When it comes to the menu of transportation choices, Mayor Greg Nickels is ordering meat and potatoes. He wants to raise nearly $2 billion in the next 20 years, to pay for repaving streets, filling potholes and fixing rickety bridges. Credit him for championing something as regular-grind as road maintenance. The shoddy road system is only going to get worse as the city's population swells and despite extolling the virtues of alternative transport, we drive a lot.

Transportation troubles are acute in Ballard. The mayor mentions 14th Avenue NW as an example of a problem road. That avenue certainly has its issues but there are plenty of other examples of transportation infrastructure in need of fixing that have a greater impact on the average Ballardite. In particular, 15th Avenue NW - with its unsigned merge lanes and clusters of mistimed streetlights - manages to be a commuting fiasco from Loyal Way NW to Aurora Avenue North. N 45th Street has is a similar feel, as commuters lurch up (and down) the hill to and from the city's principle north south corridors. Then there's the Ballard Bridge, with its dangerously narrow sidewalks, forcing bike riders and pedestrians into an awkward dance while vehicle rearview mirrors, only a couple of feet away, rush by at highway speeds. But perhaps bridge users should be grateful; stretches of Greenwood have no sidewalk at all.

According to the mayor, the situation is only going to get worse. Transportation maintenance funding is in decline, he says, for a variety of reasons including a street utility fee that was struck down by the state court, tax-limit initiatives and a declining share of the state gas tax. The city's backlog of street maintenance projects is $500 million, with almost two thirds of that for street paving and repair, and most of the rest needed for patching bridges.

To finance the initiative - which would bring in $56 million in 2007 and $120 million by 2026 - the mayor proposes three funding sources; raising property taxes, a tax on downtown parking lots and an employer tax. The levy proposal is 70% to 80% of the total funding and amounts to 45.1 cents per $1000 of assessed value on a home, or about $135 on a $300,000 house.

The employer tax - amounting to about $25 per employee that works downtown, is the smallest piece of the funding, at most, 6% of the annual total collected by the city. That's too bad since Seattle's Department of Transportation figures more than 100,000 non-resident commuters enter the city each day and use these roads to collect paychecks.

The mayor's initiative may face long odds this fall, competing as it does with King County's Transit Now program, which aims to bring buses aplenty to Ballard, and a possible vote over the fate of the viaduct.

So part of the funding package includes carrots like finishing the Burke Gilman trail, which should bring the bike lobby on board. It also sets aside money for tending to trees lining streets, lest the program gain an unseemly money-for-asphalt stigma. Even graffiti removal - tagging is a chronic problem in Crown Hill - gets some cash.

But handouts shouldn't sway voters as much as the concrete-hard rational that this city moves on some 4000 miles of pavement, 2000 miles of sidewalks, over 149 bridges and through 1000 street light intersections. Maintaining what we already have costs more every year, even without considering growth.

A few months ago, the mayor characterized the future transportation initiative by saying, "it's not sexy, but it's important." The Ballard News Tribune agrees.