Sound Transit Survey Results

Well, the local transit blogosphere is all atwitter about the results of Sound Transit's recent survey.

Over at Carless in Seattle they're not so keen on how the surveys were conducted. The Web results are useless, they say, because they're from people who are already interested in talking about transit, which makes them biased. We tend to agree, seeing as we took the survey ourselves and we know we're biased. They are encouraged by the results of the phone survey, though they think those questions were poorly designed.

The Seattle Transit Blog hasn't fully parsed the results yet, but are going to take the 9,000 web responses into account when they do. In the meantime, they seem happy too.

We're not going to get into a whole long post itemizing each response here since Carless already has charts up that do a much better job than we ever could and the Transit Blog will undoubtedly have a much more refined analysis than we ever could, since it seems that transit is all they ever think about. We will however, give you a few take aways that we like.

• 49 percent of respondents (in the phone poll, we're not looking at the Web results) think the Puget Sound region is heading in the right direction.
• 24 percent think "Transportation/mass transit is the region's most important problem" while 22 percent think traffic congestion is. Nothing else even comes close.
• 64 percent of people have at least a somewhat favorable view of Sound Transit. That surprised us, because everyone we talk to seems to remember the budget problems of the mid-90s. (As an aside, 57 percent of the people feel the same way about WSF. Pretty amazing.)
• 22 percent of respondents said Better Train/Light Rail System is the most important transit improvement the region needs. 20 percent said road expansion. 14 percent said more mass transit in general.
• 44 percent said that expanding mass transit is extremely urgent, while only 17 percent said the same of spending more money on expanding roads instead of transit.
• 75 percent of people want to see a new transit initiative on the ballot in 2008.

There's a ton more, but those are the numbers we found the most interesting and hopeful. We're sure this survey can and will be picked apart by people more experienced than us, but still, it seems like an even better bet that light rail will be back on the ballot in 08, and may even pass.

thanks for the photo romulusnr and for putting it in the Seattlest Flickr Pool.