Prop 1
A reader wanted to alert me to the Proposition 1 campaign in the Seattle area, which is basically a plan for a massive upgrade in the region’s transit offerings. The plan is impressively multi-modal, including light rail, commuter rail, and express buses which is exactly as it should be. As I’ve never been to Seattle, it’s a little bit difficult for me to evaluate the details of the proposed route map, but it seems to hit the right bases — linking the airport, downtown Seattle, downtown Bellevue, the Microsoft campus, etc.
At any rate, best of luck to the campaigners. It’s worth observing that it’s in the nature of these kind of things that as you improve any one part of the network it becomes more worth contemplating additional improvements. For example, based on their distance and population size, the Seattle-Portland corridor looks like a pretty good candidate for a high-speed rail link. But of course the problem with these kind of situations is that if once you get to Seattle you need a car to get around, then you may as well drive. That, in turn, casts some doubt on the wisdom of a HSR link. But build some transit in Seattle, and then getting to Seattle on the train looks like a better option. And, of course, if the California high-speed rail initiative goes forward, we can perhaps someday look forward to HSR all up-and-down the Pacific Coast from San Diego to Vancouver.
47 Responses to “Prop 1”
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September 22nd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I may be wrong, but I don’t think there’s enough economic integration between Portland and Seattle to justify a dedicated HSR link. It would be neat because they are relatively close, but there’s just not the huge amount of traffic between Portland and Seattle that there is between, say, San Francisco and LA. Portland, though a really neat place, is still something of a small town.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
There’s never going to be high-speed rail up the entire West Coast. It’s 700 miles from San Francisco to Portland, if you go up the coast to avoid the major mountain ranges. There are no population centers along the way — the biggest town is probably Eureka, with about 20,000 people. So we’re talking about a distance that’s about the same as DC to Florida, with no stops along the way.
SF to LA and Portland to Seattle both have great HSR potential. Those are two pairs of closely linked cities. People travel between them all the time. But they’re not particularly connected to one another.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Toady, I somewhat agree, but a rail route (high speed) would definitely improve integration. The drive from Seattle to Portland is really, really hellish at times, and always insanely boring. It is truly a slog. Plus, Portland and Seattle are very, very similar cities in many ways in terms of industry, environmental attitudes, and residents who have lived (or considered) living both places.
Portland is a smaller city, but it certainly isn’t the case that Seattle is in a different league of metropolis. They are both medium sized cities that attract a lot of the same demographics. Vancouver, BC is by far the biggest thing happening on the Northwest coast in terms of metropolitan size and diversity.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Re: prop1
Although I no longer live in Seattle I do remember a model very much like this at the Seattle World’s Fair 46 years ago.
The centerpiece was the monorail that was to be expanded to include all communities around Lake Washington.
When I go home to visit I always think of that grand plan while sitting in gridlocked traffice.
Hope they get to it this time around.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I may be wrong, but I don’t think there’s enough economic integration between Portland and Seattle to justify a dedicated HSR link.
That’s not true.
Amtrak has a commuter service which runs between Vancouver BC and Portland. It’s been experiencing massive growth – mainly on the Portland to Seattle route.
There are a TON of people who commute back and forth between the two cities. Most of them either drive or take the Horizon Air shuttle flights.
HSR may be a ways off but Amtrak is working on line upgrades along the Cascadia route to make it more viable as a commuter option. Right now, it doesn’t work very well because the train times aren’t very good from what I’ve heard from my co-workers who commute down to Portland and becuase of the right of way issues. Even with these issues, it’s a pretty popular line.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
As I’ve never been to Seattle, it’s a little bit difficult for me to evaluate the details of the proposed route map
That’s too bad — it’s a beautiful city. Definitely worth a trip for a long weekend.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
And you know what? Keep building that Vancouver-to-San Diego train like all the way to Tijuana — it would help with border security. Literally tens of millions of people cross the San Diego/Tijuana border in automobiles every year. The border guard does their best, but they can’t check every trunk and every freight truck for stowaways — there’s too many! One place you CAN do a very thorough check on the cheap, though, is a train station, where it’s possible to inspect every single person’s papers as they enter the waiting room to board the train.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:41 pm
It’s 700 miles from San Francisco to Portland, if you go up the coast to avoid the major mountain ranges.
