For a variety of reasons I prefer having the stadiums in walking distance of downtown than I would having them further out. It’s great to be able to amble home after a game or take my bike back to my apartment without breaking a sweat. Still there’s something nice about riding the light rail when the team is in town.
While I wasn’t going to the Sounders game, I happened to be riding into town from Columbia City at 6:30. The train wasn’t jam packed, but the seats were taken and people were standing. People in Sounders gear talking to strangers about the game and the season. There’s a sense of community that you don’t get fighting traffic and trying to find parking.
I was thinking, as I read your post, that what reactionaries and conservatives hate is exactly what you found on the train: community.
They despise people living close together, mingling, the sometimes noisy and messy reality of cities – places where one is forced to accommodate to all sorts of people, but is also offered rich opportunities to connect.
Preferred is the sterile suburb, with minimal human contact and life in an insulated car, moving from home garage to big parking lot, seething and raging at other drivers all the while. The safety that every strip mall looks exactly like every other, the comfort of a big lawn and a big fence to insulate against interaction. It’s a fear driven self isolation. And all the neighbors are white – whew. And not obviously gay, also, too.
Well, I just popped over to SoundPolitics, mostly to see if they were still frothing over Dan Savage (while ignoring the crucifixion of Richard Grenell, gay Republican), and what are the last three posts about? Riffs on the horrible violence of the May Day parades, ridicule of the celebration of International Labor Day, and a pearl-clutching refutation of a ST column extolling the fun of living in Seattle.
The comments contained these gems:
And from pudgey, my favorite (and quite a crooner, too, also):
What fun-loving, loving Christians they are over there!
Sound Transit was doing game day service on select weekend Mariner games before SOUNDER even had weekday service.(Demonstration service, I believe the cover was). With LINK on Mariner gamedays, and to a lesser extent SOUNDERS FC/Seahawks games, the layover track at Stadium Station probably comes in handy(although it is also used for when there are disruptions in the tunnel. Access to Mass Transit could be a selling point, for a stadium site. Notice the people trying to build a basketball/hockey arena are trying squeeze another stadium into SODO?
As for Light Rail Transit in general, last weekend Los Angeles MTA opened another line. Actually it is Phase 1a of the Expo Line.(Phase 1b opens in June, and Phase 2 to Santa Monica in 2016). Also on tap, the Regional Connector, which will make LA’s Light Rail lines able to run through(The Long Beach Blue Line and Expo Line are not connected to the Pasadena-Union Station-East LA Gold Line, yet), and the longest in the country.(Although if we ever have LINK run from Tacoma to Everett, I think we can give LA some competition for that, isn’t it more than 50 miles between Tacoma and Everett?)
@2 We were in LA last weekend–the first time we’d been there in a couple of years. (Our daughter and son-in-law who lived there moved elsewhere 18 months ago.) I’d been reading with interest for some time about the expansion of rail in the LA basin for some time, particularly with respect to the “subway to the sea”.
What we noticed right away on this trip was the tremendous expansion of the “interim solution”–there are “Rapid” buses running everywhere. Santa Monica’s “Blue Bus” municipal transit system is running its own rapids on major thoroughfares–a little surprising considering their city limits enclose only eight square miles.
I am not sure, but King County Metro’s RapidRide might be modeled a little bit on MetroRapid. Although the A-line is the old 174 rebranded, minus the portion North of Tukwilla-INternational Boulevard station. In the case of the MetroRapid, once more of the rail network is up and running, it would still have a role as a feeder. There is no way they can bring back the entire Pacific Electric/Los Angeles Railways network, as it would be too expensive. I like the LAMTA’s solution to potential overcrowding of the Blue Line. The Green Line will be interesting, from what I can tell of the plans, it looks like the plan to finally have it goo to LAX, will have it merge into the Crenshaw Corridor, which would connect it with the Expo Line and the Purple Line. Reading up on Mass Transit in the LA Region, I noticed they sure have a lot of airports,in both LA County, and the adjoining ones.
Although when one looks at the network of Metrolink and LAMTA, they might get close to bringing back a good portion(but not all) of what was lost when the Pacific Electric was shut down. Even San Francisco, with the Municipal Railway’s surviving 5 lines that formed the MuniMetro network, the new T-Third Street line, and the F-Market and Wharves historic streetcar line, once had a bigger system.(Muni once had more streetcar lines, and the-then private Market Street Railway had a bigger network than MUNI). Instead of the Roar of the Four on Market Street, they now have 6 tracks on three levels(the 4 in the Subway). BART is finally going forward with the San Jose extension(via the East Bay), and it looks like electrification of the Peninsula Commute line(CalTrain) is going forward. THey wanted to use ligher, European Electric Multiple Units instead of the types used in the Northeast and on 2 commuter lines out of Chicago, and they worked with the Federal Railway Administration to get a waiver to operate them(since they will have to share the Peninsula line with existing CalTrain rolling stock on the trains that run past San JOse to Gilroy, and there are proposals for those to go further to Salinas), a few freight trains that still use the Peninsula(including at least one that still runs into SF itself), and if it ever happens, High Speed Rail.