Recluse reflections: Learning lessons from the monorail mess
Notes on spaces seen through windows
author
archives
dialog
links
blogroll


Wednesday, November 16, 2005  
Learning lessons from the monorail mess

In this week's issue, Seattle Weekly's Rick Anderson takes his second post-election look at the monorail vote:

The sad exodus at SMP headquarters on Third Avenue has already begun. Only four of eight voting members bothered to show up for the board's meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 9. They huddled at one end of their big U-shaped executive table and decided the agency would begin handing out pink slips and cease to exist by, perhaps, as soon as New Year's.
He notes that board members and what's left of the staff are still blaming everyone else for the failure of the plan.
Alas, the monorail dream had come so close to birth, Hill says. "We were within two months of being able to build a monorail," she insisted, referring to the shortened, less expensive plan turned down by voters that might have broken ground in January. She concedes that project directors made mistakes but is "dumbfounded" by the lack of support from City Hall. In particular, she says, Mayor Greg Nickels had begun to "bully people as if he was after your milk money."
All of those rosy predictions from Hill about what won't happen are as unlikely as most of what has been coming from board members for years, but Anderson mostly lets that slide.

In the still too brief article, he offers this bit of perspective after quoting interim SMP executive director John Haley :

But then, he wasn't around for the whole torturous, secretive, dead-end ride since 2002, the often questionable spending of $185 million in taxpayer money, and what was an unofficial monorail policy of trivializing critics. A bunker mentality had set in, as well, after overblown revenue projections went south, and prying reporters were patted on the head and told they just didn't understand the process. When Seattle Weekly reported in February, for example, that construction and financing charges could soar as high as $6 billion, SMP officials tut-tutted and called it a worst-case scenario—even as some of them were covertly preparing a plan that would cost twice as much. It was a pared-down version of that plan—at $7 billion—that was rejected by voters this month.
Anderson's brief article is a start, but I hope that at least one of the dailies is working on a more comprehensive review of the whole affair. I think there are still questions remaining about how it all went so very wrong. It might still be too soon after the campaign and the vote to get a non-emotional look at the affair, but it's something that should be considered before it all gets stuck into that vault with dozens of other grand, but failed civic plans.

KUOW host John Moe tried find some lessons from the experience this week on his program The Power of Voice.
After 200 million dollars and years of study, effort, and elections, the monorail is dead without a single thing being built. And nobody's happy: not the supporters of the project, not the opponents, and not the people stuck in traffic in their cars wondering if anything will ever help ease the worsening congestion. But if we don't learn from history, how can we avoid repeating it? Tonight John Moe has a simple question: The Monorail's dead; what's the lesson?
Before taking calls, Moe said

We have to get something out of this whole monorail thing we've been through as a city, as a community.

We can't merely accept that $200 million is down the drain without a single thing being built. We can't just say "OK, there was discussion, agonizing, argument, discussion, planning, controversy, five elections and nothing to show for it. We've got to have something to show for it.

One thing everyone can agree on is that this result -- big bill, no train -- was not the most desirable outcome.

If nothing else, let's take a lesson from all this. As the long tale of the monorail closes, we are looking for a moral to this story.

His callers seemed to split pretty much as the vote did, with the majority opposed to the plan. I can't transcribe quickly enough to get more than a few highlights which I won't claim as a representative sample.

Several callers questioned the process that began without the usual "professional" studies.

"Voters are not civil engineers and should not decide important urban planning projects."
"We shouldn't trust the public to make really big decisions."
"Let the transportation professionals do their job since that's what we're paying them for."
"Infrastructure is too important to go to a vote."

The most forceful caller who rode this train of thought said, "Naive non-governmental boosters who hire incompetent amatuers should never be put in charge of multi-billion-dollar public works."

The caller cited faulty income projections that he said doomed the project from the start. "I'm glad the City didn't get involved," he said. "This was a bad idea, and it was never going to work. They gave them enough rope to hang themselves which was inevitable."

There were, of course, also several callers who blamed the mayor and city council for the plan's failure. "We have in our city a lack of leadership [in city government] and we've been paying the price for over 30 years," said a caller who sounded frustrated by the vote.

And there were, as one might expect, a couple of calls that decried the system that Sound Transit is actually building.

The program was at least a valiant attempt at extracting expensive lessons from the mess. Maybe these are lessons that can't be learned for several years.

I guess I might have offered something like this if I'd heard the program as it was airing:

We shouldn't try to spend billions on a transit project that is intended as a protest to another transit project.

Technorati tags:

posted by WebWrangler | 2:35 PM | Link | 0 comments
Comments: Post a Comment


Blogroll Me!