I am getting the feeling that the stars are aligning, in some weird and potentially violent way, which is actually less like the movement of stars than the overlapping and grinding of colliding tectonic plates.

The mystic movements I have been noticing of late have all got something to do with transportation, the facilities and environments we have and the ones we require, and the way in which we are accustomed to hauling our bodies around the place.

The ingredients that have been coming together in the fateful pie are these:

1. Washington State Department of Transport (WSDOT) announces that during maintenance work on I-90 travel between Bellevue and Seattle will take anywhere between 30 – 50 minutes, in a best-case scenario;

2. Sound Transit gets big stimulus bucks to complete light rail expansion around Seattle;

3. King County Metro prepares to cut about 800,000 hours from bus services;

4. Despite massive state budget cuts, funding is still confirmed for many highway repair projects;

5. The motor vehicle industry proves to be unviable, in its present incarnation;

6. The Environmental Protection Agency finally announces that carbon dioxide emissions endanger human health, opening the door for carbon dioxide to be regulated as a pollutant;

7. The usual suspect we’re sick of hearing about but can’t quite ignore — there ain’t much oil, and what there is is running out.

Just as I am taking all this in and wondering how it fits together, a few Sammamish councilors get back from a League of Cities conference in Portland and start talking about the rail and transit initiatives they saw down there.

It all makes me think that whether we like it or not we are being pushed toward, like on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport, a vital decision on our transportation future, and if our governments don’t toughen up and make a bold statement sooner or later that decision will be made for us by the forces of self-interest and immediate gratification, egged on by short term fiscal considerations. And it will be a disaster. I don’t think these are the beasts we want in charge.

There are options, but someone needs to push the envelope.

I was interested to hear the WSDOT guy tell the Issaquah City Council that “partial priority” would be given to public transit during the jams that will be created by work on the I-90 in coming months, and also that his department was offering financial incentives to people to join van pools to reduce the number of cars on the road.

Is it just me, or are we staring in the face what could be a ground-breaking experiment into the future of transit?

East said that setting aside an entire lane to car pools, van pools and buses would have disastrous impacts on single occupancy traffic. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see what people would do, if only for a month or two, if van pooling or buses was by far the speediest option?

All the pieces have fallen into place, but there seems a decided lack of conviction to take the plunge.

But at the same time as this is happening, someone has thought it would be a good idea to cut funding for buses. This is where we are suffering from a lack of leadership.

I was also interested to hear Sammamish councilman Lee Fellinge talk about his Portland sojourn the other week, in particular, the way he described the effect the installation of light rail has had on development.

He said that when the light rail system first went in, there wasn’t really the high density residential and commercial areas to support such a network. But that once the light rail went down, developers then had the confidence to build high density development along the rail corridor.

If you build it they will come, approximately.

He said that as a result, a large percentage of the population never has to get in their cars, and the reputation of the city is booming as a result of what sort of society this encourages.

“Putting the rail in place helps developers do the long term land use planning,” Fellinge said.

This long term planning is so intertwined with the transportation picture of the future that the agency responsible for one needs to be taking bold and unified steps with the other.

Again, what we are looking for here is leadership, and for someone to grasp the idea that although the nation of America is based on an idea of personal liberty, this concept has no logical connection to commute times or ease of movement in conjunction with millions of other free Americans.

An argument that I’ve been hearing against something like Fellinge’s Portland rail is that we don’t have the density.

Well, not right now we don’t.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will be the functional cities of the future.