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Apply least-cost approach to transit
Friday, March 30, 2001
By ALAN DURNING
The trouble with greater Seattle's incessant debate over transportation options -- from light rail to monorail to wider freeways to, now, free buses -- isn't the length of the debate, as many have claimed.
It's that the region has no method in place for prioritizing its spending on the basis of cost-effectiveness.
Or, rather, the method we have is worthy of Alice in Wonderland: elected leaders, their eyes on their political rivals, compete to bring home the biggest checks from the treasury in Washington, D.C. They fixate on headliner technologies to improve their prospects in the federal-grant sweepstakes.
This method produced Sound Transit's Link light rail proposal -- and, eventually, heated debate over the process and possible alternatives. At the moment, Ride Free Express is the favorite, claiming to be ten times as cost-effective as Link. I tend to believe the contention. But rejecting the latter for the former now would be as foolish as Link's tunnel ambitions look in retrospect. Without a thorough review, we'll just keep running in place, like rats on a wheel, grabbing for the next thing in front of our eyes.
Fortunately, there is an exit. Called "least-cost planning," it's a methodology first designed by Northwesterners 25 years ago for a similar set of dilemmas in the electric power sector. Power authorities worldwide have since copied its design. The challenge is to adapt the technique for transportation planning, something that an obscure and unenforced provision in Washington State law actually requires us to do anyway. That gives us a chance to lead.
A brief history: in the mid-1970s, a talented local economist and computer modeler, the late Don Shakow, showed the Seattle City Council how, by investing in energy conservation, the city could foreswear nuclear power. The city cancelled its investment in the doomed Washington Public Power Supply System, which went on to become a synonym for incompetence writ large.
Shakow's innovation was to apply common sense rigorously. He catalogued scores of ways to supply or conserve, priced each option (including long-term, social and environmental costs), and then -- once the council had debated the options -- assembled the most advantageous set of investments.
When WPPSS's finances melted down, the newly formed Northwest Power Planning Council in Portland applied Seattle's newfangled least-cost approach and the Northwest essentially stopped building large power plants. Instead, it invested in conservation, saved billions of dollars for ratepayers, and cut annual electric growth from almost 4 percent in the seventies to about 1.5 percent since. Making "best buys first" turned the Northwest into a world leader in conservation.
Here's the rub: Prior to the ascendance of least-cost planning, energy investments poured into massive new power plants because no method existed for effectively comparing alternatives. By the 1990s, the Northwest's transportation sector was in a similar situation: a mass of growth and congestion to which authorities responded with expensive proposals such as roads and rail.
Shakow helped put together a preliminary least-cost transportation plan for Seattle, evaluating 18 options. It concluded that the worst deals were new freeway lanes (take that, you 520 and I-405 wideners) and light rail (take that, you Link lovers), even counting environmental costs like climate change.
The best buys were humble, dispersed alternatives: expanding the network of transit and carpool lanes; subsidizing carpools; distributing free bus passes; building more bike routes; and ramping up vanpools. What most of these options share is the ability to make fuller use of existing resources: roads already built and vehicles already rolling.
State law actually requires the Puget Sound Regional Council to use least-cost planning to develop its influential Metropolitan Transportation Plans -- result of Shakow-ally Dick Nelson's tenure in the legislature a decade ago. But the council has stonewalled in its current process of revising the plan, commissioning research that obscures more than it reveals about costs and benefits.
Evidence to date suggests that Link, like WPPSS, might well die if submitted to the methodical penny-pinchery of least-cost planning. Expanding 405 wouldn't likely pass the test either. The monorail might go too. Sounder commuter rail would be iffy.
According to Shakow's last draft, a free-bus system has more promise, in combination with other options, but even Ride Free Express probably wouldn't survive unscathed.
Still, evidence to date is patchy and anecdotal. No one can say what would emerge from a real least-cost planning process for Puget Sound transportation. Until we commit to creating one, we'll just keep sprinting on the wheel.
Alan Durning is executive director of the Seattle-based research center Northwest Environment Watch.
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