After the defeat of Prop 1, Eli Sanders wondered why suburban voters like light rail, but not buses.
Seattle is surrounded by a ring of voters who appear to hate the idea of funding buses. But in 2008, voters in that same suburban ring voted in favor of funding light rail. (Take the suburban city of Kent, for example. Only 27.2 percent of its voters wanted to save Metro bus service this year. But in 2008, returns showed 50.8 percent of Kent voters in favor of funding light rail.)
These were different measures, of course, but that’s very much the point. There was something in this year’s proposal — whether it be car tabs [to fix roads and fund bus service], the focus on bus transit, or Metro Transit itself — that alienated suburban voters. The result was a marked decline of support that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.
So what was it? The influence of the Prop-1-bashing Seattle Times on suburban voters? The weirdness of an April election? Something about the winsomeness of trains that buses just can’t match? Theories?
As a suburban voter (and a long-time Metro rider and supporter), I wish I had a better answer to this question. I was frustrated to see Prop 1 go down, but I wasn’t all that surprised. The roads near my house were littered with signs saying ‘No $60 car tabs’.
Part of the problem is certainly that trains are seen as a more efficient mode of transit than buses. But I also had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that Metro was bluffing about the need to cancel routes, and won’t actually cancel them. They cited the Seattle Times, but I’m not even sure the Times went quite that far down the rabbit hole (or maybe it did, I honestly don’t read their shit anymore). So maybe it’s not as much a negative view of buses as it is a negative view of Metro itself.
Either way, as a suburbanite who relies on the 102 bus to get to my job downtown, I have one thing to say to Seattle with respect to preserving the regional character of the Metro system.
Save your routes and don’t worry about us.
I know that I might be fucked if things continue in that direction and Metro starts to de-emphasize suburban routes, but seriously, it would be hilarious to watch traffic go to levels of shit previous thought unimaginable as all of us bus commuters get back in our cars. Let’s bring it on! Carmageddon!
There has been quite a bit of noise about metro drivers being overpaid, and working nearly unlimited overtime on top of that. Some of the arguments seem to hold water.
How do the Metro drivers feel about service cuts?
Face it, the car tab is a hated tax. You have to pay it all at once, instead of in little driblets (like the sales tax), and the guy driving a beater has to pays as much as the jerk in a Beemer who just cut him off, which is very unfair. And it isn’t a $60 tax, it’s a $60 tax on EACH CAR, which for my penniless neighbor with 14 beater cars adds up to $840 a year — money he does not have. And that’s ON TOP OF the car tab tax everybody is already paying. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this tax got shot down at the ballot box.
A Seattle-only car tab tax probably would pass, if people think it’s for pothole repairs. Know why? Because nobody will pay it. Everybody in Seattle will license their cars to a post office box in the ‘burbs, just like they did to evade the Monorail tax. Remember what happened when the legislature closed that loophole at the city’s request? The public demanded another revote on the Monorail, and killed the project. Public transportation is a good idea if someone else pays for it. If you can figure out a way to tax people in New Jersey to pay for our bus system, you’ll be home free.
I hate to say it, but I would bet you that Seattle voters don’t like fucking buses either, but are willing to vote for them. I went downtown Seattle to work on a bus for 8 years. I rode buses as a very young person in the big urban area I grew up in and then trolley and subway later. Basically, no matter how much I don’t want to be, I’m prejudiced against buses and I don’t trust them to come when they are supposed to or be a pleasant ride. But I’m willing to vote for them. I suspect most people like me have trouble copping to this with their bus advocate friends, who like you above somehow don’t get what the difference is.
With the monorail, I don’t think its demise had as much to do with the voting public as the phenomena that wealthy interests given enough shots at a vote will often eventually get their way, absent some extremely passionate opposition.
Also, I’m guessing that the increasing speed of the coming climate change disaster will start to have some strange effects on how people vote, that aren’t necessarily logical. Anyone with half a brain knows that without a huge national/international initiative, this local shit is meaningless fiddle playing. But, hey, we all gotta have a purpose in life, right?
