Editorial Page staff
The Seattle Times
Fortune magazine made a goofy but telling observation about Puget Sound when it was ranking Seattle as America's best place to live and work. Editors, who did not like our slow commute, praised an affordable cost of living and cited the rent in a typical Seattle neighborhood: Auburn.
An outsider's compressed sense of geography sees us for what we truly are: a large, diverse region stuck in a common traffic jam.
What the Regional Transit Authority offers on the ballot Tuesday is the first step in dealing with a mobility problem all 2.4 million of us from Everett to Tacoma know will only get worse. All of the natural amenities and economic opportunities that will keep our children close to home and employed will attract others to move here.
We will all come together on the same finite stretches of roadway to stew in gridlock. This truth is self-evident to stalled commuters, truck drivers with deadlines and persons late for doctor appointments and soccer matches.
The RTA plan raises sales and motor-vehicle excise taxes to pay for 20 regional bus routes that cross three counties using a single ticket, 81 miles of commuter train service between Everett and Lakewood, and an electric light-rail line from the University District to Sea-Tac International Airport, and from the Tacoma Dome to downtown Tacoma. This same pot of money would pay for enhancements such as special bus ramps on the system of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes that the state has pledged to complete in central Puget Sound.
Five subareas within the RTA's boundaries in Snohomish, King and Pierce counties would have their own targeted funds for local priorities, such as expanded park-and-ride lots.
This is not a perfect plan, but it represents a consolidation and rethinking of two earlier versions: a $13 billion budget-buster that never made it to the polls, and a $6.7 billion measure that was defeated in March 1995. The new plan benefits from a more-focused RTA mission and the public's acceptance that a start must be made toward a solution.
Opponents are running out of ideas and credibility. No one believes there is any more money, physical room or public acceptance for major new highways and freeways. Republican legislative candidates who don't like the RTA talk instead about pie-in-the-sky people-movers and other fanciful technology better suited to amusement parks than serving a bustling metropolitan area.
Another diversionary tactic is to suggest that King County's Metro has the resources to take up the slack. Wrong. Metro is adding bus routes but pilfering its budget at the expense of relief for crowded park-and-ride lots.
Puget Sound's traffic problems have consequences beyond their daily personal toll of delay and aggravation. Marple's Business Newsletter reports that economic developers outside the area use our growing reputation for congestion against us and that companies who have moved here grumble about worsening conditions.
Concerns about the long-term ability to move freight and keep the region attractive to existing and new businesses accounts for generous corporate support for RTA passage and sweeping endorsements by chambers of commerce.
The RTA plan confronts a recognized problem that gets worse every day. Doing something about it begins with a yes vote next Tuesday.
