Top business brains will tackle Tacoma traffic
DAN VOELPEL; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Melanie Dressel made a confession Tuesday. The CEO of Columbia Bank occasionally rides the bus.
Eric Anderson chimed in with a confession, too. Tacoma’s city manager lamented the lack of any cohesive strategy for the future movement of cars and people in downtown Tacoma.
The chief executives made their revelations to fellow head honchos from some of Tacoma’s largest and most influential employers: DaVita, BCRA, Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, Eisenhower Carlson, Franciscan Health System, Moss Adams, MultiCare, PCS Structural Engineers, Regence BlueShield, Simpson, Pierce Transit, Port of Tacoma, Simon Johnson, O’Connor General Contractors, and the University of Washington Tacoma.
Tacoma’s brainpower convened at the Hotel Murano for the first in a series of early morning sessions with two goals:
• Slash the numbers of their employees who drive alone to work in or near downtown.
• Devise a new, agreed-upon transit network so seamless and efficient in its options and ability to deliver employees to their workplaces that it influences new companies to locate in downtown Tacoma.
Easier said than done. Transportation traditionally ranks as the region’s top problem in polls of regular folks like you and me. And yet last November we voted down a tax-package solution to our regional transit and roads problems.
If anyone can achieve those goals, I’ll bet on these folks. The state Department of Transportation has bet on them, too. The DOT granted the Chamber of Commerce $406,000 for a first-ever attempt to horse-collar CEOs into stopping their employees from driving solo to work.
What that looks like, no one quite knows yet. But if Jeff Brown, president of BCRA, can design a skyscraper, he probably has an idea or two that might work. Ray Tennison, CEO of Simpson, can oversee a holding company with timber, door and paper subsidiaries, so he certainly can help get his people from home to work and back more efficiently. Joe Wilczek, CEO of Franciscan Health Systems, runs four – soon to be five – hospitals throughout the South Sound, so designing a transit network to move his people can’t rank up there with brain surgery.
Besides, these CEOs have a host of new influences – rising gas prices, worsening roadway congestion and limited downtown parking. The sheer economics of putting gas in the tank may drive us out of our cars whether we like it or not.
My confession: Until gas topped $3 a gallon last year, I lamented its cost but really didn’t specifically calculate how it siphoned my household budget, nor did I look for alternatives.
But when I finally did, I realized that a 70-mile weekend trip from Tacoma to our Eatonville getaway – in my 18-miles-per-gallon minivan – costs me $11.67 with gas at $3 a gallon. Ouch.
The economics of gas prices persuaded me to buy a 250 cc scooter last summer. It gets more than 65 miles per gallon. You probably have noticed more scooters on the roads these days.
As a presidential candidate once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
I don’t think we’ll see Dressel on a Vespa anytime soon. (But who knows?)
The CEOs got a pep talk from John Resha, a consultant and former director of Urban Mobility Group, a four-year-old public-private venture to revamp downtown Seattle’s transit system.
In Seattle, projections showed a future with 70,000 new jobs and up to 60,000 more residents. With the existing person-to-parking-spot ratio, Seattle would need a parking garage covering four city blocks and nine stories high.
“No community wants that,” Resha said. “You have to ask, ‘How do we get the people from where they want to start to where they want to go?’ ”
In a private moment, Pierce Transit executives confided the future solution may involve two options used elsewhere but new to the Tacoma area:
• A fleet of Zipcars – vehicles parked around town and rentable by the hour or day that you reserve online, unlock with a key card and return to its parking spot.
• Bus Rapid Transit Lite, a bus that resembles a light rail car on wheels, which runs part-time with traffic and part-time in a traffic lane reserved only for it. BRT-Lite stops less frequently than a bus and only at beefed-up stations similar to light-rail stops. Look for the first one to run on Pacific Avenue from downtown Tacoma at least to Pacific Lutheran University and possibly as far as the Wal-Mart south of Spanaway.
That sounds like a good start.
“I’m happy to report,” Resha told the execs, “you have congestion. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be having good or even average economic times. Congestion is sign of health.”
Let’s hope these CEOs step on the gas and make us less healthy soon.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
