Whether it even makes sense for Sound Transit to ask voters for another sales-tax increase next year to fund new projects is an open question.
A question that should be closed, immediately and resoundingly, is whether light-rail spurs in Everett and Lynnwood should be part of any such ballot issue.
At a cost of $125 million a mile, forget about it.
Many more practical and cost-effective transportation needs are higher priorities than a new train line running along Broadway between Everett Station and Everett Community College, and another from the Lynnwood Transit Center to Alderwood mall. The latter doesn’t even have a cost estimate attached to it yet. Estimates are that it would attract a paltry 500 riders a day.
More promising items on a list of possibilities released by Sound Transit last week include widening nine miles of Highway 99 in Everett to accommodate bus rapid transit, a system in which buses arrive at stations with the regularity of a subway. Such an investment would complement a bus rapid transit project already approved by Community Transit.
Adding parking garages to existing park and ride lots to accommodate more bus commuters, building more direct-access ramps from carpool lanes to park and ride lots, and providing more bus service to growing pockets of Snohomish County’s urban centers make much more sense than blowing the bank on limited light rail.
But Snohomish County has pressing needs for more highway lane miles, too, and with limited sources of revenue, major new commitments to transit projects need to be made in the context of an overall transportation strategy.
What sense would it make to devote hundreds of millions of Snohomish County tax dollars to regional transit improvements if it lessens the ability to fund congestion relief on Highway 9 and the Hewitt Avenue trestle? Transit and roads are all part of the same picture, and planning for them separately is making less and less sense.
When voters in Snohomish County helped shoot down Initiative 912 this year, preserving a gas-tax increase that will pay for new lane miles, they weren’t handing transportation planners a blank check. If anything, the debate over the initiative made clear that voters expect planners to deliver congestion relief and safety improvements quickly and cost-effectively, and that more pavement is needed.
Proposals to bring regional transportation planning under a single roof, perhaps in the form of a directly-elected regional body, are being put to state legislators as they prepare for their 2006 session. It’s too early to tell whether a workable solution will emerge. But the idea that transportation planning should be more cohesive, that roads and transit should be parts of a single plan, seems self-evident.
When everything is on the table, it’ll be easy to reject ideas like $125-million-a-mile rail spurs.
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