Our Transportation Future
Tomorrow's infrastructure--yesterday's funding system
The Ballard News Tribune site today posted a guest column from me about our state’s transportation future relative to funding in the 21st Century.
I wrote the article because I feel how we fund transportation and public infrastructure in today’s world is essentially a ‘systems’ issue. That is: It requires us to reinvent our entire system anew.
The future is coming really, really fast
On a larger level, I feel strongly that our fundamental challenge today isn’t left versus right, progressive versus conservative…it is those who are willing to tackle bold systems issues and challenges versus those who feel paralyzed by the institutional bureaucracy of government. It is, at the risk of making you snicker, about hope versus fear–courage versus timid approaches–bold thinking versus modest excuses.
We need to have the courageous honesty to acknowledge that many of our systems like how we fund transportation do not work well; we are an entrepreneurial city and state with innovation and creativity in the private sector. Unfortunately, that entrepreneurial spirit does not frequently extend to the public sector. We can be so much more than what we’ve become.
UPDATE: Matt Rosenberg at Cascadia Center has posted an article about this posting.
Rep. Carlyle,
excellent op-ed and additional comments here. I’ve highlighted both, and added some thoughts in this Cascadia Center blog post.
Best,
M.R.
oops. somehow the link didn’t take. here’s the url: http://www.cascadiaprospectus.org/2009/07/state_rep_reuven_carlyle_new_e.php#more
Thanks Matt for the link and cross post. It’s obviously time for a courageously honest conversation about specific new ways to fund transportation. I’d like to see a legislative strategy around the issue and will be speaking with folks in the know to get a better handle on how aggressive folks are willing to be.
Reuven, thanks for your thoughtful look at the bigger-picture issues in future infrastructure. I would certainly support tolls to support expensive projects that allow travel along a specific corridor, such as the existing and future Lake Washington bridges and the proposed tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct — especially if a relatively convenient means to collect those tolls could be implemented.
Still, I’m a bit concerned about the smaller picture. While the Rapid Ride bus is expected to make travel easy between downtown Ballard and Queen Anne, I haven’t heard about any real connections to more-regional systems, such as the light rail. Walking from Queen Anne to Westlake is a bit of a hike. While that corridor has lots of bus service, convenience would be destroyed by taking a Rapid Ride bus to Queen Anne, transferring to another bus to Westlake, then transferring to the Link Light Rail.
Not all of us who want to get around local neighborhoods want to, or conveniently can, get around by bicycle. A friend of mine calls Ballard “the nearest, furthest place,” and in many respects it is. We have good public transit connections to downtown (will they be better or worse after Rapid Ride is implemented??), and an adequate but rather slow connection to the University of Washington. Getting to many points in the city requires a bus transfer either downtown or near the U.W. I’ve been a supporter of the light rail since 1995, but it won’t go anywhere close to where I live. I was never a supporter of the half-baked monorail, but it did at least propose rapid service for an underserved corridor.