IT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN a Jetsons future for Seattle. A gleaming new monorail would silently skim along above the rooftops, whisking contented commuters into the city so smoothly that not a ripple would mar the surfaces of their $4 Tully’s mint mochas. Seattle was so in love with this vision–sleek, futuristic, anti-car–that voters had approved the proposed monorail four times, most recently last November by a whopping 64 percent.
Today Seattle’s monorail proposal is a smoldering wreck. The mayor, the unanimous city council, and the newspapers have all done about-faces and have turned against the proposal. So have the citizens: a recent poll shows 52 percent of Seattleites would now vote to cancel the monorail.
What happened? Events of the past few weeks show that even a tax-and-spend bastion of social engineering such as Seattle will revolt when faced with a public works dollar figure so vast that it can only be understood in dollar-bills-laid-end-to-end-would-reach-Mars metaphors.
SEATTLE ALREADY HAS A MONORAIL, of course–a left-over from the 1962 World’s Fair. The cars travel one mile on an elevated track from the Seattle Center–home of the Space Needle, another vestige of the fair–to a downtown shopping complex called Westlake Center. The trip takes two minutes. Even though it now needs $100 million to repair “an increasing number of cracks,” as the Seattle Center director puts it, and even though the entire system was closed for seven months last year to repair damage caused by a fire, Seattleites love this old monorail, which stands as a reminder of past glory. After all, the World’s Fair monorail even made the cover of Life Magazine in 1962.
Affection for the World’s Fair monorail is what begot the new monorail in the first place. In 1997 Dick Falkenbury, a Seattle cab driver whom a local alternative paper has called “an unrepentant eccentric, ” and a “giant, long-torsoed galoot of a man with scraggly hair and an unkempt, almost haphazard appearance” drew an X on a piece of paper and proclaimed it to represent Seattle’s transportation future: a 40-mile monorail system that would connect four corners of the city. Falkenbury began holding meetings and gathering signatures.
City leaders were at first cool to the idea. Perhaps they understood that a monorail is an inflexible transportation systems, unable to adjust to the relative growth of neighborhoods by altering its route. Perhaps they had driven down Fifth Avenue–below the existing World’s Fair monorail–and knew that the rails cast the street in perpetual shadow, and that the massive concrete supports planted in the middle of the street were traffic hazards, and ugly to boot.
Perhaps they listened to University of Pennsylvania professor Vukan R. Vuchic, who wrote in the Seattle Times that comprehensive engineering studies by Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. revealed that the advantages of rail and bus systems far outweigh those of a monorail: a monorail is less comfortable for riders because the interiors are small (the height of the monorail car is an illusion created by the skirts hanging over the wheels); a monorail is subject to price gouging because the systems are proprietary and few suppliers exist; and monorails are more expensive than light rail lines to build and operate.
Indeed, most monorails are used only for special purposes: as amusement park rides or airport shuttles. Those few cities that have built monorails for commuters–mostly in Japan–have learned their lesson: no city has built a second monorail line after building the first.
BUT SEATTLEITES seized on the idea of a new monorail. In 1997, when monorail supporters argued that the private sector would pay for much of the cost, voters approved the concept of the monorail. Three years later they approved $6 million for planning. Then in 2002 voters turned serious, passing Citizen Proposition 1, establishing a car tab tax to pay for the first segment of the monorail, the 14-mile Green Line. If private sector interest had ever existed, as supporters had claimed, it had vanished. The Green Line was to be paid solely by automobile owners, an annual tax of 1.4 percent of the vehicle’s value, $140 on a $10,000 vehicle. The initiative set the bonding cap at $1.5 billion.
Those concerned about street-level aesthetics were calmed by a lovely drawing of the proposed structure, showing thin rails and narrow (three feet wide), curving supports resembling swans’ necks. Pedestrians would hardly even see the thing.
