

Paraphrasing, he said he didn’t know of a “solution” to Sound Transit – but the “only way out” is “a public vote”.

This isn’t an idle threat – he’s opposed light rail to the eastside since the beginning. Do we want a governor who wants to axe our mass transit system?

Togo's Breakthrough (courtesy Sound Transit)

Last night, Zach, Oran and I showed up at 8:30 to try to see Togo break through, completing the first subway tunnel from UW to Capitol Hill. Sadly, in the last five feet, Togo had to slow down, and ST told us to return at midnight.  Bruce and Tim Bond joined Zach at 11pm, but breakthrough didn’t happen until 4am, at which point we were all asleep. Zach did stick around until 2:30, but finally had to give up.

Bruce Gray over at Sound Transit sent us this fantastic image, taken by workers as the Tunnel Boring Machine finally broke through, completing the southbound tunnel. Be sure to click on the image (twice) to see the full size, and check out the video Sound Transit put up here.

In another month or two, Balto will complete the northbound tunnel, and then Sound Transit’s contractors will start laying rail and building University Link stations!

Today, Senator Tracey Eide and Sound Transit Boardmember Pete Von Reichbauer (along with other boardmembers and CEO Joni Earl) proposed that Sound Transit commit $25 million to do design, engineering and environmental review for light rail not just to S. 272nd St. (the endpoint planned for 2023 in Sound Transit 2), but to Federal Way Transit Center.

This way, if future funding became available through another Sound Transit ballot measure, a state funding package, or federal match, Federal Way would be ready to go immediately. This still has to get through committee and a full Sound Transit board vote, but with four boardmembers present, that sounds likely.

Senator Eide also confirmed that negotiating this began before the legislative session – before Federal Way mayor Priest’s legislative temper tantrum. It was pointed out early in the meeting that Federal Way was invited to the table when revenue projections first put light rail in jeopardy – and didn’t show up. Even despite the adversarial relationship Priest has continued to pursue, Sound Transit and the state have worked together to ensure that Federal Way is served as well as possible.

The big question I asked was whether there was state funding in the works to help get Federal Way on track. Senator Eide, a vice chair of Senate Transportation in Olympia, replied – “That’s why I’m here.” Perhaps with her leadership, Sound Transit could see increased legislative support in years to come. I look forward to it!

Federal Way Transit Center (thanks to Atomic Taco)

Last week, a group of legislators led by Rep. Katrina Asay (R, 30th) and Senator Margarita Prentice (D, 11th), dropped several bills on behalf of Federal Way, all potentially damaging to Sound Transit and expansion of light rail.

The bills should end any real discussion of whether certain Federal Way politicians actually want or support light rail. None of them address the problem of low sales tax revenue in South King County. None of them address the low density and lack of zoning for transit oriented development where Sound Transit plans to build. None of them appear to have any positive impact on building rail at all – they seem to be simply retaliatory. They are all asinine, making Sound Transit go to ballot separately with capital and operations costs, letting cities pull out of the Sound Transit district without a public vote, or reorganizing Sound Transit with only five directly elected board members. That last would open up Sound Transit to direct expenditures during an election – a perfect opportunity for Kemper Freeman to buy a board. Another would help nickel and dime Sound Transit by charging them, rather than the auditor’s office, for Tim Eyman’s new performance audits. The auditor’s office would still pay for all the other audits they perform – this would just charge Sound Transit.

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No plans to maintain this...

In one of the first sentences in the Governor’s policy brief on transportation revenue is the primary reason Olympia stays in a perpetual funding crisis:

Because no maintenance or preservation funds were provided for new lane miles created through these projects, deterioration will set in.

For every administration and for every legislator, the easiest way to pass a package that looks good to their constituents is to partially fund as many new projects as possible, and make them appear as cheap as possible. For a given dollar, it’s more politically viable to spend it on a new project – and be able to say to constituents that their needs are being met – than to spend it just to maintain an old project.

This is simply a reality of psychology, not meant to be an indictment of anyone, but it’s a real problem for legislators who only have so much power or political capital. King Street Station is a great example. The Amtrak Cascades station with the most use in the state is in disrepair, partially restored, and partially funded, after years of work. In the meantime, a barely used Stanwood station has been constructed from scratch – in the district of the chair of Senate Transportation.

Today, many of our highways are in the same boat. In 2003 and 2005, Olympia passed gas tax increases that finished some projects, but largely started new ones. A list of “Unfinished mega projects” in the brief speaks to these partial packages – full of new highway lanes, they were crafted to win public support through big-splash projects on I-405, I-90 and SR-99, largely ignoring the state’s maintenance needs – projects that aren’t exciting to voters.