I mean, look at it, the most likely Democratic candidate made a major speech asking corporate interests to be more public spirited. Asking. Public spirit. Thirty years ago it would have resulted in a lot of humorous satire. Now, we are too beat down by the relentless tragedy.
But, hey, sure, let me sign your petition. I’ll vote to raise property tax. But in an age where the Democratic party panders to the argument that $15/hr is a grand imposition on capital and may be one step over the line, its hard to get worked up over this bus thing, given what’s coming without some serious challenge to the BIG money boys that would probably have to start at the local level. LOL
…raise my property tax.
yes, I would vote to tax myself – even though I hate fucking buses.
Rail versus bus bias is a well-known and often studied phenomenon. See http://usa.streetsblog.org/201.....ver-buses/ for example.
But, I agree with RR – everyone hates the car tab tax. Didn’t an increase in tabs even fail in Seattle a few years ago?
Both Lee and Eli Sanders neglected to mention the most fundamental reason Prop 1 failed at the polls and especially in the suburbs. It was a special election held in the spring. Had this thing been on the ballot in November, especially November of a presidential election year, it would’ve passed. The difference is voter turnout.
Sound Transit learned this lesson twice. Their two successful votes were when the president was on the ballot. Their two failed votes were spring special elections.
So it’s not a bus vs. rail thing at all. It’s who turns out at the polls. Anti-tax voters will always be there voting No. The less tax-averse voters come out much less often.
@1
I doubt we’ll hear anything from Metro drivers about what they are willing to do in order to minimize cuts until there truly is no other option.
The just-failed measure would have restored what they gave up a couple of years ago. We were told in thread topics on this site that there was no other option if Prop 1 failed.
Immediately after the failure we learn that there are – what, three? – other options. So there is no reason for Metro union members to come to the table while there are other options for keeping them employed without having to concede anything.
Of course, higher revenue projections pretty much halved the shortfall we were told existed, and we didn’t learn about that until Metro was forced to admit it. So it’s possible there are other aspects of good news being held back while different groups work to restore most of the funding.
Just this week a post topic on this site crowed about how quickly Seattle is growing. That translates to more revenues to Metro. How does that affect the remaining gap? We’ll just have to wait to find out.
“Immediately after the failure we learn that there are – what, three? – other options.”
This is silliness on crack. The options were fallback options, none of which were known to anyone until after the vote failed. It’s not like Metro supporters were sitting around saying, “hehe, wait till this source of funding fails, we have an EVEN MORE IMPERFECT way of saving our budget that we’re keeping secret from everybody!”
LOL
@ 10
Bullshit.
Even people on HA were predicting the failure of Prop 1. Goldy said
http://horsesass.org/does-prop.....tion-moot/
he wasn’t surprised it failed.
As far as other options not being known to anyone, Goldy himself, explicitly, proved that statement false:
It’s not like I write in a vacuum. So when I posted this morning that we should pursue Plan C, and buy back Metro bus service cuts within Seattle, it’s not like I didn’t know that transit advocates had been discussing exactly such an option.
http://horsesass.org/group-to-.....n-seattle/
And then, of course, there’s Goldy’s post in The Stranger, back in December:
City officials have been quietly exploring options to “buy back” in-city Metro bus service cuts in the event that all other options fail.
http://www.thestranger.com/sea.....d=18454197
They were fallback options, sure. But they were options, discussed in print as far back as December. That ‘none of which were known to anyone until after the vote failed’ shit is false.
I think it was very, very wise of Metro and City/County folks to be planning for the possibility that Prop 1 would fail. I think it’s disingenuous for HA types to continue to act like these other options are materializing out of the blue and that strategies such as those now being very openly discussed weren’t being discussed well in advance of the vote. Given Goldy’s printed words and a suspicion that he probably didn’t print EVERYTHING he knew, I’ll stand by the accuracy of what I wrote @9. Other plans were being readied in the event that Prop 1 didn’t pass. Goldy knew. I suspect so did you.
