Prop. 1's Exercise in Brinksmanship

And the politicos know that; hence the RTID. If it gets funding, then the ability of the electorate to influence new projects is drastically decreased, as fewer funding plans would be placed on the ballot where a fickle electorate would be apt to nix them.

Hence the brinksmanship on the part of Prop. 1's designers: offer everyone a carrot--if you want transit, you gotta pay for roads, and vice-versa. If the voters don't bite, then, well, you're all screwed.

"Delay will add hundreds of millions to the price tag of getting anything done," writes Connelly darkly, parroting Prop. 1's supporters. "We've learned, too, of a different kind of cost -- the difficulty of getting people to jobs and moving goods between workplaces."

There are two fundamental problems with the RTID approach, though. First, exactly why should we trust these people with so much decision-making power? After all, it was the various transportation agencies (WSDOT, SDOT, Sound Transit) who failed for so long to achieve any real gains. The reason mass-transit supporters like the Sierra Club and King Co. Exec Ron Sims turned against the plan was they realized the RTID would enable those who favor more highways to siphon off funding from necessary mass transit projects, which are a much better long-term investment.

And second, the carrot-and-stick approach of Prop. 1, by putting everyone's eggs in the same basket, thus producing a single, huge set of tax increases, is potentially self-defeating. The electorate has consistently shown itself willing to vote down large funding projects. Yesterday, the P-I reported on a UW poll that found that Prop. 1 is failing 46 to 43 percent (Carless in Seattle took issue with the news analysis of the poll, but even so the race remains a dead heat).

The idea that Prop. 1 represents a break with Seattle's tradition of intransigence is appealing but likely inaccurate. A more realistic analysis of the past decade has shown that when local leaders like Sims and Nickels throw their weight behind reasonably affordable projects (like light rail and S.L.U.T.), they can achieve a critical mass of business interests, environmentalists, and civic-minded voters to make things happen. While it's tempting to throw a lot of criticism at the confused electorate in the Puget Sound region for constantly voting down options, the more likely truth is that the voters have had the good sense to fight tooth and nail to stop unaccountable agencies (WSDOT) and megalomaniacal ego-projects (Nickels' tunnel). After all, the voters willing passed tax increases on themselves for the monorail and supported it at the polls later; it was the voters, not the agencies, who took that initiative, and the failure of the SMP can be largely attributed to the fact local leaders refused to take serious action to make it work.

Thanks to Timwillis of the Seattlest Flickr pool for his awesome shot of a lonely bus ride home on the 49