(no subject)
This post is for
firni and anyone else interested in my opinion about the Sound Transit 2/RTID proposal (Proposition 1) on the November ballot in large parts of King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties. This is bound to get long, so it would never have fit in a comment.
The short recommendation is that people should vote yes, even though the combined package has many flaws.
This is a complicated issue with many facets, so I'm going to break it down into smaller chunks and handle them one by one:
Combining roads and transit in one proposition
I don't like that we're voting on roads and transit together. In an ideal world, I do think that transportation should be designed, funded, and constructed by a single regional agency that considers an integrated combination of roads, transit, and amenities designed to move as many people and as much freight as possible. There's even likely to be legislative activity next year to create a different regional governance agency like Sound Transit but with authority to build roads, too. The problem is that it's really a trojan horse for anti-transit people to attempt to get rid of Sound Transit. This proposition isn't an integrated proposal, either. While some of the roads projects, mostly HOV lanes, do help transit, the two packages were pretty much developed separately and then lumped together for political reasons. The rationale was that neither roads nor transit alone would be a likely winner alone. There's conflicting polling on the issue, but the general trend seems to be that transit is becoming more popular but still faces an uphill battle alone, and roads are becoming a harder sale and tend to pass but with diminishing margins. The no-on everything voters are a large minority but outnumbered when the roads and transit supporters are added together. So the state mandated that the two measures be combined. The result has been odd political bedfellows who hate each other and are ready to blame each other if the vote goes the wrong way. Some supporters of roads or transit are jumping ship because they don't like how much of the other mode is being funded. The end result is a combined package that's as shaky as either proposal voted separately.
But that's politics. It's messy and in Seattle it's overburdened with process and nothing gets done except with painful compromise. This is the proposition we have, and we have to consider each of its parts before deciding on the whole.
Funding
This is one of the most controversial aspects of the proposition, both in terms of the source of funding and the amount of money in question. The infrastructure costs in 2006 dollars are $18 billion--$10 billion for transit and $8 billion for roads. That money will be used to buy bonds to finance the project over the next few decades, which is typical for any road or transit project. Any time you borrow money, there's interest added. Opponents of ST2/RTID like to take the amount of money collected at year of collection, which is higher than $18 billion because dollars ten years from now will be less than dollars now so you need more of them (of course, the economy and incomes will also be larger, which they conveniently ignore). Then they add in financing costs to come up with numbers around $40 billion, claiming that proponents are lying about costs. This is bullshit, and is basically equivalent to telling somebody with a $250K mortgage that their house is costing them a million dollars. It's true, but only in the most pedantic sense. The $40 billionish figure is then expanded two or three times by adding in maintenance costs for the system and using the most pessimistic cost predictions, including taking cost overruns of existing projects as the baseline. So that's how opponents make the amount seem huge.
The bottom line is that even including maintenance costs this is costing in the range of $40-60 billion through the middle of the century. That compares to an annual economy in the Puget Sound region of roughly $165 billion. It amounts to about 1-1.5% of the regional equivalent of GDP (less with each year as GDP growth tends to outpace inflation), not counting the positive benefits of transit. The reality is that in terms of attracting new development and economic growth, the package might actually be a net financial positive. It's an investment, not frivolous spending.
So that leaves how the money is being raised. That's a problem--it's being raised with sales taxes that are already near the breaking point (five tenths of a percent more tax for transit, one tenths more for roads) and motor vehicle excise taxes (aka MVET, eight tenths of a percent, all going to fund roads.) These are both highly regressive taxes that hit poor and middle class families harder than more wealthy taxpayers. Funding transit with sales taxes is highly unusual. In most areas it's done through a combination of income taxes, property taxes, and business taxes, all of which are more progressive (and less subject to recessions, which tend to depress collection of sales and use taxes. That's one reason the MVET-funded monorail ran into trouble.) There are no tolls approved by the package (though approval will probably lead to tolls on the floating bridges. More on that later.) There are no gas taxes. There are no carbon taxes, which are arguably the way to go when the planet is facing global warming and the necessity to cut carbon emissions by 50-80% by 2050.
