Proposition 1 - Roads and Transit

Freakshow 2007^®

Proposition 1 comes to the ballot to haunt Central Puget Sound voters like a Ghost of Infrastructure Choices Past. We could have approved the 1970s Forward Thrust rail plan, but didn't; we could have taxed ourselves over the years to provide needed highways, bridges and HOV lanes, but instead we shrunk the available revenue stream.

There's a great deal of guilt underlying Prop. 1 aka RTID aka Roads and Transit. Roads and Transit! It's the Frankenstein ballot measure for our age of sustainability awareness and urban angst. Our inner angel whispers from our left shoulder, Shame on you for not building rail in the past, vote Yes to atone for that mistake! And from our right shoulder our inner devil says And look at the miles and miles of new drivable lanes!

RTID seems crafted to be an irresistible, can't-lose public works juggernaut. Remember that T-shirt from the early post-Soviet 90s? "KGB-CIA: Together at Last." Roads and Transit is like that.

Here's the thing -- Prop. 1 is surrounded by a cloud of irrelevant or borderline hysterical arguments, interfering with voters' ability to weigh the question in anything approaching a dispassionate manner. There are basically five such arguments from the No side (I'll paraphrase):

1. 'Traffic on new roads will boost greenhouse gases.' True on its face, except you have to consider this reality: the roads will serve areas that are already populated (many of them outlying areas) and are currently beset by congestion. Rail transit is too expensive to provide alternative transportation to all of those areas anytime soon, if ever. No one is proposing depopulating those areas, so additional roads are necessary for the foreseeable future. And consider this: progress has seen the introduction of the hybrid car, and we seem to be headed toward viable electric and fuel cell cars. Odds are the CO2 curve will not continue as a straight line; if Peak Oil is accurate, how could it?

2. 'Highway and rail tunnel construction will create CO2.' This says the equipment used to excavate, carry away dirt and build the highways and transit exceeds the CO2 saved by transit. It is being circulated by CETA's John Niles and environmentalist Emory Bundy, two men with whom I normally sympathize. Niles is basically a scholar, and Bundy's environmental credentials are unquestioned (well, some question, but they shouldn't).
The irony here is that Niles and Bundy are right, in isolation. They've done the math, the math works for the most part. But here's the thing --like special tunnel boring equipment, highway building equipment has a specific purpose. If we don't build roads and tunnels here, that equipment will be used to build roads and tunnels somewhere else. In other words, reducing greenhouse gases is perhaps the most important priority of our time, but as far as Prop. 1 goes, CO2 drops out as a decisionmaking criterion.

3. 'The true cost is more than $18 billion.' Sure, if you include the interest. But you can say that about any major purchase. Under this argument no one should ever use a mortgage to buy a house; it would prevent us from building any public works projects, ever again. It's a cheap claim that doesn't hold up.

4. 'You can't trust Sound Transit.' People work at agencies, but agencies are not people. Anthropomorphizing agencies by ascribing 'dishonesty' or 'evil' to them makes no sense. The Sound Transit board is not all the same people as in the early days of mistakes/willful deceptions about costs and ridership. The staff is not all the same people. 'You can't trust Sound Transit' implies a conspiracy, but how could all those people keep something that big a secret? Especially politicians.

5. 'There are cheaper alternatives.' Like Bus Rapid Transit? Maybe if done right -- but you'll need to build a network of buslanes, like Prop. 1's HOV lanes in that they too will generate construction CO2 and have a higher true cost. Plus, 4 miles per gallon on a hybrid bus is still 4 miles per gallon.
There are also people who, like me, are aware of seemingly futuristic transit technologies being developed elsewhere in the world. One such, PRT, has been possible for some time but is only now being successfully implemented -- by Europe. PRT is going to revolutionize attitudes toward public transit as well as move people with greater energy efficiency. But however strong that promise, or that of other innovations, it is irresponsible to put current public policy questions on hold for the possibility of something better in the future.
Patience, innovators. It's not like the transit networks won't have holes left for new technologies to fill. Public policy must be decided from the standpoint of the tangible things we know, right now, today, that address current problems. In the area of transportation, what we know right now are conventional transit technology and roads.

There. With the distractions identified, you can now decide how to vote on Prop. 1 by focusing on the only important question, the traditional public works question: do the benefits exceed the cost? You're welcome.

Remember, it's public works, public economic goods being purchased. The benefits don't have to all be financial -- social benefits count too. How these community benefits are valued is up to you.