@10,11
I really should have added one more paragraph from Goldy’s column in The Stranger, linked @ 11:
Seattle has unused Transportation Benefit District authority of its own (sales tax and car tab fee) that could yield up to $51 million in new revenue a year if approved by a simple majority of Seattle voters. Officials are also exploring a $25 million property tax levy “lid lift” that would also require a simple majority at the polls. Meanwhile, there’s another $50 million in new revenue available to the council without voter approval, via a hike in the city’s commercial parking tax, and a reinstatement of the controversial head tax, a per-employee tax on city businesses.
Sure, there’s more detail now. But are the concepts
Property tax increase
Parking tax increase
Employee head tax
of what is currently being discussed materially different from those Goldy listed five months ago?
They seem pretty similar to me. But I’m affected by crack-induced silliness.
I think you’re right about all of those factors. Honestly a drop-off in support this extreme is most likely a result of several negative impacts happening simultaneously: lower turnout, hating car tabs, hating buses. But I’d add another. The 2008 measure succeeded in part because it adds NEW transit capacity, and would theoretically ease traffic for suburbanites. New money for new improvements sounds better than maintaining the status quo busing at a higher price, which is how a lot of No voters perceived it. I heard more than one No-voting suburbanite person accuse KC Metro of “bluffing,” and were totally unconvinced that any cuts would happen at all. I don’t remember anything like that in the lead-up to the 2008 vote. That one felt like a much cleaner “Do you want this new thing or not” kind of vote, which probably helped its case.
Is it really that hard to guess why people prefer buses over rail? Aside from the perception that the bus is for poor people, let’s consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of rail over buses.
Rail
Advantages:
Bypasses traffic
Reliable
Fast
More comfortable/steady largely due to being on a fixed track
Relatively quiet
Short loading times
Multiple cars passengers can move to to avoid other passengers
Disadvantages:
Any disruption on the line shuts down the entire system
In the event of criminal behavior on the train, getting help from the conductor can be difficult/impossible
Bus
Advantages:
Can be re-routed in the event of disruption along the route
The route can be permanently re-routed in cases of changed demographics
Disadvantages:
Uncomfortable/unsteady due to frequent braking and potholes
Slow
Gets stuck in traffic
Noisy
Smelly in terms of the exhaust they belch out
Long loading times
Stuck with an annoying passenger? The only way to get away is to get off the bus entirely and wait for the next one
The line can be permanently cut due to spending shortfalls
Maybe if bus drivers were not such douchebags I would consider voting yes on these measures.
@9 It’s always easy to give yourself a tax break by cutting someone else’s wages, isn’t it? If bus drivers are as overpaid as you claim, why aren’t YOU driving a bus? Could it be because you don’t like night shifts, weekend shifts, holiday shifts, early morning shifts, split shifts, rotating shifts; riders who refuse to pay fares, drunks, drug addicts, and riders who attack drivers; and so on and so forth?
@11 If I can briefly change the subject, what’s the fallback option for a world with 30 billion humans and sea levels 300 feet higher than present? A scientist named Stephen Emmott discussed this issue in a book called “Ten Billion,” which ends by summing up humanity’s future in the following sentence: “I think we’re fucked.”
The fact is, you stupid humans don’t have fallback positions for much of anything. Collectively, your species makes dumb decisions, or no decisions at all, and things go to hell in a handbasket, most of the time. Look at your wars. Look at your economies. Look at what you’re doing to the planet that constitutes your home and your life support system. And you humans think you’re the smartest species? Ha!
@15 Maybe they wouldn’t be such douchebags if you weren’t such a douchebag.
@15: It’s not the drivers, it’s you. Seriously, all Metro drivers are the same? My wife rides the bus to her office at the UW every day and has for the past 20 years. She has complained a few times that a driver has windows open, making for a cold ride but that’s about it. Bus drivers have to deal with the general public and that includes a lot of difficult people. And some real assholes. You know who you are.
Well, it would be nice if bus drivers would observe more than a 1/4th of the traffic laws.
http://www.kirotv.com/news/new.....lan/nf5sC/
@19, I was not referring to how drivers treat passengers, I was talking about how they behave in traffic…they are (more often than not) a menace.
Ok FOLKs…This is an un-official chime from a Metro bus driver.
I just want people to know we are people/tax-payers/car drivers/and transit users too. We serve the public faithfully day in and day out…nights…holidays…and in all forms of precipitation to the best of our abilities.
