Yes on Proposition 1 – roads, rail for the future

Proposition 1 – the $18 billion roads-and-transit package on the regional ballot – presents Puget Sound voters with a 50-year decision.

The road construction it would pay for is needed right now: Washington is still playing catch-up on highway work.

But some of the light rail projects in Proposition 1 won’t be completed for at least another 20 years. Some won’t reach their full potential value to the region until millions more live here – as they inevitably will. Some will be of more benefit to our grandchildren than ourselves.

That’s all the more reason to get them started now, instead of kicking them into the future when they will be far more costly or outright impossible.

The roads part of the package is projected to cost about $7 billion in 2006 dollars. Most of it would finance “megaprojects,” such as the long-overdue extension of Highway 167 from Puyallup to the Port of Tacoma, new lanes on Interstate 405 and a down payment on replacing the endangered Highway 520 bridge across Lake Washington.

The transit part – mostly 50 miles of light rail extending north, south and east from Seattle – asks voters to look beyond the horizon.

Proposition 1 opponents complain that its $11 billion price tag is too high compared to the ridership expected in the near future. That may be – but those 50 miles of rail corridor will still be around 70 years hence, when the region’s urban core could look like Chicago. If the required rights-of-way aren’t acquired now, the fast-escalating cost of real estate will make them unaffordable in short order.

Opponents also assert that transit is expected to carry only about 3 percent of all trips in the region 20 years hence.

True – but extremely misleading. “All trips” means literally that: trips to the grocery store, to soccer games, to the mall, etc., in addition to long commutes.

But in controlling traffic congestion, what counts isn’t “all trips”; it’s rush hour on the highway. If Proposition 1 passes, transit will carry a large part of the rush hour commute – the equivalent of multiple highway lanes full of cars.

The measure isn’t cheap: It would add a sales tax of 0.6 cents on the dollar, plus a yearly vehicle tax of $8 for every $1,000 of a car’s value. But expanding highways through the region’s core could cost many billions more. Inescapable congestion – the result of doing nothing – already imposes a heavy price on families and the state economy.

Consider what the expanded light rail would do for the South Sound.

Once it’s built, you could board light rail at the Tacoma Dome and take it to Federal Way, Sea-Tac Airport, downtown Seattle, Bellevue, the University of Washington, Northgate and farther north – nearly to Everett. You’d get where you were going on time, however snarled Interstate 5 was.

It would take a while before the trains are running north, and a while more before they’d be at full capacity. But if the region doesn’t get started on them now, they may never run at all.