Orphan Road

The club loses round 1:

The Sierra Club, the main force behind the NoRTID campaign, asked the court Friday to decide whether the "con" statement in the King County voter's pamphlet is legal. The group says it omits an environmental point of view on the RTID portion of the ballot measure, falling short of fully informing voters.

Townsend said the "con" statement, written by citizen activist Will Knedlick, Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman and Phil Talmadge, a former state lawmaker and state Supreme Court justice, is primarily an anti-light rail and anti-tax stance, failing to adequately address the issue of more roads and highways.

I think it's generally problematic that Sound Transit gets to choose who writes the "con" statement. But then, I think voter initiatives in general are problematic, and this is just one more reason why.

Overall, though, while I respect (though disagree with) their focus on killing the roads piece of the joint proposition, I wonder if the Club is thinking too short-term here:

"We've tried to get the two issues separated," said Mike O'Brien, the local Sierra Club chairman. "When we heard about the shotgun wedding the Legislature created, we knew there was going to be a problem."

Decoupling the issues -- annulling the shotgun wedding, to borrow O'Brien's words -- is a bad idea in the long term. Environmentalists should want holistic, integrated transportation planning, one that includes rails, roads, trails, buses, bikes, hovercrafts, etc. Because that's how we're going to get the kind of transit systems that folks like the Sierra Club want to see.

For example, if you look at RTID/ST2 in a vaccum, you see that the funding is split roughly 50/50, about $10B each. An anti-rail person might look at that and say, "hey, why is half the money going to rail when it only serves 1% of trips?" Let's bracket the "only a few thousand people" line, which has been thoroughly debunked, and focus on the the money. Sure, if you narrowly look at RTID/ST2, we're looking at 50/50, but if you step back, and look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that we've spent on streets, boulevards, highways, byways, and driveways, at the state, county, and local level for the past 100 years, all of a sudden $10B on transit seems like a drop in the bucket.

In other words, we should only consider transportation spending relative to other modes, and the way we do that is by looking at it as one huge pie that gets divvied up.