BIKE: Seattle monorail: Critical news analysis

[Nawdry]

The latest issue of Seattle Weekly has an article that is sharply critical 
of the Seattle monorail project (see below).  It's worth visiting the site 
to read the article to see a graphic table which could not be reproduced in 
text form.

All major transit projects seem to have problems.  The Seattle LRT project 
is certainly no exception ~ it has had its share of problems ("issues" in 
today's newspeak), including initial community complaints and a major 
budget overrun which forced a refocusing of the entire LRT program and 
starter project.

But the travails of the Green Line monorail project seem to suggest that 
monorail projects do not have the immunity from these same kinds of 
problems that monorail promoters have claimed.  On the contrary, they come 
with their own "issues", and set of problems, as I have 
repeatedly  asserted.  Many of these are limelighted in the Seattle Weekly 
article below.

Beware of marketers who claim that their snake oil is a panacea.

LH


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http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0409/040303_news_monorail.php

Seattle Weekly
March 3 - 9, 2004

Monoreality

The monorail project's board signs off on the alignment this month. But is
this the train we voted for?

by Rick Anderson


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[PHOTO]
Along Second Avenue downtown at Madison Street.
(Seattle Monorail Project)
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Concerns over how the new Seattle monorail is to be built are giving
ground to a nagging new question: Will it be built? Seattle Monorail
Project (SMP) officials, who overestimated their revenue projections by a
third, still think they have enough money to make a revised plan work
through cutbacks and closing a license-plate-tax loophole that could leave
scofflaws facing felony perjury charges. The project is moving ahead in an
impressive, almost evangelical manner, with the goal of putting the first
Seattle cars in the air by the end of 2007. But it will not be the project
approved by a slim margin of voters in 2002. Instead, there will be fewer
rail miles, longer travel times, more difficult access, and unforeseen
engineering challenges, such as a station 10 stories tall and an 84-step
commuter stairway up a hillside. The devil in such details is likely to
surprise even supporters.
The project will bring an estimated 2,100 construction-related jobs and
more than $600 million in new income, claims the Seattle Popular
Monorail Authority. But it also could cost the relocation and/or loss of
more than 1,000 jobs, 80 businesses, and more than three dozen
households. Up to 1,400 parking spaces will be lost, and 137 residential
and business properties would be partly or wholly confiscated, while more
than 300 other property owners will, in the longer term, endure the trains'
noise and vibrations.

NONE OF THIS, of course, was imparted to voters in 2002, because the
monorail was mostly a concept. No one back then seemed to imagine that
a 5-acre campus for the developmentally disabled would be uprooted,
affecting hundreds of clients. The charity, Northwest Center, is already
preparing to give way for a massive monorail operations center at
Interbay, even though an arguably more suitable industrial site is available
in the SoDo neighborhood. Similarly, did anyone know in 2002 that 500
parking spaces would disappear downtown, that trains might pass within
five feet of buildings and close enough to residences to offer passengers
a sneak peek into private parlors and boudoirs every five minutes? Who
knew that—now seeing the mock-ups—bulky guideways and sprawling
stations would so darken horizons, dwarf neighborhoods, and, like the
station planned outside Seattle Center, loom over the intersection like a
floating freeway?

Who figured that in some areas—Delridge, for example, where a
projected 70 percent of riders would arrive at the monorail by bus—the
plan succeeds only if enough of them can be persuaded to indeed
disembark and wait for the monorail, rather than stay on a bus that might
beat the train downtown?

MEET THE JETSONS

Those developments and the cash-light monorail project's admission that
it doesn't yet know how much it will cost are causing a quiet backlash. It
includes a falling-out with original supporters and top civic officials,
including former Mayor Norm Rice, and the launch of a community drive
for a new vote to approve or reject the evolving plan. Even Dick
Falkenbury, the Seattle cab driver who is considered the father of the
monorail proposal, says he'd like to see the monorail's private contractors,
now formulating their bids to design, build, operate, and maintain the
system, toss out the project's planning and be turned loose to come up
with their own "revolutionary" ideas. There is, as well, a growing chorus at
City Hall dissatisfied with the project's breakneck schedule and financial
cutbacks, with some City Council members threatening to simply abort the
14-mile, $1.75 billion project.

