Gridlock'd!

I guess I'm finally out of my mourning period for the Seattle monorail project, which died at the ballot box in its fifth vote at the beginning of November. It would have placed a 14-mile line that stretched from near my homestead in West Seattle through downtown and up north to the Ballard neighborhood. (And for non-Seattle-ites, this monorail project has nothing to do with the ill-fated current monorail that made national headlines this last week with its two trains crashing into one another.) I've stopped mourning, but I've not stopped feeling angry at the failure of it all--blame which spreads across a wide swath of city and county politicians and Seattle Monorail Project officials. But I'm probably most angry at Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels.

Just this last spring and summer, I was quite impressed by his leadership in
getting dozens of cities to agree to reduce their principalities' greenhouse gas emissions to the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, which the BushCo administration had turned its back on.

Unfortunately, Mayor Nickels (nicknamed "Mayor Gridlock" by Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger) pulled his support for the monorail and revealed what a paper tiger he truly is on the issue of changing urban habits to a greener outlook. Here's what The Stranger noted in their wrap-up of the end of the monorail:

Mayor Nickels claimed he wanted to push an urban agenda: He was for density, development, and smart growth. He said he wanted to challenge a city that favors car-centric, quasi-suburban neighborhoods like Laurelhurst, Magnolia, and Green Lake with their single-family zoning and inaccessible grocery stores. But Nickels's claims were empty. This fall, Nickels decided to throw out elevated transit with the trash, revealing that, despite the big-city posturing, he's just a suburbanite at heart. Without keeping speedy, elevated transit in his equation for change, Nickels has negated any sense of an urbanist agenda.

I should also note that the other issue that's on the minds of Seattle-ites is the portion of Highway 99 referred to as The Viaduct, which ribbons around downtown along the edge of the waterfront on Elliott Bay. It was damaged in our earthquake of 2001, but has been patched up enough for traffic--but needs to be completely overhauled. And that's where Nickels is placing his bets:

Mayor Gridlock wants to spend $4.6 billion to build an underground highway in place of the viaduct, not only catering to the estimated 110,000 cars and trucks that drive on the viaduct every day, but inviting more traffic into downtown Seattle. It's a strategy that accommodates increasing gridlock rather than challenges entrenched suburban values. It's akin to accommodating a steady diet of Claim Jumper dinners by squeezing your increasing mass into those elastic-waist pants, rather than forcing yourself to lose a few pounds with a better diet.

The PWC's (People's Waterfront Coalition) alternative vision for downtown—building a four-lane surface street to replace the viaduct; making infrastructure fixes (like making Third Avenue and Denny Way more accessible) to tap the 40 percent capacity that's currently not being used on surrounding downtown streets according to the city's own estimates; and moving more commuters to mass transit—seeks to curb Seattle's auto appetite. Moon points out that when the viaduct reopened after being closed temporarily for a few days after the February 2001 earthquake, traffic in the area fell by 27 percent for a few months—down to 80,000 trips a day. Out of necessity, commuters changed their habits and the sky didn't fall.

Mayor Gridlock isn't interested in the PWC's alternative. After killing the monorail, the mayor is now putting his political weight behind the tunnel option. On the morning after the election, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported: "Nickels looked forward to a second term in which he said he plans to focus on replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel." Nickels has lined up about $2.4 billion so far—yet another pile of public money, currently estimated nationally in the hundreds of billions of dollars, going to subsidize the automobile.

Nickels needs to understand that prioritizing roads over mass transit is an ill-conceived approach to addressing traffic woes. Rob Johnson, policy director for Seattle's Transportation Choices Coalition, sums up the moronic, Catch-22 impulse to build more roads: "The roads just fill up with congestion as fast as you can build new lanes. It's called latent demand." Johnson's point is common sense: More roads don't give commuters an option to get out of gridlock, they simply perpetuate gridlock. To be fair, heavy traffic, even gridlock, is an aspect of density. That's why progressive mayors who promote density need to give commuters a real option to get out of gridlock.
[...]
In addition to betraying his promises to voters on mass transit, Nickels's car-centric agenda makes a mockery of his internationally acclaimed challenge to President Bush over the Kyoto Protocol. Last summer Nickels got hundreds of urban mayors to challenge Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by pledging to enact local policies that would reduce greenhouse gasses to Kyoto levels. But here in his own backyard he's obliging a future of environmentally devastating auto emissions. After he killed the monorail, the international press lambasted Nickels: "In the case of the Seattle monorail," London's Infrastructure Journal editorialized after the election, "the urban transport project had everything in place—except the vital element of political will."

Political will starts at home and shouldn't be forgotten even in the face of our Iraq turmoil (both physical battle on the ground and heated discussion back at home). This weekend I aim to focus a bit more on environmental issues and get back on track to covering them more regularly.