Prop 1 would cost
families tens of thousands of dollars over the coming years
Based on assumptions
provided by the Department of Revenue sales tax collectors in Olympia,
Sound Transit claims that the Prop 1 would cost the average person
$69 per year in sales tax the first year of the program. However, an
independent assessment of Sound Transit tax collections over the next 45 years
calculates to an average of about $60,000 per household. Half of this is
the new taxes for Prop 1; the other half is the Sound Transit taxes first
approved in 1996 and reaffirmed by technical language in the 2008 Prop 1.
Prop 1 in 2008 costs the same as Sound Transit's part of Prop 1 in 2007
The Sound Transit
taxes of Prop 1 in
2007, and those collected by the Prop 1 Do-Over in 2008 are exactly the same:
5/10th of one percent permanent increase in the general sales tax.
That's why this page calls it the Prop 1 Do-Over.
Sound Transit light rail is
behind schedule and over-budget
Central
Link Light Rail in Seattle is scheduled to begin service in early July 2009,
and time will tell if that commitment -- made in 2001 -- is fulfilled.
However, the 1996 commitment to build light rail from the northern edge of the
University District to a park & ride lot south of SeaTac Airport by 2006,
cannot be met with the taxes approved in 1996. A major reason for Prop 1
is to gain additional money to bail out and complete the 1996 phase 1 plan.
Prop 1 would not reduce
congestion
Traffic congestion will not be
reduced by Prop 1 investments. While the proposed light rail expansion fed by
bus service has the capacity to carry many hundreds of thousands of people,
the officially forecast ridership is nowhere near the passenger train
capacity. This is because the train tracks and stations don't actually serve
the vast majority of trips that people want to take. Sound Transit's Prop 1
plan forecasts only 62,000 new one-way transit trips daily in 2030 if it wins,
compared to if it doesn't. In 2030, 15 million trips per day are expected by
private vehicle and transit combined.
The claim in a Sound Transit
study that the plan may cut traffic 5% to 30% is based on agencies taking
extra follow-up actions such as promoting ridesharing. These extra activities
are not funded by Prop 1, which by itself yields a reduction in trips that is
less than 1/2 of one percent. Doing the extra actions to reduce trips further
does not require building light rail in the first place. Furthermore, many of
these extra actions are already underway by other government agencies and
private companies.
Prop 1 would do little to
expand transit in the immediate future
A very small part of Prop 1's
15-year expenditure, about 8%, is dedicated to short-term relief of the daily
crowding on buses and commuter rail now irritating transit customers
throughout the region. Most of the Prop 1 investment, 88%, goes to light
rail, which will take a dozen or
more years to begin to be put into service. The Prop 1 taxes planned to go
immediately to expanding Sound Transit Express Bus service with about 25 more
buses is said to yield 17% more service hours across-the-board and up to 30%
on high-ridership routes. This much additional bus service, if achieved, is
about a 2%, one-time increase in all the daily public bus service now offered
region wide. Recent annual ridership growth is over 7%.
Prop 1 sales taxes have no end date
Sound Transit
calculates
that its additional Prop 1 sales taxes for light rail would begin to be rolled-back
about 2038, which would be 15 years after
Prop 1 construction is completed. This is to be taken with a grain of
salt, because the language of commitment is similar to what was said in the
first Sound Transit campaign in
1996, when the agency implied that taxes would be rolled back around 2006. It's
now clear that the first phases of light rail funded in the 1996 ten-year
Sound Move plan are going to take twenty years to finish instead of ten.
Significantly, Sound Transit has not stated the end date for the new Prop 1
taxes in the
ballot title, and other ballot language affirms that the 1996 taxes can go
on as long as Sound Transit needs the money.
Relatively few travelers would
ride Sound Transit's light rail
Sound Transit brags that
its planned light rail to be constructed by Prop 1 taxes would have the
capacity to carry a million people each day. However, the
tracks don't go to all the places where people need to go. Sound Transit's
forecasts show light rail ridership failing to grow beyond a few hundred
thousand, yielding a light rail market share of less than two percent of all
trips across the region. The share is greater for work trips to a few urban
centers like downtown Bellevue, downtown Seattle, and University District
that are already served by buses and will continue to be served by buses. The
addition of a rail line simply moves riders from buses to trains.
