That discussion is interesting, but isn’t what caught my eye.  One compromise solution was to use some of the money saved and keep or add express buses to downtown.  But if the express bus was faster, what would get people to take the non-express to a slow transfer to the train?  The way we do things now we’d use capacity to limit supply – once more people can’t cram on the express bus, they’ll wait for th local.  But that’s not the logical market approach – we’re leaving money on the table.  We could be limiting supply using fares.  Bump up express service a few dollars, and we not only increase revenue but we also sort out the issue of limited capacity on express buses. 

Commuters that need to get to work quickly will pay the extra money.  More cost sensitive riders will take a bit more time to get around.  And let’s not just do this for south-end routes, but for routes throughout the region.  This will free up capacity on express routes, and we can use the added revenue to keep more service overall.

On Earth Day, April 22, Sound Transit has partnered with the Sierra Club in providing appreciation packets with free passes for ST Express and Metro buses that Sierra Club volunteers will distribute at transit facilities.

Certainly there are any number of environmental agencies that ST could have partnered with for such an event. Is the agency trying to make nice with the environmentalists who helped kill Proposition 1?

Let’s be honest: park-and-rides do, in fact, make it easier for people to mix cars and transit. But as Will says, it’s important to design with your users in mind. As long as you have to pay to park, you’re imposing a cost and letting people make a rational decision. And park-and-rides eventually facilitate denser, transit-oriented-development down the line (notice how all the parking lots in downtown Seattle are being developed). Finally, Seattle has chosen (for good or ill) to go down the path of most mid-sized American cities and decided to use basically one system for both intracity and intercity transit (ignoring Sounder for a moment). So park-and-rides are an inevitability as the system expands outside of the downtown core.

As always, one has to consdier the alternatvies, and I will be curious to see what Mike O’Brien at the club has to say on that at the forum Will mentions on March 20. Because it’s perfectly reasonable for the Sierra Club to be anti-light-rail, and they don’t even have to be advocating an alternative. They’re just an interest group with a singular mission: stop sprawl at all costs. That’s one angle, but it’s not the only angle.

But we as policymakers (yes, in the initiative-driven transit world, Joe Citizen is a policymaker) do need to weigh the alternatives. What, overall, is going to provide the best mix of decreasing fossil fuel usage, respecting the environment, increasing density, providing options to commuters, etc., etc. When you consider al the factors, ST 2.1 is a no-brainer.

Update: What Ben said. Habituating people to transit — even if only for part of their commute — is important in the short-term.

First up is the Sierra Club, with an exit poll that they claim shows that the roads portion was the real drag on the ballot. Erica Barnett cites pollster Tom Riehle’s statement that “what was unique about this election was the decisive role of a small group of voters.” Riehle and the Sierra Club’s main data point is the 20% of “no” voters — 11% of all voters — who cited global warming as a reason for voting “no.” That’s theoretically enough to tip the election.

It’s an interesting argument, but there’s a few major caveats to keep in mind. First, in a close election, one could plausibly claim that any small group was the “decisive” one. Second, they oversampled Seattle and King County voters. Based on provisional ballot data here and here, I’m guessing an oversample of King County (esp. Seattle) by 8 points and an undersample of Snohomish by about the same. That could explain much of the global warming answer.

Still, I wouldn’t call it bogus, necessarily. Groups tend to hire pollsters who will reaffirm their agenda. After all, that’s why there are Democratic pollsters and Republican pollsters.

It’s biased, sure, but there’s still some interesting data.

First, people really didn’t seem to want that Sea-Tac-to-Tacoma light rail! One could reasonably conclude that that project alone nearly sunk the whole package (if my math’s right, 5% of all voters cited it as their No. 1 reason). Duly noted!

Second, among the “yes” voters, there were many more “transit only” supporters than “road only” ones. 35 vs. 11. That can’t be explained away by the Seattle oversample. People. Want. Transit. And not just buses. They want rail, especially North and East, and they’re willing to pay for it. That’s a good thing.

I hope we see more exit polls in the near future, from different pollsters. A sample of 5,000 voters is pretty revealing, despite the flaws.

Update: Scotto in the comments offers a plausible explanation for the alleged oversample.

“Maybe (the measure) isn’t perfect. … I don’t care if it’s not perfect, we have got to move forward. And the last thing we need is to have the 1.2 million (people) that are coming into the Puget Sound area over the next decade, and leave the status quo. Want to talk global warming? That is a disaster.”

It’s a clever move, trying to pivot off of global warming, which, as Josh Feit argued, was the “one cogent moment” of Sims’ editorial.

But I think we need to step back for a moment and acknowledge that there are limits to what highway planning can and cannot do to halt global warming. The single largest cause of global warming is the burning of coal for electricity. Car and light truck emissions are just 20% of the total. More controversially, gridlock, too contributes to global warming. And though I’m not naive enough to believe that simply adding more lanes will end gridlock, adding HOV capacity to the 520 bridge will do far more good than harm in that regard.

(To be fair, transportation — including planes — accounts for over half the CO2 emissions in the Northwest specifically, but (a), that’s only because we get much of our electricity from hydro, and (b) because CO2 is only one of the gases that contribute to global warming)

So while I completely agree that denser, transit-oriented urban development is one key component to reversing climate change, it’s not the only one. Increasing fuel efficiency, reducing the use of coal-fired electricity plants, and somehow figuring out how to stop cows from passing gas are just three things that would do more to stop global warming than whether or not we pass Prop. 1 this November.

The Sierra Club and Ron Sims (both of whom I admire) would like to make this vote a referendum on global warming. It’s just not that simple.