Walt Crowely's last column says Roads & Transit is a tipping point

The late Walt Crowley penned an excellent column shortly before his death for this Sunday's Seattle Times on the end of our car centric age. In it he combined his exceptional grasp on history with his prophetic understating of things to come, as he painted us a picture of our transportation future.

Contrary to socialist propaganda and Hollywood myth, most communities blunder into the future, often stumbling backward, groping for a curb or handhold like a blind man suddenly thrust into a busy street in a strange city.Metropolitan Puget Sound is currently in the midst of entering its own future, along with the rest of Western industrial society.

It is crossing from one social and economic epoch into another. The past may be called the ICE Age, the "ICE" here being not continent-sized glaciers but the Internal Combustion Engine. This modern ICE Age is barely a century old, but it completely transformed the contours of our physical and cultural landscape.

We like to think that we can shape our destiny through dramatic acts of will. In one of his last written pieces, Walt grounds us in the understanding that change is messy, complicated, and rather unpredictable. However, with the perspective of history, the course can become clearer:

The border between the ICE Age and post-ICE Age is hazy and indistinct to those feeling their way on the ground, but it is appears as a bright, swift river to those watching from a little altitude.

Voters have been inching along the banks of this regional Rubicon for over a decade by approving Sound Transit in 1996, by gambling on an expanded monorail in 1997 (and ultimately folding a losing hand), by upholding higher state transportation taxes in 2005, and by sending Alaskan Way Viaduct planners back to the drawing board in 2006.

With each election, the public has backed a little further away from the automobile-driven imperatives that have shaped our transportation system and patterns of regional and urban development since the First World War.

The final fording looms just ahead: the Nov. 6 election on the Regional Transportation Investment District (RTID) plan for $18-billion-plus worth of transit and highway improvements over the next decade or more.

This is where Ron Sims, the Sierra Club, and others have been mistaken. As Walt notes, the future is not built “with a single heroic flourish, but incrementally through thousands of tiny gestures by individuals, corporations and governments”.

The Roads and Transit package, according to Walt, is critical to the shift away from the “ICE age” and toward a clean sustainable future

And so we stand in the last days of the ICE Age.

The future is visible in the distance — and in the not-too-distant past. Urban and regional planners have already drawn up the blueprints for denser downtowns, urban villages, close-in work places, streetcars, interurban trains, "mosquito fleet" ferries, smaller electric vehicles, bicycles and even people walking — not to attain their personal fitness goals, but just to get from point A to point B. Could horses and buggies be far behind? Don't laugh.

Passage of the roads-and-transit plan will not instantly unclog highways nor usher in some modern version of a 19th-century City Beautiful utopia overnight.

It will, however, mark a tipping point not unlike the predicted thawing of the polar ice caps, a one-way threshold of no return.

We will always need roads and highways, but once the momentum of transportation investment steers away from the gas-powered automobile in favor of transit and other alternatives, there will be no going back.

Once the ICE Age begins to recede, it cannot be reversed, and we will find ourselves delivered into the future.

Emphasis is mine. I don’t think anyone could have said it better.

Tackling the problems we face does not mean a wholesale rejection of the the kinds of projects we have historically built, but the beginning of a transition toward a transit based future.

We must remember that our car-centric society did not come into being overnight. As Walt says in the column, it was a series of small, and at times unlikely, steps over decades that got us where we are today. From Seattle’s first car in 1900, which happened to be electric, to the opening of the first floating bridge in 1940, we abandoned railways and embraced freeways. Perhaps a harbinger of change at the time was the opening of the Aurora Bridge in 1933.

Interurban railways were simultaneously challenged and displaced by county and state highways whose expansion accelerated after the federal government began funding road construction in 1916.

The death knell for rail was sounded in 1933 when the new Pacific Highway and Aurora Bridge opened without any tracks for local or interurban transit, although Seattle voters and commuters stood by their streetcars until the eve of World War II, despite the best efforts of car, oil and tire companies to bankrupt and derail street railways here and across the nation.

When I read this the first thing that came to mind is that today we are doing the opposite. From retrofitting I-90 for light rail, to ensuring that the new 520 bridge is ready for future rail use, we recognize that the automobile is not the future.

Just this year King County formed a ferry district to resurrect the mosquito fleet and I have gotten used to hearing neighbors and fellow citizens talk about the need for streetcars and light rail.

The future does not necessarily lie in adopting grand new technologies, but in re-embracing the past, albeit with modern touches and improvements.

Cars aren’t going away anytime soon, and buses need roads, but by investing in alternatives we can witness the birth of the post-ICE age.

After all, we know these alternatives worked before. If you get a chance, read the whole column - you won't regret it.