As director of the Cascadia regional planning project at Seattles Discovery Institute, (Bruce) Agnew is a leading advocate of a plan that might answer that question and a host of larger concerns. If the plan flies, you might one dayperhaps as soon as 2007phone a new Regional Transportation Accountability Board. This powerful, unifying paymaster would make sure funds are well spent, projects are coordinated and traffic disruptions are minimized. It would oversee a long list of highway, transit, freight and possibly ferry improvements, picking projects for performance, not parochial political advantage. Rather than running these systems itself, it would contract with operators such as King County Metro. To fund all this, it would have the critical authority to levy taxes and highway tolls. We need a single point of accountability, says Agnew. Read More ›