Make that the 13.7-mile (they remeasured), $1.6 billion project (they
recounted). After its miscalculated revenue from an annual tax on
Seattleites' car license plates fell as much as $300 million short—a critical
situation the monorail's staff kept secret from its executive board for
almost four months—the monorail authority has removed at least 4 miles
of guideways from its planned Green Line route from Crown Hill, north of
Ballard, to Morgan Junction in West Seattle. Rather than travel each way
on separate rails, trains now will switch back and forth from two rails to
one and back to two. This alternate rail plan is being sold as more
architecturally and construction friendly, but it's a cutback that extends trip
time while covering as much as $140 million of the shortfall. Even with a
slimmer, $1.6 billion kitty, the monorail project is still shy at least $150
million. Almost half could be made up, says the monorail, if the
Legislature passes new laws expanding license-fee collections and
allowing the monorail to crack down on scofflaws who evade the tax by
using non-Seattle addresses—though passage of such legislation is
uncertain this session. The monorail's added car-license tax is currently
0.85 percent and rises to 1.4 percent this summer, continuing until 2020,
or 2030—or is it 2040? No one's certain. The owner of a $20,000 car, for
example, will contribute an extra $280 a year until the monorail bill is paid.

THE SYSTEM COULD soon get a tax-collection boost through a pending
administrative-law change by the state Department of Licensing, which
would require car owners to note their primary residences on title
forms—or else. The guess is that more than 10,000 evade the tax,
perhaps by using a relative's address or a postal box in the suburbs.
According to a copy of the DOL's proposed rule, a registrant would have
to provide the "true, fixed, and permanent home and place of habitation in
Washington. The department will presume that a registered owner's
primary residence is the same as the address used in driver's license
records and voter registration records." The information must be certified
"under penalty of perjury that the information provided is true and correct."
Effectively, that extends a penalty that already prevails for falsifying other
licensing documents. No one's saying—yet—that the monorail will send
out the Address Police. But in the midst of the monorail funding
controversy, it seems prison sentences have suddenly been injected into
the debate. "Who's advising SMP on legal affairs?" asks monorail critic
Geof Logan. "Tony Soprano?"

The SMP already saved $24 million when some inflationary costs came in
lower than projected, and it hopes to make up the remaining millions
through other cutbacks—installing elevators in lieu of more costly (and
convenient) escalators, for example—and using creative lease- financing
and vendor-financing plans. Still, as SMP Executive Director Joel Horn
recently told City Council members during an oversight hearing, "We won't
know [the construction cost] until we get our bids back." That should be
sometime this summer, after the nine-member Seattle Popular Monorail
Authority executive board approves the final alignment on March 29. A
final environmental-impact statement is being issued next week.

Construction, by one of the two consortiums bidding on the project, is to
start by next year, and a short line, perhaps from Interbay to Westlake
Center downtown, would open in December 2007. The full line would be
running within two more years. Besides overseeing the construction and
operation of the Green Line by private contractors, the SMP is also
required to begin laying out the next phase of the monorail, envisioned
ultimately as a 58-mile, five-line system traversing the city, Jetsons-like,
with automated, driverless trains.

CONSTRUCTION CONFLUENCE

But that future is for your kids. The Green Line, bearing a load of both
dreams and nightmares, is for you, and planningwise, it has arrived.
Though the City Council held monorail work sessions and hearings last
year, it is only now beginning to aggressively review proposals and hold
more hearings, cramming in at least 12 public sessions in four months,
beginning with three design review hearings in Ballard, downtown, and
West Seattle this week. There's a sense of urgency at City Council
meetings, where the monorail's fate lies. City staffers and monorail
officials flash through their PowerPoint slides while council members try to
grasp the concepts and define the meaning of regenerative braking
(reversing power to stop), the Delridge Options (three different station
sites around the Nucor steel plant), and such bureaucratese as "no
significant unavoidable impacts anticipated." (Who the hell knows?)
Besides trying to run a major city, the council and Mayor Greg Nickels
have a few other new items on their agendas, as well—something about
construction of a light-rail line and replacement of an elevated waterfront
freeway, we hear.