This is exactly backwards. The inland route from SF to Portland is far easier — which is why the existing Amtrak trains, and the Interstate, go that way. There is a long stretch, roughly from Redding, CA to Eugene, OR, that is mostly mountainous, but south of Redding is the flat Central Valley and north of Eugene is the flat Willamette Valley. Whereas the coastal route is mountains coming down to the ocean, all the way. And the route from the coast to Portland is plenty rugged too.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Toady,
Not only does Amtrak run pretty full trains between Seattle and Portland, Horizon Air has dozens of flights a day, not to mention all the other carriers.
I think I read once that the vast majority of planes into PDX are either coming from or going to Seattle.
Granted a lot of that traffic is for connecting flights, but even then moving to a HSR-airport link up like many Euroean cities do could work really well and would eliminate the need to expand PDX and SeaTac, neither of which is exactly sitting next to a bunch of abundant cheap real estate.
I agree that high speed rail all the way down the coast isn’t likely, A San Diego-San Fran route and a Vancouver BC to Portland route both make a lot of sense.
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
too many steves: Vancouver may be more diverse than Seattle but it’s actually quite a lot smaller. It’s actually closer in size to Portland. Here are the numbers:
Metro Vancouver population: 2,249,725
Metro Seattle population: 3,424,441
Metro Portland population: 2,159,720
I agree, though, that Vancouver is a happening place, and the public transportation there is damn good.
Vancouver
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
The plan is impressively multi-modal, including light rail, commuter rail, and express buses which is exactly as it should be.
Based on what? Why “should” it be multi-modal? Have you even taken a cursory look at the case for each mode?
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Hi Matthew! Thanks for the mention.
Amtrak is running four daily round trips from Portland to Seattle – although it’s not really Amtrak, it’s mostly paid for by the state government. We’re expecting a fifth and sixth round trip in the next year (cross your fingers), as the current four can be sold out regularly. The state plans to buy more equipment to increase service past that – their plan shows up to 13 daily round trips, plenty to justify upgrading to high speed rail.
The Proposition 1 plan is rock solid. It’ll connect Seattle and Bellevue, which is a huge amount of traffic, and Seattle with Northgate. It sets us up for extensions to downtown Everett, Redmond and Tacoma in a subsequent package, as well as a second line in Seattle. We just don’t have the taxing authority to do it all at once, and we need more bus service right away. It’ll also improve commuter rail service between Seattle and Tacoma (and later Lakewood), and set us up to extend commuter rail to the south edge of Pierce County and maybe later as far as Olympia.
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
One problem with this; Seattle passed a monorail initiative a few years back, and people who didn’t like it forced a referendum on whether to continue. So the vote happened and the monorail won and was able to continue. Then another referendum was forced and the monorail won that one also. This went on and on; every time some asshole didn’t like it they would force a referendum. There ended up being five referendums and finally the monorail lost the fifth referendum (about the financing plan, naturally; opponents forced a vote on that and it lost because everyone likes public works projects but no one likes the specifics of how they will be paid for). This process makes it impossible for something like the plan Matt is advertising to ever get completed–if you’re building something you have to win every vote ever or else the whole project goes down. (Unless it’s something like football stadiums or baseball stadiums; those get rammed through even when they lose votes.) I’ll be amazed if there’s ever serious rail transit in Seattle.
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
The state plans to buy more equipment to increase service past that – their plan shows up to 13 daily round trips, plenty to justify upgrading to high speed rail.
Dream on. It’ll never happen. There’s only one even semi-serious HSR proposal in the country today, and that’s going to crash and burn for the reasons described here.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Jimble, I think you were responding to my post re the populations of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver. In any event, I think we each correct, and I’ll try to better explain my point.
