Orphan Road

Surprise! Pierce County may decide to build those roads anyway:

The defeat of Proposition 1 would allow Pierce County to break away from King and Snohomish counties and present its own road package to voters, although that’s not an option county officials are embracing just yet.

“I think it is something one would think about,” said Pierce County Councilman Shawn Bunney, chairman of the three-county Regional Transportation Investment District. “But I’m not sure our transportation problems lend themselves to a single-county solution.

...

Bunney, a likely candidate for county executive in 2008, said his main concern is making sure Pierce County tax dollars are spent in Pierce County. He also wants work to proceed on the extension of Highway 167 from the Port of Tacoma to Puyallup.

There's some interesting discussion on STB on what a revised Sound Transit initiative might look like. Scaling back to Northgate and Bellevue sounds reasonable, but it would really hurt ridership.

The real issue, it seems, is how you design a package inside the Sound Transit RTA district that spends so much on King County in particular. Subarea equity dictates that you raise the same amount of money from all sub-areas and re-invest it in those areas (RTID has a similar policy for roads -- funds raised in each county are re-invested in that county).

Obviously King County gets more because it contributes more, but even that doesn't account for the disparity of building light rail to Northgate and Bellevue while investing in nothing that crosses the Pierce or Snohomish County lines.

This gets to why subarea equity is a double edged sword. While it allows the different subareas to feel like they're all getting their money's worth, it hamstrings the planning process. Planners can't just make investments where they're best for the region, they have to make sure the projects get doled out equally among the subareas, regardless of whether that's the best use of the funds.

This came into sharp relief in the Prop. 1 debate. We all thought we were voting on a $17B (or $47B) package, but in truth, each subarea was really voting on its own, smaller package that got reinvested in its area. The "yes" folks didn't really do a good job of getting that particular message out. And I don't blame them -- it's legitimately confusing!

Either we're one region or we're not. This solomonic solution seems to be giving us the worst of both worlds. Prop. 1, following this strategy, tried to walk the line between being a holistic, regional plan and being a targeted, local plan, and it succeeded at neither.

Since Frank Bruno has declared weapons free on those who (irrationally) oppose Proposition 1, let me play el Abogado del Diablo for a momentito and ask the Hard Question: what, exactly, is the alternative?

I've started seeing signs for the last few days stating, basically: "Costs too much, does too little." Let's break this down [Frank, apologies ... I know I'm covering much the same ground as you did in the post linked above.]

Anyway, to break it down:

* Cost -- well, infrastructure costs money. And it doesn't cost less money in the future, especially with the dollar likely to continue its weakness in the coming years. We pay global prices for things like concrete (and even labor and engineering services), and those prices -- fueled by China and India's massive growth -- will continue to rise. So, yes, Prop 1 will cost money, but not taking steps now means we're only postponing the inevitable, and guaranteeing that we'll pay more for it when we finally buckle down. Remember, we're in the mess we're in today because we failed to make these investments 40 YEARS AGO when there was more federal money on the table and costs were relatively much lower.

* Does too Little -- okay, Prop 1 opponents, so YOUR plan does more? Wait. What's that? Ohhhhh. You don't HAVE an alternative plan. Okay. So, ah ... ? Truly, not to get all "I have a high school education" and everything, but "little" is a relative term, as in, Prop 1 does too little relative to WHAT? If there's no alternative, well, maybe that's sad, but the fact is that if we fail to pass Prop 1 it will set back infrastructure development in this region by decades ... maybe more, given our political culture.

[And, if you're a Green who thinks, like Ron Sims, that Prop 1 doesn't go far enough to alleviate global warming, I ask you the same question -- WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?]

Okay, people, this is getting serious now. We must pass Proposition 1.

Tons of annual CO2 emitted due to RTID projects, according to Sightline: 300,000

(15 million divided by 50 years)

Tons of annual CO2 emitted from India, the U.S. and China's new coal-fired power plants: 2.7 billion

These are worst-case scenarios. I tried to make a chart in Excel, but the RTID emissions are so small, they don't even show up:

Just something to keep in mind.

Trying to contain the fallout from Ron Sims' decision last week not to support Prop. 1, Governor Gregoire says:

"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.

I've been remiss in not commenting on Ron Sims' guest op-ed in the Seattle Times coming out against the Roads and Transit package.

There's no point in sugar-coating it: this is a substantial setback for the "Yes" campaign. As executive of Washington's largest county -- the county that stands the most to benefit from the investments in the package -- Sims' opposition is significant. He's a credible progressive voice, and, as a former Sound Transit board member, he needs to be taken seriously.

