Seattle residents put monorail on track

SEATTLE —  Dick Falkenbury wasn’t alone when sitting up in the driver’s seat of his big tour bus, cursing the long lines of traffic. Seattle hates traffic--hates it, most surveys show, worse than every other urban ill combined.

Falkenbury, in the 45-minute drive from the airport to the hotel on the other end of his route, had plenty of time to mull it over. And when he did, he came up with a monorail. Why not, he imagined, take the gleaming milelong monorail built for the 1962 World’s Fair--one of the city’s proudest landmarks--and expand it 40 miles around metropolitan Seattle?

He and local activist Grant Cogswell started an initiative campaign. They didn’t have money to hire signature gatherers, so they posted signs and blank petitions on the streets with a proposed route map and three words: “Extend the Monorail.” They’d come back, and the petitions would be full.

“People would stop their cars, leave them running in the street, and come on over to sign,” Falkenbury said.

Nobody in the city establishment wanted to hear about the monorail initiative on last week’s ballot: Too wacky. Too pie-in-the-sky. A red herring, they insisted, in view of the city’s already-approved $3.9-billion transit plan that will include 25 miles of electric light rail.

So it was with virtually no major campaigning and little public debate that more than 77,000 Seattle residents voted for the monorail. In an election that saw finicky voters turn down sweeping measures on gay rights, handgun control and money for road repairs and emergency services, 54% of the voters said yes to Falkenbury’s monorail--and now the city is left trying to figure out what to do about it.

“From the officials, it’s been shock. Amazement. They’re used to the big ideas coming from them,” Cogswell said.

“The first thing was to mock us,” added Falkenbury. “And all of a sudden they realized there were 77,000 votes behind us, and they started toning down the rhetoric.”

*

Part of that interest may stem from a clause in the initiative that says the City Council--seven of whose eight members went on record opposed to the project--has one year to create and fund a public development authority for the monorail or see its own salaries cut off.

Monorails, widely used in Japan and occasionally seen in Europe, have never taken off in the United States, other than at a few tourist spots like Disneyland, Las Vegas and the line linking the Seattle Center festival grounds and a downtown shopping center.

The small Seattle monorail, operated by a private company, is the only mass transit system in the country reporting a profit, netting the city $400,000 a year with a ridership of nearly 2.5 million.

But Seattle, whenever it has considered monorail technology, ran into the same problems everyone else did, said Denny Fleenor of Seattle’s Regional Transit Authority: opposition from citizens to an elevated train running through their neighborhoods, difficulty evacuating passengers in the event of a fire, problems with handicapped access and difficulty in building elevated rail lines up Seattle’s steep hills and across its many waterways.

But monorail backers say the RTA’s planned $3.9-billion network of buses, commuter lanes and light rail will leave commuters chugging along in traffic, while a monorail would be whizzing above their heads at 45 mph.

“Until you get up and out of traffic, you’re just arguing over what kind of vehicle you’re going to sit in, and a car’s going to win every time,” Falkenbury said. “For less money, we’re delivering more service, better service and more reliable service to a greater part of the city.”

Part of the appeal of the monorail initiative is the provision that private financing be sought to fund the estimated $1-billion cost. If private funding can’t be secured, the initiative says, the City Council can raise the business and occupation tax.

Falkenbury has little doubt that private investors could be found. Retailers like grocery stores and dry cleaners, video stores and day-care centers, pizza shops and cinemas--all could benefit from locating at monorail stations and financing the track between them, he says.

“That’s a lot of latte stands,” said a glum Mike Luis, a Chamber of Commerce vice president who had the distinction of serving as the only organized opposition to the monorail initiative.

“Small businesses like that all need customers to support them. Has anybody ever penciled that out? No. Presumably, those people who would be riding this monorail are already doing all those things someplace else in their neighborhood. I mean, you can only get your clothes dry-cleaned so many times,” Luis said.

For their part, city officials have pledged to respond seriously to the initiative and will no doubt appoint the development authority called for under the new law, although few expect it to be given much funding. Newly elected Mayor Paul Schell said he will move to get the development authority started. “With that big of a vote,” he said, “it deserves a serious hearing.”