With all of the Prop 1 fallout and hopes for Initiative 118, Seattle vs. the suburbs rhetoric is fashionable once again. For those invested in that struggle, it’s worthwhile to read my assessment of inter-city subsidies. I also encourage you to steer clear of the rhetoric of subsidy altogether.
24 Replies to “Seattle Transit?”
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Said it before, will say it again. We live and work in a region, and will increasingly do so for the foreseeable future. Think of our transit system accordingly, and the accounting will fall into balance.
But also consider Initiative 118, whereby Seattle takes a very strong first step on its own, to be strongest step in beginning the above. A weak, crippled transit system here will never be good either for our region or the rest of the state.
One that works will set an example voters elsewhere will start to get jealous of. As with everything else about Seattle, the younger ones-who will have longer voting lives- will use that feeling as motivation to copy us.
So even if they do keep running away to our city, their escape will be faster and require no license plates to track them with. And by their ORCA cards with cash. Guts and style always impres kids.
Mark Dublin
King County, over the past 20 years or so, successfully offloaded most of it’s road infrastructure spending on cities, prodding developing areas into incorporation. Today, different cities in King County, manage their roads differently, according to their desires and budget.
The failure of Prop 1, and potential passage of I118, could simply be the first step to a similar model for transit spending, with each city chipping in.
I’m all in favor of thinking regionally when it’s not an excuse for not acting at all. But as someone who lives and works in the suburbs, I think Seattle and Seattleites should go it alone if the rest of the region refuses to act. That’s a loss for everyone else, but it’s better than doing nothing while waiting for the rest of the region to come to its senses.
I hope Seattle passes 118 and the mayor’s vague plan for universal pre-K. It will be a good example for the suburbs to follow sometime down the road.
+1 Cascadian on the go it alone plan for transit.
It’s really not about who subsidizes who at this point. The rest of the county isn’t involved in this debate now. Seattle’s only option to restore service is to fund more hours internally so you’re at least steering your destiny in a generally more favorable direction. It’s not going to be a magical fix but it will at least keep things in better shape than it would be otherwise.
We agree on just about everything here, Cascadian. Just got back home to Olympia after I-118 kickoff at the Spitfire Grill on Fourth downtown. I really do think that from a regional perspective this initiative, and the initiative behind its fast introduction, are the best things that could happen.
As Ben Schiendelman pointed out tonight, there are forces in the suburbs who are also tired of being intimidated out of good transit by the State Legislature, and would see a victory here as encouragement to follow suit. A regional system will work a lot better if it’s made up of strong local transit than a passle of sickly or non-existent local systems.
After 32 years of experience driving and then observing transit in this area, I also really hate the use of the future as an excuse for a long, lousy present.
Best example for me, based on service on the Employee Advisory Committee that helped the engineers who designed the Metro Tunnel, and my last five years of service driving in there, was having every suggestion for improvement countered with “Can’t afford it- buses and joint use are only temporary.” So was the Pleistocene Era.
But most common excuse for inaction is really: “We can’t do anything about it. Separate agencies.” Real answer to my question yesterday as to why Portland’s electric rail system is forty years ahead of ours. TriMet isn’t separate agencies.
Great pen name, though. Had a wonderful train trip yesterday, and discovered that Olympia is a lot quicker ride down there from Seattle. Too bad station is so idiotically far out of town. Would be good if freight right of way into Olympia could be used to get both Cascades and Sounder into the city. Goes right by a brewery, and a block from my favorite espresso stop on its way to the port.
Mark
The fastest way using the Pt Defiance bypass line would be to build a stop at DuPont TC and have a train-to-home bus route go from there to Hawks Prairie, then Lacey TC and on to Downtown Olympia.
The lines that snake through downtown Olympia are low speed lines that interface out by Nisqually.
@Brian,
The old NP Olympia loop line broke off the main just south of Old Nisqually and went straight through Lacey on its way to downtown along Pacific Avenue and the freeway. It was pulled up forty years ago and is now the “Woodland Trail”. It runs right through the middle of Lacey’s big traffic circle; the tracks are not coming back.
The surviving UP line has a junction at “East Olympia” (a name with no place) about two and a half miles south of Centennial Station and leads to a cul-de-sac southwest of downtown Olympia. The south end of the loop via Gate has been pulled up from about five miles south of the 101 crossing.
While Sounder could conceivably go to downtown Oly via the out of the way UP line, Cascades cannot without a lot of re-construction of the south end line. And going about eight miles south, nine miles north, and an additional twelve miles west of the mail line at Gate are going to add a half hour to Cascades running time, it’s unlikely to fly.