It mattered little to Seattleites that the proposed 14-mile Green Line essentially went nowhere. At the south end was West Seattle, as sleepy a place as exists in the city. At the north end was Ballard, another quiet neighborhood. The line didn’t go near the area’s hot spots: the airport, the Microsoft campus, the University of Washington, the Boeing plants, the bustling Eastside. Nor did it closely parallel the perpetually clogged north-south freeway, Interstate 5. But the Green Line was, after all, only the first segment. The monorail would eventually reach these busy areas. It would all work out and, filled with confidence, the Seattle Monorail Project’s board of directors vowed to spend one percent of the budget, up to $6 million, on public art for the Green Line.
There were still a few doubters, though, and they managed in November 2004 to put before Seattle voters another initiative that would have revoked city permits required to build the monorail. Seattleites hooted, rejecting the initiative with 64 percent of the vote. Seattle was going to embrace its bold future.
BUT THEN the silent rubber wheels began falling off the proposed monorail. A new drawing–one that portrayed actual engineering–showed that the rail supports would be six-feet wide, not the slender three-feet which had been promised. The new monorail’s support structure would be as homely as the old monorail’s. The Green Line would consist of fourteen miles of these squat concrete plugs.
Then the Green Line’s finances were revealed to be a fanciful mess. Revenue projections had been inflated. By terms of the 2002 initiative, the car tax is the only allowable source of public revenue for the monorail. The monorail agency had projected a 6.1 percent annual increase in car tab revenues. A watchdog group convincingly argued that this figure was high by a third, and that car tax revenue would fall far short. It was also discovered that some of the projected revenues came from areas outside the city limits, which could not be taxed by the Seattle commission.
And then the bombshell: the Seattle Monorail Authority announced that the Green Line would not cost $1.6 billion as initially conceived. Instead, agency expenses, beautification funds, and other costs had raised the price to $2.1 billion. Local newspapers showed that some of these funds would have to be raised by issuing bonds at interest rates of 8 percent, and that the cost of the Green Line and its debt would be $11 billion by the time the bonds were retired. Seattleites would be paying off the bonds for 50 years. The Washington state treasurer, the well-respected Democrat Mike Murphy, announced that car tax revenues wouldn’t even pay for half the Green Line.
Eleven billion dollars over 50 years? This was too big of a cash wad even for progressive Seattle. A construction cost-to-debt ratio of 1-to-5, when the normal public works ratio is 1-to-2? Eleven billion was four times the project’s initial cost estimate. Murphy called the financing plan “ludicrous.”
Newspapers and talk radio stations were suddenly filled with angst and vituperation. Anti-monorail pressure rose. The Monorail Project board chairman, Tom Weeks, and the project’s executive director, Joel Horn, resigned. Mayor Greg Nickels–once an avid supporter–announced he was canceling street-use construction permits, saying the board had a “lack of understanding . . . of the project’s financial problems.”
Only two of the monorail commission board’s nine seats are elected by the public, and in the September 20 primary election the leading vote-getters for both seats were monorail skeptics. In fact, more than skeptical: Successful candidate Jim Nobles had said, “I am running for the Seattle Popular Monorail Board for the sole purpose of closing down the project and dissolving the agency.” He received 40 percent of the vote, compared to 34 percent for his opponent, a monorail supporter. The other anti-monorail candidate did even better. On September 21, the city council unanimously passed a resolution saying the project should be cancelled. Councilman David Della called it “a nightmare.”
Members of the monorail board may be the last residents of Seattle to understand the new anti-monorail dynamic. Monorail project board member Cindi Laws was fairly spitting: “The [city] council didn’t jerk the permits. It jerked the voters.” Last Friday the monorail board voted to place a shorter, less expensive monorail on the ballot in November.
Seattleites are now wary of the monorail board and of its rickety financing schemes. While Seattle’s propensity to tax itself and to punish automobile drivers shouldn’t be underestimated, it is probably too late to resuscitate the monorail project, and unless there is a drastic change in voter sentiment between now and November the new proposal will fail. Seattle will have to make do with only one monorail.
James Thayer’s twelfth novel, The Gold Swan, has been published by Simon & Schuster.
