Miles to go

Seattle, 2020

Scenario one:

A 14-mile monorail system whisks thousands of commuters daily from Ballard to downtown and points beyond. The wildly popular monorail rakes in millions of dollars annually without a public subsidy. The most common commuter complaint? The monorail is so fast, commuters don't have time to finish reading the comics.

Scenario two:

After a hastily written monorail scheme tanked in 2002, transportation planners turned their attention to building roads, but the cars kept coming. I-5 and 405 are now 10 lanes in each direction, but the average commute from

Lake City to downtown takes more than two hours. Road rage is the leading cause of fatal accidents in the I-5 corridor.

Which scenario will be closer to the truth? Is monorail the answer to Seattle's transit nightmares, or will its proponents' vision end up on the growing pile of failed transit solutions? Will the Elevated Transit Company (ETC), the quasi-public agency set up last year to bring a monorail plan to voters, become a mirror of Sound Transit, the agency nobody wants to emulate? Or can the two systems work together, merging into a seamless regional transportation network?

Most of the monorail debate has consisted of such rhetorical questions. But a few things are certain. Monorail supporters have only nine months to get a plan— including costs, technology, routes, and financing options—to Seattle voters. Financing the monorail will be a political nightmare, thanks to the state's budget crunch. And neighborhood politics, so far mercifully absent from the monorail debate, will become a factor.

The bottom line is simple: If monorail backers don't get a plan to voters this November, the monorail as most people know it simply won't happen. It's going to be a tough nine months.

Nine Months to Liftoff

Monorail boosters have less than a year to do what it took Sound Transit years to accomplish, and staying on track is by no means guaranteed. Neighborhood groups have started popping up with increasing frequency at the ETC's public hearings. Any number of things—a lawsuit by a disgruntled homeowner, a court challenge to the monorail's Environmental Impact Statement—could derail the process.

The most likely candidate to issue such a challenge would be the Belltown Community Council (BCC). BCC representative Rebecca Ballough says the group opposes a proposed route along Second Avenue because it would "disrupt the flow of traffic on the only remaining high-capacity route from Belltown to downtown" and cast a shadow over hundreds of homes and businesses. While the ETC has taken every opportunity to hype the incredible views that will be available to riders on the elevated trains, Ballough contends, it has ignored the view at street level. "Will anyone want to dine at the sidewalk cafes with a monorail rumbling overhead and the tracks casting a shadow over the seating areas? Will [pedestrians] avoid walking down Second Avenue?"

Others point out that Belltown has managed to grow and thrive in the shadow of the existing monorail. Proponents of a Second Avenue route also note that the alternative, running the monorail down Fifth Avenue, could require the demolition of the Westlake-to-Seattle-Center monorail if, as is likely, the two systems aren't compatible.

Queen Anne and the Seattle Center have their own issues with the routing. Both the Queen Anne Community Council (QACC) and the Center would like to see the monorail run along the south side of the Center, not north on Mercer (a route QACC transportation chair John Coney says would impact twice as many properties) or through the Center itself. A route that would have cut "through the heart of the Center," according to Seattle Center director Virginia Anderson, was ditched at a public hearing after several Seattle Center representatives voiced their opposition. The hastily assembled protest, though effective, demonstrated the difficulty of allowing public input on a truncated timeline: Anderson says Seattle Center "didn't get a chance to be involved" in the route planning process early enough to keep the disputed route off the ETC's map. "I'm sorry that we became a bit of a thorn for them, because that wasn't our intention, but it came up late in the process."

Competitors or Complementary

While Sound Transit, that elephant in the ETC's living room, has taken pains to insist that monorail and light rail aren't competitors, the agency must be acutely aware that in many voters' minds the monorail election is also a referendum on light rail—both literally and metaphorically. Literally, because the monorail proposal could possibly run alongside Tim Eyman's Initiative 776, which, if passed, would strip Sound Transit of 20 percent of its funding and potentially cripple its light-rail system. And metaphorically, because—hard as the ETC has tried to dissuade them—voters will inevitably see the election as a choice: Are you happy with the idea of light rail, or would you like to try something new?

Because Sound Transit has monopoly power over transit systems in its three-county jurisdiction (King, Pierce, and Snohomish), it has de facto veto power over monorail or any other "competing" system. Just what sort of system would be competitive is a matter of some debate; while monorail backers put their starter route on the west side of the city to avoid competing with light rail to the east, the two groups would be grabbing from the same pot of state and federal dollars. Although Sound Transit has not openly opposed the monorail so far, spokesperson Lee Somerstein says, "I wouldn't say anybody's doing anything" to hasten its approval.