Some fear that the boorish, repetitive, public-review syndrome called the
Seattle Way is sneaking up. "For heaven's sake, build it," says former
Gov. Dan Evans, echoing thousands of monorail fans. Yet can there be
too much oversight for a project—the largest of its kind in history
here—that will forever transform Seattle? "Raising concerns and asking
that they be addressed is not obstructionist," says City Council member
Richard Conlin, a tiger on the issue of monorail accountability. The line
would be the first long-distance commuter monorail in the U.S., a project
promising a blazing future of sleek, nonpolluting elevated rapid travel—but
one that begins with a destruction and construction mess and four years
of traffic nightmares that will make today's Seattle gridlock seem like a
Sunday drive. Blocked streets, lost parking spaces, and travel diversions
will be added to the current mix of headaches. Fifth Avenue will get a
twofer: the building of a new monorail line, preceded by the tearing down
of an old one. Sound Transit, meanwhile, will be competing to see who
can tear up the most streets as its builds its own 14-mile light-rail system
through the city. It's possible the Alaskan Way Viaduct will be repaired or
replaced within a few years, assuming it stands that long. Then there are
the dozens of transit buses that will return to surface streets next year as
the downtown bus tunnel is closed for conversion to light rail.



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[PHOTO]
  Joel Horn, executive director of the Seattle Monorail Project: almost
spiritual about this "grand tale."
(Robin Laananen)
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To monorail supporters, such prospects are the storm before the calm,
the road rage we're just going to have to endure en route to creating a
modern mass transit system. Just you wait: That high-flying commuter
and tourist train, soaring over traffic jams, zipping from home to work,
easing congestion and air pollution, is going to look great in three or four
years—if we don't all kill each other in the meantime.

WATCHDOGS LINE UP

There are other human costs, particularly to the hundreds of businesses
and homeowners in or near the trains' planned pathway. Those directly
affected face the forced loss of their property under the government's right
of eminent domain. They are being offered what the monorail says are fair
market prices, and landowners and tenants will all get relocation fees.
Legal negotiations are under way for many of the properties, and some
disputes might be headed to court. Property owners have geared up for a
fight, having months ago been solicited by attorneys offering to represent
them in negotiations to obtain financial agreements based on the highest
and best use of their land. Some want to be compensated for recent
improvements, and others plan to seek redress for possible noise and
vibration of close-up trains. Some downtown property owners say they
might seek recompense for tenants who have already given notice of their
intention to move out before the line is built.


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[PHOTO]
  Dick Falkenbury, the cabbie who helped give birth to the monorail project.
(Adam L. Weintraub)
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The creeping costs—human, engineering, and financial—are souring
many. "I was the poster boy at press conferences, speaking on behalf of
the monorail," says William Justin, whose Samis Land Co. owns 12
properties along the planned Second Avenue route and who gave money
to the monorail election campaign. "But now I'm starting to regret that
support." He thinks the latest alignment plan could impede downtown
development. "We've got to look back and see what the voters wanted,"
he says, "and deliver it." A new group of civic and business leaders, called
OnTrack, is also dogging the monorail, keeping close watch on its
planning and financing. Its members include developers, activists, and
civic leaders, such as former Mayor Rice and ex-Port of Seattle
commissioner Henry Aronson. They note that the instructions given by the
monorail to bidders don't require them to fully reflect all costs of the
project, and they think the monorail might end up trying to shift some of its
utility mitigation costs to city taxpayers.

