Orphan Road - prop1 - Comments

Oops...my mistake. I'm

joshkelley — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:17:05 -0700

Oops...my mistake. I'm dating myself, but I wasn't a voter at the time, so really didn't care. For some reason, I was "hearing" Sound Move and thinking Transit Now. Don't ask why.

Joshua Kelley

If KC Councilmember Larry

Oran — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:04:28 -0700

If KC Councilmember Larry Phillips, a strong supporter of light rail, runs for King County Executive against Sims and gets elected and Prop 1 fails, we might see a that as a possibility.

I guess there's always the

Frank — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:52:53 -0700

I guess there's always the option that Metro takes over the light rail and starts planning (and funding) its own King-County-centric extensions. Though that'd never happen until Sims leaves office. Add 10-20 years to the timeline.

Either way, if Prop 1 fails

jessejb — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:21:13 -0700

Either way, if Prop 1 fails its time to look for a new city to spend my young years in. Seattle will have proved that the bitter eldery anti-everything nimbys have this city by the balls. Good luck attracting a young, dynamic workforce that demands cities with real city transit.

Although I expect it to pass, soooo....

Sound Move was the name of

chrisb — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:54:30 -0700

Sound Move was the name of the 1996 plan that was approved by voters.

Hey Frank... I don't think

BenSchiendelman — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:32:11 -0700

Hey Frank... I don't think the cost was between 10 and 100 billion per year. :)

Why did they choose not to

JoshMahar — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:25:48 -0700

Why did they choose not to do a North Cap. Hill/Montlake stop and what are the possiblities of putting one in if or when the area densifies (although North 15th is pretty crackin already, who doesn't love Hopvine)?

Perhaps it does. In a

joshkelley — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:44:52 -0700

Perhaps it does. In a previous version, I had it going to Redmond, but saw only 9 stations on the current map at ST. Going out to Overlake TC gave me 10, so I just dropped the last one.

I think the new East Link

rizzuhjj — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:11:30 -0700

I think the new East Link still goes to the Overlake Transit Center, which for crazy reasons is different than Overlake Hospital and Overlake Village. (http://www.future.soundtransit.org/news_pr_2008_07_10.aspx)

Couldn't agree more, Matt.

Frank — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:15:38 -0800

Couldn't agree more, Matt. Only about 5% of the electorate knew how much Prop. 1 actually cost, yet many cited "cost" as a reason for voting "no"!

Initiatives can be good for broad, general, sense-of-the-electorate things, but for fine-grained policy tradeoffs (don't get me started on the Viaduct vote), they're useless.

To the extent that we have initiatives, they should be broad and vague. I know people SAY they want more details (and reporters demand details or they won't take your initiative seriously), but they really don't.

I'm strongly against direct

Matt the Engineer — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:04:52 -0800

I'm strongly against direct popular rule. The wonderful thing about a representative government is that the decision makers have all day to think about, discuss, and analyze issues. It's their job. But take these complex issues and make it a yes/no vote with 30-second commercials as the prime source of information, and you've dumbed down the process to a useless level. Note that I'm not calling the voters dumb here - they just don't have the time to understand issues at the level required to make an informed decision. Even the careful voters that spend hours researching each issue don't have the staff, resources, or insider information that representatives have.

Perhaps living in California has biased my feelings on direct democracy. There, most major decisions are decided by direct vote. Any vote that affects corparate interests seems to be dead before it's on the ballot, as multi-million dollar advertisements flood the airwaves.

RTA

scotto — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:14:58 -0800

Frank,

They used the RTA district.

I was also skeptical that voters would pass such a huge transit-only package, but then then I saw those poll numbers and thought about it some more: People are simultaneously starting to believe that global warming is a real problem we need to do something about quickly (lots of corroborating polls on this) and, at the same time, they are also beginning to understand that you can't build your way out of congestion (personal observation, not quite so reliable). I think those two factors made a ton of transit spending more palatable.

