Seattle is the most backward city on the West Coast when it comes to mass transit. That still puts it light-years ahead of most American cities. Its bus system is quite good, the first light-rail line opens next year and a street car now links downtown to the burgeoning South Lake Union district. Sounder commuter heavy rail runs from Tacoma north to Everett. In addition, the Cascades Amtrak service provides convenient service between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C., including Portland and Seattle. The ferry service is the best in America, despite recent underfunding.
But Seattle residents feel profoundly inferior to Portland, with its world-class light rail system, and Vancouver, with its SkyTrain. And its a sign of how much progress has been made in California that all the service I mention above is a fraction of what’s available in LA, San Francisco or San Diego. Yet Seattle is also the gang that couldn’t shoot straight when it comes to many transit projects.
A roads-and-transit measure was defeated last year. Now an all-transit measure may come to the November ballot, and already newspapers, powerful suburban developers and even the generally pro-transit King County executive Ron Sims are opposing it. Seattle’s misadventures with transit have lessons that apply to other cities, and will be more important in years ahead when a lifestyle based on long, individual auto trips becomes less viable.
Behind the misfires is something very American. But also something distinctly Seattle.
Americans, sad to say, don’t get out much. So advanced light-rail, heavy rail and streetcar systems that are ubiquitous in most advanced nations seem strange and exotic to many Americans. Think of the character in the musical Oklahoma! who goes to Kansas City and sees a building seven stories tall! ("About as high as a building ought to go").
Critics, living in the 1960s, see all this rail bunk as turning back the clock to the creaky trolleys of grandpa’s day. The powerful business forces that profit from suburban sprawl and dependence on the automobile encourage and fund disinformation about mass transit. They talk in horror about transit costs, ignoring the vast costs of highways, especially their hidden costs in generating greenhouse gases, degrading the environment, enabling sprawl, etc. Or they dangle the alternative of bus service. Because light rail, especially, seems so weird to many Americans, it receives incredible skepticism and opposition — even though it is succeeding everywhere it operates. Once light rail opens, suburbs are soon clamoring for it, as shown in Dallas.
It’s the anti-transit, anti-rail forces that are living in the past. The nation is much more urban and more densely populated than in the 1950s and 1960s, when the car seemed the uber-answer. Whatever gyrations the oil markets make, the long term forces are all pushing higher energy prices. And driving and long commutes are…horrible now. The widest freeways are overwhelmed, confirming a phenomenon from Robert Moses’ first days of building freeways in the 1930s: they are congestion generators. Americans desperately need transportation alternatives. Yet the antis have proven powerful in many cities and regions.
Then, Seattle. I’m still getting my arms around the history, but it seems as if several events have proven pivotal. Years ago, voters turned down a light rail system, a seminal mistake. More recently, years and treasure were wasted looking at monorails, which are both intrusive and very costly. Finally, Sound Transit, the regional agency, seems to have bungled the timeline and budget for the initial line between downtown and the airport, with an extension to the University of Washington. (N.B. for all cities: when you do "exotic" light rail, you’ve got to be nearly perfect; Americans will tolerate any destruction or incompetence in roadbuilding, but not transit).
The result is a deep mistrust of new transit initiatives. It hasn’t helped that the newest ones have been predicated on very long timelines, rather than offering quicker relief. And, in the one that went down in November 2007, proposing light rail to Tacoma when the sensible answer was expanding capacity for Sounder heavy rail already in place.
Seattle is also a conflicted place, sometimes in an endearing way. Natives and long-time residents don’t like the growth that has changed the city and region. Imagine a group of Phoenix natives who, circa 1970, could have frozen the urban footprint in place. This is a big environmentalist community here, too. Paralysis on transportation is their friend. Indeed, Seattle itself if blessed with a relatively small, dense city — 569,000 people in 84 square miles — and regional sprawl is relatively limited. That latter is partly the result of the blessing of small freeways, which have helped preserve a dense, vibrant central city. Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi and suburban developers would love to change that, but I doubt they can succeed. If they do, the results in a carbon-choked world will be unfortunate.
The bus option is a red herring. Anti-rail forces throw it out, and then oppose bus funding once they get their way. In any event, buses are limited in what they can accomplish. Seattle has a great bus system, but parts of the city are choked with buses lined up, one after the other, then stuck in the same congestion that clogs autos. No politician is going to take away enough general traffic lanes and designate them bus-only to change that. Buses get hung up loading wheelchairs, and if you walk with a cane, the stairs up into a bus are perilous. Light rail is much more convenient, safe and reliable. This isn’t an anti-bus point. We need all options, each in its most effective place.
Similarly, the streetcar has provoked much derision for its slow startup in ridership. Hello…if the city would have waited until South Lake Union were built out with the Amazon.com headquarters, biotech businesses and various Paul Allen developments, it would have been impossible to put it in place. These are the same critics that wouldn’t think twice about building a freeway into the middle of nowhere.
I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what’s needed on a five-year timetable or less: light rail to Bellevue and Redmond; more Sounder trains, and additional bus service on heavily traveled lines. Get moving.
Even so, as they say in the South, my dog’s sitting on the porch on this fight, personally at least. Living downtown, I have access to abundant bus, streetcar, ferries, Sounder, Cascades and long-distance Amtrak service. Shopping, entertainment and culture are all in walking distance. So who cares what the suburbs do? If it were only that simple: transportation systems and their consequences are regional. Even doing nothing is making a choice in a fast-changing world.
I know that the Washington Policy Center have gotten a lot of play, at least in conservative circles, over their “study” which claims to show light rail is extremely expensive. Nevermind that much of there “study” has been countered by people who actually understand the issue. Do they get as much air-time and space from local media as the Goldwater Institute gets down here in Phoenix?
Fortunately, no.
I agree with you. However, light rail systems are not a universal unqualified success: witness Buffalo NY, where the light rail system has had continually declining ridership as the city continues to implode.
May I be bold enough to say that transport itself is the problem, regardless of whether by road or rail. Yes, I’ll agree that a bus is more efficient than equivalent number of cars and a rail is sometimes more efficient than a bus (better for long hauls where passengers all want to get off at the same stop, worse for when passengers all want different stops).
However, if it were a REQUIREMENT that people lived close to work, then they would do so (and all the regulations, zoning and infrastructure would be designed to support that). If businesses were ONLY able to get employees by putting up an office near residential areas then they would make it happen.
The entire concept of shipping millions of kilos of human to arbitrary locations every morning, just to ship them back again every evening would seem quite insane to someone looking in from space.
Back in the day when long distance transport was slow and expensive, people found ways to cope. Now that transport is cheap and fast, other issues become more important and transport is just the thing that takes up the slack. Making more infrastructure to create cheaper, more efficient transport will just give people more opportunity to be inefficient in other areas.
Tel’s comments are interesting but absent some central authority that mandates people living close to their work, they’re also beside the point. We can do little things like congestion pricing without making government obnoxiously intrusive. Making the government regulate individual congestion really crosses a line no 1st World polity has ever done.
Modern cities allow