More Pavement! (An Enviro who admits we need more roads not mass transit!)

THIS FALL, VOTERS will be asked, as periodically happens, to pony up yet another large sum of money to fix traffic problems, which never seem to get fixed.

Environmental groups are already lining up with concerns about Referendum 51, which goes heavy on the road building at a time when Tim Eyman's free enterprise schemes have limited the available funds for public transit. As a card-carrying tree worshiper (forget hugging; I kneel and pray), I should be beyond skeptical. I should be exuding fire-breathing hostility. They're paving over our planet, you know!

This bit of heresy is what is known as a reality check. Will new and expanded road building encourage more sprawl? Yep. Will it create construction inconvenience, even displace neighborhoods? Of course. Will the lanes fill up with more cars before the asphalt's dry? You bet.

Those very real concerns are far outweighed by two bits of reality many fellow enviros either don't notice or would rather not acknowledge.

First, environmentalism should encompass protecting not just wild spaces, but the "ruined" urban spaces most of us live in. Sprawl isn't just a future threat; it's happened already, and its participants aren't moving back where they came from. As more people come to our region--often attracted by our spectacular natural setting--they're not all going to telecommute or move into densely packed Belltown condos, no matter what the transportation package looks like.

Seattle does not have the second-worst (or whatever) traffic in the country. Traffic follows metropolitan areas, not city limits, and Seattle is about the 12th-biggest city in the country. Not surprisingly, about that many cities, and all of the larger ones--think New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, San Francisco--have traffic at least as bad as here. But only one U.S. city--New York--has a combination of density and geography that supports a transit system that allows people of any income to not own cars and not be considered freaks. If they live in Manhattan--none of the 10 million or so metro New York residents who don't live there can rely on transit to get everywhere. And New York traffic sucks, too.

The grim reality is that American cities are now designed for the automobile. Seattle's gridlock isn't limited to freeways--it's especially nasty on suburban arterials that were never expanded to accommodate all those new subdivisions. In many places and at many times of day, you can't even get to the freeways, let alone get on them (for city dwellers, think Montlake). And guess what? All those idling cars contribute to global warming at least as much as sprawl does. We need to expand our road capacity just to try to catch up to the area's existing population, let alone plan for the inevitable (sorry, folks) population growth.

This leads to the second reality check. A transportation plan devoted to getting all of us out of our single-occupancy cars--the goal of most enviros--is doomed. It won't work.

There are, of course, the aesthetic attractions of combustion vehicles (e.g., our being taught from birth by TV ads to consider our SUVs not just as a machine for getting around but a piece of our personal identity) and the unpleasantness of transit (the loud, reeking wino who sits next to you on the bus insisting on sharing his views on the illuminati). But less negotiable are many, many pragmatic reasons people choose to drive their vehicles, often by themselves.

I speak from personal experience. I bicycled everywhere till age 30; then I got sick. I was sufficiently ill in the mid-'90s that I couldn't even walk the three blocks to my closest bus stop even if where I had been going was three steps from the bus line at the other end. I certainly couldn't, say, carry groceries. Neither can the elderly or disabled. Or the mom with three kids or an infant. (They can't ride bikes everywhere, either.)

Moreover, like most people, my journeys didn't conform to Metro's limited concept of where I might need to go and how long it should take. Now I have a different dilemma: If I need to, say, do an interview or cover a story, do I want to take the half-hour to two hours extra round-trip time it might take to ride a bus during my workday? Generally, no. And like many people, I don't work 9 to 5 and my most frequent trips aren't to or from downtown. To carpool isn't practical, either. And if transit isn't convenient to me--working from home in one of the denser in-city neighborhoods, with buses every 15 minutes much of the day, and with a supercheap disabled pass--it won't be convenient, let alone appealing, for the vast majority of people.

Unless we either redesign our metropolitan area or redesign our society, that's not going to change no matter how many well-intentioned vanpool programs or transit plans are unveiled. Since people will continue to move here and continue to drive, we have two choices: We can either build more roads to help accommodate them, or we can create gridlock that really will be among the country's very worst--with consequences felt most acutely by the priced-out poor, Boeing and other employees of the working classes, and, dare I say it, the environment.

We can certainly challenge--and we should--which roads to build or expand in what order and with what resulting construction impasses. We also need to make hard decisions about how to prioritize transit, education, health care, and all the other essential claims on the public body's limited money. But on the larger question of whether a transportation package heavily focused on road building is in and of itself an evil plot to despoil nature: It is. Get over it.