Bottom line: the funding sources for this package suck. Hopefully, we'll be able to change the funding source later, or shift the other sales taxes in the state to something else so the overall impact isn't so bad. But even though the funding sources are bad, the total isn't unmanageable. We're getting a complete regional rail system and roads projects built for what amounts to less than a penny on the dollar. As much as the funding situation could be improved, it's not a deal-killer. It all comes down to what we get for that penny.
For details of the projects funded, see http://www.roadsandtransit.org/content/projects.php. My take on each part of the proposition follows:
Sound Transit 2
This funds light rail from downtown to Lynnwood (technically the downtown to U-District segment is being funded separately but that's a complication not worth getting into). It funds light rail from the airport to Tacoma, where it will hook up with the downtown rail already in place there. It funds light rail from Seattle to downtown Bellevue over I-90, and then to Overlake Transit center (Microsoft main campus, basically). There's a potential segment from Overlake to downtown Redmond but it's highly speculative and probably won't happen. There is also funding to study future extensions to Everett, south of Tacoma, and future in-city lines such as one to West Seattle and/or Ballard.
This amounts to a good start to a light rail system, but we should be getting a lot more. I'd like to see a plan that commits to getting to Redmond and Everett, completes the Tacoma system to the community college there, and goes as far south as Lakewood and the northern Fort Lewis area. We should have a line along 405 connecting Bellevue to Renton and then Tukwila in the south, and connecting to Kirkland, Bothell, and Lynnwood in the north. I want to see a western line that hits Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne, West Seattle, and Burien before connecting with the center line at Seatac. For selfish reasons, and to connect the center and east lines, I'd like to see light rail from Northgate along Lake City Way to Lake Forest Park, Kenmore, and Bothell. If we weren't funding the roads part of the project, there would be money to do a lot of this. Instead, Sound Transit is planning expanded ST bus service along many of these corridors.
The Sierra Club (and two-faced Ron Sims, and the Cascade Bicycle Club) are effectively taking the opposite position, that light rail should only be developed in dense urban areas of Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma and that the suburbs should be left alone to suffer. They seem to think that if roads aren't built suburbanites will get fed up and either move away or move to the city. This, along with their disdain for building roads, is why they're opposing the project. I frankly find their attitude to be arrogant and self-defeating, and I'm a member of both of these organizations (though reconsidering by the day.) They also claim that if Prop 1 is voted down that light rail will come back on its own--this is unlikely, and I'll touch on that point later.
In addition to light rail and expanded ST bus service, this package adds more frequent commuter trains and park and ride lots near the train stations. This is to encourage people in less densely developed parts of the region to gather at station locations and commute the rest of the way to work. A large number of people using the commuter trains are Boeing workers.
Voting no because this doesn't do enough (overall or per mile) makes no sense, as projects only get more expensive over time, and any complete system will have to include all of these routes eventually anyway. It would be good if these routes went in within ten years, rather than being phased in over 17-20 (Overlake is scheduled to be connected in 2027). But voting no doesn't make that happen. If the goal is to speed up construction, we have to vote yes on this proposition and then come back with more funding from better sources to build more and build faster. It also doesn't make sense to vote no because you're afraid the proposed system won't be fully built. That's because Sound Transit has its own source of money and will buy everything that $10 billion will buy, and that there's no way waiting will increase what can be built. The earlier we start, the more we build. What's more, every single corridor that isn't funded for light rail but that ought to have rail eventually has funding for detailed study, indicating that as soon as it can, Sound Transit will expand the system to its full extent. The only reason to oppose the rail investments is if you are against rail transit.
RTID
RTID is the roads half of the proposition. There is more demand for road projects than money available, and rather than simply picking a few high-priority projects to fund and holding off on the others until later, RTID takes the dubious approach of partially funding bits and pieces all over the place. So 520 replacement and expansion is partially funded, but more funding will be needed to actually build the replacement bridge and highway. Pierce County gets partial funding for a Cross-Base Highway, but not enough to actually build it. 405 expansion is funded, as is completion of 167 from Puyallup to the Port of Tacoma, completion of an HOV system on the rest of 167, and various projects to eliminate bottlenecks. In your area, there is expansion for highway 9 and a Monroe bypass highway. My take is that some of these projects--like the HOV expansion--are good. The I-90 bridge project to convert the center HOV lanes to a light rail corridor and convert the outside lanes from two to three in each direction (with the extra lanes being HOV) is also good, and is one of the few projects that integrates transit and road planning in the same project. Some, like 520 and 405 expansion, are inevitable and won't contribute significantly to sprawl because they're in already-developed areas. So call them neutral. Others, like many of the rural Snohomish and Pierce County projects, are just downright bad.