You are correct on the overall numbers. However, Vancouver Metropolitan area is about 1111 square miles, while Seattle Metro is about 6000 square miles. So, the densities are about 543 per mile for Seattle, while Vancouver is nearly 2000 per square mile (these numbers are for the metro areas, Seattle and Vancouver are nearly identical within their city limits, at about 600,000 each, although Vancouver’s city area is about half that of Seattle, leading to approximately twice the population density).
In any event, to this Seattle resident, Vancouver just seems a lot more urban and dense due to its much smaller city limits and much smaller metro area, but I do not dispute your numbers.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:24 pm
That’s a wacky schematic diagram to illustrate what the prop would pay for. The thin red line from Seatac to Seattle is the segment that will come on line in 2009.
An interesting thing here is that the initial segment is coming in through a part of the city that was redlined and ghettoized for many years. Some of the new development can be pretty astounding to an old-time Seattleite who remembers what used not to be there. Seattle can really use a safety valve for housing demand because, geographically, the city is pretty hemmed in.
There are three levels of rail service in the corridor- heavy commuter stock, run by county-level agencies, corridor trains run by the state DOT, and Amtrak. The corridor trains run between Vancouver BC and Portland, and some parts of the corridor have been certified to speeds over 100 mph, although there are current regulations preventing actually running trains that fast now.
The real crime in this corridor is the amount of truck traffic on the freeway between Seattle and Portland that parallels the rail line. BN has prudently single-tracked long sections but this should really be a double track line and the truck traffic forced onto the rails.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
The map isn’t great, but you can find better maps at the main website.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I live in Tacoma, and am desperately hoping this gets passed. The express bus system between Tacoma and Seattle saved my sanity when I was commuting to UW a couple of years ago, but light rail would be even better (I lived in Chicago for 4 years and miss the L even more than deep-dish pizza, which is really saying something). A Seattle-Portland link would be great too; I have to make that run frequently, and it is indeed deadly dull, and occasionally truly deadly as well (there’s been some awful crashes). A previous commenter is right about our hideous initiative system here in Washington, and all the help it provides to the anti-tax fundamentalists (Tim Eyman, I’m looking at you), but I still have hope sanity will eventually prevail.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Seattle is different from most cities in that an extensive ferry system, run by the State, is an integral and essential part of its transit network.
(Why do I bring this up? Because we have all seen Mixner hating over and over and at length on buses, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, high-speed rail, and bicycles, but never a word about the evils of ferries. It will make a change.)
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:40 pm
This is a revised version of the prop that lost substantially last year. That proposal included extensive road building in addition to the rail and bus components that are similar to the current version. The Sierra Club and some other environmental groups actively campaigned against it because of the road measures.
The airport-downtown light rail was approved in 1996. It will be completed next year and extend north to the University of Washington in 2016.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:52 pm
roac: “Because we have all seen Mixner hating over and over and at length…but never a word about the evils of ferries”
The current success of the suburban neighborhood, and the extremely low rate of ferry ownership per capita is self-evident proof that ferries are a public transit failure and that automobiles are far-and-away the best form of transit evar.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I lived in Seattle just as the monorail died, and my understanding is that despite the successful referenda, there was never the necessary leadership or dedication in the mayor’s office or the city council to put the necessary resources behind the project. The result was a massive waste of dollars and more gridlock.
Based on recent projects, there IS evidently the willpower to add light rail. Unfortunately, while rail will definitely help get people into Seattle proper, without any disincentive to driving I don’t see how the traffic problem is going to be solved. The downtown tunnel is great, but there are no other dedicated lanes for buses or light rail anywhere between downtown and the park and ride sites.
A more robust transit system would be great for the city (and especially for once and future northeast transplants like me who get stressed out when the bus is 15 minutes late), but it’s just as important that the city doesn’t continue to incentivize driving. Widening the highway, as Boston knows all to well, just creates more traffic. Halting widening projects and – gasp – placing tolls to help finance transportation seem like good ways to encourage use of mass transit.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Americans will never give up the comfort and convenience of their personal hovercraft for stinky ferries.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I actually studied all the news articles and reports that made up the history of the monorail project.
