Text transcript of Ron Sims' interview by Tony Ventrella of Comcast Local Edition

• See the 4:07 minute video in Windows Media format

Ventrella: I'm Tony Ventrella. This is Local Edition. We welcome King County Exec Ron Sims. Good to see you again.

Sims: It's always good seeing you. This is quite a facility.

Ventrella: It's something, I'm telling you. It's a destination for lots of people, great employees. Huge building here. Ron, let's talk two things I wanted to cover in our short time together. One would be the tolls. Possible tolls, not possible, it's probably going to happen on 520 because of the federal grant. Tell me, what the procedure is there. Where are we now, and where are we going?

Sims: The federal government has awarded the State of Washington, and King County, and the Puget Sound Regional Council, a grant, one of seven in the United States, to reduce congestion, through congestion pricing. It has four elements of it. First, is, there has to be what we call a variable toll, throughout the day that has different pricing, so people can choose when they want to use those routes. Second, it has to have an advanced technology so nobody has to stop. Third, Microsoft's been asked to lead the effort at getting people to use... basically work from home, telecommuting. And the other is transit. So, what we're going to do is we're going to add 45 new buses on the 520 bridge. We're going to have three new park and ride lots. We're going to have telecommuting. We're going to have congestion pricing. And we're going to have a technology that really works well, you don’t have to stop. I think that's likely to happen. We're not going to turn away from $138 million of infrastructure that they're willing to buy us.

Ventrella: And that makes sense. It's certainly makes sense. It seems like a win-win situation. But you are going to have critics who are going to go, tolls, what are we doing here? How come we can't say no to a grant? And all that kind of stuff...

Sims: That's really interesting. We have tolls on the Narrows bridge. We're going to have hot lanes on 167, that goes through the Kent Valley. One thing we know is that traffic... it really affects traffic. When we have congestion pricing, it reduces traffic volume 15 to 20 percent, because people begin to use those roadways smartly. And it's also complemented by increasing the transit service that we're going to have there. So we expect that people are going to move much better. You know our goal is to have an average speed of 45 miles per hour, which is a lot faster than they're going now.

Ventrella: That's for sure. So congesting pricing basically allows people to shop for a time of day when it is maybe a little less convenient but certainly less expensive to go.

Sims: And it works. People should have their lives back. You shouldn't have to sit there and say, I can't get home till 6:15 or 6:30, and miss out on a lot of your life. And those commutes are pretty demanding on people.

Ventrella: A key element though is employers need to be cooperative in a lot of these cases.

Sims: It would help if employers do that, and they're going to do that. It's been well received.

Ventrella: We have about another minute and a half. A short, quick period of time. The I-5 phenomenon. What did you learn from the construction at Spokane Street. And we didn't have a disaster.

Sims: We told the public what was going to happen. That was the best tool we had. We informed the public, and they made really good decisions. One is that we saw an increase on the Sounder trains. We saw an increase on the West Seattle Ferry. We saw people adjusting their hours. We saw people taking vacations. We saw changes in workday. We saw people choose different routes. So this calamity that was going to befall us was avoided because we gave people the power to influence their decisions. And employers were great. And there were small things. The City of Seattle for instance synchronized all their traffic signals so we had better flows. You know, congestion is relieved by a thousand small things. When people say "If we just build the following things, it works," I want to say, no, it's the 1,000 small things that relieve congestion.

Ventrella: What a great model that was, and I hope we've learned from that, and continue to use those small decisions to move forward. Ron Sims, great to see you...

Sims: Tony, good seeing you.

Ventrella: ... King County Exec. It's always a pleasure. And thank you for joining us on Comcast Local Edition. I'm Tony Ventrella, see you next time.