Want the Sierra Club to shut up about greenhouse-gas emissions and
get on board with Sound Transit’s latest ballot proposal?
Too bad. They won’t. And they shouldn’t—at least, not
yet.
Last week, at a boozy transportation forum hosted by Friends of
Seattle at Spitfire lounge in Belltown, local Sierra Club chapter chair
Mike O’Brien echoed what is quickly becoming the Club’s
post-roads-and-transit line: Sound Transit can win the group’s support
for a 2008 ballot measure, but only if it commits to reducing
greenhouse gases in the process. Before the Sierra Club supports
any new transit plan, O’Brien said, they “need to see the whole plan,
[including] what the impact is on greenhouse gases in the region.”
A little context: O’Brien and the Sierra Club opposed last year’s
roads-and-transit ballot measure, aka Proposition 1, because it
included 182 new miles of roads (along with 50 new miles of light
rail). At the time, O’Brien and company argued that they couldn’t
get behind any transportation package that increased greenhouse
gases in the region. The group’s opposition was credited with
helping to kill the measure.
Since Proposition 1 failed last November, the environmental
community—many of whom supported roads and transit—has more
or less rallied to Sound Transit’s side, despite the fact that the
tentative new plan contains far less light rail and far more large
new parking garages than the previous proposal. The Sierra Club is
an outlier. Instead of park-and-rides that “encourage more driving,”
O’Brien said, “we want to see station access funds [that pay for] bike
facilities, more density—whatever it takes to get [transit]
ridership up.” As someone whose organization pledged to support transit
as long as it didn’t come with roads, O’Brien hasn’t made any
friends by raising questions about the latest version of Sound
Transit—despite the fact that the vote, if there is a vote, is
still seven months away.
That’s too bad, because he’s right. Sound Transit does need
to make sure that whatever it builds reduces the level of greenhouse
gases in the region, rather than increasing them. Moreover, the number
of new parking garages in the proposal—parking garages that
encourage people to drive from far-flung suburbs and take a short train
ride into the city—should be cause for concern. If any time is
appropriate for raising legitimate concerns, it’s
now—before mid-April, when Sound Transit staff are expected
to present the agency’s board with a plan. Agitating may be irritating,
but it often makes for better policy. The Sierra Club (and other
environmentalists, for that matter) should lobby Sound Transit to
improve its plan right up until the board adopts a proposal for the
ballot. And then, they should get on board—even if that
proposal is less than ideal. 