Global Gridlock, Here To Taipei -- Taiwan Is Building An $18 Billion Mass Transit System While Seattle Asks If $3.9 Billion Is Too Much

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Inching toward 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, riding sinuous Highway 1 hugging the west coast of Taiwan. Destination: the metropolis of Taipei, a "Blade Runner" kind of city set in a basin between green hills and the China Sea, smack on the edge of the Formosan cordillera - a mountain range softened by the lush, floppy tropics.

Our van has moved a mile in the past 15 minutes. A journey of about 100 miles will take five hours. Traffic is not just heavy, it has stopped. Trucks, buses, vans, BMWs, Toyota MR2s, Olds and Chevys with drivers on their cellulars sit in the grim dusk. The mountains are curtained off by the thick air. This is traffic without pity, a jam of machinery and frustration. Brake lights telegraph the news: as far ahead as anyone in the van can see, things are moving at the speed of sludge.

At the next toll booth, the money taker hangs out the window wearing a gauze face mask and who can blame her, she works in exhaust fumes that can hide mountains and dim the sky. The toll is the equivalent of one U.S. dollar for a vanful of people, five toll booths spaced over 100 miles. Gas is between $3 and $4 a gallon and apparently no deterrent to owning a big, beefy Chrysler with an interior about the size of a Taipei living room.

If this is a glimpse of the future, few would want it. A coastal region booming with computer factories, subdivisions, new people arriving from the countryside and a rising,

consumption-minded middle class is also an economy choking on itself. This moment of Perdition on the highway is like the 520 bridge, the S-curves of 405, I-5 at the Rainier brewery all rolled into one, massive blood clot on a region's arterial.

For the planners and thinkers in charge of the economic miracle officially called the Republic of China on Taiwan, the answer to gridlock is obvious: build a rapid transit system and move people around the quaint city on modern light rail. Some 2.1 million Chinese rise and go to work, school or shopping every morning and they all go home every night. Riding above or below the narrow streets on new commuter cars would alleviate traffic, reduce the crushing number of polluting motorbikes and perhaps bring some relief to the numbing traffic jams. The numbers are daunting.

While 40 percent of Taiwan's families own a car, 80 per cent own a motorbike - Taipei's traffic is growing by 10,000 cars and scooters each month. Every morning the city is burdened by more than 600,000 cars and 1 million motor scooters on the move.

Many billions of dollars, incinerated test cars, a turnover city election and lost deadlines later, Taipei has one commuter rail line that glides nearly empty during midday over the clogged city below.

What happened to ambitious public transit in Taiwan is not shameful or terrible, but maybe is inevitable to large-scale projects confronting the demands of time and precision engineering. Hope for solutions turns to compromises, deadlines are delayed and the city grows right out from under the latest mass transit solution.

"It's out of control," is one description of Taipei traffic by Lee Pei, home for a summer job but otherwise a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lee says she has to catch her bus by 6:30 a.m. to get to work downtown by 9 a.m. "There's a bridge near our house and the traffic just stops there, sometimes for an hour. If you don't get past that bridge by 7 a.m. or so, you can wait hours to get moving again."

It's a tale different only in degrees from stories about the traffic spillway that flows from 405 to westbound Highway 520 crossing Lake Washington every day. The elasticity of motorized urban transit begins to break down at a certain point, forcing the mass transit solution.

Taipei has a much higher population density than Seattle but has an odd geographic resemblance to its hills and tributaries. The neighborhoods are barely navigable in the city but in Taipei's suburbs the land stretches out to include small farms on leafy hillsides. Banana plantations are nearby.

Out in the bamboo suburbs on a quiet mid-morning, the only operating elevated commuter line begins its run near the entrance to the new Taipei zoo.

The train station is bright and airy. An automated coin machine punches out a ticket to the final stop on the line - about $1 for an eight-mile, round-trip ride. Just before lunch, maybe 30 people ride the four passenger cars as the train rises mechanically above the traffic and heads downtown.

So far, this single completed segment is way over budget. The government now has committed $18 billion (U.S.) for the transit system, an increase of 60 percent over the original estimate. The final bill is highly debated. American engineers who have seen the system say the eventual combination of 88 miles of subways and elevated tracks is going to cost double the government estimate. One engineer thinks it could go as high as $65 billion instead of the projected cost of less than $20 billion.