Kevin Orme, a board member of Friends of the Monorail, counters that it's
actually monorail supporters who are fed up—with what he calls the City
Council's tactical delays and with misleading rhetoric from organizations
such as OnTrack. "It's simply yet another way for monorail opponents to
try to kill the project," he says. Yet Falkenbury, who first envisioned the
new monorail system nine years ago and helped birth the Seattle Monorail
Project, thinks planners are untracked. He hopes the winning contractor
"sees that the monorail can actually work, make money, and even—dare I
say it?—make a difference. I am hoping that the winning bidder throws out
much of the SMP design work, which assumes that the monorail is a
burden instead of a benefit, and that they come up with a simple system
that works."

ENDLESS STAIRS

There are some pluses, however, to working with less revenue. If the
monorail authority says it can still deliver essentially what voters asked for,
then the public gets its bang for less buck. That also compels the monorail
to hold down the body count by acquiring fewer properties. Horn and
others prefer to characterize it simply as being sensitive to massive
relocations, and they say the toll is small compared to the size of the
project. One instance they cite is the plea by West Seattle businesses
which claimed that the initial, straight-away route going up Fauntleroy Way
Southwest, toward California Avenue Southwest, would displace three
homes, 11 businesses, and 80 workers. Restudying the plan, the monorail
has offered, instead, to take a seven-block jog down 35th Avenue
Southwest and then up Southwest Alaska Street to California, causing
fewer relocations (which Conlin calls nonetheless "problematic," since the
new route requires several new hard turns and could include a station that
displaces parkland).

Still, the 100-plus relocations might be a shock to some, particularly those
who saw the new line more like the existing Seattle Center monorail,
running straight and true along existing public rights of way, displacing
cars, not homes and businesses. Probably the most underestimated
impact was the 19 elevated stations that will have sizable footprints. Still
on the drawing boards, some have been tentatively downsized from
original designs, partly because of costs, while others have been upsized:
The "preferred alternative" for Delridge skies to 10 stories (100 feet) next
to Nucor Steel in order to send and receive passengers from the West
Seattle Bridge. About $1 million of the station's cost is intended to mitigate
conflicts with the steel yard and keep Nucor happy. (That's the same
Fortune 500 company that recently threatened a cutback in jobs unless its
City Light bill was discounted by $6 million.) Even at that, the mill site is
isolated and, well, scary. "If I had children," says monorail board member
Cindy Laws, "the last thing I would want is for my children to walk through
there."



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[PHOTO]
  City Council member Richard Conlin: a tiger on monorail accountability.
(Robin Laananen)
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ANOTHER STATION—it already has a land-use-change notice posted
out front—would be situated on the site of the friendly little Chinese joint
along Elliott Avenue West, Chen's Village, where the bar is a
neighborhood hangout. At four stories and 17,000 square feet, the station
will block condo views and consume the triangle it is to be built on.
Accessing the station from Queen Anne will mean, for some, a good walk
down and, later, up a stairway with 84 steps, notes Conlin. The monorail
is not building any major park-and-ride sites, and City Hall is getting an
earful on that from homeowners who foresee swarms of cars headed to
their neighborhoods.

The monorail says: Be happy. "Most people are going to be coming by
bus," Horn claims. "Think of it [a monorail station] more as a transfer
station." (A transfer station where you'll likely be required to pay another
$1 fare to hop aboard; fares and rider zones are years away from being
established, and most doubt there will be a free-ride zone downtown like
Metro Transit's today. Nine of the 19 monorail stations are sandwiched
between Seattle Center and Safeco Field.)

As proof of the monorail's promise, Horn wields ridership studies showing
that an average of 2,500 or more people an hour will eventually ride the
high rails. "A lot of people won't need parking spaces anymore because
they're going to take the monorail," the director says. Let's hope he's right,
especially about downtown. Horn says about 190 parking spaces will be
given over to the guideway's footing and up to 350 more (mostly in
parking lots and garages) will be supplanted by monorail stations. Other
assessments show more than 300 parking spots lost in SoDo and more
than 250 in West Seattle.