Prop 1 was intended to fail…a political play to the east-side Maserati crowd. Now the City is stepping in…good. The city has plenty more to do to promote transit by constraining the car. Downtown must do like many other great cities of the world, ration access to the downtown of single-occupancy cars with a heavy fine. Parking structures with transit should be placed around the fringes of the CBD to encourage workers/shoppers to enjoy the city without impacting it.
The state must reinstate the most progressive tax this state has ever known….the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax–a defacto income tax. Or…$30 tabs–quarterly. Something other than constraint on needed services so car drivers can abuse abuse abuse. Tolls? Regressive. Flat tax tabs? Regressive. The rich must pay so the poor can participate. Oh, Liberal Seattle….show us the way.
Addressing some above comments:
@1 — How do Metro drivers feel about service cuts? What busts our chops most is seeing the pain in riders’ eyes when their favorite routes are being limited or eliminated. Our work is going to get chopped up into smaller bits…our buses will be loaded to unsafe levels…our pay is going to stagnate…our recovery times are going to get squeezed down more…possibly, more coaches might break down…and The WHOLE Central District is going to be a bus-free zone. All this can be averted if the Senate Transportation Committee would get off their butts (Mary Margaret where are you?). As for car driving in Seattle….it has to be curtailed, constrained, regulated, taxed, banned in places (3rd Ave), and alternatives put in place to keep cars from destroying the city.
@9 — I’m here to tell you…while KCMetro and the Union are in the middle of a Three-Year Contract negotiation, we are feeling quite weakened by 1) The Legislature’s lack of effort in extending taxing authority to Transit Agencies. 2) This No vote and the demise of the $20 Tabs for the TWO-Years the Legislature wasted. 3) No thanks to Seattle Times for “thinking” our wages are TOO high….while Sawant etal are pushing for $15 minimum wage….just half what we’re earning….and we haven’t seen a COLA in nearly three years (concession) and our run times/recovery times have collapsed to unhealthy levels (concession) meaning, we’re working harder for longer for less money. Now we are facing possible layoffs, or hours reduced to 5-hours per day. Tell me….how selfish is that?
@16 — Thank You! Our work can be quite trying.
@17 — How does one move buildings aside to make room for the ever-growing glut of cars?
@20 — Metro Bus Drivers DO observe the traffic laws. We receive regular refresher training and random ride checks to help keep us in tune. Also lot of Rules of the Road notices (over our urinals and toilet stalls) and Policy Bulletins to reiterate Metro policy. When you hear such a complaint, its usually coming from a position of ignorance and creative law creation or interpretation to bolster their case for driving 70 MPH in the 21st largest city in the United States with a 2.8% growth rate. There is really no more room for such behavior.
@21 — Thank You!
@20 and all you complaining about overpaid Union drivers…
the driver that caused that crash was an employee of First Transit, Inc. of Cincinnati. Unlikely a union shop.
“Sound Transit owns the bus, and Community Transit in Snohomish County operates it. Community Transit subcontracts with First Transit, Inc. of Cincinnati, which employs the driver and maintenance crews.”
www dot kirotv dot com/news/news/one-dead-several-injured-after-bus-driver-says-bus/nXjQH/
@21 Our buses should follow the rules that London uses. You have to yield to buses. When they signal and pull out, get out of the way! When they signal to turn, get out of the way! By signalling, they mean as soon as that blinker goes on.
@24 In fact, it would appear that the majority of motorists (presumably including our friend “Nope”) are completely oblivious to the fact that it is in fact the law around here that autos must yield to buses. Are any of you aware of those little triangular signs on the back of each bus? They’re supposed to remind you of that. Of course, if it’s not that that’s got your britches in a bunch but the last time you wanted to charge through an intersection on the right and found yourself blocked or pocketed by a bus pulling into a stop to pick up passengers, it’s not only the rules of the road you’re trying to ignore but common sense and the laws of nature. Grow the fuck up.
You know what would be great? Get the Bus stops away from the fucking intersections.
@23, Being a Union member does not magically make you awesome at your job.