Whatever the fuck for, you ask? To pay for projects like high-capacity streetcars connecting the University District, Ballard, and lower Queen Anne to downtown Seattle.
From the mayor’s blog:
The committee recommended an $80 [vehicle license fee]. Much of it goes to catching up on deferred maintenance, which I support. 49% percent goes to implement the Transit Master Plan, to catch up on our deferred transit needs. As a permanent funding source, this could fund the following in the next ten years: planning and alternatives analysis for all five high capacity corridors in the Transit Master Plan, planning and construction for connecting the two streetcar lines through downtown, speed and reliability improvements on half of all non-high capacity transit corridors, and substantial upgrades to our electric trolley bus infrastructure. Over the next twenty years, we could make good on the Transit Master Plan’s stated need to accommodate substantially more travelers on each of the high capacity corridors the Plan identified.
Of course, Mayor McGinn admits there is at least one problem with this proposal.
The $80 tab fee currently being considered has a decade-or-so shelf life. “The City Council is only considering a VLF for a limited amount of time, after which it expires,” McGinn writes. “For this amount of money, all you can do is study a single corridor. You cannot finance long term infrastructure with a short term financing plan. You cannot get in the queue for federal, regional, or state funds because there will be no source of funds for us to put up our local match. The Transit Master Plan will join the Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plans as nice plans, without serious funding.”
Read the rest of his pie-in-the-sky plan for unlimited transit funding over here.
Even if the council does pass it, citizens will revolt, gather signatures and recind the fee increase and force a public vote, for which it will probably fail.
It’s a great plan, I read it over earlier.
We need to get back on track with transit expansion and growing with the flow. Hell, even San Antonio, TX is adding in streetcars. Why are we aggressively pursuing freeways but only meekly attempting to grow our in-city transit network? Why can’t we add a neighborhood-to-neighborhood fixed transit system to compliment our under-construction center-to-center one?
This is the direction we need to head in, not back to fifties freeway freedom fantasies. Let’s do it!
@1: I think you’ll find support for transit to be much higher than you reckon. Your silent motorist majority is just a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Is McGinn counting on federal money? How precious.
Screw the lower classes and screw my reelection chances!
I tell ya, without morons like McGinn, we’d never be able to convince the lower classes to vote against an income tax.
from the bottom of my heart, I thank you.
Raise taxes, spend money on transit. I have no problem with this.
Along these same lines, Publicola reports on great results from a survey Metro did: voters prefer the County Council be bold too, and pass the $20 fee before them. The message came through clearly, too that the public does NOT want electeds to force the public into any more CYA votes – Council needs to decide what we’re paying them to decide.
http://publicola.com/2011/08/09/survey-s…
@3 I suspect the Stop Stupid Fees crowd stronger than you think. Remember the bag fee? Or the soda and candy taxes?
Passing new, regressive, taxes in a recession is dumb.
@7 If you believe anything on Publicola, I feel sorry for you.
@4: Yep! And it can happen, easily. While we’ll have difficulty rubbing two pennies together over freeway funding, the feds are still tapping their transit-loving feet waiting for green-y green Seattle to jump.
If San Antonio, TX can get it and if Fort Worth, TX can get it offered, then certainly Seattle, WA can snag some. 🙂
A Streetcar Named Delusion
@8: Remember Sound Transit 2 and Transit Now?
Folks will do backflips for transit here. 🙂
@8: Passing Eyman initiatives is dumb but here we all are.
@7: To be fair, that’s just a summary of public comments. If you were against the tax and thought that there was no way it would pass by council, what incentive would you have to go to the meeting? Not saying there is or isn’t enough opposition, but the results would certainly be skewed positive.
@1: “Even if the council does pass it, citizens will revolt, gather signatures and recind the fee increase and force a public vote, for which it will probably fail.”
Yes, like people aren’t going to do for the tunnel, right?
This state is drowning in “transit”.
Billions spent, and relatively no one uses it.
Congestion on I-5 is still bad.
No changes have been made to do the one thing people want — get speedily between point A and point B.
