Transit advocates haven’t let the defeat of last November’s
roads-and-transit ballot measure get them down. In the last month
alone, two promising plans have emerged for local and regional transit
from Sound Transit and the Seattle City Council. The council just
released funding to study a system of streetcar lines that would serve nearly every neighborhood in Seattle; meanwhile, Sound
Transit is working out the details of a new regional transit plan that
could send new light rail and buses to Bellevue, North Seattle, and
Tacoma.
But for those hoping Sound Transit will provide a panacea for the
region’s out-of-control sprawl and growth-management woes, the latest
proposal from the agency includes some sobering information.
In a nutshell: Growth management—which calls for concentrating
growth in areas that are well served by transit, encouraging people to
live close to where they work, and discouraging or banning new sprawl
that promotes driving and harms the environment—isn’t
working. Not only is it not working, the region is moving in
the wrong direction. (Transit, in the absence of policies
disincentivizing driving, isn’t “working” either—according to the
US Department of Energy, vehicle miles driven could increase by 59
percent over 2005 levels by 2030—but that’s another column.)
According to data included in Sound Transit’s preliminary “menu” of
proposals for the ballot, the biggest growth is expected in places like
Marysville and far Southeast Pierce County—places that
won’t be served by new transit at all. Meanwhile, most
of the job growth will be in places like Seattle, Bellevue, and
Redmond. That means more trips—more long trips—in
and out of the major urban centers from and to the sprawling,
transitless suburbs.
Those projections—unchecked sprawl in the formerly rural
hinterlands of Pierce and Snohomish Counties, new houses where there
aren’t jobs and jobs where there aren’t houses—represent
the opposite of good growth management. The problem
is, it isn’t (entirely—all those park and ride lots and “bus
rapid transit” lines aren’t exactly supporting smart growth) Sound
Transit’s fault. Nor is it the streetcar’s: Even a vastly expanded
streetcar system will provide only neighborhood-to-neighborhood
service—great for Seattle, not so great for our close-in
suburbs.
Growth management needs teeth to work. That means smaller
growth-management boundaries, real limits or even a ban on
growth outside those boundaries, affordable housing incentives
in cities and inner-ring suburbs, sensible policies to encourage trip
reduction, and land-use decisions that encourage tall, dense
developments in cities and already dense suburban areas. In the absence
of those policies, transit alone will never be enough.