(no subject)
Nov. 20th, 2002 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravencallscrowsI am yet again baffled by the local electorate.
Sensibly enough, the voters rejected a poorly-written ballot initiative for improving roads which proposed spending a large quantity of money over a thirty year period, but didn't cite any specific projects on which it would work.
Predictably, a referendum passed to limit car registration fees to $30, regardless of vehicle value, preventing counties from adding surcharges for local projects.
And officially, now, Seattle has approved a $2 billion project to build fourteen miles of monorail from Ballard to West Seattle. Want to guess how the funds for funding the monorail construction have been proposed to be raised? Yup. A car-tab surcharge of $140 per $10,000 of assessed value for vehicles registered within the city of Seattle.
The mayor of Seattle is still pushing the concept of light rail as a commuter solution also, regardless of the fact that the initial budget outlay called for twenty-one miles of track at a financial outlay of $2.3B, yet currently only the cheapest (and lowest volume in terms of potential riders- estimated at only a third of the total amount) segment of fourteen miles has been projected at coming in at a cost of $2.9B- a full six hundred million dollars above the allocated total for the whole system as approved by the electorate. No idea from where that additional money is supposed to come, either.
Yes, the growth in the city has outstripped the ability of the infrastructure to cope, and the result has been traffic snarls and gridlock. The solutions can't be just throwing cash at projects with wanton abandon, though, especially when the public has stated pretty clearly that it's not interested in paying for them in the form of higher vehicle taxes.
Seattle needs a solution to the traffic problem. Not just any solution will do, though. We need something that's going to effectively address the problems with the roads- and not just the congestion problems, but things like replacing or repairing the Alaskan Way viaduct- and not just projects that look good but don't serve the needs of the people, like light rail from the Convention Centre to Maple Valley.
Sensibly enough, the voters rejected a poorly-written ballot initiative for improving roads which proposed spending a large quantity of money over a thirty year period, but didn't cite any specific projects on which it would work.
Predictably, a referendum passed to limit car registration fees to $30, regardless of vehicle value, preventing counties from adding surcharges for local projects.
And officially, now, Seattle has approved a $2 billion project to build fourteen miles of monorail from Ballard to West Seattle. Want to guess how the funds for funding the monorail construction have been proposed to be raised? Yup. A car-tab surcharge of $140 per $10,000 of assessed value for vehicles registered within the city of Seattle.
The mayor of Seattle is still pushing the concept of light rail as a commuter solution also, regardless of the fact that the initial budget outlay called for twenty-one miles of track at a financial outlay of $2.3B, yet currently only the cheapest (and lowest volume in terms of potential riders- estimated at only a third of the total amount) segment of fourteen miles has been projected at coming in at a cost of $2.9B- a full six hundred million dollars above the allocated total for the whole system as approved by the electorate. No idea from where that additional money is supposed to come, either.
Yes, the growth in the city has outstripped the ability of the infrastructure to cope, and the result has been traffic snarls and gridlock. The solutions can't be just throwing cash at projects with wanton abandon, though, especially when the public has stated pretty clearly that it's not interested in paying for them in the form of higher vehicle taxes.
Seattle needs a solution to the traffic problem. Not just any solution will do, though. We need something that's going to effectively address the problems with the roads- and not just the congestion problems, but things like replacing or repairing the Alaskan Way viaduct- and not just projects that look good but don't serve the needs of the people, like light rail from the Convention Centre to Maple Valley.
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no subject
Date: 2002-11-20 03:27 pm (UTC)And what is it about mass-transit taking people efficiently where they work? Run from downtown to Bellevue or Redmond or Renton and vice versa and co-ordinate with Metro and/or Sound Transit to get them to Boeing or Microsoft or where ever. Or parallel 405 and run Lynnwood to Kent with stops along the way. Get people off the roads which have the worst of the goddamned overcrowding. Once that's a success, people will vote to add on to it. Instead, we can ship old Norwegians to the ferry terminals, assuming the thing gets built. Wheeee!