No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Seattle Votes No

Nov 13

2007

Last week the Antiplanner failed to note that Seattle voted down a massively expensive light-rail plan. Sound Transit, the agency that is at least 100 percent overbudget and several years late on its initial light-rail project, somehow thought it could persuade voters to fund the most expensive light-rail system in the universe.

The proposed system was going to cost anywhere from $10.6 billion to $150 billion depending on who you believed. The lower figure was the capital cost in 2002 dollars; the higher was the total tax that Seattlelites were expected to fork over before the system would be completely paid off.

In exchange, Sound Transit promised to build 50 miles of light rail that would take about one-half percent of cars off the road. Ads for the project warned that congestion was going to get worse over the next twenty years but pointedly did not promise that the project would do anything about it.

Early polls found that about 60 percent of voters were initially favorable. Proponents spent more than $5 million promoting the measure, while opponents had less than a million.

About 20 percent of the money was going to go for a handful of road projects, enabling proponents to call it the “Roads and Transit plan.” Sound Transit thought that, like Phoenix, including road projects would lead more people to vote for the program. But that turned out to be a fatal error. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club who are dead set against any new roads came out against the ballot measure, which helped to kill it.

In the end, about 56 percent of voters rejected the plan. This goes to show that, if rail opponents can find one dollar to spend for every ten spent by proponents, they can usually educate enough voters to prevent passage of rail boondoggles.

The amazing thing to the Antiplanner is that anyone would take this proposal seriously. The average urban freeway lane costs about $10 million per mile. The average light-rail line costs about $50 million per mile and carries only a fifth as many people. Seattle’s proposed lines were going to cost $250 million per mile, making then 125 times more expensive at moving people than a freeway lane.

Of course, for some, the high cost of light rail is what it is all about. More spending means more contracts, which means more campaign contributions from grateful contractors. So it is easy to imagine that someone might think that the most expensive light-rail line in the universe might actually be easier to sell than a more modest one.

Fortunately for Seattlelites, a Bellevue businessman named Kemper Freeman made the effort to stop this boondoggle that no one else thought could be killed. Freeman, a former state legislator and owner of the Bellevue Square shopping mall, has made light rail his personal crusade for many years. He put up about a quarter of the money spent against the roads & transit plans. Without Freeman’s leadership, Seattlelites probably would have approved one of the largest and most useless public works projects in American history.

Unfortunately for Seattlelites, the rail proponents expect to be back with another proposal. It will be interesting to see if they placate the Sierra Club by putting together a pure-rail plan and whether voters will be more or less favorable to such a plan.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner

Unfortunately, a year after this repot was written, light rail narrowly won a  victory.