And if transit isn't convenient to me--
--it won't be convenient, let alone appealing, for the vast majority of people.

False, narcissistic assumption.

Mass transit even benefits those who do not use it by alleviating traffic congestion and limited urban parking spaces.

High-speed rail as an alternative mode of transportation in the U.S. is long overdue. We are reaching the point of diminishing returns as we expand our 4-lane interstates to 6 or (gasp!!!) 8 lanes. And even costly airport expansions make little sense when (prior to 9/11) the air corridors themselves are over-congested.

High-speed rail and maglev offer the perfect alternative to augment & supplement our highway and air transportation infrastructure. For regional trips between 150 and 350 miles, it is faster than automobile and not that much slower than air. Yet offers the potential to alleviate both congested highways and air corridors!

In light of current economic conditions, construction of this vital transportation infrastructure should be accelerated.

High-speed rail (up to 190 mph) and Maglev (up to 300 mph) are systems designed to be competitive with automobile and short-hop air travel between cities (between 100 and 450 miles, depending what source you read).

This does not rule out the necessity of local, urban transit systems such as light rail (trolleys). subways, low-speed maglev, etc. These systems don't need to travel as fast as the high-speed regional systems, but provide more local stops convenient for local commuters. They also provide faster service by bypassing congested roadways while helping to reduce that congestion and demand for limited urban parking.

light rail has been an expensive and absolute dismal failure in Portland OR. For years the cry has been to add lanes to US Hwy 26 (only 2 lanes each direction) which is one of the major arteries into downtown Portland, and for years the metro planning board has ignored citizens voting down light rail bond measures and built the rails anyway. They have used "creative" accounting and actually stolen urban renewal dollars and school dollars to pay for this boondoggle. Don't forget, this is in an area where there are urban growth boundaries so as the population becomes more and more dense, traffic gets worse and worse with no solution offered up. (Make that only the solution that metro wants) Metro actually cut the number of high speed bus routes to park and rides to pad their light rail ridership stats. Of course all those "enlightened" people know better than us peasants.

There are a number of good points here. However the correct answer is "none of the above"...and "all of the above". As a transportation engineer (trying to solve these problems is my job), I've looked at different situations and solutions (I've also been involved with a study of the Seattle area). First of all, more roads will not solve anything, at least not by themselves. Mass transit (LRT, high speed, etc), can help in certain instances and regions. Car and vanpools also have their place. But again, these won't work alone.

The underlying problem, and source of the solution, is land use and planning. But local officials have to be willing to suck it up, stand up to special interests, and decide to zone for each solution, to in essence dictate how a region will grow and expand (this is called smart growth). Urban and residential centers can be layed out and connected by rail solutions; roads can be used for local travel (to school, store, etc).

For entrenched urban areas the solution is more difficult. But more roads means more traffic, unless some effort is made to manage where people live and work. And the commuting public needs to recognize this fact, and be willing to give up a little convenience, maybe live closer to work, or quit bitching about traffic. Because unless commuters recognize they also have an active role and responsibility, traffic will only get worse. Also keep in mind that more roads (and any transportation system) means more maintenance and upkeep costs, which means more taxes...and nobody likes that.

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(this is called smart growth)

No, "smart growth" is a code-phrase coined by the save-the-snail eco-terrorists who wish to stifle any development whatsoever and reintroduce the grey wolf into suburban back yards.

Electricly powered mass-transit systems make sense to alleviate congested highways and reduce our consumption of imported oil. However, the "smart growth" crowd would insist that these systems be propelled by giant windmills.

The only alternate sources of power that are capable of producing the vast quantities of energy necessary to significantly reduce transportation oil consumption are nuclear and clean-coal technologies. Sadly, the "smart growth" crowd isn't very realistic about that scenario either.

"...code-phrase coined by the save-the-snail eco-terrorists who wish to stifle any development whatsoever and reintroduce the grey wolf into suburban back yards."

Sorry, but no. Smart growth is not some enviro-fringe movement and has nothing to do with windmills and other environmentally friendly power sources. It is simply a common sense approach to transportation planning:

"In response, communities are beginning to implement new approaches to transportation planning, such as better coordinating land use and transportation; increasing the availability of high quality transit service; creating redundancy, resiliency and connectivity within their road networks; and ensuring connectivity between pedestrian, bike, transit, and road facilities. In short, they are coupling a multi-modal approach to transportation with supportive development patterns, to create a variety of transportation options."

