The vote now defines the mayor's race. On September 27, King County Council guy and mayoral hopeful Greg Nickels voted to approve Sound Transit's controversial plan for a 14-mile light rail line from Westlake Center to... well, not quite the airport. The line falls far short of original voter expectations for the $2.5 billion, 21-mile plan approved in 1996. That line was supposed to run from the U District to Sea-Tac Airport and beyond, and generate 127,000 boardings per day. The $2.1 billion line approved last week is expected to generate just 42,500 boardings per day.

With his vote, Nickels is continuing to tempt fate and the disapproval of pro-monorail voters (the Stranger ed. board included) by staking his political life on light rail. He's already facing ridicule for being Sound Transit's finance chair: The light rail project came in $1.1 billion over budget late last year.

Interestingly, though, Nickels' vote does something else. It turns the tables on the conventional wisdom about Nickels and his mayoral opponent Mark Sidran.

Sidran--who sent out a press release immediately after the Sound Transit vote, bashing Nickels--bills himself as a damn-the-torpedoes leader who will forsake dreaded Seattle consensus to get things done. Sidran pooh-poohs Nickels as a slave to task forces and process.

But with last week's Sound Transit vote, Nickels demonstrated that he's willing to stick to his guns whether his stance is popular or not--and damn Seattle consensus. "We voted in 1996 to build light rail," Nickels says. "We already had that conversation. Is there consensus? No. Will there ever be? No. But as mayor I'm going to get this thing built." (Nickels dismisses the observation that the new plan is significantly different from the one voters called for in 1996.)

Sidran, for his part, doesn't have any specific transportation solution, and in his Nickels-bashing press release cited the "consensus" against the plan.

josh@thestranger.com