The worst project of them all is the Cross-Base Highway, which is the one completely new highway in the package, going straight through the last patch of local prairie habitat in the region. It's just plain evil. However, it's likely this highway will never be built. The reason is that it was included in the package under the condition that environmental groups would be able to mitigate its worst effects. If they don't sign off on the final result of negotiations, the road can't be built. And without extra money, it won't be built anyway. It's in the package mostly to keep the Pierce County Executive from leaving the Sound Transit board.
Removing that project from the list, the remaining mix still has problems, and leaves a lot of better projects undone, but it's an acceptable trade-off for the overall transit package. I would prefer that RTID fund bridge repair and replacement, infrastructure maintenance, HOV lanes, bottleneck removal, and other key projects without a single additional general purpose lane anywhere. I'd like it to all be funded by tolls, gas taxes, or carbon taxes. But that's not politically realistic right now.
As for tolls, they're coming whether we like it or not (I like it, you may not.) The shortfall in 520 funding has led to a search for other funding sources. It appears that thanks to Senator Murray's seniority that we'll be able to get federal funding for part of the shortfall, assuming RTID passes. The rest of the funding looks like it can be gathered by putting tolls on the 520 and 90 bridges, according to a detailed study. As this is the only way 520 is getting built, and as the Governor and every regional and local politician and a majority of voters want it built, it's almost certain that the bridges will be tolled. And once that happens, it's only a matter of time before there's a trend toward tolling on other regional highways--a complete tolling system with congestion pricing has already been subjected to a detailed study by the Puget Sound Resources Council. Prop 1 is silent on the topic and gets its funding elsewhere, but people should realize that tolling on 520 and 90 is almost a foregone conclusion if RTID passes.
Global Warming
The Sierra Club claims the road projects will increase global warming and that's why Prop 1 is unacceptable. It's true that more people will drive more miles with these road projects. But the reality is that one million new people are moving to the region, and they have to be accommodated. Those people will still drive even if roads aren't expanded, spewing CO2 all over the place, UNLESS they have the option of using light rail (and even then, many of them will continue to drive). So it makes no sense to cut off road funding until we have an effective light rail system in place. The reality is that global warming is such a huge problem on such a global scale that road miles driven, by themselves, are pretty much a non-factor. What we need to do is convert our fuels to low-carbon or no-carbon sources. We need carbon taxes and emissions caps that will encourage different approaches and new investment. None of those things are accomplished by either supporting or opposing this plan. Global warming is a red herring in this argument. This is really about providing transit options for people, and limiting sprawl.
Congestion
Opponents of transit projects and Prop 1 in particular like to claim that congestion won't go away when trains are used, so it must not be worth funding them. This position ignores the fact that when you add a million people to a region, you will have more congestion in the end no matter what you do. Relative to doing nothing, rail investment improves congestion, but in absolute terms congestion will continue to get worse. But that's also true of roads projects--any temporary relief in congestion is quickly absorbed by increased demand for driving. What rail investment does, however, is give people an alternative. The cliche is that nobody drives in New York City because the roads are too congested. If NYC can't eliminate congestion with its transit system, no city can. The reality is that while in absolute terms millions of people drive in NYC, in relative terms very few people do proportionally because trains take people anywhere they can't walk, eliminating the need for cars for most people, and reducing the need for cars for most everyone else. Anyone who says building infrastructure will reduce congestion overall is lying, as is anyone who tries to get you to vote no because congestion won't go down.
