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.
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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.
For the selected freeways they were going to / could widen, does the cost per lane mile include purchase of additional right-of-way or is it currently sufficient for the expansion? Just wondering, because buying right-of-way is expensive. In the region where I live, they recently built a toll road (TX 130) through a lot of undeveloped ranchland and it wound up costing over $25 billion extra, and that is with the widespread use of eminent domain powers by the state government, not to mention law costs brought up by property rights issues. I can imagine land is even more expensive in the Seattle area than it is in Central Texas.
Try this again.
Last week the Antiplanner failed to note that Seattle voted down a massively expensive light-rail plan.
Um, no.
The exit polls showed that 52% of voters would have voted for just the light-rail portion of it.
The bill left a lot of climate questions unanswered too**, which caused key opposition and also key support to withdraw [[R]ail opponent Kemper Freeman called road opponent Mike O’Brien, of the Sierra Club, “my new best friend” in a campaign debate, as both opposed the measure.]
DS
** This would have torpedoed key climate goals for the region.
Climate questions? What would there be to analyze? If you take the position that (1) human-generated carbon dioxide emissions are making the planet warm, and (2) that these emissions need to be prevented, and (3) vehicles emit carbon dioxide, then isn’t all highway building effectively banned? Also, all arterial road building?
Indeed, if you took any human activity and analyzed it from the climate question perspective on the assumptions above, you’d have to effectively ban it also, wouldn’t you? I don’t see how such governmental activities as school building would pass the climate test. Also, if you took individuals’ actions and subject them to the test, you’d have to ban them as well. For example, activities such as auto usage or auto purchasing have to go. But I’d also note that procreation would be hard to justify, again from the climate question perspective. If your prime goal is carbon dioxide emission suppression, placed in importance above the value of self-determination, you have to ban a very broad range of activities.
If your prime goal is carbon dioxide emission suppression, placed in importance above the value of self-determination, you have to ban a very broad range of activities.
JK: And CO2 isn’t even responsible for most of the greenhouse effect, di-hydrogen oxide is – lets ban it first.
Thanks
JK
Of course the reason why the political classes in cities and transit fans have to put these rail plans up for vote in the first place is because transit is such a miserable failure in the marketplace. That is represented by the fact that transit systems rarely cover their operational costs, much less their capital costs. That is why rail and streetcars largely disappeared from many American cities by the 1940’s, to be replaced by buses.
Many complain about the issue that roads are also paid for out of gasoline taxes, but think for a moment about the idea that we could abolish all gasoline taxes and replace them with tolls (whether roads are privately or publicly owned and operated). I’d be willing to put up some big betting money out of my own pocket that roads could easily be paid for out of user fees. Here in Houston, our County toll authority collects over $400 million per year in toll fees, which drives transit fans here bananas. One should observe that Wall Street and the big pension funds are falling all over themselves to get into the toll road business, but few are willing to do the same with transit.
However, rail plans often do win in political markets, which is why the Antiplanner should not be amazed why anyone would take such plans seriously. And there is a very big difference between political markets and real markets. In the normal marketplace, if you do not meet your costs and pay your way, you ultimately will be punished for your failure by being forced to exit – and that is a good thing. In political markets, your idea can fail the normal marketplace test by huge margins, over and over again, but still be a political success as long as you can continue to sucker voters in the political marketplace into thinking that your idea will do wonders for them and that the actual users will only be responsible for a fraction of its true cost.
You also have to realize that a full 20% of naysayers voted no primarily for environmental reasons, worried that building the roads will increase GHG emissions.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2007/11/08/2004002419.pdf
Granted, this was less than half of those who voted no due to fear of higher taxes, but it is indeed significant because it shows that environmental concerns of any big project are now a major concern among the people of the Seattle area (and I would imagine all of the Pacific North West).
Veddie Edder, your comment is really quite silly, and not worth a response.
No, actually, Veddie Edder made an excellent point. Many environmentalists are in love with global warming because they can use it to make any human activity, including merely existing, to appear evil.