Whee! Only 45 Minutes To Moses Lake

OLYMPIA - So far in the unsettled argument about managing growth in the Puget Sound region, most of the state-level focus has been on regulating land use and unclogging transportation arteries west of the Cascades.

But in the view of a small group of mostly Republican legislators (a handful of Democrats have joined up in recent weeks), Western Washington's relentless growth pressures could be eased considerably by spreading them over a wider geographic base.

Thus the startling proposal for a super-high-speed rail connection between the Seattle metropolitan area and Moses Lake, where the Grant County airport would be elevated in rank to an ``international'' state-of-the-art passenger and cargo terminal.

The idea is so ambitious, even visionary, that a lot of people in and around the 1990 Legislature are reacting with shrugs and bemused smiles.

Pie in the sky? Maybe. But similar skepticism probably greeted far-out ideas advanced by dreamers at other points in Washington history.

Those dreams produced giant dams on the Columbia, carved railroad tunnels through Cascade rock, built floating bridges across Lake Washington, and transformed Eastern Washington deserts into rich farmlands.

Sen. Mike Patrick, R-Renton, insists the proposal is not futuristic.

The technology for high-speed (up to 310 miles an hour) rail - both steel-wheeled and magnetic-levitation (maglev) trains - exists today, Patrick says. It's operating or in the planning stages in Japan and more than a dozen countries in Europe.

In the United States, a high-speed ``maglev'' line linking Florida's Disney World with the Orlando airport is to open in October 1994.

In Washington, D.C., Joseph Vranich of the boosterish High Speed Rail Association told the Transportation Research Board last month that California and Nevada planners are exploring high-speed rail service between Anaheim and Las Vegas. Vranich said Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio are among other states investigating so-called bullet trains for crowded corridors where cities are 300 to 600 miles apart.

But Moses Lake? Don't laugh, says Republican Rep. Glyn Chandler, who lives there.

The existing airport, Chandler says, already has plenty of room on the ground and in the air to accommodate a huge volume of passenger and cargo flights.

Developed originally as Larson Air Force Base (a Strategic Air Command operation closed in 1964), the 4,500-acre facility has four runways, two of them long enough to handle jumbo jets and supersonic transports. Unlike airports farther west, Chandler adds, it's seldom closed or restricted by adverse weather.

Also, Moses Lake lies hard by Interstate 90, the principal cross-state travel route. The plane-train plan's sponsors say the I-90 corridor would provide most of the high-speed rail right-of-way. Travel time over the approximately 180 miles from Moses Lake to connections at, say, Bellevue and Sea-Tac Airport: 40 to 45 minutes.

Rep. Roy Ferguson, R-Bellevue, thinks future economic development all along the route could help absorb growth pressures now being felt on Western Washington roadways and in the increasingly crowded skies around Sea-Tac.

Off-hour rail movement of air freight to and from Moses Lake, Ferguson says, could cut I-90 truck traffic by 40 percent.

As for Sea-Tac, the proposal would impose an immediate moratorium on any expansion of the airport or alteration of its flight patterns - sweet music to noise-conscious foes of the Federal Aviation Administration's current efforts to revamp Sea-Tac's approach routes, and to opponents of airport expansion anywhere around Puget Sound.

The sponsors say the business opportunities would be especially important to economically stagnant areas such as Grant and Kittitas Counties - a resort center, say, at Cle Elum or even ``exurban'' housing subdivisions.

Chandler says, for example, that a Seattle-area worker could build an 1,800-square-foot home in the Ellensburg area for $75,000 and commute to Seattle by rail in about 25 minutes.

Financing for the airport and rail line would come from a mix of private and public dollars. The latter perhaps would come from the FAA's rich airport trust fund, and private capital from both U.S. and foreign investors.

The Japanese, says Duane Berentson, state transportation secretary, ``are very interested'' in the idea.

Far less enthusiastic is Andrea Riniker, boss of Sea-Tac: ``These people are very well-intentioned, but their proposal is highly unrealistic. It might make sense for sometime in the middle of the next century.''

But with 70 percent of all this region's air travelers living in five counties around Puget Sound, Riniker says, ``we've got to do something right now. Otherwise, we'll be out of space in less than 10 years.'' Riniker worries that the Moses Lake concept might distract attention from more immediate airport issues.

If all this is too grandiose for many legislators' tastes, the train-plane scheme still serves a useful purpose by drawing fresh attention to the long-standing political and economic divisions between Eastern and Western Washington, separated by what Patrick calls the ``Cascade Curtain.''

An analysis in the just-out first issue of The New Pacific, a highbrow public-affairs journal, documents the growing gap between urban centers and non-metropolitan areas around the state in terms of job generation and personal incomes.

Except for places such as Spokane and wheat-rich Lincoln County, the report says, income disparities are drawing population out, making development in rural sections ``that much more difficult for those left behind.''

So, the rail-plane plan has meaning that goes beyond growth-management questions. To raise issues about the ``Cascade Curtain'' is to state the case for all kinds of efforts to bring all Washingtonians closer together.

Herb Robinson's column appears Monday and Friday on The Times' editorial page.