Traffic study should embarrass state, city leaders

Almost everyone reading this right now: your commute sucks. If you have a commute in the morning or afternoon, chances are, your commute is just awful. It’s especially bad if you’re driving in a car alone.

You’re stuck in traffic for more time than you want to admit, keeping you away from your family or from your job for too long. It increases your stress, it makes you angry, and it makes you miserable.

Related: It will take a lot more than higher gas prices to get us to carpool

Your commute sucks, but you won’t change your driving habits even if it could make the commute better.

At least, that’s what a new survey from the Puget Sound Region Council says. PSRC surveyed over 6,000 households across the Puget Sound: King, Snohomish, Pierce, and Kitsap counties.

And overwhelmingly, when solo drivers were asked what would would get you to stop driving alone to work, they said ‘nothing.’

Nearly 50 percent of Snohomish County residents said ‘nothing.’ Sixty percent of Kitsap and Pierce County residents said ‘nothing;’ forty percent of King County drivers said ‘nothing.’

There were a lot of alternative options, such as high-speed transit that would save you 10 minutes per trip. But there wasn’t much enthusiasm for it.

If gas prices climbed to $5 per gallon, or more, not even a quarter of you would stop traveling alone.

If a toll hit $5 per trip, still, you’d pay it and drive solo.

If there were more HOV lanes, only 9 percent of you would share your ride. If the cost of parking your car increases by 50 percent, only 8 percent of you would stop driving alone.

Most of the solo drivers will continue to drive solo, regardless. So there are a number of takeaways &#8212 many of which don’t really tell us anything shocking and their conclusions are not very meaningful.

In the Times, Gene Balk points out that this basically indicates that the traffic nightmares are all of our own making. He also says that if even the small number of folks change their habits, it could have some impact on traffic.

Both are overly-simplistic takeaways that don’t really get to the root of the problem of traffic, which is not just bad infrastructure decisions coming from city and state leaders, but their inability to win us over.

I think the concept of light rail is brilliant. I love it. I was in Europe for a couple weeks in March and I took the light rail when available. Amsterdam, for example, had one and it was fantastic. Again, I loved it.

I’ve taken the South Lake Union streetcar in Seattle and it’s a nice experience. It’s almost always empty. The people on it, in my experience, are workers with the Seattle Department of Transportation and I suspect they don’t have to pay.

But I love the idea of light rail. The problem is, I don’t support it in Seattle.

How’s that possible? The problem is the people who are pushing the idea are not trustworthy.

They’re bad at their jobs. They come off as scam artists and they don’t deliver on time. What’s that mean? I couldn’t care less if they deliver according to their internal time lines. Their internal timeline is too damn slow.

Look at what they’re doing on Mercer Street, which causes huge traffic jams coming in and out of Seattle.

For one, I’m pretty sure they’ve made it worse. The design is bizarre. They cut down on lanes unnecessarily for parking that will be scarcely used.

Two, it’s taking too long. It’s about a year too long right now. A timeline is about perception and if you’re unwilling to get a small stretch of land done because you don’t want to work on weekends or overnight, then I have zero faith that you’ll deliver to me a connected light rail system that works and won’t take 10 years.

Sound Transit is asking for more money from us and they sent out this mailer a couple weeks ago for you to take the survey, which you should do. But they cite light rail openings as “upcoming” in Lynnwood, Kent, and Bellevue &#8212 2023 is a long ways away. And it’s that long because they didn’t come up with an effective plan 20 years ago for this.

This is for SDOT, WSDOT, Sound Transit &#8212 you name it &#8212 they’ve failed us.

That they couldn’t convince voters many, many, many voting cycles before today to get people to invest, that’s on them, not us.

And their inability to be inspiring on this topic has lead them to pretty much try to impose their will on us. They’re punishing us for not agreeing with their positions. They can’t win the argument, so they force changes.

They know we’re unwilling to change our behavior on driving solo because they haven’t convinced us their plans and ideas work. So in the case of WSDOT, they hit you with absurdly high I-405 tolls that can reach over $10 during one ride. This is just financially abusive; it’s disgusting. But it’s not beneath them because that’s what they do.

So the takeaway from this survey isn’t really about our behavior as drivers; it’s about the state’s inability to convince us that they have solutions. It’s about an individual city agency’s inability to convince us they’re right.

This is an embarrassment on them. Not us.