What happened was not that simple, but be careful who you blame.
The first vote was for a study, with the assumption that the monorail project could be private and profitable (yeah, right) – Initiative 41, in 1997. It couldn’t even pencil out, and died quietly.
The second vote, Initiative 53, in 2000, was basically another study – it said ‘build a plan that we can vote on’, assuming that we’d need some public money. It authorized some money for actually building a transportation plan and submitting it to voters.
In November 2002, Citizen Petition No. 1 went on the ballot and passed. There were all these things built into the plan that made it dead in the water – the bonding capacity was too low, the MVET assumptions were too high (they were going to get less tax money than they thought they would – and Sound Transit warned them about this), and they built in requirements that would make contractors have to bend over backward to submit a bid – more so than other public agencies.
So there was a recall vote when it became clear this wasn’t going to happen. What’s interesting here is that the recall vote had ‘yes’ to recall, and ‘no’ to keep the agency alive. Post-vote polling showed that people thought a ‘no’ vote was a vote against the monorail! So the recall failed.
The last vote was because the monorail agency had to cut costs and come up with a new funding plan. The funding plan had a crazy debt to equity ratio, paid nearly five times the total cost due to exotic financing, and cut a lot of corners – like single track across the west seattle bridge. During this time, the monorail agency’s representatives were attacking light rail, making bogus claims about their system’s capability, and acting as if everything was fine. This vote failed.
I really blame only the monorail agency itself for not making a functional plan in the first place. We could have had two votes – one to make the agency, one for a flexible plan. Sound Transit effectively had this – they were created by the state, then put a plan to voters and lost in ‘95, fixed it and passed in ‘96. Their plan was conservative enough that they were able to complete even in the same economy as the monorail.
So please don’t blame our politicians. The monorail agency did a really poor job.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Hey Angry Sam – nobody’s adding general purpose lanes to our major freeways in the corridors where we’re building rail. We know rail in this region is a hit already – we have two commuter rail lines that are bursting at the seams.
Basically, you don’t need to be concerned about it. Our highways are already clogged, there are tons more people moving here, and there’s no place in the city where you can make our highways wider. Transit will do just fine, and all the new kids being born and people moving to the region will use it instead of trying to drive in stopped traffic.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Based on recent projects, there IS evidently the willpower to add light rail. Unfortunately, while rail will definitely help get people into Seattle proper, without any disincentive to driving I don’t see how the traffic problem is going to be solved. The downtown tunnel is great, but there are no other dedicated lanes for buses or light rail anywhere between downtown and the park and ride sites.
Like all other urban light rail projects, Seattle’s system is so small its impact on road congestion is minuscule. The average weekday number of unlinked passenger trips on the line is about 3,000. Maybe 1,500 unique daily riders. Compared to the volume of road passengers in the same area, it’s negligible.
By the way, ridership on the Seattle light rail line during the second quarter of 2008 was lower than for the same period last year, despite the rise in gas prices.
As you suggest, the only way to produce a large-scale shift in modal share (rather than a fraction-of-a-percentage-point shift) from cars/trucks to mass transit is to create large incentives for people to substitute transit for driving. And no policy to do that would be remotely feasible economically or politically.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
“By the way, ridership on the Seattle light rail line during the second quarter of 2008 was lower than for the same period last year, despite the rise in gas prices.”
Uh, Seattle’s light rail line opens in Summer 2009.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:18 am
but never a word about the evils of ferries
To be fair, a lot of the WDOT ferry system is basically and extension of the highway system, and more closely a substitute for ginormously long impractical bridges rather than actual mass transit.