Cracks in the concrete caused early engineering delays and test runs shouted a terrible warning: the cars were catching fire and the interiors of the cars were flammable. City corruption and big-city politics added to the delays. Transit officials say that's all behind them but the loss of credibility and torn up streets is a constant joke with people all over the country. The transit system probably contributed to the defeat of the national party's mayoral candidate. In an election that delivered the city to the opposing Democratic Progressive Party, the newly-elected mayor of Taipei said his party could do a better job saving the city from its daily gridlock.

What anyone can do to change the basic dynamics of a city freezing into gridlock is a good question with wildly opposite answers.

"Why did Taipei wait so long to start building its big transit system?" someone asks. "We didn't think we would stay on Taiwan this long," is one answer that sums up the global diaspora of the Chinese people. But there are questions unrelated to politics. Urban planners also have questions about how people who are accustomed to being wholly independent in their small, daily travels can be lured onto a system which carries them all at once between fixed stations.

Skimming just above the traffic of one of the world's most congested cities is such an appealing idea that commuters met in casual conversation were enthusiastic about the future of light rail in their lives. The cars are French VAL 256s, driverless, fully automated and, so far, squeaky clean. "Just wait until the real crowds come," said one passenger. The train makes 12 stops, with another train every 2 to 4 minutes in rush hour. Additional stations were added as each politician's turf was reached and each wanted a station for his constituents.

Looking down from the silent train, the evidence of terminal gridlock on the city is dramatic and obvious. The crush of cars makes people aloft in the train cars giddy with relief. Blocks of traffic line up between stop lights. Motor bikes move like flowing lava around the cars, trucks and buses. The elevated train is so easy to use compared to what's below, where are the passengers?

"Actually, they should stay on their motorbikes," says Eric Heikkila, associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning at USC in Los Angeles and a former resident of Taipei.

"All over Asia, in booming cities we see the same progression," Heikkila said. "In Vietnam right now, and mainland China, they're riding their bikes everywhere. Then they shift to motor scooters as they have in Taipei, then to cars. Commuters on motorbikes are better than commuters in cars, but Taiwan's middle class is growing rapidly, and pretty soon they will be in air-conditioned automobiles, out of the acid rain and pollution.

"The little, one-cylinder motor bikes are polluting and noisy but imagine the traffic when cars replace them," Heikkila said.

"The clear lesson when looking at the experiences of other cities to an American city's problems is that there are no lessons. In Hong Kong, where there are some geographical similarities of water and hills to Seattle, the mass transit system is working beautifully, but is privately run. The Hong Kong government built the system and then said, `no more money, run it on your own.' In a high-density city, that may work. How it would work elsewhere is debatable because the densities are not always available," Heikkila said.

"HOV lanes are also not an automatic answer. Giving up a lane that could be used by everyone consumes land costs for limited use. Instead, some cities deal with the rising number of cars by making downtown parking fees extremely high, causing a penalty for driving."

The idea of HOV lanes is very humorous to the planners of Taipei. "Are you crazy,?" one said. "Nobody would pay any attention to a HOV lane. As it is, they drive on the sidewalks to get past the traffic."

No one who has seriously looked at Taipei's mass transit investments concludes that the massive undertaking is a mistake. Faced with an exploding population, the city and regional authorities must do something today to be ready for the next 20 years. But there are real questions about mass transit's ability to dramatically alter the way people move around the city.

"On the Los Angeles Blue Line," Heikkila said, "the new commuter line is taking on the same passengers that previously were on the express buses that are now gone. The cost is billions of dollars, but it moves the same people the buses did. Those in their cars stayed in their cars."

Here's Heikkila's equation for calculating the cost of mass transit systems:

"Think about the cost of mass transit as a capital expense seeking a rate of return. Let's round it off and say the Taiwan government spends $20 billion instead of $18 billion. With a 10 percent rate of return by simply investing that money on world markets, they would get $2 billion a year. You can take care of a lot of city problems aside from just traffic on $2 billion a year.

"For a transit system to pay off the $20 billion, you'd have to have 2 million users paying $1,000 a year, or $3 a day, seven days a week. You can't get the money back, and it's gone, not available for other uses."

But that's only the mathematics, not the bigger problem.

