If you live in the state of Washington and can vote on I-985, please vote No.

I-985 is sponsored by the anti-tax, anti-equality, anti-environment Tim Eyman, which to any hardcore liberal means a vote of you can't be serious (or is that not an option on the ballot yet?). Eyman seems to think that petroleum is a renewable resource and that population growth will slow to a halt soon. His latest initiative aims to provide congestion relief by:

• opening car pool lanes to everyone during non-peak hours
• locking away tolling revenue from mass transit, securing its use road expansion/improvement projects
• using all money collected from red-light camera fines to "reduce traffic congestion and increase traffic flow"
• increases funding for road emergency response (mind you this is not to help the victims, it's to help the vehicles being slowed by obstructions)

As with a lot of conservative solutions, this all seems reasonable at first glance. But when you think about its long-term effects, it makes almost no sense at all. Reducing congestion on roads will leave people thinking personal transit is the way of the future, that they can continue to live many miles from work without major consequences. It's clear that the market is not working quickly enough in motivating people to switch to mass transit. The future will inevitably be one of reduced energy, powered by wind and solar and biokinetic energy, where people live within walking distance of the place their food is grown, electric mass transport connecting villages to one another. This means extremely major changes in a relatively short period of time. In ten or fifteen years, when gasoline is unaffordable to the lower and lower-middle classes, weather patterns are beginning to spiral out of control, and the economy is in ruin, do you want to look back and think we didn't do everything we could to avoid the situation?