There is one thing that does seem to reduce traffic congestion (other than economic recession), and that's congestion pricing, which has been a huge success in London (which has light rail by the way--it's called the Tube). But congestion pricing requires a system of tolls and transit alternatives. Tolls are politically unlikely here, and require that drivers change their expectation of free, easy motoring. In any case, voting no on Prop 1 doesn't make tolls more or less likely, and voting yes only makes it more likely at the margins, starting with the floating bridges. As for transit, this package goes a long way toward getting it into place.
Conclusion
In 1968, Seattle voters had an opportunity to approve a light rail system as extensive as the current proposals (though without the Eastside emphasis that is necessary now because of subsequent development.) That was one year before I was even born. It failed because of many of the same no arguments that are still being used dishonestly today. Proponents thought this was a temporary setback and that we'd pass a system eventually. The cost would have been about a billion and a half dollars, and it would have been completed by 1985 (including light rail to Bothell, which is only being studied by ST2), which was the end of my first year in high school. The idea did come back to the ballot in 1970, a year after I was born, but it was defeated. Atlanta got our federal funding (2/3 of the total). Here we are half a lifetime later and we still don't have any light rail, and the Sierra Club is saying we should vote no and then come back in a couple of years with a proposal more to their liking. Even if they lose this argument and we finish this on time, we'll be waiting until I'm nearly 60 before this is completed. If we vote no, it's unlikely to come back next year with a major election on the calendar and the wolves circling Sound Transit's wounded body calling for a regional agency to replace it. If it comes back at all, it's likely to build even less and have even less support from the public. That's the problem with half-measures--the people who don't want to build anything still don't want to build anything, and the people who want something are unsatisfied with what little they get and turn against it. It's quite likely that if this fails, we'll build no light rail at all, for another half-lifetime. MY half-lifetime. The only one I have left. (I'll note that many of you reading this are about my age.) As for roads, if there is no alternative to roads in the form of transit, roads will get built because they'll be the only option left. So we'll have another half lifetime of sprawl (and greenhouse emissions), until the Puget Sound area looks like LA with development up to the foothills and a tangled spaghetti of new highways, and a daily menu of smog.
Fuck that. I'm voting yes, and so should you.
firni and anyone else interested in my opinion about the Sound Transit 2/RTID proposal (Proposition 1) on the November ballot in large parts of King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties. This is bound to get long, so it would never have fit in a comment.
The short recommendation is that people should vote yes, even though the combined package has many flaws.
This is a complicated issue with many facets, so I'm going to break it down into smaller chunks and handle them one by one:
Combining roads and transit in one proposition
I don't like that we're voting on roads and transit together. In an ideal world, I do think that transportation should be designed, funded, and constructed by a single regional agency that considers an integrated combination of roads, transit, and amenities designed to move as many people and as much freight as possible. There's even likely to be legislative activity next year to create a different regional governance agency like Sound Transit but with authority to build roads, too. The problem is that it's really a trojan horse for anti-transit people to attempt to get rid of Sound Transit. This proposition isn't an integrated proposal, either. While some of the roads projects, mostly HOV lanes, do help transit, the two packages were pretty much developed separately and then lumped together for political reasons. The rationale was that neither roads nor transit alone would be a likely winner alone. There's conflicting polling on the issue, but the general trend seems to be that transit is becoming more popular but still faces an uphill battle alone, and roads are becoming a harder sale and tend to pass but with diminishing margins. The no-on everything voters are a large minority but outnumbered when the roads and transit supporters are added together. So the state mandated that the two measures be combined. The result has been odd political bedfellows who hate each other and are ready to blame each other if the vote goes the wrong way. Some supporters of roads or transit are jumping ship because they don't like how much of the other mode is being funded. The end result is a combined package that's as shaky as either proposal voted separately.
But that's politics. It's messy and in Seattle it's overburdened with process and nothing gets done except with painful compromise. This is the proposition we have, and we have to consider each of its parts before deciding on the whole.