@8, fair enough, but there are better reasons to feel sorry for me. And I confess I’m one of those people who literally never met a tax he didn’t like if there was a chance to get it. Sales, use, BO, VAT, dual income, the works. We underfund the things we need to a degree that has never stopped shocking the shit out of me.
This is a good idea. I’d add one proviso: anyone driving an all-electric car (not hybrid) gets a pass on the fee. They’ve done their part. Anyone driving a recent hybrid (3 years or newer) gets one-half off. They’re helping too.
Send it to the voters, we will pass it overwhelmingly. We voted for a more expensive car tab fee like 9 times just for one monorail line and it only died when the $130 car tab fee would no longer pay for it.
This is the McGinn the majority of Seattle voted for. Finally!
@14: Because when we want to build the good stuff, it gets opposed. Like when corporate interests opposed Forward Thrust, setting us back decades.
The watered down stuff is what we get until people realize that there’s only so much room for roads in a region and that people aren’t going to suddenly evacuate the city unless it’s become less for people and more for machines.
@17: You do recognize that a car is merely a carriage with a motor, a millenias-old solution, and that the idea of mass transit — that is, accommodating more than a small number of people — was practically invented yesterday, in comparison? If you throw out the propulsion and look at the actual methods, it’s an entirely different beast.
Now that McGinn has tossed his hat into the ring, public support can’t be far behind.
@16: “Anyone driving a recent hybrid (3 years or newer) gets one-half off.” They’re helping too.
Right, and anyone driving a late model BMW get’s a tax break for making our streets sexier.
@20: Which is why your car’s power is measured in horses 😉
So long as not a cent goes to the suburbs this is a great idea,
Rich people already cheat on taxes and tabs anyway, most of them are felons who hate America.
Your writing sucks, you ugly bitch.
Grid powered (i.e. electric from hydro/wind) streetcars and buses alongside increasingly energy efficient cars are where we’re headed, regardless of McGinn’s meat-headed anti-car politics.
A lopsided car tab tax is bad for two reasons. First, because roads and transit will always need to be built in parallel and funding is a nightmare if it doesn’t come out of the same pot. I’d like to see any car tab tax married to a fare increase for transit. There’s no need to force people onto transit–just do a good job and people will use it, end of story. Second, as @16 alluded to, we should use a tiered rate when registering a vehicle, like all electric ($10 credit), modern/hybrid ($10 fee), outdated ($40 fee) and gas-guzzler ($80 fee), compounded with an additional credit/charge for low/high miles traveled since the last registration.
@11 True. And, its retarded transit they do backflips for too. OOO, A first hill streetcar! OOO, another streetcar that’s rarely used! *roll eyes* Light Rail is one of the few good transit deals going in this region. Everything else is like “Let’s go nowhere slowly!” Blarg.
@12 That’s kind of my point. Don’t underestimate the No New Taxes crowd.
Interesting that this plan would build more street cars. The SLUT currently costs $2.5 million per year to operate while bringing in only $760,000. That’s a $1.7 million loss per year.
It’s like the thing is fueled by a money furnace. Seems to me the last thing the city transit budget needs is more of those.
#26 – Portland’s streetcar carries 50% as many riders as our light rail system per day, but cost 1.9% as much. Light rail (especially not-at-grade light rail) is an expensive inter-city form of transit. Streetcars are a cheap (but exactly as nice) in-city form of transit. SLUT will haunt Seattle for years, it was built as a Vulcan subsidy and not an ideal transit route.
#17 – The first modern streetcar was opened in 2001, it’s brand new technology. It’s like saying electric cars are 1920’s technology.
@3 “I think you’ll find support for transit to be much higher than you reckon.”
Are you sure? Were already spending 18 billion on light rail through sales tax. Then we have mass transit supporters wanting to kill the viaduct tunnel and basically use the money for mass transit. Mayor is trying (mostly failing) to block the 520 bridge, unless there’s mass transit on it. Then a 20$ fee from every car in king county to keep metro from cutting 17% services, then add another 80$ in further tab fees to expend the already exploding mass transit system that we already have. Drivers really dont benefit from anything in return for paying for all this. They’ll be driving in grid lock traffic if the fees get passed or not. There has to be a balance in the fees used to pay for all this, otherwise the alternative is just going to be Tim Eyman. Maybe he’ll consider 40$ bike tab fee’s? That could be a slam dunk for him and if your lucky, maybe some of that bike tab money will actually be used to pay for things that cyclists use.