Now, at the top of the priority list is a sudden need to do maintenance. We have roads and bridges crumbling! Only at the end of a road’s life, when it can be portrayed as a danger, can public opinion turn to new revenue to maintain it. But right below is a list of new highway expansions, with words like “economic development improvements”, “improved mobility” and “congestion relief”. But we know new lanes don’t improve congestion. More roads equal more traffic.

So the state’s task force has proposed “guiding principles” for a package. The middle of the three options (clearly the target, as it’s the only one anyone’s talked about), is $21 billion. Of that, after all that talk about how our maintenance needs are going through the roof, maintenance adds up to less than $6 billion – with $11 billion in “improvements in economic corridors”, also known as wider highways. $2 billion – less than a tenth! – is offered for transit, but given the state’s history of ‘transit funding’, that sounds a lot like vanpools.

Our economic centers don’t have room for wider highways. The task force is trying to do two things – frame low density, low productivity places as “economic corridors” (and say they’d be more productive with bigger highways!), and totally ignore the strong voter message they received when we shot down Roads and Transit in 2007.

If the state wants a transportation package to pass, they’ll have to work with us, not propose doing more of the same. We’re in a maintenance funding hole because of this kind of planning, and we need to get out.

83 years later...

In a move that earns Mayor McGinn credit for successful inter-agency planning, Sound Transit and City of Seattle are finally working together to start studying high capacity transit through downtown and to Ballard – the first steps toward any new rail.

Ballard to downtown is in both the draft Seattle Transit Master Plan and Sound Transit’s long range plan, and voters funded planning in this corridor in Sound Transit 2 in 2008. Working together here prevents some duplication of work between the city and Sound Transit, and helps them determine which agency should build in the corridor, what kind of rail they want to build, and what corridor it should be built in.

This isn’t just a streetcar study – because the FTA has provided funding, it will study a range of modes. It will likely show a preference for streetcar in the downtown portion, as there would be a cost savings from leveraging the investments we already have in South Lake Union and that we’re making on First Hill, but it will be more open-ended for a Ballard to downtown connection; the FTA requires a full alternatives analysis with more range than the work done in the Transit Master Plan.

That’s actually where we come in. Once the money is committed, lobbying the city to ask that this be higher capacity rather than low can have an impact. The monorail project found that grade separated transit had fantastic ridership potential between Ballard and downtown, and we’ve only grown since then – both in population and in congestion. We should be involved – the city has to consider not just what provides the most bang for the buck today, but what we’ll need in 50 years.

There is some criticism of this plan. Some voiced concerns about the impact of Seattle going to ballot alone, as Sound Transit ballot measures need city voters to make up for majority anti-transit votes in some suburbs. But with Sound Transit unlikely to go back to ballot before 2016 or even later, it’s unlikely that the city and ST would go to ballot close together – and as Sound Transit and the monorail showed, Seattle is more than willing to go to ballot several times to build a comprehensive system. Some also worried that this would leave the city competing with ST for federal funds. But ST, Seattle and King County compete for federal funds regularly, and that’s OK – the feds fund the most effective projects, helping guide our choices of what to invest in, and frankly, giving us more chances as a region to win funding. Having one local agency lose out to another is much better than losing out to another state.

For a subway line, this is a great first step. Any modern data in this corridor is better than no data, and identifying the differences between transit via South Lake Union and Fremont vs Belltown and Lower Queen Anne is important to deciding where Sound Transit puts their investments in ST3. The key is to ask for something that will pass at the ballot – which is all about how excited voters will be for a commute better than what they have today.

Seattle Subway's Vision

For a long time, I’ve been writing about what should come next, how it fits into the big picture, how we can take steps to get there now, how we might fund it, and how we can be successful in the long term. I’ve delved into smaller topics, like what happens in the downtown tunnel and ideas about how to approach city-level expansion. We’ve talked a lot about what to do, and when.

Today, we have a vacuum. Sound Transit is well under way, and relatively safe from attack. Seattle has done some transit planning and has identified corridors where high capacity transit is necessary. This is a great time to start!

I’ve recently collected a small group of activists to show what Seattle’s mass transit could look like in the coming decades – and to campaign for it. Will you join us to help? You can sign up at Seattle Subway to get updates, and let’s start talking about it here.

There’s already a lot of analysis of Prop 1′s failure, but I think most is occurring in specific frames – social justice, transit planning, the economy. I agree some people make decisions about how to vote based on very specific concerns and interests, but for the most part, I think ballot measures are much more simple, and visceral, than we admit.

For most voters, I think these votes come down to two fundamental, linked questions, which I’m hearing echoed in a lot of the comments here as well: “How much will I get, and how much will I pay?”

The answer to what a voter gets can range from the focused, like a streetcar extension along a particular street – to the diffuse, like a list of projects all over town, or no list at all! The answer to how much they pay is similar: As focused as $60 per car once a year, and as diffuse as .05% on every purchase.

