Not So Fast

From his office high on the 42nd floor of the Bank of America Tower, Joel Horn can see the future. Looking south toward Safeco Field, the path of the proposed monorail stretches out before him, from Yesler Way through King Street Station, past Sound Transit's Union Station headquarters, and south toward the West Seattle Bridge. Horn, technical program manager for the Elevated Transportation Company (ETC), envisions a day when stoplights and traffic jams will no longer be impediments. The miracle monorail will whisk travelers high above it all at speeds exceeding 50 mph. "We're going to take people where they want to go," Horn says.

The ETC's offices, located in the city's tallest building, give the agency a bird's-eye view of its larger rival. But for the past two years, the monorail agency has labored in Sound Transit's shadow. Monorail proponents regard Sound Transit as everything they're trying to avoid: a hulking bureaucracy —seemingly accountable to no one—that has yet to lay a single yard of steel on its heavily altered, over-budget light-rail line from downtown Seattle to Tukwila. (A 1.6-mile line in Tacoma is on track for completion next year.) But Sound Transit is years ahead in the process of building a network of light rail, heavy rail, and bus service, while the monorail project—to be financed by a 1.4 percent motor-vehicle excise tax, on the Seattle ballot in November—still seems like a fanciful, if perhaps attainable, dream.

Unlike the light-rail project, which has a record of achievement and failure, the monorail agency is still selling promises and projections. And while it's too soon to praise the monorail or bury it, there are some alarming signs. Ridership numbers, the basis for the monorail's sky-high revenue projections, seem implausibly large. The board that will govern the monorail agency, the Seattle Popular Transportation Authority, will be—like Sound Transit's—mostly appointed, not elected, with just two members chosen by the public. Neighborhood opposition, which prompted monorail planners to move their route three blocks east in Belltown, is starting to percolate elsewhere, but the ETC has no mitigation plans in place. And the ETC's cost estimate of $1.75 billion is based, like Sound Transit's initial estimate, on minimal design work and engineering—a mistake partly to blame for $1 billion in overruns that cost Sound Transit a large measure of its popular support.

On Nov. 5, Seattle voters will decide if the monorail deserves a chance to prove it can succeed where Sound Transit fumbled. Here are some of the sticking points.

RIDERSHIP

The ETC loves to tout its ridership projections, and it's no wonder: The figures are nothing short of astonishing. The ETC predicts 69,000 people on average will ride each weekday between Ballard, downtown, and West Seattle by 2020: 57,000 commuters; 8,000 "event riders" attending Bumbershoot, Mariners games, and the like; and 4,000 tourists. That's nearly three times the current ridership on all 11 bus routes between Ballard, downtown, and West Seattle, which carry about 22,500 riders a day.

Sound Transit had to slash its ridership forecast by two-thirds after its original route, from SeaTac to the University District, was shortened by seven miles—eliminating service to the city's populous North End. At 42,500 riders a day, Sound Transit's latest projection is dramatically lower than the monorail's. One reason, according to Sound Transit spokesperson Lee Somerstein, is that the light-rail agency didn't include event and tourist rides, "which are difficult to reliably quantify and typically generate the most ridership on weekends rather than weekdays."

The ETC's most recent estimates are based on a study done by URS Corp., a San Francisco engineering firm whose record at forecasting ridership has been spotty at best. In St. Petersburg, Fla., the company's estimates for the Osceola Parkway, a toll road that was supposed to pay for itself by charging $1.25 a car, turned out to be little better than fantasy. URS predicted the Osceola would bring in around $9.4 million in tolls every year. Instead, it netted less than $6 million annually and could end up going $1 billion or more over its original $150 million budget, according to the Orlando Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. URS also produced inaccurate estimates for nearly a half-dozen other toll projects in Florida. In some cases, according to the Times, the roads drew only half the cars the company predicted. One of those, the Suncoast Parkway, was supposed to make $70 million this year. Instead, it will pull in just $14 million.

Besides factoring a huge number of tourists into its weekday projections, the Seattle monorail plan also assumes that a substantial number of people will pay extra to transfer from Metro buses to the monorail. Instead of participating in the regional Puget Pass program (whose partners include Metro and every other transit agency in the region), the monorail agency will consider offering a "transfer discount" of up to 50 percent. That means a ride on the monorail will cost anywhere from about 60 cents to $1.25 more, depending on time of day, than simply staying on the bus. "Why one would want to take a bus to a monorail stop rather than sit down on a bus and stay on it is beyond my comprehension," says Henry Aronson, the former Port of Seattle commissioner who is managing the Citizens Against Monorail campaign. Nonetheless, the ETC predicts that 82 percent of its ridership would come from existing bus riders.