Two major developments in local transportation planning during the last month point to a worrisome trend. With universal frustration over our area's interminable transportation and planning gridlocks, new efforts to try to solve the problem seem intent on saving time and hassle by cutting the public out of the decision-making process.The first of these events was the much-ballyhooed unveiling of Dino Rossi's comprehensive transportation "plan" last month. The quotation marks are appropriate because Rossi's document seems much more a political statement than a serious transportation proposal. Numerous commentators, political observers and transportation experts alike, have ridiculed Rossi's plan for its numerous flaws; among many other things, his total reliance on new automobile capacity - using dollars illegally transferred from Sound Transit's local taxing authority to state road-building - is politically unworkable, badly underestimated in costs, unconstitutional and would actually make local gridlock worse, not better. As a planning document, it's a non-starter.But as a political statement, where the implications of Rossi's plan haven't gotten nearly as much attention, the gubernatorial candidate couldn't be more clear. The centerpiece of Rossi's plan is a proposal for a new, eight-lane segment of SR 520 crossing Lake Washington. It's ridiculous as a transportation option. For starters, neither I-5 nor I-405 could handle the traffic from an eight-lane SR 520, creating worse traffic nightmares than we now have. But the proposal also runs roughshod over the lengthy planning process that's already taken place regarding a replacement SR 520 bridge, a process that rejected the eight-lane idea early on as unworkable and has spent the last year working with neighborhoods at both ends of the bridge to mitigate the impacts of the coming expansion and construction. Rossi's message: All that was a waste of time. We don't need neighborhood involvement in planning. We don't need all those lengthy meetings and expert studies. Just ram it through.At the west end of the 520 bridge, there's a monument to that type of thinking. Old-timers will remember it. Peeling off SR 520 are a couple of lanes to nowhere, built in the '60s to connect with the planned Thompson Expressway that was to run through the Arboretum and down the west side of Lake Washington. Angry residents put an end to that bad, top-down idea 40 years ago. Now, oblivious to the changing transportation realities of the 21st century - increased density, global warming and $10/gallon gas among them - it appears some politicians want to bring back top-down road-building and the casual destruction of neighborhoods it inevitably entails.Frustration with both transportation gridlock and the slow planning and construction process are understandable. That's no excuse for government by fiat, especially since such edicts inevitably aren't as well-thought out as plans that have been vetted and honed by public involvement. And it is, after all, our tax dollars they're using.Someone at Sound Transit, alas, also didn't get that memo. Still stinging from the defeat last November of the shotgun-wedding "Roads and Transit" Proposition 1, Sound Transit board members voted April 24 to present for public comment two possible proposals to go back to the ballot in November. One plan, costing $9 billion, would extend light rail to Northgate, to Overlake Hospital in Redmond and south beyond SeaTac to South 200th Street, financed by a 0.4 percent sales tax increase. The other plan would extend light rail to Northgate, to the Overlake neighborhood in Redmond and south past 200th to Highline Community College, financed by an 0.5 percent sales tax increase. The latter plan also throws in a First Hill/Capitol Hill streetcar.If those two plans sound nearly identical, it's because they are. Both rely solely on (highly regressive) increases in local sales taxes, already the highest in the Pacific Northwest. Both call for (nearly identical) incremental extensions north, east and south, relying on voters' future willingness to spend more rather than investing wholly in fewer but more extensive lines now. And rather than responding to the rejection of Proposition 1 by asking whether voters want substantially more or less transit, the scope of the two proposals is just about the same. Which raises the obvious question: why bother with public comment? The public isn't being asked whether it wants a new house, or how many bedrooms or even what area it'd be in; we're being asked to weigh in on whether to use wallpaper. With luck, while that input will be ignored, we'll get to have a say in what color wallpaper they'll put in the breakfast nook.It's easy, when such proposals are released, to focus solely on whether they'll relieve our transportation woes and at what cost. But we also need to understand that what Rossi's plan, Sound Transit's plans and a significant chunk of the local chattering classes have in common is an impatience with letting the public have any kind of meaningful say in our transportation future. That trend will only be stopped if the public, once again, objects.[[In-content Ad]]