I personally think that at some point, the voters are going to say mass transit can wait. Lets build what we approved for first, then decide on whether to expand it.
The “tax the rich” I-1098 last year, only got 45% of the vote in King County. Those that were on the fence basically said now was not the time and theres a good chance they’ll say no to this as well, citing the same reasons. Why would they reject the fee increases? Because rejecting these new fees isnt going to make more people homeless, its not going to kick poor kids off school lunch programs, its not going to kill seniors on life support, its simply going to slow the growth of mass transit. As a life long bus user, the state of mass transit in king county is fucking great and I know this because im 40 years old, born&raised (renton, kirkland, seattle), never owned a car in my life.
@28:
Real rapid transit is only prohibitively expensive if you put off building it for decades — oops! — and settle for cheap, ineffective “stopgap” crap (first more buses, now streetcars) along the way.
And actual rapid transit becomes a worse value if you insist on calling it an “inter-city” form. You end up building dozens of miles through sprawl with zero pedestrian use and consigning it to a once-a-day commute expediter for a lucky few — again, oops! — while busier city corridors with all-day demand have to settle for the aforementioned cheap, ineffective stopgap crap.
Sound transportation policy advice: Ask a Northwestern “expert” to tell you everything he knows about public transit, and then do the exact opposite.
(p.s. It’s faster to walk than to take the Portland Streetcar.)
China’s Autonomous Car: Are Robot Chauffeurs Finally Here?
http://www.allcartech.com/news/1064633_c…
@28 I like how you’re comparing apples to oranges. Oh, look, the intercity transit carries fewer people than the intracity transit. Yeah. No shit. How does that mean that we need to build more intracity rails? If you’re going to compare cost effectiveness ratios, convince me that the steetcar system is more cost effective, than the bus system we have right now. And that it can eventually hit as many areas as the buses. Right now, it is a complete vanity project.
@32
Current Metro farebox contributes to 25% or so of budgeted operating costs. The SLUT is budgeted at 55% for the 2011 adopted budget.
If you define ‘cost effective’ maybe someone could answer the question effectively.
@33:
The actual farebox return for SLUT is 35%, not 55%, and the 25% farebox rate you cite is for the entire Metro system, not the same route covered by SLUT.
But even if we go with the 25% figure, the cost of operating the SLUT is so much higher than a bus that the 65% SLUT subsidy is an order of magnitude more money than the 75% bus subsidy. And that’s not including the costs to build the stupid thing.
The financial sustainability of the Portland streetcar is even worse. It costs $5.5 per year to operate, with only $0.5 recovered by fares. That’s only 9%. Ouch.
Whatever – if you are a lefty cliche who’s determined to spend our communal money on streetcars, you’re certainly not going to be persuaded otherwise by me.
@32: The streetcar is bullshit. But real in-city rapid transit would be exponentially more cost effective than limited-use lines to the boonies.
For apples-to-apples, let’s look at the beloved BART system over which Seattle “transit regionalists” love to drool, a.k.a. one of the least cost-effective things ever built: A 104-mile monstrosity, it carries an embarrassing 3,400 passengers per mile on an average weekday, and it requires an eye-popping $6.14 operating subsidy per passenger. Pathetic!
(Ironically, promoters will exploit the system’s length to trot out a reasonable-seeming “subsidy-per-passenger-mile” number. Don’t buy it; that’s still one guy sucking up $6.14 to commute from the middle of nowhere.)
It would have been exponentially smarter to build BART’s trans-bay tube plus branches just as far as the worst highway bottlenecks — El Cerrito, Orinda, and Hayward should have sufficed — then built a bunch of gigantic parking garages at their termini and been done with it. It would have provided precisely the same regional benefit — especially since BART has, as built, facilitated zero people giving up their cars.
