There was a miracle in Tuesday’s election returns: the spectacular victory of Sound Transit’s Proposition 1.
That victory was all the more sweet combined with the equally spectacular defeat of Initiative 985.
Those two results suggest that Washingtonians have a sophisticated and farsighted understanding of the state’s transportation problems, especially in the Puget Sound region.
I-985 – a so-called congestion reduction measure – had led in the polls until a few weeks before the election. Cobbled together in Tim Eyman’s initiative shop, it was tarted up with a bundle of pseudo-solutions engineered to knit together various aggrieved groups.
It proposed, for example, to open HOV lanes during heavy traffic hours, defeating their purpose and creating more congestion. This provision pandered to solo drivers who don’t understand that HOV lanes are designed to cut congestion for everyone.
It would have forced cities to use taxpayers’ money to finance photo-enforcement cameras at major intersections and in school zones. This pandered to the scofflaws who run red lights and blast through school zones – whose fines are now paying for those cameras.
It would have imposed a one-size-fits-all traffic synchronization rule on cities throughout the state. As a whole, I-985 added up to a misbegotten “congestion relief” package that threatened to make many roads more dangerous and crowded.
The voters saw through it; they simply shredded I-985. As of Wednesday, it was losing by a nearly 60-40 margin. That was nearly the same margin by which Proposition 1 – an $18 billion expansion of mass transit – was winning.
It took genuine vision to see the value of Prop 1. The measure promised – near term – to expand express bus and Sounder train service in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. But the big ticket item was a three-way, 36-mile extension of electric light rail: south from Sea-Tac Airport to Federal Way, east from downtown Seattle through Bellevue to Redmond, and north from Seattle to Lynnwood.
The full 36 miles of new tracks can’t be delivered until the early 2020s. It will then take a third stage of construction to bring the tracks all the way south to Tacoma.
As a nation, we’ve been spending big for immediate benefit and deferring costs to future generations. Proposition 1 offered the opposite: Payment now for the benefit of future generations.
It speaks well of Puget Sound voters that they were willing to take Sound Transit up on that deal.
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