During a campaign, the side promoting a measure has to communicate the benefit to as many people as possible. The more focused and simple that benefit is, the cheaper it is to communicate – the slogan can be catchier (“Mass Transit Now!”), the explanation simpler (“A monorail from Ballard to West Seattle”). An interaction that leaves a voter with confidence in your project is shorter, meaning you can make more contacts in the same amount of volunteer time. Even less engaged voters will be exposed to your message, because a simpler message is more easily repeated.

A more diffuse package raises negatives – which are much more powerful than positives. If a measure has roads and transit, people who hate roads will vote against it as well as people who hate transit. People who hate bike lanes voted against Prop 1, people who hate streetcars, and people who hate buses. The more complex your package, the more likely you are to trigger someone angry about another project.

At the same time, the opposition’s job is to communicate the cost. The more focused, like an annual fee, the better for them – $60 per car is easy to communicate, because it’s the same message for everyone, and it’s easy for people to understand – there’s no math involved. It’s more difficult, and costly, for an opposition campaign to communicate a sliding scale or make people angry about a tiny increase on many, many transactions, simply because it takes more words, time, and even math to tell each voter about it. This is why we have a sales tax! It takes work for a voter to understand how much it costs them.

Prop 1 was basically terrible in this respect. “A $60 annual fee for a wide range of small, difficult to explain projects.” Compare that to “a 0.5% sales tax for 50 miles of light rail,” and I think you get the idea.

We can debate all day what percentage of voters cares about what particular value set, but this is economics. Everyone cares about how much bang they get for their buck, and little projects for big money doesn’t sound good. I editorialized in August that this package needed a signature project to make selling it easier, and while a streetcar might not have been enough to pass Prop 1, I believe the results would have been different. As for the funding mechanism – we need to take that fight to Olympia.

Lakewood Station - finally seeing Sounder in 2012! Photo by Andrew Smith

Two weeks ago Sound Transit released its 2012 Draft Service Implementation Plan.  (Executive Summary, or Full Document)  Given the current funding crises faced by all agencies, there is very little expansion in the plan except where new efficiencies allow for increased service.  As Sounder service to South Tacoma and Lakewood opens late in 2012, the most dramatic service revisions will occur in Pierce County.

Sound Transit will host a public hearing on November 3rd at Union Station from 1-1:30pm.  If you find the time or limited duration of the hearing inconvenient, you may comment anytime at fastride@soundtransit.org.

A route-by-route breakdown of proposed changes after the jump… (more…)

If you thought Bellevue’s light rail saga was over, think again.  Over the next two weeks, the city will host two public meetings – an open house next Tuesday and a public hearing the Monday after – all on the subject of East Link, namely mitigation for the B2M route and terms of an MOU with Sound Transit to fund the downtown tunnel.

With ST’s adoption of the final preferred alignment, these meetings shouldn’t end up being about routing or mode choice, but that won’t stop Link opponents from using any tactic possible to drag this process on longer. The City Council’s latest complaint? That the timeline for the October 24th MOU deadline is “unrealistic,” according to City Councilmember Kevin Wallace. We’ve heard rumors that the pro-B7 council quorum might try to push this deadline out, possibly even after the council changes next January.

If anyone’s at fault for the short timeline, it’s the City, which has had plenty of time to execute an outreach process and work out an agreement with ST – but instead, it’s been wasting its effort and money pushing for options that are already clearly not cost effective, like B7-R and the Vision Line. Pinning the blame on ST certainly won’t make Bellevue look any better. If the City Council wants to get serious about collaboration and getting the tunnel it wants, it would do well to stick to ST’s timeline, which it has already impacted.

The upcoming meetings, especially the public hearing, are going to be an important chance for Bellevue citizens, the majority of whom voted for East Link, to stand up against these tactics and join other key regional voices in pushing for mass transit now.

If you want this, testify tonight.

Today, at 5:30pm at City Hall, we’ll have the opportunity to ask the Seattle City Council to place a long term, $80 Vehicle License Fee on the November ballot. There are a number of competing proposals, and all but one of them are, quite simply, bad for transit.

As Martin wrote recently, the efficiency winner (by far) of the streetcar corridors in Seattle would be the 4th/5th connector, bringing the SLU streetcar and First Hill streetcars together. Building it would dramatically reduce negative perception of the SLU streetcar and dramatically increase visibility for the streetcar network overall. With such a connector in place, any future streetcar expansion will be more cost effective and poll better – this is the project that would lead to a snowball effect for rail transit.

