You know that old “Did I just say that out loud?” trope, like when Homer Simpson reverses his inner and outer monologues to comic effect? Well, that’s kinda what happened to Ted Van Dyk when he absentmindedly revealed the true objective of “governance reform”:
It would not stop light rail construction in place, but it would limit construction to a line running from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to either Convention Place, Husky Stadium, or Northgate. Future funding would be focused more greatly on express bus, bus rapid transit, and normal bus service; dedicated transit lanes; HOV lanes; tolling; and selective repair and expansion of long neglected local roads and lifeline highways. Citywide trolleys definitely would not be part of the scheme.
See, that’s the sort of honest discussion of governance reform you might hear over foie gras and Chateau Lynch-Bages at the Rainier Club (or some crank and a dead hooker at the Discovery Institute,) but it wasn’t really meant for public consumption. Publicly, the goal sounds laudable — the creation of a four-county, elected, regional transportation commission “better able to make independent, cost-benefit-based proposals for balanced transportation systems” — while privately our region’s power elite have always understood governance to be a scheme for shifting infrastructure dollars from rail to roads.
Well, thanks to Van Dyk and his inability to distinguish between consensus and wishing, it’s gonna be a tad harder for backers to sneak governance reform through the legislature this session. My fellow bloggers are all over the issue (here, here and here) while Josh over at The Stranger has aptly labeled it “the New Prop 1.” Driving a stake through the heart of light rail is the kinda thing muckraking bloggers like me hold grudges over, especially now that the goal of governance reform has been clearly spelled out, so you can bet that politically ambitious legislators would be wise to think twice before blindly signing on to this pro-roads/anti-rail vision of our region’s transportation future.
In fact, what we really need to solve our transportation problems is less regionalism, not more, a thesis I intend to lay out in some detail over the coming days and weeks. Stay tuned.
The last thing we need is another local taxing authority that will inevitably be captured by special interests.
Van Dyk did us all a great service by explaining his real reasons for “governance reform”. It has nothing to do really with what is the best transportation mix or system and ways to achieve it but really how to transfer dollars to “lifeline highways”, roads and buses. Sounds like an old recycled Kemper Freeman, Jr proposal to me – all roads lead to Bellevue Square.
What light rail needs is a viable funding mechanism that marries infrastructure costs to users, like motorists have. Highways are paid for by those who drive on them. Even the state ferry system is 80% rider-supported, and the other 20% comes from highway users (the ferry system is considered an extension of the state highway system).
Light rail should be paid for by those who ride on it. When somone figures out how to do this, opposition to light rail will melt away.
Human nature being what it is, something that’s incredibly expensive always looks better if you can make someone else pay for it.
I get it. Van Dyk is sort of acting like the infamous DI “wedge document.” ID = Creationism; Governance Reform = Killing Light Rail and Building More Roads!!
If I ever actually meet Ted Van Dyk, I’ll probably have to have a few words with him. His Crosscut post was a good illustration of his own Plan B, but has shockingly little to do with structural reform that Rep. Jarrett and I have been talking about and working on for several years now.
Our work centers on re-negotiating the existing contract that creates and empowers the Puget Sound Regional Council. If we intend to strengthen the land use-transportation linkage, to motivate sufficient density to abate the high cost of housing and to ensure environmentally-friendly mobility in this region, (instead of just talking about it, which we seem to enjoy) … well, then, that won’t happen by doing the same things that we’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
In case you haven’t noticed, this approach doesn’t seem to be working very well. While we’ve been wringing our hands, talking about how we don’t want to become L.A. … well, that traffic out there looks amazingly like L.A., don’t you think?
This is about a lot more than Sound Transit, and eventually, we’ll collectively figure that out.
Impeachment – 9 Years Ago This Week
In December of 1998, the House of Representatives, through a bill authored by serial adulterer Henry Hyde, during a lame-duck session of Congress where Speaker and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich (who started up with a mistress while his wife was in the hospital with cancer) had to hand over his gavel to Ray LaHood, during a floor debate marred by the resignation of potential House Speaker candidate and serial adulterer Bob Livingston, voted to impeach the President of the United States for only the second time in American history. The count was 228-206 on the perjury charge, and 221-212 on obstruction of justice (two other counts failed). Being the anniversary week, C-SPAN decided to air large portions of the House debate.