Funding
This is one of the most controversial aspects of the proposition, both in terms of the source of funding and the amount of money in question. The infrastructure costs in 2006 dollars are $18 billion--$10 billion for transit and $8 billion for roads. That money will be used to buy bonds to finance the project over the next few decades, which is typical for any road or transit project. Any time you borrow money, there's interest added. Opponents of ST2/RTID like to take the amount of money collected at year of collection, which is higher than $18 billion because dollars ten years from now will be less than dollars now so you need more of them (of course, the economy and incomes will also be larger, which they conveniently ignore). Then they add in financing costs to come up with numbers around $40 billion, claiming that proponents are lying about costs. This is bullshit, and is basically equivalent to telling somebody with a $250K mortgage that their house is costing them a million dollars. It's true, but only in the most pedantic sense. The $40 billionish figure is then expanded two or three times by adding in maintenance costs for the system and using the most pessimistic cost predictions, including taking cost overruns of existing projects as the baseline. So that's how opponents make the amount seem huge.
The bottom line is that even including maintenance costs this is costing in the range of $40-60 billion through the middle of the century. That compares to an annual economy in the Puget Sound region of roughly $165 billion. It amounts to about 1-1.5% of the regional equivalent of GDP (less with each year as GDP growth tends to outpace inflation), not counting the positive benefits of transit. The reality is that in terms of attracting new development and economic growth, the package might actually be a net financial positive. It's an investment, not frivolous spending.
So that leaves how the money is being raised. That's a problem--it's being raised with sales taxes that are already near the breaking point (five tenths of a percent more tax for transit, one tenths more for roads) and motor vehicle excise taxes (aka MVET, eight tenths of a percent, all going to fund roads.) These are both highly regressive taxes that hit poor and middle class families harder than more wealthy taxpayers. Funding transit with sales taxes is highly unusual. In most areas it's done through a combination of income taxes, property taxes, and business taxes, all of which are more progressive (and less subject to recessions, which tend to depress collection of sales and use taxes. That's one reason the MVET-funded monorail ran into trouble.) There are no tolls approved by the package (though approval will probably lead to tolls on the floating bridges. More on that later.) There are no gas taxes. There are no carbon taxes, which are arguably the way to go when the planet is facing global warming and the necessity to cut carbon emissions by 50-80% by 2050.
Bottom line: the funding sources for this package suck. Hopefully, we'll be able to change the funding source later, or shift the other sales taxes in the state to something else so the overall impact isn't so bad. But even though the funding sources are bad, the total isn't unmanageable. We're getting a complete regional rail system and roads projects built for what amounts to less than a penny on the dollar. As much as the funding situation could be improved, it's not a deal-killer. It all comes down to what we get for that penny.
For details of the projects funded, see http://www.roadsandtransit.org/content/projects.php. My take on each part of the proposition follows:
Sound Transit 2
This funds light rail from downtown to Lynnwood (technically the downtown to U-District segment is being funded separately but that's a complication not worth getting into). It funds light rail from the airport to Tacoma, where it will hook up with the downtown rail already in place there. It funds light rail from Seattle to downtown Bellevue over I-90, and then to Overlake Transit center (Microsoft main campus, basically). There's a potential segment from Overlake to downtown Redmond but it's highly speculative and probably won't happen. There is also funding to study future extensions to Everett, south of Tacoma, and future in-city lines such as one to West Seattle and/or Ballard.
This amounts to a good start to a light rail system, but we should be getting a lot more. I'd like to see a plan that commits to getting to Redmond and Everett, completes the Tacoma system to the community college there, and goes as far south as Lakewood and the northern Fort Lewis area. We should have a line along 405 connecting Bellevue to Renton and then Tukwila in the south, and connecting to Kirkland, Bothell, and Lynnwood in the north. I want to see a western line that hits Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne, West Seattle, and Burien before connecting with the center line at Seatac. For selfish reasons, and to connect the center and east lines, I'd like to see light rail from Northgate along Lake City Way to Lake Forest Park, Kenmore, and Bothell. If we weren't funding the roads part of the project, there would be money to do a lot of this. Instead, Sound Transit is planning expanded ST bus service along many of these corridors.
