We’ve heard a lot about the multi-billion dollar “Sound Transit” system of integrated rail and bus service planned for the Puget Sound corridor. But what about the rest of the state? How can we reduce airport congestion and improve cargo movement throughout Washington?

As it turns out, we’ve been sitting on a good idea for more than a decade.

In the late 1980s a thoughtful legislator from Moses Lake proposed building a super-speed, magnetic levitation (Maglev) railway across Washington. The trains would travel at 300-plus miles per hour and carry passengers and cargo from SeaTac and Spokane International airports to Moses Lake’s airport, an abandoned Air Force base.

Glyn Chandler was a farmer, rancher, tractor dealer, a Republican State Representative — and a visionary. He predicted that the Seattle and Spokane airports would become so congested that our state’s economy would begin to suffer. He also predicted that the highway system serving those airports and ports in Seattle and Tacoma would run out of capacity, damaging the state’s competitiveness.

That was verified recently by a former lumber mill owner who told me one of the key reasons he sold his business was that the increasing time delays moving lumber by truck and rail made his operation less competitive. In addition, Puget Sound employers are having trouble getting people to and from work and companies like Boeing find it increasingly difficult to move parts from one plant to another.

Chandler saw high-speed rail as the missing link in our region’s transportation network. He believed Japan’s 200-mile per hour “bullet trains” and Germany’s Maglev technology were on the “right track.”

The Maglev trains that Chandler envisioned could travel on elevated tracks and could even use some of the center parts of our freeway system. International passengers could land at the rural Moses Lake Airport, board the Maglev train and be in Seattle in about the same time it now takes to retrieve your car and fight through 18 miles of traffic congestion from Sea-Tac Airport to downtown.

Several times over the last few months, I’ve been forced to sit in miles of traffic jams in the Puget Sound area. That left me with a lot of time to think about Chandler’s proposal. His predictions about gridlock have come true and the situation is getting worse.

It’s time to think about regional transportation systems beyond the Puget Sound corridor. Linking Seattle and Spokane (east-west) and Bellingham to Portland (north-south) with super-speed trains is a concept that needs to be taken off the shelf and dusted off. It’s time to rethink Chandler’s idea about high-speed rail and Maglev trains.

(Editor’s Note: Don Brunell is president of the Association of Washington Business, Washington state’s chamber of commerce. Visit AWB on the Web at www.awb.org.)
.