STB does a good job of dissecting the nuts and bolts of Sims' argument, so I won't go through them here. The counterintuitive gist of Sims' argument amounts this: "we're running out of time to solve our transportation problems, so we need to slow down!"

He has a point. The funding for this plan is frustratingly slow. In order to collect enough money to start construction, we have to basically wait a decade. But Sims needs to offer more solutions for this. Why is it so slow? What factors do we need to change to speed it up? He doesn't say.

Now, we know that Sims has been very concerned about regressive taxes, and he's been a key voice in calling for a statewide income tax to make the tax burden more level. That's the kind of fundamental reform that's needed before we can even begin to think about more aggressive financing for transportation projects. But he avoids this altogether in his op-ed.

Reading Kerry Murakami's backstory on Sims in the P-I, I'm struck by just how liberated he must be right now. Having tried, and failed, to capture the Governorship, and with two relatively young and well-entrenched Democratic Senators in our state, there's really no where else for the man to go, politically (Transportation Secretary in an Obama administration??). So he's free to think big, from congestion pricing to surface-street solutions for the Viaduct (which, as Josh Feit noted, was a "kooky" idea until Sims got behind it).

But ideas are not the problem in this state. We're a hotbed of innovation. The problem is knocking heads and bringing interest groups together to agree on something, anything. I personally think the Roads and Transit package is that thing. It's not perfect, but it works. If Sims wants to dedicate his time to something else, I wish him godspeed. I certainly share his values, and so I imagine I'll support what he proposes. But at some point we need to stop dreaming and start digging.

Update: I have more, somewhat coherent thoughts on the global warming angle over at Bruno and the Prof.

James Vesely is concerned that there's no single point of accounability for RTID/ST2. And he's right: that's the whole point of the package. It's designed to provide supplimental funding to a whole bunch of projects that are currently under the purview of different agencies (WSDOT, Sound Transit, SDOT, etc.) but that have in common the fact that they're part of an overall central Puget Sound infrastructure upgrade.

STB argues that this is a fundraising issue, which is true, but there's more to it than that. The whole point of the vote is to say, "look, we have serious transportation needs in the central Puget Sound, the State's not gonna foot the bill, and there's no single government with jurisdiction, so we're going to have all the goverments come together and work on funding the most critical projects."

What we don't want, it seems to me, is to create yet another agency like the Port that has its own separate accountability. But there's no way we can have a direct chain of command, because there are overlapping jurisdictions involved, and the city of Seattle, for example, doesn't "report" to King County. So this is what we're left with: a coalition of governments.

In other words, while Vesely argues that a vote for RTID is "a vote for bureaucracy," in fact the exact opposite is true. You're voting for less bureaucracy, since the money will be funneled into projects that need it (SR 520, I-405, etc.) that are already under the management of existing bureaucracies (WSDOT, ST, etc.)

So we don't want more quasi-independent fiefdoms like the Port, but we do want oversight and accountability. How do we get there? Knute Berger said it best a couple of years ago when he referred to these new bureaucracies as "designer governments." He also pointed out that I-900, which was on the ballot that November, and which subequently passed, gave the State the authority to do performance audits of these agencies. There's your accountability. In fact, we can go right over to the Auditor's website and learn that his audit of Sound Transit is 99% complete. I hope Vesely reports on the results!

That Up Front episode also mentioned a Survey USA poll that King 5 commissioned. At first glance, it showed trouble for the Roads and Transit measure. But look close, and you'll see that it actually doesn't cover the same area that will vote on the bill.

The poll asked residents of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. But only a small subset of those counties is in the RTID/ST taxation area (see image at right).

In other words, the survey included a lot of folks who don't live or work near the proposed projects, and won't be voting on them anyway.

The Seattle Times on the state of the RTID:

In an Elway poll in June, 57 percent of voters surveyed backed the ballot measure. The poll also found that the road and transit proposals drew more support together than individually.

Elway said he was struck by the level of support "even though most people thought the costs are high, thought it would not be a significant improvement and thought there are many unknowns about the future."

That suggests, he said, that people are so sick of being stuck in traffic that they'll vote for just about anything.

The support has dipped a bit from 61 percent in the last Elway poll to 57 now, but that's within the margin of error. Without a well-funded, unified opposition, It'll be interesting to see how they stop this train (pun intended).

Speaking of which, one of the most curious paragraphs is at the very end, in section discussing what happens if the measure fails:

It's possible light rail would reappear on the ballot fairly quickly, but fixing the region's highways is another matter. Legislative leaders predict few people would want to touch the issue in 2008 because it's an election year.

That would push any highway proposal off until 2009...

Explain something to me, election wonks: why is highway funding a non-starter in an election year but light rail is not?

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.