Seattleites Urged To Take The High Road -- Cab Driver Pushes Monorail Initiative

Dick Falkenbury is a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice, the kind of voice that can utter a mere "uh" over his cab radio and be instantly recognized by the other drivers.

Falkenbury drives a Redtop cab in the winter and a tour bus in the summer, and these days he's campaigning on behalf of a November initiative that, if successful, would put him out of his two current jobs.

When talking with Falkenbury, it isn't long before he pulls out his business card: "The Monorail Initiative," it reads below a black-ink drawing of Mount Rainier.

And then out comes a brochure: "On November 4, 1997 . . . vote Yes on Initiative 41," it reads. It's folded in quarters, complete with one large map on the back. The map is a long squiggly X detailing approximate (this word is underlined) locations of 22 Monorail stations along a 40-mile track extending from downtown to Ballard, Lake City, West Seattle and Rainier Beach.

Initiative 41 is a proposal calling for the creation of a Public Development Agency to build and run an elevated, electric-driven, rubber-tired train or monorail. It would cost an estimated $850 million to build, through private and public funds as well as an increase in the city's business and occupation tax.

"Common sense tells you the monorail works. It's profitable, it gets people up and out of traffic," Falkenbury says.

"Downtown Seattle to downtown Ballard in 7 minutes. Only the monorail can move at speeds with any consistency. When it snows, when there's a traffic accident, this thing is going to go!"

At about this time last year, petitions for the Extend the Monorail initiative were plastered on billboards, outside neighborhood grocery stores, post offices, and dry cleaners.

People went up to these petitions - these petitions tacked onto billboards that were unmanned - "No haranguing," Falkenbury explains - and signed them.

"People just wanted this thing so badly, we had problems with suburban people signing, even though it said `Seattle resident' three times on the petition," he says.

"You just gotta have something people believe in."

Falkenbury, 44, has been believing in things for a long time now. It started at Roosevelt High School, where as a student he worked on two city committees. Over the years, he campaigned on behalf of various politicians: Randy Revelle, Norm Rice, Mike Lowry. He worked, in 1978, to stop construction of the I-90 bridge.

Then four years ago, when people started talking about building the Regional Transit Authority, Falkenbury wasn't hearing anything about extending the Monorail.

It didn't make sense to build a transit system of rail and buses without even a nod toward Seattle's Monorail and its potential to ease transportation woes within the city.

He drafted an extend-the-Monorail proposal. He gathered signatures, but not enough. The proposal died.

He decided to try again last year and this time he got the 18,000 valid signatures to place the initiative on the November ballot.

Falkenbury is now known, by some people, as "The Monorail dude."

"Yeah," he says. "It started as a joke, but I'll say it myself.

"One of my fears is that I'll become obsessive about this. I'm not. I don't wake up in the morning thinking about this. It's not the last thing I think about when I go to sleep at night."

He does, though, spend a lot of time thinking about it. And talking about it, too.

Last night, at 7:15 , there he was, in a basement room of the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, in a room with two American flags, two charcoal drawings, 40 blue plastic chairs and 15 people attending the Wallingford Community Council meeting.

"All of us have been downtown and have seen the Monorail over our heads," he says as a few heads nod. "It makes sense."

Industry standards, he tells them, show monorails are on time 99.9 percent of the time. And the proposed stations will be commercial hubs. "Grocery stores, dry cleaners, a Kinkos, a day-care center, a gym. These will be lively."

What about blight, a woman then asks. "If you look at Fifth Avenue (where the current Monorail runs) it's not a happy place to be."

"Neither is Third, or Fourth, or Sixth," he replies. "The monorail track would be about the size of a guardrail on a freeway. And when you ride on it, you'll have fabulous views."

Falkenbury wants to raise about $10,000 to get the campaign going. No "flashy TV" is planned, but some "fun" press conferences are.

Low scale, he says. That's the sort of campaign he plans on running.