JOSH FEIT: With one exception, your concerns with the Seattle Weekly cover story "Not So Fast," which we published September 25, are matters of interpretation, not accuracy ["Fact Check," Oct 3].
First, you are correct that we blew the Vancouver SkyTrain ridership figure, and we fessed up in the October 2 Seattle Weekly. Even so, SkyTrain is not necessarily a good comparison. It's twice as long as the monorail would be and it links a densely populated city with its suburbs.
Population density also figures into the comparison of present bus ridership with projected monorail boardings. Yes, Seattle Weekly's figure of 22,500 average weekday boardings for Metro Transit buses along the proposed Green Line corridor is from 2001, while the monorail projection of 69,000 is for 2020--we said so. (If you want to insist that the bus number should be 33,180, that's fine as long as your readers know your figure includes buses that are nowhere near the monorail route.) In any case, proponents of the monorail predict its ridership will be more than twice what bus ridership is now. In the next 18 years, will the populations of Ballard and West Seattle grow enough, and will the monorail be cool enough, to cause transit ridership to more than double? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine. During the prosperous period of 1980-2000, Seattle's population grew by 9.4 percent.
Every one of your other points is refutable, but only one more absolutely begs correction: "Did anyone at the Weekly read the plan? The plan includes $162 million for mitigation." That would depend on one's definition of mitigation. As you know, in that $162 million, you're including $86 million that will pay for limited parking, station facilities to accommodate buses, bikes, and pedestrians, as well as street repaving, replacement of sidewalks, and landscaping. Whether this can be considered mitigation and not simply the cost of building the system is debatable. But the most questionable way you arrived at $162 million was by throwing in the $76 million "agency" reserve, which is intended to cover unexpected increases in the scope of construction.
Chuck Taylor, Managing Editor, Seattle Weekly
JOSH FEIT RESPONDS: Your letter actually highlights the errors in your original story. First, it's clear that you were unaware of the $162 million in mitigation money when you published your article and reported, "The ETC has no money in its plan for mitigation." Now, in your letter, after I called your attention to that money, you hedge, saying it's "debatable," and admit that there's $86 million in possible mitigation for things like street repaving, replacement of sidewalks, and landscaping--the very definition of mitigation. Meanwhile, as you now know, the additional $76 million is a line item for project reserves that can be used for "non-designated construction," like mitigation projects.
It should also be pointed out that there's an additional $210 million already in the budget for specific construction contingencies--meaning the $162 million won't be tied up in those contingencies, and so will be available for mitigation.
Meanwhile, the "correction" you ran last week about the SkyTrain numbers failed to acknowledge that the mistake undermined the entire premise of your article: that the ETC's numbers were "implausibly large." When one actually plugs in the correction (the Weekly reported the SkyTrain number at 65,000 rides, even though the real number is 140,000 to 150,000), it becomes apparent that the ETC's projections are dead-on. Now, since the numbers actually debunk your premise, you state in your letter that the SkyTrain is "not necessarily a good comparison" to the ETC's plan. But, when you originally thought the numbers supported your premise, you felt compelled to stress the comparison in your article.
As to the Metro ridership comparison: I'm not insisting on the 33,180 number (by the way, it's actually 35,140). Metro's own analyst, Bill Bryant, says the numbers correspond to the monorail's service area.
Finally, you dismiss some glaring corrections that I made to your story as "refutable," but you never address those big gaffes and how they may be "refutable." The two biggies you left out were the Weekly's statement that the ETC's projection of 69,000 people a day "might as well have been cooked up by WorldCom" and that the ETC's projection for 4,000 tourist riders was "huge." As I said in my article, the ETC isn't projecting 69,000 people a day, it's projecting 69,000 rides--or about 34,000 people. As to the "huge" 4,000-tourist number for 2020: As I reported, 4,000 is the current tourist component of today's monorail system. For an article that purported to unveil "what every voter should know about the numbers," one would have hoped for more accurate numbers and more rigorous reporting and editing.