ALL-POWERFUL CITY HALL

Nickels and City Council members are insisting on additional time to
review plans for the monorail, which is an independent municipal
corporation known as the "city transportation authority." Nonetheless, the
monorail project is dependent on the city to approve or deny its plan. It
must secure a number of permits and approvals from the city for use of
public rights of way and property, such as Seattle Center, the West
Seattle Bridge, and miles of city streets. Without those OKs, the
monorail's a goner or faces possible major revisions and even a revote.
The council could, for example, give thumbs-down to the currently favored
and controversial route through, rather than around, Seattle Center and
down Fifth Avenue, replacing the old monorail, instead of skirting the
Center along Mercer Street to the north (or, more logically, some argue,
avoiding the costly Center swing and stopping at its southern foot, then
racing down Second Avenue). Whatever the monorail authority proposes,
the city can undo.

A recent council resolution says the city wants substantial evidence the
entire line can be financed and constructed, and the council has declared
that any permits and use agreements are conditional until all costs are
known. At least three of the nine council members—Conlin, Nick Licata,
and Peter Steinbrueck, with newcomer Tom Rasmussen beginning to ask
pesky questions—oppose the through-the- Center route. Steinbrueck also
pointedly drew up a resolution noting that the Center's master use plan
ordains that "vehicular access should not segment the site or undermine
the primary pedestrian nature of the site."


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[PHOTO]
  On Elliott Avenue West, neighborhood hangout Chen’s Village is a goner,
to be displaced by a monorail station.
(Rick Anderson)
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SOME COUNCIL members are frustrated at the monorail's apparent rush
to build, although the monorail project says it's merely keeping up with the
schedule. "If this project is now so fragile that taking the time to make
good decisions endangers its ability to go forward," Conlin said in a recent
position paper that took issue with the monorail's initiatives, "then the
project is doomed to failure." Conlin says he's gotten considerable e-mail
and letters from people who say they're monorail supporters but are upset
by SMP's choices. One of the contractors bidding on the monorail told
him, Conlin says, that insisting on a 2007 opening rather than letting
contractors set the schedule will cost millions in unnecessary expenses.
(Monorail officials say that delays will, among other things, most certainly
inflate costs.)

The dispute animates Conlin. While Licata, for example, made it clear to
Horn in a meeting that the city feels "we have the authority to essentially
pull the plug if we feel the finances aren't there," Conlin, who accused the
monorail of "papering over its problems," antagonistically challenged the
monorail leader. Horn explained that SMP hadn't included in its initial bid
proposal a sky bridge from Fifth Avenue to Westlake Center (it can be
added later) because monorail officials felt it "didn't have the right" to 
build
it without city permission. Conlin responded: "You don't have the right to
build anything without our permission." Horn, who has a firm but mostly
nonconfrontational style, nodded and moved on.

The dynamic in such exchanges, says a council aide who asked not to be
named, "is that the council is sort of being set up to be blamed for cost
overruns." If things are moving too fast and furious, and council members
slip up in their oversight role, they could find themselves helping fund the
monorail. "The bidders won't say so publicly, but they want the SMP to go
slower, too," the aide adds. "It's hard to put together bids on a project in
such flux."

CONLIN SAYS HE has no agenda to scuttle the monorail, but a new
opposition group, monorailrecall.com, wants a new vote taken, at least. A
few months old, it already claims 400 members and hopes to sign up
enough people to foster an initiative asking for approval or disapproval of
the modified plan. That could be the fourth vote on a project whose
development and realization was approved in 1997, 2000, and 2002 (in
the last case, establishing the SMP, by a margin of 877 out of 189,000
ballots cast). Recall backers contend the multimillion-dollar revenue
shortfall is proof that the monorail has "significant financial problems,"
which should trigger a revote. (The establishing statute reads: "The City
transportation [monorail] authority may be dissolved by a vote of the
people residing within the boundaries of the authority if the authority is
faced with significant financial problems.") They also say voters expected
escalators and not elevators at stations, that a preferred alignment
through Seattle Center was not approved by the ballot, that it wasn't clear
the 1962 World's Fair monorail would be torn down, that ridership
projections based on future housing growth along the Green Line are
overblown, and that the public was not told in advance that some trains
would run on one track.

That last one's a stickler at City Hall, too.