Billions going to light rail could be
more effectively spent on providing incentives for ridesharing, building more HOV
and HOT
lanes to speed the passage of buses, and adding more bus service on the many overcrowded routes the region
has right now.
Prop 1 provides limited benefit across the region
Sound Transit
supporters claim
that 70% of homes and 85% of businesses in the Sound Transit district
will be near rail stations by the end of construction in 2023. This raises a
question: what does "near" mean? Answer according to Sound
Transit calculations: Up to a half-mile walk to a train station, or up to a
quarter-mile walk to a bus stop where a bus will take you to a train station,
or a 2.5 mile or less drive to a parking lot at some of the train stations.
Without asking if this is "near" enough, the Puget Sound Regional Council calculates that if 125 miles of Sound Transit's light rail were completed
by 2040, the average household in the region would have a 30 minute or less transit trip to only one percent of employment locations
in the region. This tiny percentage is reflection of the cruel fact that the tracks of Sound Transit's
light rail
won't go to all the places that people need to go.
Light rail expansion would
take 15 years to complete
Sound Transit states that the
light rail expansion of Prop 1 will be completed in 15 years. Sound
Transit claims Prop 1 light rail will connect Bellevue and Northgate to
Seattle even sooner, by 2020. But Sound Transit said back in the late 1990s that
using existing ST taxes light rail would be built by 2006 between a park and ride lot in SeaTac at South 200th
all the way to the northern edge of the U District at NE 45th Street. Instead, the completion of this much light rail now
requires the doubling of taxes that Prop 1 tries to provide and would take at
least until 2016. So, along with the promise of a tax rollback in 30
years, the 15 year construction plan of Prop 1 is best
taken with a grain of salt.
Extended and improved bus service would be
better than light rail
Light rail generally moves
more reliably than buses on mixed-traffic lanes,
because trains use a dedicated track way that is lightly used compared to a
typical roadway used by buses. However, the high construction and operating
cost of light rail means that far less geographic coverage can be provided with
light rail than can be achieved with a similar investment in buses.
While Sound Transit's light rail plan has only a few dozen stops, the bus
system provides thousands of places to get on and off. Technology and public policy favoring
more bus priority on roads can provide a
transit
system that provides more service sooner and less expensively than is possible
with urban passenger railroads. This priority is being provided on city
streets all over the world, including Paris, Los Angeles, Beijing, and in
downtown Seattle on Third Avenue and along 15th NW. Buses on well-managed HOV and HOT lanes,
or on arterial lanes with bus priority, move
quickly enough to attract hundreds of thousands of customers daily.
Light rail across the I-90 floating
bridge would create more traffic congestion
If Sound Transit's plan to operate light rail on the center roadway of I-90
by 2020 comes to pass, that corridor's
capacity would be
reduced for people-movement, cargo-movement, and vehicle movement.
Although the prospect of light rail is forcing WSDOT to add another lane in
each direction on I-90 across Lake Washington, all vehicle lanes on the outer
roadways of this Lake crossing will be narrower and slower. Computer
modeling shows vehicle flows would be impeded by removing the present-day
reversible HOV express lanes in
favor of light rail track in the center
roadway. A lane of closely spaced buses and other HOVs can move more people
per hour than trains holding 800 people. Why? Because the light
rail trains in Sound Transit's plan must operate with miles of empty track between them.
Prop 1 contributes to global
warming
Because light rail
trains run on electricity and cars run on liquid fuels, a Sound Transit study
calculates that the transportation system to be built with Prop 1
taxes would cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 100 thousand metric
tons per year in 2030, approximately 1 percent of annual emissions. However, this figure does not include the
greenhouse gas generated by light rail construction, and also does not take into
account the potential for greatly reduced emissions from private vehicles
beginning by 2020 because of new power systems such as plug-in electrics with
batteries. Furthermore, the environmental
Record of Decision for the six mile tunneled portion of Central Link light
rail that is to be completed under Prop 1, indicates that the greenhouse gas
emissions of construction would not be compensated by people riding the train
in the decades ahead if the emissions of cars are reduced to near zero by new
technology. Because a new generation of low emission buses are available to be
deployed quickly, it is likely that spending the Prop 1 dollars on expansion
of bus service would be more helpful to the global climate than building light
rail in a tunnel.