Still, I want to vote YES on transit ASAP, and a streamlined transit-only plan is the most likely thing to come out in 2008 or 2009: I'll take it. Actually, there were a few good road projects in RTID as well: I'd take those too.

The main thing for me is that whatever plan shows up on the ballot has got to put us on a path towards climate sanity.

Our leaders could have made greenhouse gas reduction a key selling point of Prop 1, but instead, they allowed staff in the State gov't to use a bureaucratic maneuver to pull GHG analysis requirements out of the legislation. I'm fairly sure they feared how badly Prop 1 would have failed on that measure.

So, by the time of the next vote, I'll be hoping to see a plan that will drop transportation GHG's down to 80% of 1990 levels (what scientists say we need to avoid the worst effects of global warming). We don't have to buy the whole thing at once, but transportation Plan B has to make the fast GHG cuts we need in the next decade, and be on a trajectory that is likely to reach the end goal in another 40 years.

I've got my fingers crossed.

It's a compelling idea, I

Frank — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:01:38 -0800

It's a compelling idea, I agree. But we're already working on a lot of interagency cooperation (on fares, we have PugetPass, for example) without actually combining agencies.

Martin at STB offers an interesting caution to "governance reform," which is basically that it will create a brand new huge bureaucracy that will have to spend a decade or so getting on its feet and making mistakes before it becomes effective. The question is whether it's worth it.

I think it's worthy of consideration, but it's not a slam dunk, necessarily. Thanks for the comment!

RTID vs RTA

Frank — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:59:03 -0800

Hi Scotto,

I was using the RTID numbers, which come out to 409,883. 381,860 is the RTA number. The districts are slightly different, so that's where the difference comes from. Do you know which district the pollsters used?

Based on those numbers, I get a breakdown of 57%/21%/22% for King/Pierce/Snohomish, the RT poll has 64%/21%/15% (when you combine Seattle and the balance of King).

Also, I'd never accuse them of "faking" anything. They're certainly a reputable firm. I was just suggesting that there are ways to tweak poll questions that can influence the numbers you get. Pollsters like to please their clients. James Carville's firm, for example, only polls for Democrats and tends to come up with poll results that Democrats like, that's all. But point taken, "bias" may have been too strong a word.

And yeah, I definitely think this poll confirms that people want transit. I'm still skeptical that this specific $10B Sound Transit package would have passed on its own, though. It's still, what, 3-5 times the size of the 1996 ST measure? And you've already got 60% or so people saying that they don't feel like they got their money's worth from Sound Move according to that King 5 poll.

I hope we'll find out soon enough! Thanks for the comment.

non bias

scotto — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:22:37 -0800

The poll was definitely not biased. It was done by:

http://www.rtstrategies.com/index_files/Partners.htm.

They are the pollsters for the Cook Political Report, and have conducted polls for the Associated Press, Business Week, CBS News, NBC News, Newsweek, the Orlando Sentinel and the Wall Street Journal.

They've got their national reputation to protect, so there's no way they'd fake this.

They also did not oversample Seattle. It's hard to tell where you're thinking the oversample came from, but...

RTA District (Portions of King, Pierce & Snohomish Counties) = 381,860 ballots cast to date
http://vote.wa.gov/elections/W EI/Results_Prop1.aspx

Seattle = 94,848 ballots cast to date
http://www.metrokc.gov/electio ns/200711/resPage17.htm

That works out to be 24.84% for Seattle. The RT Strategies survey had it at 24.98%.

You can't ask for a more accurate sample than that!

About global warming vs. other factors: you should really dig into the crosstabs some more. That 11% of global warming NO's came from people who would have voted YES if roads and transit had not been tied together. That's quite a different thing from, say, the 30 or 40% of cheapskates who will always vote against any tax -- they would never have voted for Prop 1. But the global warming NO's were near-certain losses.

Anyway, I'm glad you're receptive to the message that this poll is good news for transit.