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As I’m reading a post on the Washington Policy Center’s blog I found myself somewhat stunned at the simplicity of the statement in this paragraph:

During our annual transportation event, Dr. Ronald Utt, a transportation and economics expert from the Heritage Foundation suggested that moving toward performance-based transportation decision making (and away from the current political system) means resources are distributed on getting the biggest bang for your buck. Instead, Sound Transit’s resource allocation appears to have very little to do with performance and everything to do with buying votes.

The more I’ve thought about it the more sense it has made. Over the years I’ve learned that there is great wisdom in simple things. A change in goals can lead to a complete overhaul of the way things are done. Focusing on a clear, attainable result can make a lot of choices along the way a lot simpler to decide.
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I’m not sure if this is a sign of improvement, but Puget Sound is ranked only 9th worst in the nation for drive time congestion in a recent report by Inrix of Kirkland. Some other lowlights from the report puts us 10th worst in overall congestion, 6th worst in their ‘Drive Time Travel Time Index’ and we have the 8th worst travel time hour.

Funny thing about these rankings, they don’t often show any improvement when a city’s rank changes. Instead they show that the other cities got worse. However, in this case we can claim that we have the 7th largest decrease in drive time congestion from 2006 to 2007. Things improved by a whopping 0.2%. Sounds like a new plank in the Democrat governor’s campaign. Finally she has something to hang her hat on besides quid-pro-quo legislation for her campaign donors.

In other news Silicon Valley can produce more then chips and disks. Scientists there have come up witha genetically altered microbe that eats agricultural waste and excretes crude oil. They wouldn’t put it in their own cars, but they think it will get us off of our Saudi oil dependency (no mention of Venezuela). Maybe someday I’ll be able to put my grass clippings into my SUV.
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Does the city really need more money to pay for street repairs? Recently the city came up with $45 million for improvements for downtown in a supposed attempt to keep Russell Investments Group from leaving (and to keep their pipe-dream of a pie-in-the-sky financial district alive).

Now they’re considering going back to voters to ask for more money to repair streets. We already said, ‘no’ to such a proposal, but I’ll get back to that. There wasn’t a vote during this discussion so the only members mentioned in the News Tribune article as supporting the idea are Lonergan (who seems to have proposed it) and Fey.

But this is the money-quote from the TNT article:

But Councilwoman Connie Ladenburg questioned whether there was enough time to develop a proposal that would get to voters this year. Ladenburg also said that the City Council had not determined that street maintenance was the top priority, although it certainly is among the top priorities.

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Union workers shut down the Port of Tacoma today for an illegal protest of the war in Iraq.

What do unions have to do with foreign policy? The short answer is nothing. So why do they think they can protest on company time and the taxpayer’s nickel?

In case you weren’t aware, it’s illegal for public employees in the state of Washington to strike. Unions do it all the time, but just because public officials and judges don’t do anything about it doesn’t change the law. These people should be put on trial for breaking the law. Not that it would do any good. The union would hire their lawyers (and probably get money from other unions to support their cause… exploiting employers and members) and the judges would likely dismiss the charges or suits after lengthy and costly appeals. But I wouldn’t mind my tax dollars going to strike a blow against these union thugs and in support of the rule of law in our state.

They claim they’re supporting the troops in this protest but that’s just double-talk. Nothing about what they’re doing is supportive of the troops. You can’t support the troops without supporting their mission, you can’t support the troops when you’re wasting money for the businesses that hire our troops when they’re not deployed and you’re not supporting the troops when you waste taxpayer dollars to do something that won’t do a bit of good for anyone.
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Op-eds by pinheads.

They actually got to paragraph two before going way, way wrong:

With RTID’s failure at the polls last November, we threw out highway expansion as the answer to our congestion problems.

No we didn’t. ‘We’ threw out an expensive and massive expansion of Sound Transit. Maybe they didn’t notice but there were two gas tax-roads packages approved by voters in the last few years totalling 14.5 cents per gallon of gas. People want roads and they proved it.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature have changed the way we look at transportation and global warming – making huge strides towards dealing with the problem.

