I haven't encountered any sig gatherers yet. I need to sign the petition.

What a well-reasoned, thoughtful and straightforward piece that will be ignored by all decision-makers of consequence.

And it’s not just any old transportation that wins; overwhelmingly, these referenda are aimed at funding mass transportation and local street improvements.

Great - so why aren't the surface/transit folks petitioning for a vote on surface/transit? When that option wins overwhelmingly at the polls, the tunnel will be dead.

So, do we get to vote for surface/transit next fall? No? Why not?

This is a nice effort. Not too strong on demonstrating more than a vague understanding of the components of our local economy and employment situation, but...

Namechecks supposed 1970s glory days...yup.

Claims declining driving somehow argues against the tunnel's lower capacity...yup.

Urges somehow removing from the state its responsibility for replacing a state highway, presumably at no cost to locals...yup.

Confuses new tunnel construction jobs for preservation of existing ones at highway-reliant employers...yup.

Panders to our neverending thirst to be thought of by out-of-towners as "world class" in any way possible....yup.

@1 - Print it out and mail it in. http://www.protectseattlenow.org/sign-th…

@3: We need to keep this one from going ahead, otherwise the road lobby will bulldoze us. Literally. Like you, they insist the tunnel is a "done deal", so unless we unplug them they'll just move forward in spite of any support for a green solution to the AWV replacement.

Billions for road expansion under the guise of "maintaining road capacity" and "jobs", all to keep us rooted in this 1950s "roads or failure" status quo that demands we cede environmental concerns and urban space to more cars, more parking and more pavement.

Let's move forward instead of turning the clock back to the dawn of the 1950s.

@1 - Print it out and mail it in. http://www.protectseattlenow.org/sign-th…

I am perfectly willing to allow the State to build the Deeply Bison-filled Tunnel, provided they pay for it by cancelling all corporate tax exemptions FIRST.

(pin drops)

Yeah, didn't think so.

@7 lol - good link.

"Fifth, you don’t want to lose your world-class reputation for addressing energy and climate change."

Wow, that's a laughable one. Reminds me of how the Republicans in Congress kept saying the United States has the best health-care system in the world. Anyone who sincerely believes Seattle deserves to be considered a worldwide leader in addressing climate change needs to get out of their bubble.

Speaking of health care, the health-care equivalents of Scott Bernstein made some wonderful arguments for single payer. And all their arguments were true, with the small exception that they refused to acknowledge the context in which health reform was being considered.

Perhaps Mr. Bernstein can simultaneously explain how he's going to amend our state constitution to make sure that the $2 billion in gas tax funding for the tunnel doesn't get spent on other, far more sprawl-inducing highways. But of course Bernstein knows about as little about Washington state transportation politics as a physician in single-payer Great Britain knows about American health care politics.

Hey Will, no one cares what you're "willing to allow".

You're going to be steamrolled. *guffaw*

Declining traffic per capita is not the same thing as declining traffic.

@10 actually, the UW is rated anywhere from 1st to 4th in various Green stats on Universities, and the City itself shows up near the top of a lot of Green Tech Cities lists.

Green tech is just another way of saying Use Less Foreign Oil.

@11 is that why you're so desperate?

I've seen the polling. And so has everyone else.

Baconcat @6:

Billions for road expansion under the guise of "maintaining road capacity" and "jobs", all to keep us rooted in this 1950s "roads or failure" status quo that demands we cede environmental concerns and urban space to more cars, more parking and more pavement.

Baconcat, I'm used to seeing you make ostensibly sensible arguments that fall apart at the slightest thought of how they play out, but I'm not used to seeing you make patently silly statements. "Billions for road expansion?" This project is about replacing an existing roadway with a new one that has a reduced capacity.

The sad irony here is that, in the likeliest scenario if the tunnel is killed, the state legislature will take most of the $2 billion or so in gas tax money it has earmarked for the tunnel and spend it on, well, road expansion. I hope I'm wrong about that. Still, regardless of how wisely the state redirects those funds, the state still has to spend gas tax money on "highway purposes." See:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Finance/fueltaxe…

For the cost of building a two-mile deep bore tunnel, just imagine how many miles of surface roadway in the cheaper exurbs and farm country WSDOT could build. It's like a John Bailo vision of utopia.

