OPPOSING RIGHT WING INITIATIVES AND FIGHTING TIM EYMAN
MYTH: Light rail is an expensive boondoggle that will cost an enormous amounts of money to build but will provide no real benefit to commuters.
TRUTH: Light rail is a wise, sensible investment that is comparable to expanding highways in terms of cost, but moves more people when it is completed. Light rail will give commuters a choice, connecting neighborhoods, increasing property values, and spurring redevelopment. Light rail benefits everyone, even those of us who don’t become riders, because it gets cars off the highways.
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MYTH: Transit carries only a small percentage of total trips [for example, one percent, or five percent, or a a similiar number] and is therefore not worth spending money on.
TRUTH: The “total trips” statistic, frequently used by those opposed to rail transit, is a misleading, deceiving figure which poorly measures the effectiveness of public transit. Rail systems, in particular, are constructed in key corridors and can’t be fairly or accurately compared against all of the roadways in a region.
The crippling congestion that Puget Sound faces today doesn’t occur on the roads that run past our houses…it occurs on our arterials, interstates, and highways, where currently our only option is to drive to get where we want to go - or get on a bus that will be stuck in the same traffic.
Asking what percentage transit carries of the trips for which it can compete yields a different number, a much more accurate number, one that demonstrates the importance of transit. Transit cannot be competitive unless three criteria are met: it must be available, the service must be high quality, and the purpose of the trip must be one for which transit can compete. Proposition 1’s 30+ miles of light rail broaden the availability of high quality light rail for a reliable commute.
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MYTH: The real way to solve congestion is to just widen our existing highways and build new ones.
TRUTH: It has been proven time and time again that this approach does not work. Building or widening highways is counterintuitive. It may seem practical, but in reality, it just encourages commuters to drive more and live further away from where they work, creating a vicious cycle of congestion that never ends. It’s like trying to lose weight by loosening your belt. Does that sound like a good dieting plan?
Whenever new general lanes are added they instantly fill up with more single occupant drivers in their automobiles.
Other regions such as the Los Angeles metropolitan area have studied their crippling congestion problems and concluded that even double decking their highways would have almost no effect on their traffic jams. The best L.A.’s Southern California Governments Association could recommend was that people live closer to where they work…but that’s exactly what highway building mitigates against!
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MYTH: Light rail has been tried in many other cities and it is a failure…the transit industry is in decline.
TRUTH: These assertions are false. Light rail has been successfully built and implemented in city after city across America, with great results, even in the western United States, from Portland to Dallas to Salt Lake City to Denver.
The transit industry is actually growing with the construction of many new lines, and as a result, total transit ridership is higher today than it was 1980, and higher than at any point going back to 1959.
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MYTH: Light rail, when built, just siphons bus ridership and doesn’t get more people out of their cars.
TRUTH: Reality is actually just the opposite. Buses and light rail are different types of transit. Buses generally provide mobility to people who can’t drive, do not wish to drive, or can’t afford to own a car. Rail transit, however, appeals to people who own automobiles and already use them to get to work - people who would never ride a bus but will consider riding rail if it is available.
By providing commuters with a reliable choice, light rail eases congestion and unclogs highways without destroying entire swaths of nearby homes and businesses to make way for even bigger urban canyons of asphalt and concrete.
Again, evidence bears therse facts out. When Seattle temporarily replaced its waterfront streetcar service with buses, ridership predictably dropped to one-fifteenth of what it had been on the trolleys.
In a 1993 study done in St. Louis after that city’s light rail opened, surveys found that 70% of bus riders said they used the bus because they did not drive or had no car available. For train riders, the figure was only 17%.
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