Goin Nowhere: Seattle's Transit Follies
by Ross Anderson
Once upon a time in Seattle, on a day when rushhour traffic had ground to a halt, thousands of irate commuters rolled down their windows, stuck their heads out into a cloud of automobile exhaust, and issued a collective howl that
sounded something like: “Aaarrrgh! Somebody do something! Do anything!”
Fifteen years, several elections and a few billion dollars later, it's about to happen. Seattle is building something. Something that runs on rails and taxes and that promises to lure a few commuters off the roads and onto trains.
But don't bet the family car on anything. Not yet, anyhow. No trains will run for a few more years. And Seattle has a long, dubious history of hand-wringing, public squabbling and collective changes of mind over transit. In this soggy corner of the continent, nothing stays on track for very long.
Witness light rail, the ever-so-fashionable update of old-time streetcars. In 1996 voters approved a new light-rail route between Northgate and
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but what Sound Transit is building hasn't reached either point. Instead, work has begun on a route from downtown to someplace in suburban Tukwila, where it is expected to run out of gas.
And then there's the ever-popular monorail, which promised to whisk commuters from Ballard to West Seattle via downtown, but instead became the Little Billion Dollar Train That Couldn't, God rest its ever-hopeful soul.
Whatever does or doesn't get built, the outlook is grim for long-suffering Seattle motorists—years of heavy construction along major thoroughfares
in downtown, up 15th Avenue Northwest to Ballard, in West Seattle and down the Rainier Valley. At least for now, expect far more buses on downtown streets, as light rail displaces them in the downtown tunnel.
But never mind the obstacles. Local voters are determined—this time, really, truly. A new survey, sponsored by the Regional Transportation
Investment District, shows the following:
• Most voters consider traffic the region's biggest problem.
• A majority would vote for a regional tax package that includes money for both transit and oads.
• Building light rail to the airport is the highest priority—higher than expanding I-405 or the SR 520 bridge or replacing the decrepit Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Ask and ye shall receive. If construction proceeds as planned (don't laugh—it's just hypothetical), then sometime in the next few years, it will be theoretically possible for a Ballard resident to ride public transit all the way to Sea-Tac Airport. Without taking the express Metro bus. To accomplish this, Ms. Ballard will catch her local Metro bus downtown. Somewhere along Second Avenue, she will climb off the bus and find her way downstairs into the transit tunnel to climb aboard a southbound streetcar, which will clatter south
into the Duwamish flats, then turn east into a new tunnel under Beacon Hill to Rainier Valley, then turn south again, eventually wending its way to Tukwila. There she will disembark and step aboard another bus, which will take her to the airport.
By the time our intrepid traveler reaches the airport, she will have traveled some 20-plus miles on three different transit vehicles operated by three different agencies. After all this, airport security will look like a model of people-moving efficiency.
Which means Ms. Ballard will probably do this only once. Next time, she'll take a cab, a shuttle, or the express Metro bus.
Puget Sound is about to get a transit system designed and operated not by a committee, but by a multitude of committees. Sound Transit is doing light rail and commuter rail. The Seattle Monorail Project is no longer building you-know-what. The folks at Metro Transit continue to run the buses, no doubt rolling their eyeballs at the newcomers and their newfangled choo-choos. Pierce and Snohomish and Kitsap counties still operate their own overlapping transit systems. Washington State Ferries, which delivers thousands of commuters to the city every day, hopes somebody will remember to connect with its Seattle boats. There's the state Department of Transportation, Amtrak, the feds ... and on and on.
The PR folks and Web sites assure us that these projects are proceeding nicely. But, in keeping with Seattle tradition, there are skeptics out there, a growing school of well informed detractors who argue that Seattle's
construction binge has all the makings of an enormous train wreck. After taxing itself several times over for rail transit, greater Seattle, they warn, is on track for a major case of buyer's remorse. These are not your typical not-in-my-back-yard reactionaries. They are credible urban progressives to whom rail transit is supposed to be an article of faith, right up there with gun control and abortion rights.
Prominent among them are people such as Emory Bundy, whose environmental credentials include time at the helm of the Bullitt Foundation. There is Maggie Fimia, a smart and earnest Democrat and former King County Council member, MIT educated transportation consultant John Niles,
former Democratic State Rep. Will Knedlik, former Democratic Gov. Booth Gardner and many more.
At some point, the editorial board at Seattle Times, the state's largest newspaper and a longtime booster of rapid transit, flipped its position and now advocates abandoning those rail projects.
What's their beef? Light rail is obsolete, they argue. It's 19th-century technology. It's slow. It runs mostly on the surface, obstructs traffic, collides with cars, knocks down pedestrians. Running it through the downtown tunnel will displace scores of buses, putting them back on downtown streets.
And it won't ease congestion, Niles emphasizes. For all those billions, he claims light rail will reduce rush-hour traffic by less than 1 percent. "It’s like tearing one page out of the Seattle phone book and trying to see a difference."
The monorail was a slightly better idea, Niles says. But heavy rail makes fewer stops and thus requires dense populations—lots of high-rise apartments and clustered business. Seattle doesn't have that kind of density and doesn't want it.
Rail won't work in Seattle, these detractors say. And Seattle can't afford to launch multibilliondollar rail projects—not in the midst of a continuing tax revolt and a Republican administration unfriendly to urban transit. Sound Transit, they argue, can't afford to build even its scaled-back project, thanks to Initiative 776, the voter-approved measure that rolled back the vastly unpopular car tax. ST continues to collect and spend that money while lawyers try to figure out how to rationalize two contradictory laws.
