Mass transit – or roads?
That is a false choice. In fact, the Puget Sound region must invest in both light rail and its overcrowded highways.
Proposition 1 – on the ballot in Pierce, King and Snohomish counties – would do just that. If approved in November, it would buy about $7 billion worth of road improvements and $11 billion worth of transit.
The South Sound has a big stake in the measure’s success.
The road portion includes, among other projects, an extension of Highway l67 from Puyallup to the Port of Tacoma as well as an expansion of 167 north of Puyallup – which would greatly improve northward commutes for East Pierce County drivers. Transit’s share would pay for 50 miles of new light rail service that would connect Tacoma to Sea-Tac Airport, Seattle and the region’s other major cities.
Much of the opposition to Proposition 1 is rooted in the region’s old, tiresome roads-vs.-transit dispute. Too many transit supporters don’t want to see a penny spent on new highway lanes; too many highway fans consider rail a big waste of money.
In reality, the region cannot get enough of either. With another million people expected to be living here by 2025, the demand for both kinds of transportation infrastructure will only get more intense as years go by.
Neither the anti-transit nor the anti-road camp is offering any realistic alternative to Proposition 1.
If the anti-transit folks had their way, they’d spend billions more on highways. They’d substitute “bus rapid transit” for light rail.
Take the latter first. The argument for BRT is that bus service, unlike rail, is flexible and can be rerouted according to need. But to replace rail as a means of bypassing traffic, rapid-transit buses would require exclusive use of new – and inflexible – highway lanes. New highway lanes don’t come cheap, especially when cut through the core of cities.
Free-flowing BRT service could wind up costing many billions itself without delivering the unique benefits of rail – such as concentrating population growth around train stations.
As far as paving our way out of congestion, there just aren’t enough billions in the region to make it happen – even if we were willing to endure the massive environmental costs.
Then there’s the anti-road crowd.
Their theory seems to be that if the highways become all-but-impassable, drivers will migrate in droves to mass transit. But it would take more than traffic jams to pry Puget Sounders out of their automobiles. In many cases, they just can’t get where they need to go on a bus or a train.
Cars won’t be going away anytime soon. It’s far more realistic to focus on making them cleaner – instead of using congestion to punish drivers and choke Western Washington’s economy in the bargain.
In any event, Proposition 1 does much more for transit than it does for highways, balancing the additional billions Washington is already investing in its roads with the gas tax increases of 2003 and 2005.
Neither a transit-only nor a roads-only package would work in the real world. That’s why Proposition 1 offers both – and deserves approval from Puget Sound voters.
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