Proposition 1 Analysis: No vote won't make traffic woes go away
If measure fails, officials may try again in a couple of years
Voters answered one question when they apparently rejected the ambitious roads and transit proposal on Tuesday's ballot, but that just sets up another one:
Now what?
It's not as if the region's transportation problems will disappear with the failure of the measure, which aimed to address those concerns by extending the Sound Transit light rail system north, south and east from Seattle, and by adding highway lanes and interchanges in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
Even if the package were to be approved, highway congestion is projected to worsen significantly in the next 20 years as the region's population swells; if nothing replaces the proposal, the traffic jams will get worse still.
Given that situation, it's possible that another transportation proposal will show up on the ballot within a couple of years -- much as in 1996, when voters approved a scaled-back Sound Transit plan after rejecting a grander one in 1995.
But it's unclear what a follow-up measure might look like.
A key question is whether highway building and mass-transit proposals would be yoked together as they were in Proposition 1, which sought $31 billion for Sound Transit and $16 billion for the road-planning Regional Transportation Investment District (the figures are adjusted for projected inflation and include construction, financing and, for light rail, operations expenses). The money would have come from sales and motor vehicle taxes in the urbanized areas of the three counties.
Gov. Chris Gregoire said Monday she thinks the roads and transit marriage should remain intact.
"To do one without the other simply will lead to a food fight and will not be healthy for the people," she said at the swearing-in of Paula Hammond as state secretary of transportation.
And Hammond said, "It's not going to be roads versus transit any longer in this state."
But the conjoined measure divided the environmental community, whose members philosophically support the expansion of light rail, but usually not highway-building. Some green groups backed the ballot measure, willing to take the bad with the good; others objected, hoping for a transit-only proposal in the future.
Continue reading this article from the Seattle P-I:
Proposition 1 Analysis: No vote won't make traffic woes go away