Who is this ‘we’ they keep referring to? Gregoire didn’t change anything, well, other than increasing spending by 33% in just 3 years. But there’s still time to overturn this garbage, pandering legislation.
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The Washington Policy Center (WPC) has several posts over the last few days on transportation and Sound Transit.

WPC examined ‘Sound Transit II’ (ST2), the second phase of Sound Transit’s longterm overall operational plan and funding. ‘ST1′ said that if ST2 failed to pass a vote of the people that Sound Transit would roll back the taxes raised under ST1. They have yet to do so:
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The Puget Sound Regional Council today released what they called a study. I guess in some definitions it would qualify as a study, but in the truest sense, it’s a piece of agitprop. Their goal was obviously to find out if drivers would actually pay more money, but they veiled it in other terms. Anything to avoid doing their job of building roads.

The problem with congestion pricing:

Starting with the basic premise of the study, asking the question, “would drivers change their driving habits if they were charged congestion pricing”. What happened to the question of ’should they have to change their driving habits’? They have paid for the roads, they shouldn’t have to pay for them all over again.

Next, congestion pricing is a punitive fee placed on taxpayers for a failure in government. Neither the drivers nor the taxpayers are at fault for congestion. The responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of government for failing to meet the demand. Taxpayers trusted these people to provide adequate means of transportation, but the people they trusted used the money for pet projects instead of paying for the roads that the money was intended to cover. Here’s some comments on that from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation:

Secretary Paula Hammond displayed a trend graph of the last 25 years, which showed population, licensed drivers, employment, and vehicle miles traveled rising between 50% and 100%, while new lane miles barely increased 10%.

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Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is an idea that liberals support to justify exorbitant expenditures on mass transit projects. It starts when they spend a bunch of money on a mass transit (usually rail) claiming that it will bring more development to the area around train stations and bus transit centers. Then, when it fails to do so, they have to pump a bunch more money into development so they can justify their original waste of money on the transit projects.

Portland, OR is a prime example of this liberal folly. The most recent problem is that they’re facing a lawsuit from a developer who bought a piece of land near a transit center for just $1.

TriMet officials originally said they were in favor of the Allegro partly because it would have stood right next to a light-rail station, which would have encouraged more MAX ridership.

So, at this point, I’m a little confused. Wasn’t MAX supposed to encourage the development? But they need to pump money into development (in the form of the $1 sale of land) to encourage MAX ridership? What if they had just relied on buses until the development came about. Then they would only have had to pay for half of this chicken-egg equation.
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Dino Rossi, once again running against Queen Christine to take back the election that he won in ‘04, has unveiled his transportation plan for Washington state.

Funding for the plan comes from several sources:

• Less than half of revenue from vehicle sales taxes [goes to funding roads] ($7.7 billion)
• Stop charging state sales tax on transportation projects ($2.4 billion)
• Half of the current and future eastside subarea equity Sound Transit surplus ($690 million)
• Reasonable tolling ($ ?)

The plan:

• Congestion relief - nine projects given the highest priority (other than safety, stated in a video)
• Other Transportation Initiatives - Alaskan Way Viaduct, our state ferry system, and addressing the funding gap for projects statewide
• Green Initiatives - promotes the use of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles, and provides funding to repair salmon blocking culverts owned by the WSDOT
• Transit - Transit has always been planned, and managed, at the local level. The state should not meddle in local transit decisions.

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Finally, an objective review of rail’s ability to deliver on its promises.

Conclusion:

There may be places in the world where rail transit works. There may be reasons to build it somewhere in the United States. But saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are not among those reasons. Regions and states that want to be green should find cost-effective alternatives such as the ones described here. [emphasis added]

The CATO Institute’s report, Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?, released yesterday, has some less than flattering things to say about rail transit systems in the U.S.
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