@6: I don't think the tunnel is a done deal at all. If the ballot this fall pitted the three options against each other, and surface/transit emerged as the winner, I think the tunnel would effectively be dead.

A referendum on the tunnel by itself, however, is meaningless, and won't/shouldn't change anything.

That high metropolitan per capita mostly comes from people drawing salaries in Bellevue, Kent, Everett and Redmond where all the high tech and aerospace goods are produced.

@17 no, that was a decade ago. Most of that is in-city now.

Read the new census tract figures.

@8 I love Bison! Why did no one tell me there would be Bison in the tunnel. Now I feel bad having signed that petition...

Nobody who supports the surface option is ever going to answer the simple question of how you are going to implement it should you kill the tunnel when it has the least public support, the least support of the business community, and the least support of the political establishment. It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread but you have failed to convince the public and power players of that fact, and so its merits don't matter -- it's never going to happen.

#18 (maybe Fnarf's right!)

Read the new census tract figures.

What on God's Earth are those? And how can they tell you where people work versus where they live?

@21 not sure, I know those were on the Canadian long form, but not sure the details on the US long form. As I recall it was only ZIP code and miles of commute, so that might not grain down finely enough for exact matching.

@18, @21 -- not to all of a sudden start agreeing with John Bailo, but Supreme is only slightly wrong here -- and Will is as always utterly upside down wrong, wrong, wrong. He's even wronger here than he was yesterday when he claimed that all Seattle taxicabs are electric now.

Employment downtown is declining precipitously, and the decline predates the economic downturn. Considering the increases in population, the city should be seriously concerned about this. City employment outside of downtown is also down, though not by as much.

Employment in the rest of King County -- most of those software and aerospace jobs -- is up, but not hugely. The really big increases in jobs, as with population, is out in the sticks, in the exurbs -- not Renton or Redmond but Snohomish, Kitsap, and Pierce.

2000-2009 figures: Downtown -12.4%, King County minus downtown +2.8%, Snohomish +16.3%, Kitsap +15.7%, Pierce +12.7%. Pierce county now has twice as many jobs as downtown Seattle; Snohomish county will soon.

Seattle is a bedroom suburb now. More people live in the city than work here, including daily commuting in and out.

@23, one of the legislature's selling points for the viaduct replacement was to fund the option that would combine best with I-5 (without overwhelming its capacity) as a way to get people *through and past* downtown the best. To an awful lot of I-5/99 corridor users, downtown Seattle represents just another bottleneck to get around on the way to wherever they're actually headed.

No doubt the City leaders -- famous for keeping us going to the polls over and over until we decide to vote their way -- will repeat the words of southern Judge Chamberlain Haller in "My Cousin Vinny": "That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection. Overruled."

@23 the problem with your stats is you see the past, whereas I see the present and the future.

Most statistics on jobs etc reflect a prior time, not the actual present.

@25 for the insightful win.

Ok, here's some strangeness with the tunnel. One of the major bidding partners is Tutor-Perini. Perini is 75% owned by Richard Blum, who is married to Diane Feinstein. Diane is a Senator from California. Tutor-Perini is based in California. What is Feinstein's connection to this tunnel in Seattle? And, could this have anything to do with why our State and City representatives are feeling pressure? And, what does all this have to do with the Bilderberger group, which Feinstein is a part of?

@ cressona:

There are ample projects that the WSDOT could legally spend gas tax revenue on, including the $2B ostensibly earmarked for the deep bore tunnel, which do NOT expand roadways as you claim. The projects need merely be part of the "WSDOT highway programs", which potentially include
- Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety
- Safe Routes to School ("improve safety and mobility for children by enabling and encouraging them to walk and bicycle to school")
- Air Quality Improvement
- improving safety on roadways (e.g. the High Risk Rural Roads program)
- improve existing deteriorating roadways (e.g. the Bridge Program)
- replacing the 520 bridge (This is yet another boondoggle, but if we can eliminate the tunnel project, at least there would be less "new" money spent on the 520 project by virtue of it being diverted from the tunnel project. Alternatively, perhaps the $2B could be legally spent solely on parallel transit/HOV lanes astride the existing 520, leaving the old bridge in place. Is this a "highway program"? In this case, those who choose to sacrifice some possible convenience by riding transit/HOV would be suitably rewarded with a safer pathway.)