Here, at last, is one possible upside to the new football and baseball stadiums (a.k.a. Big Money Pit and Bigger Money Pit). Since the construction of those corporate-welfare classics was exempted from sales tax, it’ll be awfully hard for legislators to deny such exemptions to any other projects, at least with a straight face (and if they want to look at themselves in the mirror). School construction is the obvious big candidate for a sales-tax exemption. But as noted two weeks ago (“The Tracks of Their Fears”), the trains, buses, and HOV ramps of “Sound Move” (a.k.a. the Regional Transit Project) are the ones crying loudest for exemption. And, lo and behold, a bill, SB 6021, that would grant just that exemption has cleared the state Senate Transportation Committee. The smart money says 6021 won’t make it through Rules this year, but that this is a good warm-up for passage next year. Forgiving sales tax would kick back some $300 million—nearly enough to extend the light- rail line from the U District to Northgate, triple the cost of building much-needed (and currently unfunded) stations at Beacon and North Capitol Hills, or . . . what’s that rumbling noise down in Tukwila?

Build first, justify later

Of course, it’s thin praise to say a project is less of a boondoggle than the stadium Money Pits. Even as we gnash over how to get the most out of the billions we’re pouring into the Regional Transit Project (a.k.a., in newspeak, “Sound Move”), remember the big point: The light-rail line is a whopping boondoggle in its own right. It can “succeed” (i.e., rack up rider numbers) only by poaching riders from the best routes. Ridership, taken alone, is the transit equivalent of Vietnam War body counts: a dangerous distraction from real questions of strategy, such as, how many people will a system induce to leave their cars (not just force to switch from the bus)? And how many will it provide with new mobility?

Unlike the trains, a monorail could climb Capitol Hill without a tunnel to reduce the incline. That would save sinking a half-billion dollars into the tunnel, and save us from the absurdity of getting just one stop on Capitol Hill for that half-billion. And (I know I’ve said this before, but we’re still riding that rail), elevated, automated guideways are the only type of fixed-path transit that might be flexible and inexpensive enough to really serve a low- to mid-density city like Seattle.

One gauge of elevated transit’s potential will be the response to a “request for expression of interest” (a prelude to a request for proposals) that the Elevated Transit Company recently issued. The ETC (established by the 1997 Monorail Initiative) is asking private developers to put forward elevated routes and designs that could actually pay their own way—or, more likely, come close enough to merit public subsidy. Imagine if light rail had to pass such a test. We wouldn’t be fretting today over the effects of its tracks and tunnels on various neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, the rail gang has already staked out the fattest transit corridor. But the city-sponsored Seattle Transit Initiative has identified 38 other corridors meriting “preliminary study” for midcapacity transit. The one sparking the most buzz is the University-Wallingford-Phinney-Ballard stretch, where rush-hour driving and busing is a misery. But merchants loath to lose on-street parking, rebuffed past attempts to open up more lanes to traffic on sclerotic 45th Street. Do we really think we can build our way out of gridlock, with trains or trams any more than with highways?

Shaky all over

And now, adding irony to injury, the University of Washington complains that the rail tunnel would jar its physics experiments. This prompted ex-legislator Dick Nelson (who as an engineer says he “understands the mind-set” that builds big, gorgeous, wasteful things) to write to Nick Licata:

Dear Councilmember Licata:

The latest revelation (that the UW will get the shakes) about the RTA (a.k.a. “Sound” Transit) should provide more than enough evidence that the costs of this transit boondoggle far exceed its benefits. The question is whether you and your colleagues will stand up to the cabal of interests that is determined to build us a train system regardless of the harm it will do, and find better and more cost-effective transportation solutions. Here is a brief summary of what it has brought us so far:

• Close to the highest sales tax in the nation
• No appreciable money left for other more effective solutions
• A much foreshortened system because of the difficulty and price of navigating Seattle’s unique topography
• Divisions between neighborhoods who perceive unequal treatment . . . and the likelihood of a ballot initiative

More is to come when the realities of dumping hundreds of buses back on the streets of an already clogged downtown become apparent [and overruns from] reconfiguring the downtown bus tunnel and punching a hole under the freeway hit the headlines, when the construction activity disrupts neighborhood businesses for years, when regional congestion continues to grow in daily hours and spreads across more of the road network, and when major policy contradictions, like building the rail line to the airport at the same time the airport is more than doubling its parking capacity, start to penetrate the consciousness of citizens and voters.

And all of this for a marginal number of new transit riders.

Sound Transit’s attitude that all problems can be ignored or finessed (e.g., $50 million for a cosmetic buy-out) and that we should get on with it because we may loose federal funding is the worst of all red herrings, as you well know . . .

So a suggestion: Save yourself, your colleagues, and the rest of us a lot of future grief by convening an inquiry into cost-effective alternatives to the light and commuter rail systems. It is never too late to stop bad public policy before more damage is done.

DICK NELSON

Cartoonists of renown

Maybe getting dropped by the Weekly is a good career move; at least it doesn’t stop cartoonists from winning their peers’ esteem. This month, Roberta Gregory won the grand Toonie Award as “Cartoonist of the Year” from the professional association Cartoonists Northwest, for her strip “Bitchy Bitch”—which got squeezed out in a comics-page redesign. But we hope to run more of her work later—if she’ll let us. Meanwhile, look for her latest collection, At Work and Play with Bitchy Bitch, from Fantagraphics Books.

And John Ambrosavage beat Jack Ohman and Matt Wuerker to win the “Political Cartoons” Toonie for his Media Culpa illustrations—which ran until writer Mark Worth retired that column. Ambrotoons still grace the Weekly‘s Web site.