The Sierra Club (and two-faced Ron Sims, and the Cascade Bicycle Club) are effectively taking the opposite position, that light rail should only be developed in dense urban areas of Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma and that the suburbs should be left alone to suffer. They seem to think that if roads aren't built suburbanites will get fed up and either move away or move to the city. This, along with their disdain for building roads, is why they're opposing the project. I frankly find their attitude to be arrogant and self-defeating, and I'm a member of both of these organizations (though reconsidering by the day.) They also claim that if Prop 1 is voted down that light rail will come back on its own--this is unlikely, and I'll touch on that point later.
In addition to light rail and expanded ST bus service, this package adds more frequent commuter trains and park and ride lots near the train stations. This is to encourage people in less densely developed parts of the region to gather at station locations and commute the rest of the way to work. A large number of people using the commuter trains are Boeing workers.
Voting no because this doesn't do enough (overall or per mile) makes no sense, as projects only get more expensive over time, and any complete system will have to include all of these routes eventually anyway. It would be good if these routes went in within ten years, rather than being phased in over 17-20 (Overlake is scheduled to be connected in 2027). But voting no doesn't make that happen. If the goal is to speed up construction, we have to vote yes on this proposition and then come back with more funding from better sources to build more and build faster. It also doesn't make sense to vote no because you're afraid the proposed system won't be fully built. That's because Sound Transit has its own source of money and will buy everything that $10 billion will buy, and that there's no way waiting will increase what can be built. The earlier we start, the more we build. What's more, every single corridor that isn't funded for light rail but that ought to have rail eventually has funding for detailed study, indicating that as soon as it can, Sound Transit will expand the system to its full extent. The only reason to oppose the rail investments is if you are against rail transit.
RTID
RTID is the roads half of the proposition. There is more demand for road projects than money available, and rather than simply picking a few high-priority projects to fund and holding off on the others until later, RTID takes the dubious approach of partially funding bits and pieces all over the place. So 520 replacement and expansion is partially funded, but more funding will be needed to actually build the replacement bridge and highway. Pierce County gets partial funding for a Cross-Base Highway, but not enough to actually build it. 405 expansion is funded, as is completion of 167 from Puyallup to the Port of Tacoma, completion of an HOV system on the rest of 167, and various projects to eliminate bottlenecks. In your area, there is expansion for highway 9 and a Monroe bypass highway. My take is that some of these projects--like the HOV expansion--are good. The I-90 bridge project to convert the center HOV lanes to a light rail corridor and convert the outside lanes from two to three in each direction (with the extra lanes being HOV) is also good, and is one of the few projects that integrates transit and road planning in the same project. Some, like 520 and 405 expansion, are inevitable and won't contribute significantly to sprawl because they're in already-developed areas. So call them neutral. Others, like many of the rural Snohomish and Pierce County projects, are just downright bad.
The worst project of them all is the Cross-Base Highway, which is the one completely new highway in the package, going straight through the last patch of local prairie habitat in the region. It's just plain evil. However, it's likely this highway will never be built. The reason is that it was included in the package under the condition that environmental groups would be able to mitigate its worst effects. If they don't sign off on the final result of negotiations, the road can't be built. And without extra money, it won't be built anyway. It's in the package mostly to keep the Pierce County Executive from leaving the Sound Transit board.
Removing that project from the list, the remaining mix still has problems, and leaves a lot of better projects undone, but it's an acceptable trade-off for the overall transit package. I would prefer that RTID fund bridge repair and replacement, infrastructure maintenance, HOV lanes, bottleneck removal, and other key projects without a single additional general purpose lane anywhere. I'd like it to all be funded by tolls, gas taxes, or carbon taxes. But that's not politically realistic right now.
As for tolls, they're coming whether we like it or not (I like it, you may not.) The shortfall in 520 funding has led to a search for other funding sources. It appears that thanks to Senator Murray's seniority that we'll be able to get federal funding for part of the shortfall, assuming RTID passes. The rest of the funding looks like it can be gathered by putting tolls on the 520 and 90 bridges, according to a detailed study. As this is the only way 520 is getting built, and as the Governor and every regional and local politician and a majority of voters want it built, it's almost certain that the bridges will be tolled. And once that happens, it's only a matter of time before there's a trend toward tolling on other regional highways--a complete tolling system with congestion pricing has already been subjected to a detailed study by the Puget Sound Resources Council. Prop 1 is silent on the topic and gets its funding elsewhere, but people should realize that tolling on 520 and 90 is almost a foregone conclusion if RTID passes.