When Horn played down the notion that single beams were a cost-saving
move, instead insisting that the change was made as much for its "urban
design impact," Steinbrueck, an architect, piped up. "It's an oxymoron," he
said. The single beam "seems to create its own urban design impact."
Horn allowed that yes, the single beams will require the use of more
visually polluting switches—some as long as 180 feet—straddling
intersections. But on the upside, fewer visually polluting support columns
would be required for a one-rail guideway. The public hasn't actually seen
a depiction of the overhead switch "lids," Horn added. "We explained what
they looked like."

So, Conlin asked again, it wasn't a budget decision?

"It came out of an urban design issue," Horn repeated. And it's "a double
positive," because with more switches, other trains can more easily move
around or reverse direction from a stranded train, he said. (Vancouver's
SkyTrain stalls on average almost once a week.) Stranded passengers
would have no chance to be moved to another train if the monorail stalls
on a single beam, since there'd be no second guideway for a side-by-side
rescue. But Horn says a stalled train could be pushed to the next station
by another train.


CRUNCH TIME

Horn and other monorail officials are striving to display, as the monorail
promised voters, "transparency and accountability," revealing the good
with the bad—as opposed to the SMP's predecessor, the Elevated
Transportation Company, which kept its memos secret under a phony
attorney-client privilege and tried even to keep monorail cost figures from
being listed in the ballot title. They regularly release documents and
details to the public and media and provide updated info and include links
to critical newspaper articles on their Web site. Horn's an energizing
manager and enthusiastic leader who is almost spiritual about this "grand
tale," as he calls it, the erection of a transit skyway through a city that's
long desired to have one.

But it's crunch time, and the incoming fire is increasing. There's a sense
that, at some point soon, someone will crack—start throwing things across
the office and shout, "Where were all these assholes when we were
drawing this up!" Or, judging by the wincing exchanged by monorail
officials listening to recent City Council questions, maybe it's already
happened. The SMP says it has taken innumerable surveys, hosted open
houses, heard from thousands of citizens, and held a legion of community
meetings and public hearings, in addition to hundreds of get-togethers
with local, state, and federal officials. It has been working elbow to elbow
with city departments. "We have so much pressure from this community to
keep this [project] moving along," says monorail board member Paul
Toliver.

OK, but around City Hall, advises a council staffer, "the thinking is speed
kills."


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[SIDEBAR]

PROPERTY ACQUISITIONS

These are some of the business properties the Seattle Popular Monorail
Authority might fully or partially acquire for construction, right of way, and
station sites, according to SMP records:

CROWN HILL/BALLARD
Thai Siam Restaurant, Crown Hill Stamp & Coin, Excel Plaza, Walt's
Radiator, Philly's Sub, Denny's, Walgreens, Lake Union Boat Repair, Lyle
Branch Flower Co.

INTERBAY/LOWER QUEEN ANNE
Northwest Center for the developmentally disabled, portion of Fishermen's
Terminal, Chen's Village, Blackstock Lumber, Interbay Animal Clinic,
Shanty Café.

SEATTLE CENTER AREA
Delmasse Apartments, Center meeting rooms, areas outside KeyArena
and the Art Pavilion, Inge Corp., Tex's Tavern, McDonald's, Fat City auto
repair, Faulkenbury & Wright dry cleaners.

DOWNTOWN
Centennial Building, Annex Theater/Avco Financial, Superior
Reprographics, Forest Hotel, Eitel Building, Liberty Loans, Federal
Reserve Bank, "sinking ship" parking garage.

SODO
Land beside Seahawks Stadium and Safeco Field, Filson's, Gans Ink,
Wells Fargo bank, Sherman Supply, 1st Deli, Home Depot, All Metals, St.
Vincent de Paul mattress factory.

DELRIDGE/WEST SEATTLE
Golf course clubhouse, fire station, Nucor Steel, West Seattle Herald,
Skipper's Fish & Chips, Chan Medical Dental, KFC, Thriftway, Jefferson
Square, Firestone, U.S. Bank.
---------------------------------------------------------------



randerson