Monorail mess the latest snag in Seattle's mass transit dreams

By: ELIZABETH M. GILLESPIE - Associated Press Writer | Saturday, October 2, 2004 5:19 PM PDT ∞

SEATTLE -- Visions of a slick, elevated train gliding over streets choked with traffic wooed a razor-thin majority of city voters to pass the Seattle Monorail initiative two years ago.

Now the $1.6 billion project is on a collision course with another ballot measure to kill it -- the latest snag in the city's tortured dreams to get wheels off roads and people into anything that moves on rails.

"Green Line" enthusiasts have vowed to fight the recall measure in the run-up to the Nov. 2 election and in court if it prevails, while backers of Initiative 83 say, "Bring it on!"

"It's certainly tiring," said Peter Sherwin, co-chairman of the campaign to defeat I-83. "No matter what the plan is, there is always going to be a coalition of 'no' that can mount a protest. It's frustrating in a larger sense as a Seattle resident to see this kind of nattering negativity and ongoing obstruction. Can we ever get anything done?"

That's a question this region's eco-friendly masses have been asking themselves for decades -- long before the highways got clogged with commuters.

Critics of the Green Line, the first of five planned monorail lines, balk at the steep tax bite required to build it and say the project is better suited to an amusement park than a city trying to ease gridlock.

"It's just a pet project being rammed down our throats by a few interested people," said Liv Finne, co-chairwoman of the Monorail Recall campaign, an effort bankrolled largely by a commercial property developer who owns buildings along the proposed route.

Most U.S. cities with mass transit systems built them long before streets got crowded. Seattle is trying to do it with roughly twice the number of people living in the region as there were 30 years ago.

"In Seattle, because we're doing it backwards ... it's more cumbersome," said Anne Levinson, the Seattle Monorail Project's deputy director.

Mass transit in Seattle began with a horse-drawn rail line in 1884, which gave way to a network of cable cars and electric streetcars, then "interurban" trains that ran south to Tacoma and north to Everett.

But as cars became cheaper and more popular, people started hitting the highways instead of piling onto trains. After Interstate 5 was completed between Everett and Tacoma in the 1960s, the first Puget Sound Regional Transportation Plan favored new highways and roads over mass transit. In the next few years, King County voters twice rejected extensive rail systems.

As population boomed and traffic slowed in the 1990s, voters in the region created Sound Transit, which promised a network of express buses, heavy-rail commuter trains and light-rail transit aimed at easing some of the worst traffic choke-points.

But financial problems forced the agency to scale back the light-rail line, galvanizing critics who said taxpayers weren't getting what they were promised. The agency hopes to have the line running by 2009.

Meanwhile, voters in Seattle itself approved the monorail at the 2002 election. The 14-mile line will course through some of the city's most liberal, transit-happy neighborhoods, a different set of areas than the choke-points targeted by Sound Transit.

Although the line will run along bus routes that carry more than 30,000 people every day. Monorail backers pooh-pooh buses as clunky, exhaust-spewing behemoths that get stuck at red lights -- just like SUVs only with more people in them.

Levinson concedes that the region has a host of pressing transportation needs -- perhaps more pressing than building a pretty elevated train on streets that are usually less jammed than the highways outside the city.

But there's no sense in waiting for other problems to be solved first, she argued. "We could sit around and wait for decades and say something else is higher priority," she said, "and nothing would get done."

Back in the mid-1990s, hard-core monorail proponents touted elevated trains riding high above the traffic jams as the sleekest, most elegant solution to the city's transit troubles -- much better than the light rail in Sound Transit's plan.

"It's the idea of having in essence an elevated subway, something that lets you see and get the view and the excitement of travel ... without getting stuck in traffic," Sherwin said.

Although some transit advocates worry there are only so many train systems voters will agree to pay for, the monorail and light-rail movements have evolved toward each other.

"Sound Transit is a regional system. The monorail is a local system. ... Our riders will use a monorail system. And their riders will ride Sound Transit," said Lee Somerstein, a Sound Transit spokesman.

Like Sound Transit, the Seattle Monorail Project has run into financial troubles. The first chunk of revenue from a 1.4 percent tax on vehicles registered in the city came up short, forcing scale-backs that included limiting some parts of the line to a single track.

"They have been shrinking this system markedly," Finne said. "There will be choke points."

Monorail officials insist that having a single track on the outer two miles of each end of the line won't slow the trains down because they'll be able to pull off onto side tracks, allowing the trains to pass each other if needed.

The measure on the November ballot would ban the monorail from building on city streets.

The initiative got on the ballot in a squeaker. Last month, a state Court of Appeals panel overturned a King County Superior Court judge's ruling that the monorail is an "essential public facility" already approved by voters and thus not subject to recall campaigns. The state Supreme Court refused to hear the case, saying there wasn't time to review the matter thoroughly before the election.

"It's frustrating from a legal standpoint -- frustrating and confusing to voters, because it's something that's been ruled illegal by one court so far, but it's going on the ballot," said Natasha Jones, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Monorail Project.

On the Net:

Seattle Monorail Project: http://www.elevated.org/

Monorail Recall: http://www.exordia.net/monorailrecall/

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