Global Warming
The Sierra Club claims the road projects will increase global warming and that's why Prop 1 is unacceptable. It's true that more people will drive more miles with these road projects. But the reality is that one million new people are moving to the region, and they have to be accommodated. Those people will still drive even if roads aren't expanded, spewing CO2 all over the place, UNLESS they have the option of using light rail (and even then, many of them will continue to drive). So it makes no sense to cut off road funding until we have an effective light rail system in place. The reality is that global warming is such a huge problem on such a global scale that road miles driven, by themselves, are pretty much a non-factor. What we need to do is convert our fuels to low-carbon or no-carbon sources. We need carbon taxes and emissions caps that will encourage different approaches and new investment. None of those things are accomplished by either supporting or opposing this plan. Global warming is a red herring in this argument. This is really about providing transit options for people, and limiting sprawl.
Congestion
Opponents of transit projects and Prop 1 in particular like to claim that congestion won't go away when trains are used, so it must not be worth funding them. This position ignores the fact that when you add a million people to a region, you will have more congestion in the end no matter what you do. Relative to doing nothing, rail investment improves congestion, but in absolute terms congestion will continue to get worse. But that's also true of roads projects--any temporary relief in congestion is quickly absorbed by increased demand for driving. What rail investment does, however, is give people an alternative. The cliche is that nobody drives in New York City because the roads are too congested. If NYC can't eliminate congestion with its transit system, no city can. The reality is that while in absolute terms millions of people drive in NYC, in relative terms very few people do proportionally because trains take people anywhere they can't walk, eliminating the need for cars for most people, and reducing the need for cars for most everyone else. Anyone who says building infrastructure will reduce congestion overall is lying, as is anyone who tries to get you to vote no because congestion won't go down.
There is one thing that does seem to reduce traffic congestion (other than economic recession), and that's congestion pricing, which has been a huge success in London (which has light rail by the way--it's called the Tube). But congestion pricing requires a system of tolls and transit alternatives. Tolls are politically unlikely here, and require that drivers change their expectation of free, easy motoring. In any case, voting no on Prop 1 doesn't make tolls more or less likely, and voting yes only makes it more likely at the margins, starting with the floating bridges. As for transit, this package goes a long way toward getting it into place.
Conclusion
In 1968, Seattle voters had an opportunity to approve a light rail system as extensive as the current proposals (though without the Eastside emphasis that is necessary now because of subsequent development.) That was one year before I was even born. It failed because of many of the same no arguments that are still being used dishonestly today. Proponents thought this was a temporary setback and that we'd pass a system eventually. The cost would have been about a billion and a half dollars, and it would have been completed by 1985 (including light rail to Bothell, which is only being studied by ST2), which was the end of my first year in high school. The idea did come back to the ballot in 1970, a year after I was born, but it was defeated. Atlanta got our federal funding (2/3 of the total). Here we are half a lifetime later and we still don't have any light rail, and the Sierra Club is saying we should vote no and then come back in a couple of years with a proposal more to their liking. Even if they lose this argument and we finish this on time, we'll be waiting until I'm nearly 60 before this is completed. If we vote no, it's unlikely to come back next year with a major election on the calendar and the wolves circling Sound Transit's wounded body calling for a regional agency to replace it. If it comes back at all, it's likely to build even less and have even less support from the public. That's the problem with half-measures--the people who don't want to build anything still don't want to build anything, and the people who want something are unsatisfied with what little they get and turn against it. It's quite likely that if this fails, we'll build no light rail at all, for another half-lifetime. MY half-lifetime. The only one I have left. (I'll note that many of you reading this are about my age.) As for roads, if there is no alternative to roads in the form of transit, roads will get built because they'll be the only option left. So we'll have another half lifetime of sprawl (and greenhouse emissions), until the Puget Sound area looks like LA with development up to the foothills and a tangled spaghetti of new highways, and a daily menu of smog.
Fuck that. I'm voting yes, and so should you.