There does need to be better bus service to Centennial, for sure; the Gray’s Harbor transit buses should continue past the Oly TC to there at least a couple of times a day. But Cascades will not be serving downtown Olympia.
Sorry, “@Mark”, not “@Brian”.
King County has amply demonstrated over half a century that it has zero interest in the best practices of urban transportation.
If an absolute and unequivocal severance were what it would require to surmount the agency’s perpetual service follies, than I am all for it. The other consequences will duly sort themselves out.
Anything is better than $90/month to hardly get anywhere and forever arrive surly.
This is not a new discussion about transit spending. When King County assumed control of Metro in the early 1990s, many Seattleites said at the time that our regionally unique needs would be held hostage to suburbanites. Fast-forward to the vote on Prop 1 …
The pendulum is swinging back now that the suburban growth is a thing of the past. Once Seattle starts funding its own portion of Metro its probably time to manage, fund, and operate a city system again.
For metro areas, county-level government is kind of an odd fit. For transit in particular, wouldn’t it make more sense to have municipal governments that are part of a single regional framework (that is, Seattle Transit and Sound Transit)? I guess in practice there is a set of suburban transit projects that would pass in King County but not the Sound Transit district, but how big is that set really? Do we need the county-level structure, aside from the fact that changing it at this point would cause more disruption that just living with it? On first thought, it seems as if you could take most Metro routes and place them in either a “Seattle” bucket or a “Sound Transit” bucket.
ST doesn’t do buses. They contract with county agencies to run additional bus service. It’s like calling Rapid Ride a transit “bucket”. It’s just a different paint scheme on the bus. ST has zero ability to run anything; or anything useful anyway. They operate the free Tacoma Link service and that’s it. And if ST even had a clue the tax structure prevents what you’re suggesting. ST is a “bucket of gold” for large capital project construction.
Well, the split I’m postulating would be less operational and more in planning, where ST is definitely distinct from the county agencies. Though I do think the different county agencies could integrate their cross-county service better. I’m in Bothell in King County and the county borders make for some odd discontinuities in service between Metro and Community Transit. While I like Metro I do wonder if its countywide structure encourages suburbanites to adopt an anti-transit approach just to stick it to Seattle. Maybe they’d take it more seriously if they didn’t have Seattle to blame.
If you folded all the county and city agencies into Sound Transit, it would change Sound Transit so much that it would essentially be a different agency, so we might as well plan it that way from the beginning. There are arguments on both sides of such a shift. But ultimately, the agencies’ identities and bureaucracies are less important than the routes on the ground, so let’s focus on that priority because we have a lot of work to do there. ORCA already takes care of inter-agency transfers and passes, so that makes it easier.
I support the ideal of a unified agency; it works well in BC and in Germany. But a unified agency won’t magically make our problems go away. What happens to inner East King routes, outer East King routes, Snohomish routes? Initially it will have to absorb the status quo, because trying to do a massive reorg at the same time you’re realining the agencies is too much. Everybody will be concerned that “their” area’s service hours aren’t shortchanged or reassigned to another area, and that will be a perpetual problem. In Germany the regional agencies have full authority to plant subways and buses and streetcars and regional rail exactly where they’re needed, and land use is fully designed around transit stations. Here there’s too much “local control” and anti-tax/pro-parking sentiment to implement that, at least in the current era. So any unified agency would have to defer to the subareas’ wishes to some extent — and that means P&R “transit centers” with express routes in the usual places, no matter what urbanists think of them. In other words, it would be a better status quo, but not the full-on perfection of transit like in Germany. (I’m sure Germans would not call their transit “perfect”, but in a relative sense they’re doing it right.) But we can achieve a better status quo without necessarily merging all the agencies. For instance, Metro could adopt Sound Transit’s concept of subarea equity. Then what happens in Bellevue stays in Bellevue, and Seattle could ignore it as it spends its own money on rapid/frequent corridors.
Another thing that gets overlooked. People say consolidating the agencies would “reduce overhead” and “save costs” but they never quantify it. How much would it save? Is that really guaranteed? And how significant is that compared to what we might otherwise do with the money? I.e., would it be enough to fund another Link line or Swift route? If not, why is it significant enough to matter?
