An idea is going around, particularly in conservative circles, that the Covid pandemic fundamentally changes transportation needs and behooves Seattle to cancel its transit expansion plans. These ideas are built on a basic misunderstanding of cities, society, and geometry; they should be discarded.
On Monday, Puget Sound Business Journal published an op-ed from Mariya Frost plying the “let’s abandon transit” case. Frost works at the conservative think-tank Washington Policy Center and has long been grinding an axe against light rail projects. Her critiques are easily refuted.
Pre-Covid, mid-Covid, or post-Covid, transit is the backbone of our transportation system. Seattle’s ambitions of growth and high quality of life–things the Puget Sound Business Journal normally champions–only work if transit lays the groundwork. Highways can’t be widened fast enough even if we did want to waste all that money and lock in all those climate emissions and sprawl. Autonomous vehicles don’t change the basic geometry of cities. If you want the city to be dominated by places rather than parking lots, private vehicles and ridehailing cannot be your focal point, autonomous or otherwise.
“Four years ago, transportation experts predicted Sound Transit’s light rail expansion would be obsolete before it’s built,” Frost begins her piece, with “experts” referring primarily to her own think-tank and Republican leaders. Already granting herself victory in re-litigating her failed Sound Transit 3 (ST3) argument, she adds Covid only “accelerated trends that were already happening.”
Claiming voters only passed ST3 out of desperation to improve their commute–heaven forbid–Frost launches in the central transportation argument: let them eat buses. “Officials plan to spend billions to send light rail to low-density suburban areas despite better alternatives like Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which is more flexible and less expensive.”
Never mind that ST3 funded 54 miles of BRT along with 64 additional miles of light rail. How would buses better serve Ballard and Uptown? Those neighborhoods already RapidRide D, a version of BRT-lite, and don’t actually seem satiated by it. Likewise, Tacoma wanted a light rail connection to the airport beyond the express buses they already have, the same goes for Everett.
“It is time for a Sound Transit reset,” Frost continues. “Planners should stop developing 20-year transportation plans when our future is so unknown.” She proceeds to make an argument that working from home in mass numbers is a lasting deep-rooted phenomenon, despite that being the most knee-jerk conclusion to draw from Covid. People would rather work from home than contract a deadly virus in the office, but it seems foolish to assume that’s immutable once a vaccine is available. And it’s already not the reality for the essential workers that make up one in three transit riders. More to the point, tons of transit trips aren’t work commutes anyway.
The next erroneous claim is that light rail is failing to “attract companies.” The example she cites is REI selling its shiny new headquarters to Facebook. She fails to note that REI pocketed a handsome profit in the process–light rail was a big reason why it could flip its headquarters so easily. A suburban office park on a lonely highway may have been a different story.
