Seattle Times - December 9, 2007

 

How green is my valley of roads, transit?

By James Vesely

 

ometimes, I think we don't know how good we've got it.

Thursday night in downtown Seattle was one of the most pleasant gridlocks I have encountered in some time. The city was abloom with light, from twinkling storefronts to bulb-dappled trees lining Fifth Avenue.

I have lived in dead cities before, and this is the opposite, a city luring shoppers and partygoers to a night on the town — festive accompaniment to the season.

Same thing in downtown Bellevue, where I lost count at 12 or 13 construction cranes one night last week. There are so many cranes in the box of streets that is downtown Bellevue, it looks like the rebound of a species. Same thing with the crowds and the dazzle of lights.

What happened? So far, metropolitan Seattle has been sheltered from the high winds, rising water and other kinds of storms, such as the subprime tornado.

So, the building continues. Bellevue is expected to top out at about 140,00 people by 2030, according to Mayor Grant Degginger. But, I wonder if the city can be successful in stopping at that number. More than a decade away is too far to see clearly, but another million or so Washington residents are going to hug the coastline cities disproportionally, including everywhere from Bellevue to Shelton.

Port Townsend can be considered a suburban city within the larger umbrella of Seattle, Bellevue, Everett. And Bellevue's rise in jobs and other temptations extends its pull of people as far east as the Cascade Crest.

All of this growth adds lights to the night sky and a physical imprint to the Earth. In the adjoining column of opinion today, authors Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres argue that concentrated cities and suburbs produce a hot footprint by their density and high energy use.

Those authors bring up the notions of "smart sprawl" and "an archipelago of villages." That last one seems close to the vision of the Cascade Land Conservancy's idea of rural cities still dependent on forest products from living forests protected from sprawl but not from logging.

Finally reaching consensus, the three most-urban counties of the Puget Sound archipelago — Pierce, King and Snohomish — agreed with great unanimity on something last month. Voters in all three counties decided not to accept an $18 billion tax bill associated with roads and transit improvements in Proposition 1. Death by a thousand cuts.

How good we've got it is that already there is a library of people and ideas to change the rickety scaffolding of today's transportation agencies and bureaucracies. Summed up perfectly by The Washington Roundtable, the goal looks like this:

"Enact a state transportation planning and investment strategy that reforms governance in the Central Puget Sound region and allows for creative financing."

Several sacred cows are sacrificed in those simple words because the challenge is to completely revise the thinking that counties and their elected representatives are the instrument of regional accord. Proposition 1 proved they are not.

A model out there to tackle roads, bridges, trucks and trains is one of many blue-ribbon-commission findings allowing for private-public partnerships on big projects and a council of sages to oversee the entire transportation infrastructure.

I don't think that is possible in the way things work around here. But we've got to admit that something remarkable is going very well, and that is the transformation of the cities of Puget Sound into hot spots of innovation and pleasant living. In that I include a robust Seattle, a gracefully maturing Tacoma, a new center and heart for downtown Everett, Bremerton's zippy new Harborside district and Bellevue's leap into a sophisticated mercantile economy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Redmond didn't even have one movie theater. Now it has several.

We can complain about the car and about the hot spots of Earth, but hear the angels sing about this region and what changes can rain down on us in just a few years.

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