The link to “The Reality of a Seattle Transit Agency” is very apropos to today’s reality. Martin, that was a great summary of how Metro was created and is still a mechanism to prop up Seattle bus service. We may not agree on the conclusion but we agree on the facts. Not covered is how the structure resulted in inherent wasted new service allocation that tried to even out the balance by funding empty buses. But the forced belt tightening has largely put the kibosh on that. Ben’s current Initiative is spot on. Number one it’s going to pass and actually accomplish something. With the exception of Ross Hunter that’s something politicians seem to care very little about. Well, I’d put McGinn in that category but look what that bought him in Liberalville. Keep Metro as it provides economy of scale and “borderless” service planning but put funding on a local level. Really, DT Seattle needs transit. DT Bellevue and Kirkland do too to a lesser extent. Microsoft already runs their own transit system. Everywhere else… it’s a nice to have but not a must have.
Bernie,
You nailed it. I agree completely with one caveat: you guys on the Red Team must allow cities to tax themselves at whatever level they deem necessary and by whatever means they deem appropriate. If your theory that taxation drives away business and wrecks economies is everywhere and at all times true, the cities will come up bupkies and have to change.
But this bullshit of a bunch of redneck wheat farmers trying to tell Seattle how to run its shop has got to stop.
I agree with that. The taxation limits I see as valid are what limits Metro sales tax authority at .9%. Without these type of protection it’s too easy for municipalities to vote tax increases that rural voters have no chance of defeating, no benefit from passing and no way to avoid paying since they have to shop where the stores are. That’s the trick PT tried. The property tax Initiative which is geographically limited to the city limits is the way to go.
I’d agree on the sales tax limitation if other things were allowed. There is a certain level of coercion inherent in the clustering of sales tax revenues in just three cities within the county. Well, I guess Federal Way gets a little from it’s mini-mall, but most goes to Seattle, Bellevue and Tukwila.
What a pot-o-gold Tukwila has……
Thanks Bernie. I’d add “UW” to your list, but you’re basically right — unless you’re transit dependent in the suburbs, but nobody cares about them.
When the pro-transit ads are being designed, please stay away from “if you vote no, you will increase traffic.” I think that’s one of the biggest reasons Prop 1 failed. You talk about traffic, most people are probably going to look at their commute and think “I’m paying such-and-such in taxes and the traffic is still this crappy? I’m not getting my money’s worth and there’s no way in hell I’m paying more!” Design the pro-transit ads in terms of transportation choices, becoming a modern world-class city, etc. Anything but “this will reduce traffic”!!! Because we know it’s not going to significantly reduce traffic. Just go to any major city that has a great transit system and you’ll still see lots of traffic on the road so I wish pro-transit groups would stop saying public transit will reduce traffic.
This, coming from a Metro user since 1981.
Cinesea,
It only reduces traffic in comparison to what it would have been. You are completely correct to say that large cities almost always have terrible traffic congestion; vehicle trips in the peak hours expand to fill all the available road capacity. But transit does “cut the top off the peak”; and I expect that as the cuts start in the fall, there will be a few weeks of carmageddon. However, people will quickly adjust: they’ll have to because the roads can carry only so many vehicles while the number of person-trips won’t change but the buses will carry fewer of them.
People will finally take the time to form a carpool; they’ll leave for work earlier in the morning and leave for home later in the evening; they’ll beg to telecommute one day a week and the boss will say “OK” because at least they’ll be working.
Within three or four weeks a new normal will be achieved but everyone will have a little longer or less convenient commute (well, except the lucky ones who get a day of telecommuting).
When the pro-transit ads are being designed, please stay away from “if you vote no, you will increase traffic.” I think that’s one of the biggest reasons Prop 1 failed.
I’d be very interested in seeing, or hearing a description of, the evidence that led you to such a confident conclusion. Because without some evidence, it’s hard to take such a claim seriously. It’s speculation, and it’s a form of speculation that is very much at odds with what we know about voting behavior.
Not to sound like a broken record, but the evidence that messaging has a big effect on electoral outcomes is very scarce. Turnout, general economic conditions, and pre-existing dispositions toward what’s being funded and how are, in virtually all cases, sufficient to explain the vast majority of outcomes. I haven’t been presented with a reason to believe the Prop 1 election is an exception.
Nearly every piece of literature over the past 20 year about voting for public transit mentions ‘reducing traffic.’ I talk with my co-workers who drive(you know, the ones who are also paying car tabs/sales taxes) and they all say basically the same thing: “I was promised that voting for this tax increase that traffic would decrease but it didn’t. I was lied to and I will never vote to increase taxes again.” Other people have visited other big cities and have seen that even with public transit, there is a lot of traffic. Even if that is full of hyperbole, it is what a lot of people who don’t ride public transit believe. So, I say stop saying public transit will reduce traffic because people will no longer believe it. Continue promoting transit as a choice, as something that will make this region world-class but stop with the ‘reducing traffic’ as anyone not on this blog won’t believe you.