Have you voted yet? Don’t wait. Your ballot should be arriving any day if it hasn’t already.
Vote Yes on Seattle Transportation Benefit District Prop 1
More and better King County Metro transit service. Not sure I really need to say more than that.
It’s at the end of a long and confusing ballot, so be sure you make it all the way there.
Vote No on the Monorail
We all agree that an actually functional monorail would be super cool, but this measure won’t get us there. It has essentially no coalition of support and even its own board members don’t seem to think it’s not a good idea. Yikes.
Sound Transit is the way to get the high capacity transit service we need, so let’s focus on getting a bold ST3 package ready for a vote as soon as possible.
Cascade and Feet First candidate questionnaires
We here at Seattle Bike Blog are in no way prepared to endorse a slate of candidates, but we can point you to some resources to help you decide.
Cascade Bicycle Club has made a bunch of endorsements and has posted all candidate responses to their safe streets focused questionnaire.
They also sent fancy emails to people in their system personalized to their legislative district:
For more safe streets endorsements, check out Feet First’s questionnaire responses.
And, of course, if you have any endorsements of your own, let us know in the comments below.
Comments
7 responses to “Vote! Here’s who safe streets organizations are supporting”
Although I understand the position taken by this blog on transportation-related votes for this posting, as a resident of West Seattle, I find the region’s transportation proposals highly inequitable to West Seattle and Ballard residents. While we dig deep to pay for the rest of the region to secure rail solutions, we get little in return.
I believe the original (meaning 10 years ago) monorail extension project would have at least tipped the balance towards equity. I realize any proposal for a monorail today is doomed. Even so, I will vote for it so the “haves” (meaning residents northeast Seattle, south Seattle and the Eastside at least see a few of us are more than sheep.
Oh come on, it was largely the monorail’s fault to begin with that light rail for West Seattle and Ballard wasn’t on the table earlier. That was supposed to be built by the previous and now-defunct monorail authority, so Sound Transit went elsewhere.
Voting for the monorail again would be shooting Ballard and West Seattle in the foot yet again. It would again fracture support for the corridor between two agencies and continue the status quo of those areas getting jack squat.
The previous stupid monorail thing already put West Seattle and Ballard a decade behind where they should be, and now you want to ‘protest’ by potentially delaying it even further?
Alex, that’s a crock. Sound Transit being a regional agency can’t spend all it’s money on West Seattle and Ballard. They have this deal call “sub equity” which requires them to spend their money where they collect it from. That said, when they reach Pierce County and Snohomish County they can apportion some of the overall costs of a system to those regions. Hence the desire to get to the county borders as fast as possible. (along with the East side.)
Also once the East side rail is running the downtown tunnel will be at capacity, so no room to run rail to Ballard and West Seattle.
That said, the original Monorail group failed misribly in estimating the necessary tax revenue and the cost of crossing the ship canal.
This ballot issue like ST has no limit on the taxing authority written in to it. It’s also highly regressive relying again on sales tax and MVET. Once in place there is almost no way to get rid of the board.
That’s why it should be voted down.
Why a monorail? It’s the best technology to get to Ballard given the limited surface space to put a rail line and the high cost of tunneling.
And I wish that someone would get this right….
Gary, that’s a crock. I’m quite aware of subarea equity, and when ST3 hits the ballot in 2016 it’s pretty obvious what the big project for the North King County subarea is going to be–connecting Ballard to the light rail system. I also wouldn’t count out West Seattle as being on there as well. It’s also quite likely that we’ll eventually need more tunneling downtown for, as you say, when the DSTT runs out of capacity.
All this monorail ballot measure is for is to form yet another redundant bureaucracy. Read the measure. It’s not to build a monorail; it’s to create another bureaucracy.
I think you live in a different region if you’re paying for a rail solution for the rest of us, because the rest of us do not have a rail solution either… I’m on capitol hill, and no a line to the airport is NOT a rail solution.
Dave, At least you have a tunnel entrance to the Light Rail, and it’s going North to the U and beyond and to Redmond (at Overlake) and beyond. You have more than a promise, you have access. Ballard and West Seattle have nothing.
IMO, Light rail should go to West Seattle and South, to meet up the existing line near the airport.
As for Ballard, an elevated system would be best, of course crossing the Ship canal is going to be expensive no matter what we do.
On existing crappy/scary infrastructure, from the Alaska Junction in West Seattle you can walk to the SODO light rail station in 1 hour 12 minutes. You can bike there in 24 minutes. I would rather see some covered elevated biking/walking trails from West Seattle than a monorail. You could even do it in an electric wheel chair if you are disabled. Or also allow a space on the trail for electric bikes for the lazier commuters.