It’s also the easiest project to showcase during a campaign for the VLF – while wonks like us appreciate small efficiency projects and planning, a new rail corridor through downtown is a lightning rod that earns votes and creates a simple, cheap campaign message. Remember that votes are rarely about how good projects are – they’re about how easy the projects are to understand and repeat to others.

Surface/Transit/I-5 is a great example of a counterpoint – it’s unarguably the most cost effective viaduct replacement solution, but it’s the most complex and difficult to explain, so it gets short shrift. In the case of this streetcar, we would have both a good project and a simple project – exactly what we need for a November win.

Here’s the problem: Only a long-term, $80 VLF will fund this connector – and the Council hasn’t seen much pressure to put that on the ballot. Most of them are interested in a $40 or $60 package that has nothing exciting – a package that voters won’t care about or talk about, and will end up being ignored on thousands of ballots. Today, at 5:30, is our one chance to put on that pressure.

There’s another, long-term reason this is very important.

Next year, the legislature will be discussing a huge transportation package, possibly for a statewide vote. With the transit master plan largely complete, Seattle will be in a strong position to go to Olympia to ask for transit funding for one of our half dozen unfunded high capacity transit corridors. Olympia knows they need our vote to overcome rural and suburban anti-tax voters, and they’ll be open to providing us a good incentive to come to the polls.

Our best argument to demand real funding for transit is to be bold today. I want to walk into a hearing room in Olympia next year and testify that Seattle uses every penny given to it by the legislature – and that we want more, from a progressive funding source. The only way I can do that is if we tell the City Council, today, to use all $80 that the legislature has provided it, and to use it to build rail. If we only use $40, or $60, legislators will ask why Seattle isn’t using the funding they’ve given us – and they will balk at offering more.

So I urge you to show up tonight, at 5:30, at city hall, and demand rail transit now. This is your chance to have it today and tomorrow.

People fear change for many reasons. In the International District, unfounded fears have reared their ugly head again, this time in opposition to tracks for the First Hill Streetcar.

The City’s Charles Street Service Center, at 8th and Dearborn, is to be the site of the streetcar maintenance facility. Lead tracks will extend south from the line at Jackson to Dearborn. These will be the same as any other streetcar – downtown Portland, the South Lake Union Streetcar, and many others around the US and the world.

I could understand if this were an opposition, say, along a major cycling route – cyclists riding parallel to the tracks can catch a wheel in them. I could also understand an issue if there were fast-moving trains here. But – neither of these are the case. The Seattle Chinatown International District preservation and development authority, or SCIDpda, is “worried” and “concerned” that people crossing the street will trip and fall.

Now, when I first heard about this, I was given an example of a senior citizen catching a walker or cane in the rails. I can see that happening, as there’s senior housing right next to 8th – so I asked how often it happens. It turns out… it doesn’t. The city hasn’t found any instances, nor has the SCIDpda, or any other groups who have picked up on this claim. What’s more, SDOT went on to investigate in Portland, just to be sure – and heard back from Good Samaritan Hospital, located in the streetcar loop in Northwest Portland, and a retirement facility next door. They’ve never heard of a problem.

These groups say their concerns are being ignored – but they claim “hazards” and “risk” without any evidence at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if street safety improves – as crossings and sidewalks will be improved throughout this project. If there were ever a legitimate claim here, it’s lost in an unwillingness to accept reality.

Roger Valdez over at Seattle’s Land Use Code has a pretty amazing piece today about the analysis – or lack of it – that went into Sound Transit’s decision to waste the airspace above the Roosevelt station and build what amounts to a suburban commuter station.

This isn’t really new. In the US, transportation agencies aren’t incentivized properly to get involved in land use. Their incentive is to build the lowest risk option available to them, which is, unfortunately, generally a terrible choice for the neighborhood.

In this case, Sound Transit claims they did no economic analysis of potential development on their Roosevelt site before deciding it wasn’t worth it. With a six story mixed use building adjacent to them on one side, and a developer who’d like to build 12-15 stories on the other side of the street, I have no problem calling that decision embarrassingly dumb for the neighborhood.

Unfortunately for us people who care, it’s quite smart for the agency. They’re not a developer – they can’t spin up a limited liability corporation to build a building and then let that LLC declare bankruptcy if the building fails. They’re stuck with what they build, which means the risk to them is very high – both financially and politically –  if they don’t have an absolutely sure thing. It makes sense that they wouldn’t do an economic analysis, because the chances are vanishingly small that it would show them anything other than “don’t build anything but the station.”

What really needs to happen here is that we need to fix Sound Transit’s incentives. There aren’t easy solutions here – it’s essentially impossible for them to partner with a developer when they have a ten year planning timeframe. But there are solutions, and we need to make them happen soon enough that the agency doesn’t become hated by the neighborhoods it builds in – because that’s a great way to sink ST3 and beyond.