What happened to Seattle's dreams of a rapid transit system zipping through its downtown core? Why is it that our sister cities, Portland and Vancouver, British Columbia, with similar economics and demographics, have been able to build nifty little rail systems while Seattle squabbles over rival technologies and scarce tax revenues? Where did Seattle's train veer off
track? And, most important, whom can we blame? Local leadership? Well, they are apparently doing precisely what voters told them to do, aren’t
they?
Or how about taxpayers themselves, the regional body politic, who passed ballot measures to build rail transit, then passed more measures to repeal
the taxes that were supposed to pay for the projects, and then changed its mind and dumped the monorail idea?
Or we can blame it all on geography, which has always been the city's greatest asset as well as aggravation. All those glacial-carved hills and lakes and waterways may be easy on the eyes, but they pose major problems for anybody trying to get from Point A to Point B. This is particularly true of rail transit. Portland and Vancouver built their systems largely on river flats, which lend themselves to rail. Seattle's hills, which run north to south, do not.
And we can wag fingers at our predecessors, all those nice people who repeatedly voted down earlier transit projects when it could have been done on the cheap. As far back as 1911, voters had a chance to approve a grand city makeover designed by a New York engineer named Virgil Bogue, who proposed a regional system of subways, elevated trains and streetcars stretching around Lake Washington. Voters rejected the plan by a 2-1 ratio.
But even then, the city had built up a 70-mile network of cable-car and streetcar lines, including the "interurban" car that rattled back and forth to Everett.
Then came Henry Ford, and the jig was up for rail. As Americans fell in love with their cars, the streetcars were hauled off to the scrap yards, replaced by diesel buses courtesy of General Motors. The last interurban streetcar left Seattle in 1939. That was the same year a new Lake Washington bridge opened the way for an Eastside population boom.
And in the early 1950s, Seattle built the Alaskan Way Viaduct, one of the nation's first "freeways," designed to move commuters past the downtown bottleneck to and from jobs at Boeing and the industrial area. A decade later,
bulldozers were clearing the way for Interstate 5, which was to be the backbone of a grid of freeways slicing across the citys, much as they have in Los Angeles.
That was too much for laidback Seattle. In the 1970s, the city rebelled against concrete, killing the RH Thompson Freeway, which would have run up the east side of the city and another across South Lake Union.
But the same voters rejected rail transit proposals n 1968 and 1970. It didn't seem necessary. The Boeing Bust of that period had resulted in a
decline in population, real estate values and traffic. Seattle's only traffic problem was a lack of traffic. In 1972, just 31 million riders boarded Seattle buses, less than a quarter of the 1944 ridership.
Then Seattle got hot and stayed hot, fueled by some combination of Boeing and Microsoft and grunge rock. Thousands of people were moving to the region—more people, more cars, all crammed into a network of roads and buses dating as far back as the 1950s. Something had to give.
Metro, which began as a regional sewer authority in the 1960s, took on transit long before voters in 1994 approved merging it with King County. It had pushed for such innovations as high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) commuter lanes, the free-ride bus zone downtown and the bus tunnel. Ridership grew gradually, reaching 75 million in 1992—a big improvement.
As traffic got worse, voters started having some second thoughts about rail transit. But it was too late, says former mayor Charles Royer. “By the time we were poised to do it, the federal government was backing off. Our transit system got built in Atlanta. That money was supposed to be ours.”
By the mid-’90s, the situation was becoming desperate. Long touted as the nation's most livable city, Seattle was fast becoming one of its most gridlocked. In the Texas Transportation Institute's most recent ratings of 75 U.S. cities, Seattle's traffic ranked fourth-worst in the nation. Seattle's gridlock ranks closely behind Chicago and San Francisco–Oakland and not so far behind the perennial champion—Los Angeles.
And here we are. So we turn to the critics. If not light rail, if not monorail, then what should we build?
How about something that doesn't ride on rails—like buses?
The money now being spent on light rail and monorail could be diverted to something called “Bus Rapid Transit (BRT),” they say, which has all the advantages of rail transit but with the added flexibility of a vehicle that is not confined to rails.
“We already have a mass transit system that is established but unfinished,” argues Maggie Fimia, a New York City native who grew up riding rail transit. “When the region rejected rail 20 years ago, there was a conscious decision to go with express buses. We spent $1 billion on the nation's best system of express buses, with 200 miles of HOV lanes that operate around the clock.”
A bus system will never be as sexy as a gleaming, stainless-steel monorail, says transportation consultant Niles. But it's infinitely more flexible. Build a railroad, and it’s there to stay, while bus routes can be shifted to suit changing needs. “Our alternative is not an icon," says Niles, "but we think the region could make the bus work better.”
That means using the latest technology, such as hybrid engines fueled by a combination of oil and electricity. Or dedicated lanes, much like the bus tunnel, that can whisk buses past freeway traffic jams.
But don't bet on BRT either. Seattle has had it with buses. They conjure up images of groaning diesels, clouds of exhaust, and oddball seatmates.
They're small-town transit. The Emerald City wants transit befitting a major-
league metropolis, a system akin to what Virgil Bogue proposed nearly a century ago.
So hold onto your Ms hats and your wallet. Never mind that buses are cheaper and more flexible. After a century of indecision, frustrated commuters now say they want trains—even if they have no intention of riding them. So, for
better or worse, for richer or poorer, for good times or bad times, it appears that Seattle shall have its choo-choos.
