Panic Delayed Is Panic Denied
Recently the Seattle Transit Blog relayed fears that state legislation would destroy Sound Transit and dash our hopes.
If you read SB5803 Engrossed you will find that a lot of work has gone into preparing what seems logically inevitable- transportation governance for over a million people between Everett and Tacoma.
I think a lot of the concern here is based on the mistaken impression that a weak elected board of commissioners would serve as a rubber stamp for the state highway department.
What would really happen would be that the regional commission would have enough muscle to go head to head with the state highway department. The professional planning employees who have been weakened by their balkanization into 50 different planning departments would be gathered under one roof, while in the past all of their efforts have depended on Redmond agreeing with Carnation to agree with Issaquah ad infinitum- a tedious process that predictably was not effective in confronting the state highway department.
The state highway department has always been a pork barrel for rural areas. Aside from the historical anomaly of the ferries, rural population density is too low to support public transit as an alternative to roads. Thus, a state "transportation" department tilted towards rural areas becomes inevitably a state highway department.
I think this is why Republicans are opposing this- they see clearly that a new agency representing the urbanized voters of King, Pierce and Snohomish will be acting to keep transportation dollars in the greater metropolitan area.
The bill obviously represents a tremendous amount of work to modernize transportation in the metro area, and I really don't see how it fails to come back.
And that, I think, is not a bad thing. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
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I do see the logic in a regional transit authority -- Sound Transit plus all the local metro transits, which is kinda what New York has -- but I don't see why this authority should be building or funding roads and bridges, something that the feds, the state, the cities, and the counties already do. that seems to add bureaucracy, not remove it. No?
The real thrust of the proposal is twofold- one, to reduce congestion by modeshift, and two, to implement modeshift by studying regional transportation needs and solutions.
For example, this proposed agency could easily identify a bicycle path between, say, Carnation and Redmond, propose funding, and implement it. As matters stand today, there is no state or federal involvement in such a task, and to do it you need to coordinate Redmond, Carnation, and the county, and then those relatively weak jurisdictions have to deal with the opposition.
What "they" really want to implement is congestion pricing, to speed up commercial traffic on the roads, and more transit, for the same purpose.
What people need to do to understand this is to get into the nuts and bolts of road building. We do this a lot in Mason County because there really isn't much other news. Cheap thrills!