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When you’re in a hole, start digging?

Early this year I wrote a post based on a quote from John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist of the last century. Keynes had an idea about filling a hole with bottles filled with money, covering the hole over with dirt and then selling permits to dig out the bottles. His argument was that during an economic downturn the best thing was to spend, even if the spending seemed to contradict common sense.

Last week I wrote about the falling rate of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States and the Northwest. The post goes into a bit of detail about the numbers and asks the question, “Why invest huge dollars in capital infrastructure for new ways to carry cars?”

It’s far from certain what the downturn in VMT means. Part of it is attributable to last year’s price spike in oil and gas prices. But when you look at gasoline consumption (down), VMT (down) and car sales (down) you can’t help but wonder why we’re digging a big hole along the waterfront and filling it with cars. Does a tunnel that will cost billions of dollars still make sense?

Could the possibility that we are significantly changing our driving habits make Keynes’ idea more attractive?

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This entry was posted by Roger Valdez on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Planning, Politics, transportation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Matt Hays

    There’s a chance driving will drop massively in the coming years, assuming gas prices rise to unheard of levels. But to replace 99 the drop would have to be truly massive, at a level nobody seems to be projecting.

    Otherwise, all you’re doing is putting a large percentage of those cars onto Downtown streets, making Downtown inhospitable for pedestrians and everyone else. Political pressures from the pass-through crowd would result in all sorts of trade-offs, starting with the PI’s truly evil suggestion that not all intersections should have pedestrian crossings.

    Making the central city inhospitable would make it harder for density to work. Would as many companies locate jobs centrally if that meant working in grid of high-capacity throughways (aka avenues) designed for pass-throughs? Would people want to live Downtown?

    The tunnel seems reasonably popular because very few people consider it the worst-possible outcome, because Downtown people like me get our liveable, walkable streets and get our waterfront, the passthrough crowd gets most of what they want, enviros (also like me) get their non-increase in car capacity, and everyone gets a fairly innocuous construction period. The cost is probably the best of all alternatives in the long run once you factor in loss of business with the other alternatives. And many consider it either ok or the best-possibly outcome.

  • Matt the Engineer

    “But to replace 99 the drop would have to be truly massive, at a level nobody seems to be projecting.” Except that traffic volumes were increasing when they tore down San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and that turned out wonderfully.

    “making Downtown inhospitable for pedestrians and everyone else” Not at all. Fast moving cars are much larger of a problem than slow moving cars. It will simply take longer to pass through downtown by driving. I’d argue that’s a good thing.

    “Political pressures from the pass-through crowd would result in all sorts of trade-offs” Now this nails it. The reason we’re building the tunnel is the same reason – politics. Politics creates inefficient systems that serve special interests disproportionately.

    The silver lining to all of this is the possibility of converting this tunnel to rail in the future. Sure it would be much cheaper to just build rail in the first place, but the state would never pay for that.

  • mhays

    The Embarcadero was a “dead end” that served local traffic, vs 99 which has a lot of longer-distance traffic. The 99 tunnel moves the Downtown traffic to the streets, but the longer-distance traffic to the tunnel. (Regarding traffic projections, I’m talking about national projections.)

    Downtown would be inhospitable not because cars would go slowly, but because roads would be “highway-ized” due to, yes, political concessions to industry and the driving public. This would mean use of measures such as turning parking lanes into traffic lanes, potential removal of pedestrian crossings, potentially narrower sidewalks or at least removal of bulbs, longer wait times to cross east-west, and so on. (Correction: some of this was already planned for the surface alternative; more would happen due to the concessions.)

    Let the car and truck people think the tunnel is for them. To me, it’s the tunnel that will save Downtown from the horrific alternatives.

  • Craig

    mhays – You are clearly forgetting the year long study and work the AWV stakeholder group completed with WSDOT that realized we could deal with the problems you mention (for half the cost of a tunnel) with improvements to I-5 and increased transit service. Also, the tunnel is about as popular as our current Mayor (~30%); I wouldn’t call that reasonably popular, I would call that a reasonable campaign issue – see http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politicsnorthwest/2009314997_mcginn_poll_voters_agree_with.html for more information.

  • JoshMahar

    The thing I dont get is that there is already a plan in place to convert 99 in SLU/Uptown into a more “regular” street, instead of a highway. By that I mean it will have more stoplights, slower speeds, and the rest of the grid will reconnect across it.

    If this is the case, and I certainly think it should be, then won’t the traffic flying through the tunnel just get backed up here anyway? So really, what’s the point.

    If you want to get somewhere fast and your transportation of choice is a car, then use I-5. Period. We don’t need to maintain any more highways. (eventually we should convert portions of I-5 into a rail line and try to reconnect more of the grid across it also.)

