Dori grills SDOT director on Mercer Street, Sound Transit

Cutting right to the chase, KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson asked Seattle Department of Transportation director Scott Kubly why the city isn’t doing more for drivers.

“I think we are,” Kubly said in an interview Thursday. “We’re doing a lot of things to make it easier to get around. We’re giving people a lot of different choices for how they get around. Not everybody drives everywhere and not everybody takes the bus everywhere. There’s very few people who use one mode exclusively.”

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Kubly said for people like Dori, who can’t take mass transit because of his schedule, they’re putting more people on buses so the roads aren’t so crowded.

Dori argued it really feels like traffic in and around the city has gotten dramatically worse for drivers, even in the last year.

“Well, you’ve got the economy rebounding and anytime you’ve got the economy rebounding and growing strong, you have people taking more trips and traffic tends to go up when the economy is strong,” Kubly said. “The other thing is we’re making a lot of investments. The mayor and councilman Tom Rasmussen are leading the charge at getting Prop. 1 passed to add more bus service to the city streets. So we’re going to add a ton of transit capacity to help us keep pace with the growth that we’ve seen in the last 10 years.”

As predicted, Dori said trips on Mercer Street have gotten much slower. He wondered if it was wise to invest so much money into a project that was expected to slow down drivers.

“The data that I see shows that east-west on Mercer has gotten substantially better since I got here in August,” said Kubly.

“But not better since before the project began,” countered Dori.

“What we’re doing there is we’re taking a street and a road network there that was built for the 1950s and 1960s and we’re knitting it back together so we actually have a better street grid for local traffic,” Kubly said. “The other thing that you see is that travel times are decreasing, so undoubtedly, the last couple years of construction have been really painful for a lot of folks in the city. But you see on Mercer, as the project comes closer and closer to completion, travel times are dropping.”

He argued that the project was a good expenditure that was needed for a successful tunnel project and it also benefits walkers, bike riders, and drivers.

Dori switched gears and asked Kubly if he’d ever support tolling existing roads in Seattle.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anybody who’s talking about that,” answered Kubly.

Dori also wanted to know more about Mayor Ed Murray’s pitch, in his State of the City address on Tuesday, to expand Sound Transit.

“How can we justify putting more money into an agency that has been billions over budget and that has fallen so far short of what they promised the voters?” Dori asked.

“I can only tell you about projects that I see, which are projects that are coming out of Sound Transit that I hear are coming in ahead of schedule and under budget,” Kubly said.

“That’s absolutely not true, Scott,” Dori argued.

“If you look at cities around the country, should it be Washington D.C. or Chicago or New York or San Francisco or any city that’s made big investments in transit, it is an investment that helps the city for decades, 50 to 100 years,” said Kubly. “I don’t think anybody in any of those cities would say that their transportation system would function without the high-quality, high-capacity mass transit system.”

Dori said he’s skeptical because Sound Transit has broken its promise to deliver 125 miles of light rail network. Even with the U-District extension, we won’t be at half that number, he said.

“They’re billions over budget and I know that eventually people would like to keep soaking us, but it’s going to cost my family of five – our share of Sound Transit costs are going to be $86,000 for just the plans that are on the table right now over the next 30 years. How can we justify that?” asked Dori.

Kubly questioned Dori’s math and said that, bottom line, there is no more space to add lanes to I-5 or SR 99.

“Is there anything that I can say that could convince you that (light rail) is worth it?” Kubly wanted to know.

In a nutshell, Dori answered no. He still doesn’t understand why a city would tie its future to an agency that has over promised and under delivered. He suspects that Sound Transit has a high approval rating because government and the media have chosen to ignore the numbers.

“I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree that Sound Transit is a good investment,” Kubly said. “I think it’s a fantastic investment; you don’t. We live in a society where people are allowed to have differing opinions.”