The additional millions of dollars wasted on dozens of pointless miles of track could have fucking fixed MUNI, providing a much greater benefit to city residents and to anyone visiting SF on BART but needing to go anywhere other than downtown or the Mission.
Think about that the next time someone talks about building Link out to Federal Way or Everett. Puget regionalists was to build us a mini-BART but leave the city with a dinky MUNI-on-tranquilizers. It’s useless and wasteful.
@34
I don’t recall indicating what I thought of the SLUT, but thanks for the bait. The question stands: what metric do you want to use to measure cost effectiveness?
Based on Metro’s overall budget, I’m not entirely sure if a bus would actually cost less. In 2009 ran 220 routes on an operating budget of over $606 million. That works out to around $2.7 million per route. So how much would it cost to run a route with the same headway and hours as the SLUT? I don’t know.
There are many valid criticisms of SDOT and the SLUT – ridership/farebox projections, capital costing, stupid stand-alone route – but is looks like the operating costs are closer than expected. And, yes, it is difficult to compare a snowflake with a blizzard which is essentially what is being asked here.
@36 There are many ways to compare the snowflake with other snowflakes in the blizzard. For example, we have the 60. How much does it cost to run the 60? How much would it cost to operate the streetcar? If it’s cheaper to run the streetcar, how many years until the cost is recouped?
How many of the passengers use the 60 to get to the hospital at Madison and Boren? How many are left, and would, presumably, use the first hill streetcar? Would we still run the 60 after the streetcar was built?
Do you know or even care? Or do you just want a fucking streetcr because it’s chic and will cost money?
Asking retarded questions like “Define cost effective” make you sound positively Bill Clinton-esque in your stupidity. Define ‘is’ for me.
Sounds to me like McGinn is trying to coopt this into his ‘rail measure on the ballot’ campaign promise.
Which honestly I don’t think I have a problem with.
@36:
I’m defining “cost effective” as the amount of money (or, alternatively, the size of the government subsidy) required to move a given number of people from point A to point B.
The fact is, streetcars are way less cost effective by either measure than buses, and again, I’m not even counting building costs, which make them even less cost effective.
And Portland’s streetcar is even less cost effective than the SLUT (it has a $5 per year subsidy), so this isn’t just a SLUT problem. (Given all of the development in South Lake Union, the SLUT route is as sensible as any.)
The ultimate irony? Those big heavy train cars would have to be packed to capacity to match a single occupant Prius in fuel efficiency per rider. That’s true of streetcars and light rail.
@39 Oops, Portland’s subsidy should read “$5 million”.
You need to get out more.
And how does that compare to buses, which are polluters and energy hogs and are only filled to capacity during rush hour?
@39 & 40 –
Those are decent metrics.
Streetcar – $2.5 million/yr operational. Budgeted at 3,800 riders/day, 55% subsidy (arguable)
Metro bus – Roughly $2.7 million/yr per route operational. So you are probably in the neighborhood of $2.3-2.7 per route looking at the budget.
There are only 50 routes out of over 200 that carry more than 3000 riders per day. The Route 60 that TheMisanthrope mentions carries about 3,500 per day.
I have no way to compute costs for an individual route. If you have one I’d be interested to hear it.
@41: “You need to get out more.”
That’s hilarious when you’re suggesting that someone leave a vibrant city to enter its dead, dull suburbs.
Whoops, Misanthrope.
I mistakenly thought your @32 was replying to my @30. So my @35 only addressed the “rapid transit must go to distant suburbs” fallacy.
In fact, your argument was much, much worse. You manage to contort the rapid transit must go to distant suburbs fallacy to arrive at an in-city transit must be slow and on-street no matter the mode fallacy, which you muddled into a great buses are the only cost-effective in-city transit fallacious cocktail!!
You need to travel. To other cities. All around the world. Where rapid transit moves you within and throughout the urban are with such ease that “how an I going to get there?” doesn’t need a moment’s thought, much less an iPhone app.
And then tell me that the slow bus to Hades is the best we can do.
“You need to travel. To other cities”
Ah, I take back my previous post.