It allows the communities on the west side of sound to diversify a little from military employment or tourism, by giving some a chance to commute to the Seattle side (or some to reverse commute; you see this with higher educated military spouses who can find work in the tech/aero sector, while the military member is at the shipyard, sub base, or NAS – or Everett, but that’s on the same side)
Quick google gives this:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/planning/wtp/datalibrary/facilitiessystems/WAFerries.htmthis which shows about a 2:1 ratio of passengers to cars.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:49 am
Hey Mixner–Seattle doesn’t have a light rail line yet, and won’t until 2008. You’re making up numbers about something that doesn’t even exist.
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:47 am
Matthew, I’ve seen you write about connecting Portland and San Francisco before as if it’s the next logical step after high-speed rail connecting Seattle-Portland and SF-LA, and never acknowledging that the Portland-SF leg would be nearly 4 times as long (650 miles or so) as the Seattle-Portland leg.
Not to say that I wouldn’t like to see it happen one day, but you should at least acknowledge that such a route would not fit the current ideas for high-speed rail to replace shorter flights in the 300-mile range.
Furthermore, even if the situation were to change so that such a route were feasible, it’d be more accurate to think of a route being from Sacramento to Portland, not San Francisco to Portland. The more coastal route is just not practical due to the local topography and the distinct lack of people. North of the SF Bay Area, the biggest urban area on the coast before Portland (which isn’t really on the coast) is Eureka, which has a census-defined Urban Cluster population of 43,452.
To put that in perspective, imagine driving from DC to Jacksonville, Florida, and not passing through an area as big as Brunswick, Georgia. By contrast, roughly paralleling I-5 would at least nab you several smallish-but-non-negligible urbanized areas or clusters — Redding, CA has 105,267; Medford, OR has 128,780; Eugene, OR is 224,409; etc.
In other words, go ahead and advocate for it, but at least acknowledge some of the scope of the problem. Portland and San Francisco are not just a hop, skip, and a jump away from each other.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
I’m from Seattle, and I firmly believe we will choke as a city if we don’t have light rail/subway connections going N-S between northgate and Sea-Tac, and also E-W between downtown Seattle and downtown Bellevue. One of the reasons I moved away to Boston is to avoid the necessity of a car. I might consider moving back some day if Seattle can pass things like Prop 1.
The main problem with Seattle is that everyone thinks they’re soooo green and eco-friendly, and ahead of the rest of the world, but then they vote down any kind of real infrastructure improvements (or they vote for it, but the city council decides they don’t want it). One of the downsides of living in such a mono-culture is no political debate of any kind, and a highly corrupt local government.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:33 am
I like the idea of a HSR between Seattle to Portland, but its for selfish personal purposes, because I have family and friends in both cities and when I make a trip out there, making the awful 3-hour drive between them sucks.
But then, given that a drive takes 3-hours, I can’t imagine you have many “commuters.” How long does the current train take? How long do the flights take from city to city (not gate to gate)? (Public transportation from PDX to the city is lacking, I think.) Price comparisons between the two? And were a HSR built, what would be the time and price? In other words, would HSR make commuting between the two cities feasible? “If you build it, they will come.”
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I can’t believe there are no references to the classic 1992 film Singles. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105415/
The main character is an urban planner, proposes a Seattle based “supertrain” and the project gets denied.
Also, ouch, just realized that movie is 16 years old.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Two comments:
A) I don’t think HSR south of Portland makes much sense. The interstate distance is about 630 miles from Portland to Oakland. If built for the same speed as the proposed LA-SF route, the trip would just scrape in under four hours; the trip length at which HSR is considered comparable to air travel. Three hours is ideal. Plus, the likelihood of a Portland-Oakland route being built to the same standard as the CA route is very low given the differences in population density. I’d rather see that money spent on more sensible intra-regional projects first.
B) You can’t really compare international definitions of “metro area”. The US in particular uses an absurdly broad definition. Especially problematic is that metros are defined by counties, which can get pretty darn big in some parts of the country. Just for comparison, the census defines metro Houston as about 5.5 million people in 10,000 square miles. My home state of Maryland has about the same number of people in 12,000 square miles.
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