From Smartgrowth.org

If you're interested, do a Google search on smart growth transportation planning

The problem is that you take a perfectly good 4 lane stretch of highway and restrict it by 75% by declaring it off-limits to most of the traffic. We're talking "diamond lanes" here.

The goal of carpooling was to encourage people to "share the ride" with ... well... anybody. Trouble is, that just doesn't happen. If you can carpool, you're in a very small minority. Most people who commute don't have a co-worker that lives next to them or near them. I frankly would move if a co-worker of mine moved into the neighborhood. However, if you find work buddies who live near each other and get along, you don't have to encourage them to pair up on rides. They'll do it just for the company. This notion that we'll all link hands and sing kum-by-yaa and give complete strangers rides to wherever we're going is insanity. I don't know about you, but for most people, their car is an extention of their house. They cherish the music they can crank and I for one ain't gonna turn on Arlo Guthry to make Lefty Louie more comfortable while we all go a-workin' at the plant. I ain't gonna want to sniff Louie's Hi Karate aftershave. I don't want to listen to someone complain about the job, or the way I drive.

So, the original intent of carpooling is an abject failure. Any "studies" that count cars and occupants is simply recording happenstances. Like when me and the wife go for lunch. "Yup Karl, I got two people in dat Ferrari, that dude must have a good job! Count it as a carpool! I wish Central Command would give me a Furrari and pair me up with a hot babe!"

Lastly, there is a wrong-headed notion floating around that diamond lanes should be open too all traffic on "off peak" hours. OFF PEAK!?! Hell, why not make them open to all at 2:00AM when nobody cares?! You need to make them open to all on PEAK hours when the demands on the system are the greatest. Excuse me, but DUUH! In short, you need to eliminate the "diamond lanes" entirely and chalk it up to a failed social experiment.

An honest, plain-speaking liberal Seattle environmentalist is a truly rare thing......

He's just the warm up act. He may not have the fortitude to "break some eggs", but the lefties who he is paving the road for (pun?) surely are. Make no mistake about it, the ultimate solution is the ban humans from nature. They believe that humans are a blight on earth and if somehow they get into power, they'll enact laws to do just that. This dolt is a well-known Seattle frother and clearly not on the cutting edge of environmentalism.

The goal of carpooling was to encourage people to "share the ride" with ... well... anybody. Trouble is, that just doesn't happen.

AMEN AND AMEN

I've recently moved to Washington from NJ. Even in NJ, where mass transit into NYC and other high-employment areas is abundant, the extent of HOV lanes is no where near what it is here. In order for HOV to be effective, people have to be able to commute to a central area of employment from the same home community. This set of conditions just does not exist here. So, the HOV lanes remain empty while the other one or two lanes remain bumper to bumper.

I wish someone would actually study the use of HOV before they start wasting dollars to build new highways or worse yet, "Park and Rides" that have no source to catch a "ride." I thought NJ traffic was bad until I moved here! Someone needs to go to the East Coast and learn how to do it!

I've recently moved to Washington from NJ. Even in NJ, where mass transit into NYC and other high-employment areas is abundant, the extent of HOV lanes is no where near what it is here. In order for HOV to be effective, people have to be able to commute to a central area of employment from the same home community. This set of conditions just does not exist here. So, the HOV lanes remain empty while the other one or two lanes remain bumper to bumper.

The problem here is one of vision. I'm not going to complain that there is no vision. There most certainly is a vision. It's just unworkable. They have some wish to be on the site of some trendy sitcom based in Manhattan ala "Friends" or "Seinfeld".

This is absolutely delisional! We do not all live on a small narrow island with high-rises and a standard grid street layout. The Northwest is your standard west coast sprawl. My high hp car gets about 3 miles to the gallon in stop in go traffic which is absolutely killing the planet while the "save the earth lanes" go mostly empty except for the cars which by chance happen to have more than 1 occupant in them. So, I would argue that diamond lanes pour more hydrocarbons, nitrides of oxygen and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere than if we had our original roads back.

But it must be remembered, they don't give a rip about the planet. They're primarily concerned about social engineering.

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