Buying Back Our Souls
Politics makes strange bedfellows. That old adage was never more true than in Washington State, where an unlikely coalition of anti-tax groups and the Sierra Club is opposing Proposition 1, a tax measure on the ballot this fall intended to raise $18 billion for roads and light rail. The unlikely alignment has emerged because some environment and alternative transportation groups are beginning to question the wisdom of packaging funding for mass transit with new road construction. Public transit proponents have long accepted the notion that the only way get funding for new transit projects is to squeeze some dollars out the massive appropriations for road construction and maintenance. As U.S. cities have become more progressive with regard to transportation issues, proposals to increase taxes for road construction have increasingly included money for transit to build a broad coalition of support for these tax measures. Lured into supporting omnibus transportation packages, alternative transportation advocates have entered into a long term deal with the devil; their pet transit projects get funded but our collective car addiction grows all the while.
The Sierra Club’s stand represents a long overdue evolution in strategy for groups concerned about excessive car use and its impact on the environment. The view that people will give up their cars if we simply give them enough alternative options has proven to be false. While we’ve been laying miles and miles of track for light rail and expanding bus service to all corners of the region, we've funded an even greater expansion of our network of roads and highways and, more importantly, allowed sprawl to the stretch the bounds of our metropolitan areas beyond the reach of our new buses and trains. The statistics support this depressing conclusion: use of alternative transportation has increased only slightly in recent years despite a massive increase in the cost of operating a car. While some may conclude from these statistics that our car addiction is impervious to market incentives, I contend we haven’t done enough. Especially when we continue to send mixed messages through new road construction.
I don’t believe it is possible any longer to work on behalf of the environment or alternative transportation and rationalize concessions to car owners. Our entrenched car use is too destructive to the objectives of these causes. As Seattle’s recent experience with summer road construction demonstrated, we can get a significant number of people out of their cars without any change in transit capacity. So trading new light rail for an increase in road capacity doesn’t really make much sense. If we’re successful in getting enough people out of their cars, light rail will take care of itself. Plus, letting the car addicts fight for their own tax increases has the added benefit of finally decoupling the two opposing camps in the eyes of voters and legislators. If we’re lucky, we may end up with a somewhat perverse but far more beneficial outcome: less public funding for our projects but more progress toward our long term goals.
Photo Credit: Sound Transit