  • mhays

    Craig, part of those results were that Downtown streets would take up a huge amount of additional traffic. I don’t believe McGinn’s push poll either.

    JoshMahar, nobody is calling for lights on Aurora, at least that I’ve seen. Where you see “reconnect the grid” (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/boredtunnelmap.htm) they’re talking about overpasses, which is also shown on renderings, though I’m not finding them.

  • Craig

    mhays – How can you not believe a poll that simply asks if you support the tunnel (and only 37% said yes)? After learning more information this support drops to the low 30s%. This correlates directly with the vote in 2007 (recognizing its an entirely different proposal). People understand that how we spend our money reflects our values; and spending $4.2 billion (potentially much more) to speed cars under downtown while we lay off teachers, close libraries, neglect our parks, cut social services and slash transit service just doesn’t mesh with most of our values.

  • mhays

    That’s how polling works. Any questions can get different answers based on who they’re reaching (in this case “likely voters who answered their phones, probably all landlines”), how the questions are asked, etc. In this case, there’s an extra variable: it was Seattle-only. That’s a huge factor. Outside of Seattle they can be tigher with spending but they tend to favor traffic flow more.

    This was a classic push poll where people “learned” a slanted view. If you introduce elements such as this being the only option where 99 stays open during construction, or being the only proposal that doesn’t close off a lot of business during the project, I suspect opposition drops.

    In any case, my point about Seattle’s opinion wasn’t simply about yeses vs. nos. People might grumble, but they don’t seem to be grumbling very hard. My guess is this is due to the tunnel not being very many people’s worst case scenario (the other altneratives are nightmares to a lot of people each), a general sigh of relief that we won’t jam things for six years during construction, and another sigh of relief that a decision has been made.

    The fact that McGinn would still lose 43-29 even as the only anti-tunnel candidate (even with a “push poll” at his back) supports the theory that opposition to the tunnel isn’t that strong.

    As for librarians, I fail to see the relevance. We’re not building this in 2009, but in 2012. The economy will be different then. Though I agree that people don’t always think of that.

  • Craig

    Yes, we are building in 2012, and we won’t finish construction until 2015 (at the earliest); but more importantly, the tunnel will likely remain operational until the end of this century – and the world is going to change dramatically over the next 75 – 100 years. Faced with the problems of climate change, energy scarcity (= dramatically rising gas prices if/when our consumption based economy ever awakens from its coma) and the declining health of Puget Sound; why on earth would be spend billions of dollars on an infrastructure investment that creates sprawl, increases our impact on climate change (and in no way improves our adaptability), hurts the health of Puget Sound and quite simply makes no long-term sense for our region? For the amount of money that we are spending on the tunnel to speed cars under downtown, we could build many more RapidRide lines, another Light Rail line, the entire proposed streetcar network and still have money left over to greatly enhance Seattle’s bike/ped facilities and create a spectacular waterfront. The tunnel is a 20th century solution (we need to move cars!) and we are facing 21st century problems; its time for real leadership to step in and begin putting the pieces in place to deal with the real problems that we face.

  • mhays

    I share much of that vision (more transit, more walking, more density, less sprawl), just not your view of how the tunnel impacts it.

    For example, a big part of centralizing employment and living (a key to successful transit and reducing sprawl) is keeping Downtown hospitable and functional. Turning streets into highways would hurt that.

  • Craig

    Matt – Glad we agree on the vision, but here’s how the tunnel impacts it: If we want more transit then we need to fund it (the tunnel precludes this funding); if we want more walking then we need to fund it (the tunnel takes all the resources away from funding things like the Pedestrian Master Plan); if we want more density then we need to fund it (with things like parks, open space and amenities that make livable cities, and again, the tunnel takes away our ability to fund these amenities); and if we want less sprawl then we need to discourage it (the tunnel does not do this) while encouraging people to move back into cities (with the transit and amenities that we can’t afford because we wasted all of our money on the tunnel). It’s simply a matter of allocating our money in support of our vision. We don’t have to turn downtown into through-ways for cars if we don’t want to (just like we didn’t have to build 183 miles of highways to get more light rail). Let’s work together and create the political reality that we want, not let the powers that be dictate what we have to accept.

  • mhays

    Part of my point is that the tunnel isn’t more expensive. Not when you factor the side costs (like loss of tourism, industry, etc.) with the six years of construction distruption.

    As for turning Downtown into highways, that’s the difference between how the surface advocates intend their plan to be, vs. how it would really occur. It’s not a question of whether the “throughput” advocates would get concessions, it’s a question of how much.

  • mhays

    Clarification on the last: six years of construction disruption with the aerial plan. Less construction disruption but permanent car-domination with the surface plan.