Political gridlock delays roadway repairs in Seattle

SEATTLE -- The Alaskan Way Viaduct, a major elevated highway that links downtown to the western portion of the city, is in danger of collapsing after being damaged in an earthquake. The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, which connects Seattle to its eastern suburbs across Lake Washington, might sink. Much of an 18-mile stretch of Interstate 5 through Seattle, the most heavily trafficked section of roadway in Washington state, is in such bad shape it has to be rebuilt.

Despite the severe economic and quality-of-life consequences that would result should any of these key pieces of the transportation infrastructure be rendered unusable, progress toward fixing three of the most pressing transportation problems in the Puget Sound region moves at a snail's pace -- if it moves at all.

Seattle's trouble, and the seeming inability of the state's political leadership to alleviate it, highlights the thorny political and financial issues that arise as metropolitan areas around the country confront the huge costs associated with repairing aging transportation infrastructure, much less expanding capacity to serve growing populations. With Washington state's population up 42 percent over the past two decades, Seattle grew into the second-most congested metro area in America in 1999, according to an annual ranking by the Texas Transportation Institute, although congestion has eased slightly with the economic downturn of recent years.

"The growth in our economy and population has created an imbalance of demand and capacity, and the problem is complicated because big pieces of the system are near the end of their useful lives," said Doug MacDonald, Washington state's secretary of transportation.

He cited the Viaduct and the Evergreen Point Bridge as the state's two highest priorities, given their vulnerability should the area be hit by another earthquake like the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually quake that struck the region in 2001. But MacDonald acknowledged that he does not know whether they will be replaced anytime soon: "There is a lot of resistance to tax increases to raise money to modernize the system."

A big part of the problem is sticker shock.

An initial estimate for replacing the Viaduct with a tunnel was $12 billion. Then state engineers offered a scaled-back plan, which will cost about $4 billion. The Evergreen Bridge needs $1.75 billion more, with I-5 reconstruction an unknown but clearly sizable sum on top of that.

And those figures are only to maintain the status quo. Capacity expansions on what are termed "highways of statewide significance" will require tens of billions more, according to a blue-ribbon transportation commission formed by Governor Gary Locke in 1998. Meanwhile, the state's entire annual transportation budget is only a little over $1.5 billion.

The problem of infrastructure needs outstripping funds is common around the country, but in Washington state bitterly divisive political battles over how to proceed have caused three decades of near-total political gridlock. The fights have pitted transit-friendly urban Democrats against suburban Republican road warriors, the populous Puget Sound against the less dense rural regions of the state, and a powerful undercurrent of populist antitax sentiment against a seemingly limitless need for new transportation dollars. The paralysis is exacerbated by the consensus-oriented political culture of the Puget Sound, which requires an endless array of stakeholders to come to agreement before projects proceed. According to Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington, "in other cities, when you want something done, the people in power trample the people who aren't in power. Seattle is a much more polite place. We have this wonderful belief in consensus. We do process better than anybody. We just don't reach decisions."

While road improvements are stalled, Seattle is moving forward with two controversial, expensive, and incompatible mass transit systems: a long-planned light rail line that has been beset by years of court challenges and ballooning cost estimates, and a $1.7 billion monorail line that was narrowly approved by Seattle voters in 2002 but has been embattled ever since. Neither system, however, is expected to do much to reduce road congestion.

That does not bother Peter Hurley, executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, a mass transit advocacy group based in Seattle. A genuine transportation fix will come not through costly and sprawl-inducing road construction, but from the creation of denser neighborhoods bound together by mass transit, he said. "Public opinion says we can't build our way out," he added.

While environmentally conscious Seattle voters are willing to accept taxation to build transit, they balk at tax hikes geared to road-building, seeing such construction as an open invitation to increase sprawl. More-conservative suburban and rural voters in Washington state, mistrustful of government, tend to reject all tax increases out of hand.

The latest proposal to address Seattle's needs, a $12.8 billion three-county regional plan of road improvements, was delayed repeatedly over the past two years as local politicians haggled over what to include in the package. This June, with the plan largely hammered into shape, an expected November vote was again put off after polling indicated that the measure was doomed.

The failure occurred on the heels of an earlier referendum on a $7.8 billion statewide plan funded by a 9-cents-per-gallon gas tax increase, put before voters in 2002, which flopped miserably at the polls despite bipartisan support from some of the state's best-known politicians.

Dwight Pelz, a liberal Democrat and member of the King County Council who is vice chairman of the tri-county committee that developed the regional plan, placed much of the onus for the stalled plans directly on the shoulders of the voters. "I don't think you can separate our transportation problems from tax revolts and the growing sense that government doesn't really solve our problems," he said. "People say transportation is the number one issue, but they don't want to fund it."

And King County council member Rob McKenna, a conservative Republican who is another key participant in formulating the regional plan, said the very existence of a regional effort is a glaring indication that the state has punted on its obligations: "We're not getting anything done because the state of Washington has essentially abdicated its basic responsibility for transportation."