SEATTLE — Dick Falkenbury wasn't alone when sitting up in the driver's seat of his big tour bus, cursing the long lines of traffic. Seattle hates traffic--hates it, most surveys show, worse than every other urban ill combined.
Falkenbury, in the 45-minute drive from the airport to the hotel on the other end of his route, had plenty of time to mull it over. And when he did, he came up with a monorail. Why not, he imagined, take the gleaming milelong monorail built for the 1962 World's Fair--one of the city's proudest landmarks--and expand it 40 miles around metropolitan Seattle?
He and local activist Grant Cogswell started an initiative campaign. They didn't have money to hire signature gatherers, so they posted signs and blank petitions on the streets with a proposed route map and three words: "Extend the Monorail." They'd come back, and the petitions would be full.
"People would stop their cars, leave them running in the street, and come on over to sign," Falkenbury said.
Nobody in the city establishment wanted to hear about the monorail initiative on last week's ballot: Too wacky. Too pie-in-the-sky. A red herring, they insisted, in view of the city's already-approved $3.9-billion transit plan that will include 25 miles of electric light rail.
So it was with virtually no major campaigning and little public debate that more than 77,000 Seattle residents voted for the monorail. In an election that saw finicky voters turn down sweeping measures on gay rights, handgun control and money for road repairs and emergency services, 54% of the voters said yes to Falkenbury's monorail--and now the city is left trying to figure out what to do about it.
"From the officials, it's been shock. Amazement. They're used to the big ideas coming from them," Cogswell said.
"The first thing was to mock us," added Falkenbury. "And all of a sudden they realized there were 77,000 votes behind us, and they started toning down the rhetoric."
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Part of that interest may stem from a clause in the initiative that says the City Council--seven of whose eight members went on record opposed to the project--has one year to create and fund a public development authority for the monorail or see its own salaries cut off.
Monorails, widely used in Japan and occasionally seen in Europe, have never taken off in the United States, other than at a few tourist spots like Disneyland, Las Vegas and the line linking the Seattle Center festival grounds and a downtown shopping center.
