We apparently did not make it clear in our editorial, "Sound Transit looms," April 11. We are not now, nor have we ever been opposed to light rail transit. We are opposed only to the political inertia that seems to doom Ballard to a future of no real mass transit, of slow, crowded buses and of highways that are clogged by the millions of new residents predicted to be coming to the region in the next few decades.

What this newspaper wants is political leadership now! We want more than excuses and half-hearted solutions that no one really expects will solve the problem.

As it stands now, Sound Transit's light rail system will come no closer to Ballard than the University of Washington. We only wish it did. Some suggest we can get on a bus and go eastward to meet rail and then go south into the city. With our continual problems moving east and west in Seattle, does anyone think that is a real solution? The trip now to the university is a slow, torturous one.

The specter of the Alaskan Way Viaduct being gone, either to be replaced or just, simply gone, will add to the inability of Ballard residents to get to downtown in anything like a timely matter. That does not even consider what it will be like to commute to the Eastside or go to the main marine port or to a ballgame.

This is not a complaint about Sound Transit and their future plans. We have not analyzed those plans beyond the thorough story Tim St. Clair has written on Page One of this edition.

The political leadership of the late 1990s made a fateful agreement. Sound Transit would be ceded the eastern half of the city and the Seattle Monorail Authority would get the western part of the city. There would be some merging points, but the two systems would split Seattle in half.

Then admittedly shoddy leadership by the Monorail Authority, and messy intervention by politicians not apparently interested in the western half of the city left us flat out in the cold.

We are appreciative of County Councilmen Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine for seeking a study on what Sound Transit can do in the future for the west side of Seattle. But that will do us little good, gentlemen. As our story says, it will be at least 20 years and maybe forever before any mass transit comes to Ballard.

What we needed is an immediate public commission to study the needs of mass and rapid transit in West Seattle, Ballard and other parts of the Puget Sound side of the city. So-called "bus rapid transit" will only be as rapid as the roadway, and much of it will be clogged with cars. The loss of the Ballard Bridge and/or the Fremont Bridge will isolate us from anything south of the Ship Canal.

Get the leadership of the city, the county, the region and the state to start a full-blown study now to figure out how the western half of Seattle is going to survive the growing catastrophe in transportation. We need money and people to figure out solutions, not lip service and delay.

We want a real study of the situation and we want it to start already.

-Jack Mayne