Visionless

The worst local news of the past week pertaining to urban livability comes from Seattle City Hall, where City Councilmembers thanked citizens for reelecting some of them by proposing to eliminate from the city budget the $1.5 million for planning streetcars and light rail requested Mayor McGinn.

Local planning is a prerequisite for federal grant applications. Therefore, applying for federal support to expand the rail network would be delayed by whatever amount of time it would take to marshal the will to fund and carry out such studies.

If rail planning is kept out of the final budget, the Council would have dealt another setback to providing Seattle with even the minimum transit infrastructure the people of a major city should expect. It is the kind of thinking that has made Seattle into an also-ran behind the region's truly great cities, Portland and Vancouver, BC both economically and in quality of life.

Update 1: Part of what I have previously told several Council members:

I would like to separately urge the Council to move to inject true vision into Seattle's long term transit planning.

It seems as though the last two decades of Seattle ambition has been dictated by the urging to be "World Class." Yet I find the vision in the Transit Master Plan to be problematic.

The TMP is very realistic in terms of identifying corridors and types of service that are doable in the short and medium term. Streetcars are identified for some corridors, but Bus Rapid Transit is matched with others.

This is not vision, this is absence of vision. It reflects no ambition beyond what is fundable in the foreseeable future.

Bus Rapid Transit is a second-class transit technology. It can be said to provide all the transit service of rail, with none of the accompanying side benefits.

Ballard, Fremont and the U District have concentrations of business and housing which can support rail. But rail would give other areas the stimulus to achieve smarter urban uses.

This matter is one of equity among all the districts of Seattle. Identifying some districts for rail and others for BRT is to designate economic winners and losers.

Long term vision means stating as official policy a goal of eventually reaching ALL corridors with some kind of fixed-guideway transit.

For the moment the Transit Master Plan is a good starting point, it is a good interim plan (although West Seattle, and Aurora Avenue above N. 80th Street, should be be identified as rail corridors NOW). I urge the Council act to add real, long term vision.

It does not cost more money to declare as policy that "The long term goal is rapid rail service in all corridors."