I couldn’t stop watching.
You actually can read the transcripts here, but believe me when I tell you that the phony sanctimony from the Republicans is striking. I’ve never heard so many renderings of history, deep intoning about the Constitution and reverance for the rule of law come out in such a stream of pabulum in my life. Set against the background of the current Administration, which has lied us into war, spied on American citizens, tortured and indefinitely detained suspects without trial in secret sites all over the world, subverted the will of the people through deliberate deception, and brought this country to its knees, all in full view of many of these same lawmakers, the experience of watching them speak is almost otherworldly.
What the Republicans were actually doing is throwing a hissy fit. They saw in the Lewinsky case an opportunity to whine and cry and get a media predisposed to hating Bill Clinton on their side. After all, he came in and trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place. So they would use every rhetorical means at their disposal to make the impeachment about these abstract concepts of justice that they
regularly ignore these days, so that they could mask the fact that they were trying to remove a President over a blow job, and among those voting to sustain that were Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Randy “Duke” Cunningham and the entire cast of sexual and moral deviants.
The media, not recognizing that the public largely didn’t care about Clinton’s infidelity as much as they cared about his policies, played the scandal to the hilt, using sensationalism for ratings glory, but also trying to cast a member out of their Village they prized so much, because the Clintons weren’t part of their gang. The endless series of blonde female prosecutors filled the cable nets, pundits of the kind of Chris Matthews sat around looking grim, and the High Broderists moaned about the “crisis” in Washington, which was the only place in the country there was a crisis, of course.
RR how do you calculate that 80% figure of user fee support for the ferries?
Does that include capital, capital replacement as well as operating costs?
How do you calculate that 20%, is that the transfer of funds from the gas taxes??
Thanks.
Light rail sucks. Plain and simple. It’s grossly expensive for what we get- compare the cost per mile of light rail (estimates range around $200million/mile) to that of even the SLUT (which cost just $53million for 1.3 miles) or of course the MUCH lower cost of plain old buses.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to kill light rail. It should have never been built in the first place.
re #8
User fee (fares) support for state ferries is 80% of operating costs. It does not include capital costs.
Actually Ted Van Dyk usually opposes anything that’s an advancement from the status quo. At least that is the impression I got from reading his newspaper columns over the years. So it’s not surprising to me that he would oppose light rail, even though I strongly disagree with that viewpoint.
So let me see if I have this right. This region needs highway improvements and transit improvements, and there is not nearly enough money to do all that is needed. So the solution is to create a whole new governing body of elected officials and staff, some obviously making over $100,000 a year, to do what exactly, more studies?
Goldy is right about this, despite the protests of the state representative.
The “governance” proposal being pushed by Norm Rice and John Stanton (on behalf of Dino Rossi) would mean a takeover of Sound Transit (one of the few things that is really working well) – funds now specifically targeted to building a true high capacity transit system would be split with road funds. That’s clear. This gang anticipates endless big regional “roads and transit” ballot measures just like Prop. 1.
I’m too old to wait for big regional “governance reform” to solve anything. We’ve been reforming regional government around here for over 40 years. Better to actually concentrate on building something that will last. Small local steps are better because that’s what been proven to work. Waiting for the theory of perfect regional government is a big expensive roll of the dice.
And why would anyone want land use policies in King County influenced by the bulldozer crowd that dominates politics in most other counties in the state? King County is big enough to call itself a region. It is where most of the big transportation problems are. Is it too much to ask the state legislature to do us all a favor and just get the hell out of the way?
Or maybe Olympia could actually complete the state roads that need fixing and maybe quit punting responsibility to a big new regional government that would make the Port of Seattle look peachy.
@9 Paul Cox, please understand that the reason light rail is more expensive than “plain old buses” is that it also provides new right-of-way. We can buy all the buses in the world and if they are only stuck in traffic, what on earth do they accomplish? If you want to compare costs, compare light rail with the cost of adding new lanes on any of the region’s freeways, starting with I-5 in Seattle. When you do that, suddenly light rail starts to look downright affordable.