THE MONORAIL ADVOCATES refuse to quietly go away, even though Seattle’s political powers-that-be want them to.
For those of you who just tuned in, Dick Falkenbury and Grant Cogswell launched a grass-roots initiative drive back in the late ’90s, to build a 50-mile citywide monorail system. The politicians, the newspapers, and the business establishment all denounced the scheme as impracticable, not cost-effective, and (most accurately) a wrench in the civic leaders’ carefully planned-out, lobbied-for, and funding-applied-for regional transit scheme.
The initiative passed. The city govt. followed the letter of the new law and absolutely nothing more, in establishing an agency to “study” the scheme’s viability. (In Seattle governance, to send a project to be “studied” is to politely kill it.)
Sure enough, the study group gave the city what the cit wanted to read–a report claiming a monorail would be impracticable and not cost-effective.
Under the initiative’s text, the city was permitted to revise the original citywide monorail scheme starting this summer if the study group decided it couldn’t work out as the initiative originally stated. That’s what the city council’s been doing the past month or so–“revising” the monorail plan into oblivion, by sticking it under the administrative thumb of regional transit-planning bureaucrats who’ve already said they don’t care much for it.
Even before this latest action-in-favor-of-inaction, the original initiative’s backers had been back on the streets with a new initiative. Under the petition slogan “We Said MONORAIL,” the new initiative calls for a more emphatically defined monorail-building organization, one the bureaucrats can’t legally quash so easily.
What the planning bureaucrats don’t understand is a basic facet of human nature. People like things that are attractive. They’ll be much more likely, I believe, to get outta their wasteful cars and onto a transit system if it’s fun and futuristic and streamlined and gets you around within your community. That’s what the Monorail Initiative’s backers want to see built (with private funds as much as possible).
The Sound Transit system, already begun by the bureaucrats, will utilize “light rail” vehicles running sometimes at street level, sometimes in tunnels (tying up lots of real estate for construction staging areas, while giving few or no scenic views to riders); along routes devised more for commuters than for in-town residents. (Sound Transit is taking tax $$ from three counties; while the monorail scheme is purely in-Seattle).
There’s no real reason two transit concepts can’t both work. Their mapped-out routes cover largely different destinations, and are intended largely for riders with different purposes. The plain ol’ light rail line could work for plain ol’ work trips. But a citywide monorail would be something people would want to ride. It could even become a tourist attraction.
ALL THIS COULD BE MOOT, however, if professional demagogue and John Carlson pal Tim Eyman gets his way. Eyman’s Initiative 745 will be on the statewide ballot this November, giving voters in economically depressed regions outside Puget Sound a chance to “stick it to” those haughty Seattleites by killing all mass transit programs statewide.
Officially, it would require 90 percent of all transportation money raised anywhere within the state to be used exclusively on roads and highways; effectively, it would divert funds from needed transit projects in and around Seattle and put it into make-work roadbuilding schemes in counties that haven’t seen as much growth (or as many traffic jams).
It would take the Seattle area’s now-horrible commuter traffic and guarantee it would only become worse; which just might be what John “I Hate Seattle” Carlson would want anyway. Carlson is a master of the politics of divisiveness and cruelty; one more reason he should not become Governor.
TOMORROW: Fashionable magazines depict ordinary people’s bodies as oddities.
ELSEWHERE:
