The resounding defeat last week of the joint roads-and-
transit
ballot measure has spawned lots of theories. People
just don’t
like taxes. People wanted more highway expansion. There should
have been more transit. The transit in this package went to
the wrong places. But the explanations all fall apart in the face of
one simple statistic: Of all voters (“yes” and “no”) polled on November
6, more than half—52 percent—said they would have voted for
transit on its own. Transit is popular, which is why it was linked to
(unpopular) roads in the first place; just 45 percent of all voters
said they’d support roads on their own.
The defeat of roads and transit sent a clear message to elected
officials who spent years trying in vain to come up with a roads
package that would pass, only to link it to light-rail expansion: The
era of big freeway projects is over. It’s time to move on, put a
transit package together that can pass on its own, and figure out
another way to pay for repairs to the state’s crumbling highways and
bridges.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, who kept himself out of the
roads/transit fight, now says he wants to see light rail on the ballot
in 2008; Governor Christine Gregoire has said she’d be open to that
possibility. King County Executive Ron Sims has already said he’ll push
for it. The sudden show of support for light rail is (promising)
anathema to the conventional wisdom pushed by many environmental groups
before the election, which said that this was the last possible chance
transit advocates would ever have to get light rail in this region, and
that Gregoire and the state legislature would “never” let light rail
move forward on its own. While we’ll have to wait and see what happens
in the next legislative session, it’s clear that light rail is not
going away. We need to stop bickering and make it happen.
* * *
What will it take to get light rail in Seattle? Denver,
Colorado—of all places—offers a model for compromise.
When Sound Transit went on the ballot last week, it was explicitly
linked to highway expansion—voting yes on 50 miles of transit
meant voting yes on 152 new miles of highway lanes. Denver did it
differently, expanding light rail without expanding general-purpose
highway lanes. In 2003, Denver-area voters approved a $4.7 billion
package of light rail and HOV lanes (for bus rapid transit) that will,
when completed, put rail and BRT in every part of the city and its
suburbs. An analogous compromise in Seattle could consist of funding
for a new light-rail line to Redmond, maintenance dollars to fix our
crumbling bridges, and funding for road improvements that will make bus
travel faster and more convenient for areas that aren’t served by light
rail, like West Seattle.
Denver is one of those cities hardly anyone would regard as cutting
edge. The women still wear tube tops (or, if they’re older, floral
sweatshirts); the men still favor large wire-frame glasses last seen in
these parts around 1992. Still, the seven counties in and surrounding
Denver have done something truly remarkable: They’ve managed to reach
consensus on a package of rail and road improvements that are actually
getting people out of their cars and onto trains and buses.
Denver’s downtown has been absolutely transformed by the light-rail
line that cuts diagonally along a transit-only corridor from one end of
the center city to the other. Before light rail, “the saying that the
city rolls up the streets at five was actually true,” Regional
Transportation District of Denver spokesman Scott Reed told me. Now
downtown Denver is a bustling, if somewhat corporate, hive of shops,
restaurants, and bars at all hours of the day and night.
When I visited about a year ago, I had a chance to ride light rail
in and around the city. I traveled to the suburb of Englewood, where
developers tore down a big, old shopping mall and built a new downtown
from whole cloth. Denver-area planners hold Englewood up as an ideal
example of transit-oriented development—the kind of development
Sound Transit
would like to see around its own light-rail
stations. In Denver, unlike in Seattle, planning and building light
rail was and continues to be a quick and relatively painless process.
It took three years to build a 19-mile segment from downtown Denver to
the southeastern suburbs; that segment opened early and under
budget.
What did Denver do right? For one thing, they recognized political
and demographic realities: With one million more people expected to
move to the region in the next 20 years, the old way of doing
things—more highways, more congestion, more sprawl—wouldn’t
work anymore. Back in the ’80s, Metro Denver Economic Development
Corporation Vice President Tom Clark explains, Denver was surrounded by
a “brown cloud” of smog; although the city managed to clean it up, if
they hadn’t done something about traffic, “we’d be right back where we
started… We realized that we weren’t going to be able to build enough
lanes to build ourselves out of it.” So the region’s transit agency
came up with a plan that expands transit without increasing capacity
for single-occupancy cars—discouraging driving while providing a
real alternative to sitting in traffic.
Denver’s not a paradise, of course. It’s a sprawling, ugly mess of a
city, with suburbs stretching out from the freeways as far as the eye
can see. There are parking garages everywhere, with more proposed as
part of the transit expansion plan. The “transit-oriented development”
at Englewood had a distinctly suburban feel—identical taupe
stucco and brick apartments perched on top of liquor stores, nail
salons, and chain restaurants, and right around the corner was a
massive, ugly Wal-Mart/Petco retail complex. Still, change takes
decades, not years. At least Denver is getting started. So are other
cities across the country, including Portland (where a 44-mile system
will soon be expanded) and Houston (where voters recently approved 73
miles of light rail).
* * *
Denver has several advantages Seattle doesn’t. It’s flat, so
trains don’t have to burrow through any hills (they do go up in the
air, though, to avoid railroad right-of-way). It’s big and sprawling,
and land is relatively cheap, so stations don’t cost as much to build.
And it’s a major rail depot, so many of the lines run along (or
sometimes over) existing tracks. All of which suggests that in Seattle
we’ll have to get creative to pay for a light-rail system that will
cost billions of dollars more than Denver’s.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative funding source waiting in the
wings: tolls, which happen to be the most popular funding mechanism
around. In exit polling after last week’s election, 54 percent of all
voters preferred tolls to general tax increases, and a full 70 percent
supported implementing tolls on the I-90 and SR-520 bridges across Lake
Washington. King County Executive Ron Sims already has a plan to pay
for road maintenance and light rail with a “transportation improvement
fee”—a variable toll that would apply throughout the region’s
highway system. Similar systems are already in place or in the works in
many cities, including Minneapolis and San Francisco.
With the region expected to have $40 billion in transportation needs
over the next 20 years, finding ways to spend our transportation
dollars will be easy. The hard part will be convincing state and
regional leaders that the fairest way to pay for transit and road
maintenance is to start charging drivers to use roads they’ve always
gotten for free. 