"The one tangible return on investment for mass transit is the environment," he said. "All over the world, we are finding that environmental quality is a luxury good. The middle class has to be willing to pay for it and at a certain point, they do."

Eventually, Taipei's elevated and subway system will handle 40,000 passengers an hour at each station, a serious commitment to getting the people of this bursting city off the roads. Compared to the mass transit system proposed for Puget Sound communities, Taiwan is making an enormous investment, but the need is a hundredfold greater. Even so, original plans for a huge, national-scale project have been greatly reduced.

In 1993, the government announced a $300 billion, six-year plan for roads, parks, affordable housing and a transit system. The plan called for 775 projects and an amusement park the size of Disney World. Now, individual projects have to be justified every year and current projects show the plan's completion in 15 years, not six.

So, mirroring Seattle, it's a matter of meeting what planners think will be the future public demand against today's gripes about torn up roads and high costs. Those sections of the transit system that are finished are workable and grand, none grander than the famous Dragon Boat station, a transit platform melding Chinese sense of design to a modern rail system.

Chief architect of the Dragon Boat station is Kevin Peterson of Bellevue. He works with International Transit Consultants, a Parsons Brinkerhoff Corp.-led international joint venture in Taiwan.

"They've had delays," Peterson says about Taipei's problems, but the Dragon Boat "is one of those pieces of the cityscape that will always be identified with Taipei and will be part of the life of that city. Of course it's worth all the effort that went into it.

"If the gusto of the Taipei effort is noteworthy," Peterson said, "the forethought of the Singapore metro system is equally impressive. Singapore, a relatively dense urban environment with most people living in mid-rise apartments, is blanketing the residential and business areas with efficient mass transit. With air conditioned metro stations and excellent transfers between bus and rail, Singapore is on its way to being the best mass transit-served city in the world."

In Asia, the chaos of everyday life is causing a variety of solutions to urban life. Some are working, others not but everywhere, planners and governments are trying to get a grip on approaching gridlock.

A few Americans and Chinese gather at an outdoor table in a night market near Taipei National University in the cool of the evening. It's already late, but the market is alive as only Asian cities come alive at night. The meal is intestine soup served steaming hot for 20 cents a bowl. The soup is the color of a rich, brown suede. With the soup comes a Taiwan favorite, slabs of fried tofu cakes in a brownish gravy.

In this kaleidoscopic market, the bounty of the countryside is on display and so is the gush of its factories and sweatshops, its backyard gardens and poultry pens, its inventions, energy and aroma. First-time Asian visitors to U.S cities must be stunned by the great caverns of silence that swallow nighttime in so many American downtowns.

The thousands of young Chinese who pass through this night are something new in their people's history.

For the first time in 5,000 years, they have directly elected their president. Taiwanese-born, Japanese- and American-educated Lee Teng-hui holds the distinction of representing voting Chinese in a free election.

Not all the implications about that moment have set in yet among these students. What these people do with their quasi-country is both a test of their new democracy and of the institutions that serve them. Political corruption and bribes are not an usual story in Taipei. During Lee's inauguration week, 89 policemen in a capital precinct were indicted for taking payoffs. It is a country neither old nor new, recreating itself before our eyes.

But, boy, is the city alive. In its crush and tangle, under the smog and the sound of grinding gears, China rises.

Editorial page writer James Vesely recently returned from his fourth visit to Taiwan.

------------------------------------------ Seattle and Taipei transit plans compared: ------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------.

: Seattle : Taipei : ---------------------------------------------------------------. Proposed cost : $3.91 billion : $18 billion : (in U.S. dollars) : : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. Region's population : 2.5 million : 4 million :

: : (7 million by 2021) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. Miles of track : 25 miles new : 55 miles :

: (electric rail) : (88 km) :

: plus 81 miles : :

: (existing commuter : :

: rail) 106 miles : :

: total : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. HOV lanes : 20 new routes : 0 :

: (100-plus miles) : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. Stations : 14 new : 68 :

: plus shared Amtrak : :

: stations : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. Fares : Unknown : $1 for 8 miles :

: ($155 million est. : roundtrip :

: farebox revenues) : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. New taxes : Sales-tax increase : 0 :

: of .04 percent; : :

: license-tag increase : :

: of .03 percent : : - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. Completion date : 2006 (est.) : In stages, current:

: : through 2021 for :

: : intra-city service: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -.